It is fitting to end my research logs almost exactly where this all began. I googled “Millennials cultural appropriation” looking for think pieces about how our generation is shifting conversations about identity and ownership. Not surprisingly, the first article was a New York Times op-ed titled “Will the Left Survive the Millennials?”
The author started talking about a young Sudanese-born Australian woman who walked out of her speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival. I suddenly recognized the name of that festival, and the name of the author. It is Lionel Shriver, the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin. Last year, she appeared at this festival wearing a sombrero as a nod to our very own Tequila Party at Bowdoin College. She used the party as a point about writing fictional characters of different races: “The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats.”
I first heard about Lionel Shriver a year and a half ago, when SBC sent me an article about white writers. I was about to start writing Recur and wanted to know how white writers approached the problem of race.I had never read the full transcript, which was my mistake. At the time, I was too consumed with arguing with the authors talking about Shriver. Shriver’s argument is that fiction writers – read: white writers – have the right to imagine experiences of those with identities they do not personally share. While I agree with that to some degree, I find her entitlement to that right to be arrogant, dismissive, and dangerous. As a white writer trying to approach issues of prejudice through storytelling, the process is not easy and does not belong solely to the author.
In my own experience with storytelling this year, I have had to work to earn the right to tell others’ stories. I constantly fear misappropriating other people’s experiences, exploiting their stories for my benefit alone, and being generally inconsiderate. During my time writing at Bowdoin, I have done all of these things. It is a sharp slap to remember that people are not just ideas or single identities, but complex people. It takes a lot of work to preserve or portray the complexities of individuals, in any medium.
I think that Shriver does have a point when she says membership of a larger group is not an identity:
“If we embrace narrow group-based identities too fiercely, we cling to the very cages in which others would seek to trap us. We pigeonhole ourselves. We limit our own notion of who we are, and in presenting ourselves as one of a membership, a representative of our type, an ambassador of an amalgam, we ask not to be seen.”
This is an inciting quote, and something I think our generation will wrestle with over the next decade. “Identity politics” have been blamed for the rise of Trump, but his presence in the White House puts many in danger due to identity. Self-segregation is rampant at Bowdoin, but the narrative of universality (from “the average Bowdoin student” to “All Lives Matter” to “We’re all human!”) have left a bitter taste in our collective rhetoric and people are wary to come together in that way. Hence the need for storytelling – hopefully the collage of intimate specificities will pull out common threads among the students in our class and beyond.
I am very excited to put together the podcast. Editing is known as the final step of storytelling, so though we are not working in fiction we do have power in manipulating the perspectives. As we talked about earlier today, this is not necessarily manipulation but an argument. Perhaps they are synonymous.
I got sucked into this conversation, because it is at the heart of public intergenerational discourse today. These articles are battles between a white older woman and a younger woman of color. The Niceties all over again. I think that this project is part of a wider plea to end this type of discourse. These intergenerational arguments about identity and entitlement are frustrating and unproductive. Rather than debate, storytelling could provide a new path for empathy and the introduction of new perspectives. We need to make more space for underrepresented people to share their experience outside of exasperation and anger, to share the same types of complex narratives that white people enjoy.
Yassmin Abdel-Magied, the young woman who walked out of Shriver’s speech, poses the same question that we all are wondering: “Asking to be respected – is that asking for too much?”
I plan to add my annotated bibliography later this week and give notes for Bern’s article on closure. These articles took me in a surprising direction for the research, and I think Shriver’s speech could be strong evidence for why us students need to have agency over our collective narrative.