Cultural appropriation, cultural authenticity, second languages

[owlectomy]

In November, my editor and I got to discussing books, and on the subject of Samurai Shortstop, I said, "He didn't do enough research." Now, normally I actually think about the words that are going to come out of my mouth before I say them, and I could have considered that it might be unkind to criticize the books my own house puts out, so I don't know what happened there. And here's the thing: I was wrong. He did a lot of research. I can't say he should have done more without setting up a standard that I would consider unreasonable. But the way that the main character talks to his father! It's the same thing you see when a lot of Americans try to write Japanese characters. They can't quite decide whether the characters are Klingons or Americans chafing against the restrictions of Klingon society. And piling on the research into the factual details of history doesn't change that. (Do I know more about what it's like to be a 19th century Japanese boy than Alan Gratz? Hm? Surely not, but I can believe in Soseki's people, and Tanizaki's people, and Mori Oogai's people, in a way I can't believe in Toyo. Luckily, Gratz's book has no female characters in it that I can remember, and I don't have to contemplate whether he can write female Japanese characters that are more believable than Murakami Haruki's.)

So, when we talk about cultural appropriation, certain people always want to turn the topic towards Research, Doing Enough Of It.

I just finished Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and was left with a deep humbling sense that I could never ever do that. Not just because Chabon is a supergenius, although he is, but because he writes about the Jewish residents of Sitka with such a level of intimacy and familiarity and the kind of expertise that never looks like it's trying too hard. Chabon did his research, and he cites his sources, and there's something more than that. It's the gap between carefully searching your brain for the memorized tables of how to conjugate irregular Ruritanian verbs, and knowing with a native speaker's intuition what to say.

This, even though the Sitka he writes about bears no relation to the Sitka that actually exists today in the real world. If I were to write a book with that same alternate-history setting, you couldn't say that I've got it wrong, because there's nothing to get wrong in an alternate history, a city that doesn't exist in the first place. And yet, it's possible to get it wrong, and possible to get it right.

You can put Canadian characters in a book, and I'm really unlikely to quibble that they don't feel "authentically Canadian" (as if I knew from growing up in one western suburb of Montreal what it meant to be Canadian) but if you know about Kraft Dinner made with real butter, like Martha Brooks does in Mistik Lake, then I know you know about my childhood.

This is nothing more than what people have been saying all along about the Cultural Appropriation Debate of Doom, right? If you borrow the food and clothing and myths from another culture but your characters still think and act like WASPs, you're not looking outside of your own culture, you're just going "Ooh, shiny!" and taking it back to your own nest even though it doesn't really belong to you.

So. What you do is listen, not impatiently for the shiny thing that you can pluck out of someone else's hair, but out of respect for each other as human beings. (I'm not saying that I'm good at this.)

A person can learn to speak a second language. It felt very odd, eight or nine years into my study of Japanese, when I started to get an intuitive feel for what was right and what was wrong. And a little maddening, when I started answering questions with, "You can't say that, but I have no idea why. It just doesn't sound right." And a person can learn another culture, too -- I believe that -- but it doesn't just take time and exposure. Let me tell you about a boss I had who had lived nine years in Japan and didn't know any better than to flirt with the Mister Donuts cashier in English. It takes unlearning your defaults, and enough humility to know your defaults aren't the defaults for the rest of humanity. And letting go of the expectation that you're going to get patted on the head because you can say "Arigatou" and "Konnichi wa."

Comments

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

a little maddening, when I started answering questions with, "You can't say that, but I have no idea why. It just doesn't sound right."

Well, it's what my profs in Tokyo used to say. 'It's not *wrong* grammatically, we just wouldn't say it.'