Muddy territory
Controversy over American Dirt shows danger of current intellectual climate
American Dirt is a thriller about a Mexican who makes an enemy of a drug cartel boss and attempts to flee to the U.S. with her son, only to fall foul of the restrictions and other dangers that beset the thousands of undocumented migrants who attempt to gain entry to the United States. A strong plot is combined with right-thinking politics: the ingredients for a snob-hit-cumbestseller.
The book’s U.S. publishers certainly thought so, awarding the author, Jeanine Cummins, a seven-figure contract. But Cummins is white: She can claim nothing closer to Mexican heritage than a Puerto Rican grandmother. In December, Myriam Gurba, a writer of Mexican heritage, published an online review arguing that “American Dirt fails to convey any Mexican sensibility” — it is “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf.” Gurba is at least funny and thought-provoking in her spite, but inevitably every right-on wiseacre has now jumped on the bandwagon.
Some British newspapers have asked their critics to revise positive reviews of the book, or are simply not running them. The publisher has cancelled Cummins’s bookshop tour in the U.S., citing fears over her safety. The book is “exploitative, oversimplified and ill-informed,” say 137 writers who have signed a letter calling for Oprah Winfrey, champion of the U.S. literary scene, to drop American Dirt from her book club. They do stress, however, that “we believe in the right to write outside of our own experiences.” Cummins simply, in their view, hasn’t done it well enough.
This is a subtle distinction not observed by many of the critics on Twitter, who are blasting Cummins for presuming even to think about writing about non-white people. And while American Dirt may or may not be a pile of old hooey, the hysterical reaction is dangerous, because it will inevitably put people off writing about experiences they haven’t had. We will end up with nothing but novels about novelists, and there are quite enough of those already.
Literature would be in a sorry state if we did away with “appropriation.” Flaubert, discouraged from inhabiting the consciousness of a woman, would have had to write Monsieur Bovary. The world might still know nothing of Oskar Schindler if the Australian Thomas Keneally hadn’t stumbled upon his story and written Schindler’s Ark. Keneally may not have been Jewish, but it is hard to imagine anybody writing a better book on the subject. The many black detectives in U.S. crime fiction had their way paved by Virgil Tibbs, hero of In the Heat of the Night by the white writer John Ball.
Sometimes an outsider can have a more disinterested and therefore sharper take on a group and culture, or at least offer an alternative perspective. Going beyond literature and into other art forms, I can think of few films that capture Englishness better than Went the Day Well?, made by the Brazilian Alberto Cavalcanti. Or is there a better film adaptation of an English classic than the Taiwanese Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility?
Of course, outsiders’ views should not completely crowd out those of insiders, and therefore Cummins’s publishers at Flatiron
Books should have found a Mexican novelist to put their promotional heft behind as well (earlier this week, in fact, they vowed to increase Latinx representation across Macmillan, Flatiron’s international parent company, the Los Angeles Times reports). Perhaps. But Cummins’s much-mocked claim to be “a bridge” between the Mexicans she met and the predominantly white U.S. book-buying public should not be dismissed out of hand.
Cummins’s book may be simplistic and overly melodramatic, but although that may be an artistic failing, is it a moral one? Might it not be a good thing to write something more soap opera-like if that appeals to more U.S. readers, and ultimately draws more people’s attention to the reality of the migrants’ experience, however crudely delineated?
That’s debatable. But debate is what we need, and what the current intellectual climate makes people shy away from.
The Sunday Telegraph