So, we are all agreed then?

This debate isn’t even a debate

It is curious that the issue of “cultural appropriation” should arouse such controversy when in fact we are all agreed. Here’s Buzzfeed’s Scaachi Koul, writer of colour and one of the first to hit “send” in Thursday night’s melee: “No one, in the history of writing books, has ever suggested that white people are not allowed to write thoughtful portrayals of Indigenous people or people of colour, namely in fiction. Frankly, we encourage it.”

Here’s Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott, in Room magazine: “I will not say t hat t hese ( white) authors cannot write from an experience they’ve never had. To an extent, all fiction writers write from experiences they’ve never had since the characters they’re writing aren’t real.” Here’s Coast Salish blogger Robert Jago: “Do I care if you have a native character in your stupid book about wandering pants or whatever? No. Write away. It doesn’t affect me.”

So we are agreed: no one is saying that writers of one culture should never write about another culture, or in the voice of a character from another culture, and all the rest. Because of course it’s a crazy idea: all of literature is about imagining yourself in another person’s position, a person who by definition must be unlike you unless you are writing autobiography; the whole history of art, likewise, is of cultures learning from and being influenced by another, mixing and borrowing and producing something new. So I join with Scaachi in rejecting outright this ridiculous idea of cultural hermeticism that no one has ever suggested.

And while we are all agreeing, here’s another thing we are all agreed upon. If I may borrow a phrase, no one has ever suggested that writers should venture into another culture in a slapdash fashion, relying on broad stereotypes and hamhanded caricatures in place of close observation and deep understanding. Where the sensitivities are greatest, the more the obligation to take care and attention to get it right, and the more unfamiliar the territory the greater the caution that should be taken.

There is a phrase f or writing that fails that test, one that long predates the present controversy. It’s called bad writing: offensive, yes, but offensive because it is sloppy, lazy, inaccurate. That sort of laziness is not just disrespectful of the subject — and it is right that the rest of us should be more conscious of how hurtful that can be, and the harm it can cause — but disrespectful of the reader, whose judgment is swift and terrible as the closing of a book. Again, I know of no one who would disagree with this.

So if we are all agreed, why are we fighting? Because in fact we are not all agreed. Scaachi and I may be as one in defence of the idea that cultural boundaries are not absolute and inviolable, that writers should be free — in fact, encouraged — to write on any subject they like but accountable for the result, but alas not everyone is as reasonable as we are. There are plenty of people who regard any use of one culture’s artifacts, customs and expressions by another as objectionable in itself, and any attempt to set a story in another cultural setting as anathema, no matter how respectfully treated or accurately observed. Here’s Janet Rogers, Mohawk/ Tuscarora writer, on Canadaland: “Write about how my reality affects you, don’t write about me. Write about your relationship to Indigenous issues, communities, and experiences; don’t write as if you are me. I’m here. I can write my own stories.”

Well. We c an debate whether, as this implies, there is such a thing as a property right to a “reality,” or whether there are only a fixed number of stories that can be told about a place or a people. Or rather: can we debate it? Can we even debate whether we can debate it? Because most of the present controversy is not about cul- tural appropriation itself, but about the unacceptability even of taking a contrary view on it — a view, that is, such as the one on which Scaachi and I are so firmly agreed. That view may be right or it might be wrong; it may be important or it may be trivial; it may be relevant or it may be beside the point. But it’s a view, held in good faith. And we are at the point now where people are losing their jobs for expressing their views.

That was what the “appropriation prize” that caused such excitement was about. It was a protest, yes, against the idea of placing boundaries around the writer’s imagination, but more particularly against the forced departure of Hal Niedzviecki as editor of Write magazine, for writing an essay in defence of cultural appropriation — cultural appropriation, not as the careless plunder of another culture, but in the sense described here, of writers getting out of their own cultural bubble and exploring others, with sympathy and care, which he proposed should not be discouraged but encouraged: hence his off- handed suggestion of a prize, and our — for I was one of the baleful media types who signed on — echo of it. I defy anyone in good faith to read his essay (“It’s up to each of us to find the right measures of respect, learning, and true telling”), or our endorsement of it, as meaning anything else.

That it would in fact be read another way should perhaps have been foreseen: Twitter is not the place for these discussions. That the counter- argument would amount to accusations of whiteness, likewise. But I must admit to some dismay at finding so many of those piling on were writers. When writers are attacking other writers for writing in defence of the right of writers to write, something is very wrong.