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| Hearsay: |
Hari Kunzru, in a letter to the Guardian expressing his displeasure with the kind of coverage given to Monica Ali’s unintentionally incendiary Brick Lane, settles once and for all any question about misappropriation of voice:
As a mixed-race novelist (hell, just as a novelist), I would like to say to your leader writer (The trouble with Brick Lane, October 27) that I reserve the right to imagine anyone and anything I damn well please. If I want to write about Jewish people, or paedophiles or Patagonians or witches in 12th-century Finland, then I will do so, despite being “authentically” none of these things. I also give notice that if I choose, I intend to imagine what your muddled writer quaintly terms “real people” living in “real communities”. My work may convince or it may not. However, I will not accept that I have any a priori responsibility to anyone – white, black or brown, let alone any “community” – to represent them in any particular way.
All rise and stand corrected.
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October 29th, 2007 at 9:40 am
All through University I felt that the appropriation of voice debate was off because, for quite some time, it was very black and white. It seems to me that a novelist’s job is to imagine other lives and to suggest that someone cannot imagine anything they like is saying that you cannot do your job.
Where I do find it challenging, however, is when people appropriate a voice for the sake of stereotypes or for bent purposes. Or it’s just done badly.
I’ll admit that I have been the victim of appropriation of voice bias (a story I wrote won a contest in the US. the story was about a young Southern black girl who was in a very unhappy home. I was told I won, then when they contacted me and found I was a white Canadian they informed me that the contest was not open to Canadians and quickly changed the rules on their website). Because of this situation I wrote another story from a woman’s perspective, used a female name, created an overly feminist biography and had a story published in a ‘women’s only’ literary journal. I don’t know what I proved by any of this other than that the voice you create is just that, a voice.