Otherness
It has a life cycle, the ‘otherness’.
It slumbers, dormant, wrapped in the silken threads of a pupa – and then the silk shreds, and the thing inside surges out with beating wings – and some see a butterfly there, and some see a vampire bat ready to suck the life out of whatever target it’s aimed at (be it pretension, prejudice or just passion). And then it dies down again for a while, and the idea pupates again and hangs there, waiting, for the next trigger to help it along.
The idea of Writing the Other, of Cultural Appropriation, of breaking the cardinal rule of writing – “Write what you know”.
This time there were several independent triggers which then coalesced into a blogosphere carnival of comment and countercomment – a selection of the current crop of discussions on the matter has been gahtered <a href=”http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2009/01/great-cultural-appropriation-debate-of.html”>here</a> – and you can go back and re-read it all if you wish. I shall focus on a few independent throughts, rather than trying to respond to any individual or any particular concept.
A few obvious caveats at the start –
- I am a white woman, a middle-class princess who didn’t grow up pampered but definitely grew up sheltered, and I freely admit that this position in life has shaped who and what I have become.
- I am unusual in one respect. I have lived and studied and worked – or even just travelled – on every continent of this planet excepting South America and the Antarctic. I attended schools and colleges in at least four countries, and my best friends during those years were from China, Sweden, Malawi, Wales, Canada, Serbia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, Greece; they were atheist, Catholic, Jewish, pagan. I am not a monocultural monolith. I have interacted, spoken with, laughed with, cried with, been outraged with, shared joy with, squabbled with, sang with, been exasperated with and loved many different kinds of human being. There have been plenty of differences between them. Sharing some small part of your childhood and youth with somebody who is not like you doesn’t immediately grant you magical comprehension and insight into that other person’s thoughts and feelings. It does, however, give you a grounding in a lot of different ways of looking at things. I may not have walked many miles in the shoes of otherness, but I have taken a first step or two into it here and there, enough to realise that I was in a country that might look familiar but was in fact subtly and fascinatingly not my own back yard at all. I am not approaching this from the point of view of expecting everyone to conform to the same stupid boring template; I believe our world is the richer for all the things that are in it.
Let me back into this by taking up that calcified old chestnut of ‘write what you know’ – with which aspiring authors are gifted as soon as they string two words together – and smash it into a thousand pieces.
