As I mentioned in my first post, I was privileged as a child and still am as an adult to read books featuring main characters that are mostly like me. This is because I'm white, abled, cisgender, heterosexual, and upper middle class. I do not truly belong to any marginalized community. I know plenty of women who have experienced gender discrimination, but I have never personally felt it (though it may have happened to me without me knowing about it, of course). I identify with the neurodiverse community because I have ADHD, but I didn't even know this until I was in my 40's (I just though I was spacey and disorganized) and, because I've set up a lot of scaffolding for myself, I can "pass" as neurotypical in most situations. It's only behind the scenes that my ADHD tends to show itself.
Despite this, as I shared in my first post, I have a passion to create stories and characters to which a greater diversity of kids can relate. I love books that that portray diverse characters. I fell in love with Rick Riordan's mythology inspired books when my son was in elementary school, and I love how the Rick Riordan Presents imprint has allowed authors from diverse backgrounds to showcase stories inspired by myths and legends from their own underrepresented cultures. I also love the diverse cast of characters that Rick Riordan himself created. I've recently discovered some great series books featuring nonWhite girls as the stars. My 9 yo also loves these.
The question I face as a nonmarginalized author is, at what point does creating a carefully researched character from a culture that is not my own cross the line into cultural appropriation? Should I just err on the side of caution and only create characters who are like me as a child? I don't think so, but I do think I and other authors like me need to proceed with caution.
An example of this is Anna Ono, the 9yo protagonist from the book I'm currently querying, which I hope will be the first in a series. Anna is half Japanese and half Swedish. Her mother is an immigrant from Sweden and her father is Japanese American. Her multiethnicity first began as an accident. I wanted to create a character who was obsessed with palindromes due to both her first and last names being palindromes. Anna was easy to hit upon, but the only palindrome surname I could come up with that sounded at all reasonable with Anna was Ono, which would mean she had Japanese heritage.
I first reached out to a multiethnic friend to ask her opinion on whether it would be okay for me, as a white author, to create a multiethnic character. My friend's response was, "Maybe, if you approach it sensitively and do a lot of research." I decided to forge ahead and really own Anna Ono's multiethnic identity as a big part of the story.
I think I succeeded. I hope I did. The friend I approached with the idea was one of my beta readers and approved of the way I approached the topic. Another friend who is a person of color and the child of immigrants said it was well done. If the book gets published I hope the readers, especially multiethnic readers, understand that I approached this character carefully and thoughtfully. I intended to create a unique character who will be loved by many and allow multiethnic kids who discover her to feel "seen" in a book, perhaps for the first time, and did not intend to imply that I know all there is to know about the multiethnic experience.
I am, of course, not the first white author to have created a nonwhite character. For a long time, nonwhite characters (the few there were) were only created by white authors. This is because white authors were the only ones being published. There's still a huge problem in the publishing industry with nonwhite authors not being represented or published at the rate they should be. There's a movement by some in the industry to begin to change that.
This is being partly addressed by the creation of a Twitter pitch party called #DVPit. In case you don't know, Twitter pitch parties are events in which authors are invited to pitch their book in the form of a tweet during a certain timespan in a certain day using a certain set of hashtags. Agents (and some acquisitions editors) will peruse the feed. If a pitch intrigues them, they will like it, which is an invitation for the writer to submit more.
The original pitch party, as far as I know, is Pitch Madness, or #pitmad for short. This one is open to anyone. It's been followed by pitch events specific to picture books, faith based fiction, romance, and quite a few others. #DVPit is one of the newer pitch events and it's specifically for writers from marginalized communities. There's no policing. Any author who identifies with a marginalized community is invited to pitch.
There's been a controversy on Twitter recently involving a not at all marginalized author who pitched in DVPit despite not belonging to a marginalized community (and even justified it by stating on their blog that we're all marginalized in some way), got an agent through the event, and now has a book deal for a book representing a culture to which the writer doesn't belong and which presents a misrepresentation of that culture.
I don't think I've done that with Anna Ono. I definitely did not and will not participate in a Twitter event that's not intended for me. I do feel I'm treading a fine line, however. And, no I don't share this to say "Woe is me." I enjoy a ton of advantages that are completely unrelated to anything I've done. I want to create books with characters that aren't all the suburban white kids I mostly read about during my childhood. I hope I can do this thoughtfully and sensitively.
No comments:
Post a Comment