Writing outside your lane

In Alexander Chee’s essay, How to Unlearn Everything, he suggests that the question of writing about ‘other’ people, ‘has become one of those fights with no seeming end’. However, he also suggests many writers are not asking for advice, they’re asking if it’s okay to find a way to continue as they have. ‘They don’t want an answer; they want permission.’

Yet it is a debate that has seen authors abandoning novels left and right, for fear of being condemned. Earlier this year, Jeanine Cummins was lambasted for being a white author telling a Mexican immigrant’s story in her much-hyped American Dirt; her tweets of barbed-wire themed table decorations and manicures attracted even more derision. More recently, David Walliams suffered a 20-Tweet take down by Jack Monroe, who accused him of ‘targeting the working class’ in his children’s books, and when a tweet by care-experienced Cambridge graduate, Kasmira Kincaid went viral, she followed up with an article for The Sunday Times which questioned who should have the right to write the ubiquitous orphan story.

One of the complaints levelled at Cummins was that white writers can find mainstream success when writing about marginal subjects far more easily than those marginal subjects can, even though the latter must be writing far more authentically about their own cultures and lives. The problem is compounded by the fact that unless a ‘voice’ or narrative structure fits what, for decades, has remained narrow in definition, they’re often neither understood nor seen to be of ‘quality’. NB: see Booker Prize winner, Marlon James’s 78 rejections for his first novel, John Crow’s Devil…

In light