{"id":5218,"date":"2014-05-25T07:08:21","date_gmt":"2014-05-25T12:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=5218"},"modified":"2014-05-25T07:08:21","modified_gmt":"2014-05-25T12:08:21","slug":"a-literary-trick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2014\/05\/25\/a-literary-trick\/","title":{"rendered":"“A literary trick”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nIn the New Yorker<\/cite> Junot Diaz talks about MFA vs POC<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\nFrom what I saw the plurality of students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis, Francine Prose, or Alice Munro\u2014and not at all in the traditions of Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Walker, or Jamaica Kincaid. In my workshop the default subject position of reading and writing\u2014of Literature with a capital L\u2014was white, straight and male. This white straight male default was of course not biased in any way by its white straight maleness\u2014no way! Race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people and as such was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nOne way how this works was described by Anne Ursu talking about the way mainstream literary criticism has anointed John Green as the saviour of Young Adult fiction<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\nSo the peculiar canonization of John Green and this string of bizarre articles that anoint him as the vanguard of a post-sparkly-vampire seriousness in YA isn\u2019t simply about taking a white male more seriously than everyone else. It\u2019s also about privileging a certain narrative structure\u2014the dominant narrative\u2019s dominant narrative. It\u2019s not only that Green is a straight white man, it\u2019s that he writes in the way that generations of straight white men have deemed important and Literary. And in art, the remaking of form has historically made the establishment very uncomfortable.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nApart from his own writing, Juan Diaz is perhaps best known for the following quote:\n<\/p>\n

\nMotherfuckers will read a book that\u2019s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we\u2019re taking over.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nWhich may be the most visible way in which the tension between literary values and writers of colour Diaz talks about in his essay plays out. For example in a Strange Horizons<\/cite> review of the science fiction anthology The Long Hidden<\/a><\/cite> where the reviewer was critical about the use of dialect<\/a> in one story:\n<\/p>\n

\nTroy L. Wiggins\u2019s \u201cA Score of Roses\u201d features heavy use of phonetic dialect, a literary trick which works perhaps one time out of a hundred\u2014a shame, because the story underneath all the \u201cchil\u2019ren\u201ds and \u201cyo\u2019self\u201ds is charming.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nWhich sparked a mini debate about dialect, first on Twitter with Daniel Jos\u00e9 Older<\/a> (one of the editors of The Long Hidden<\/cite>) and Rose Lemberg<\/a> criticising the assumptions made in the review.\n<\/p>\n

\nTroy L. Wiggins himself wrote his own response about dialect being called a “literay trick”<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\nAnd, to be honest, I\u2019m still not angry at the reviewer for not understanding before that review went to print exactly why her statement would be problematic. That she was essentially claiming that the voice I used to tell my story wasn\u2019t sufficient, because it was a trick\u2013and hackneyed to boot. That maybe this suggestion crossed the line from \u201ci didn\u2019t like this story\u201d to \u201cthis story\u2019s quality is invalid because of this THING.\u201d Another friend of mine, another fantastic creator, recently gave me this advice: \u201cTell it true.\u201d Sure, I could have used a style of dialogue that was less\u2013whatever, I don\u2019t know what would have been appropriate for the reviewer\u2013but it wouldn\u2019t have been true.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nHe also linked to Junot Diaz’s MFA vs POC essay and talked about his own experiences in writing workshops:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nIn my first year workshop, there was a young dreadlocked black woman who wrote in the tradition of Hurston, Walker, and Wright. Homegirl took big steps. She wrote in a powerful voice that mixed Wright\u2019s sensibilities with Hurston\u2019s down-home universes. Her stories examined the unique kinship of women who love each other in all the ways that humans should. They were powerful and poignant. She wove images in her work that captured the sorrow and joy of being in love.\n<\/p>\n

\nBut her dialogue. Oh! A tragedy.\n<\/p>\n

\nShe used AAVE. Vernacular. Dialect. American black folks\u2019 speak. That specter of language, that literary trick that made the folks in our workshop cringe in their boots with actual physical discomfort because they didn\u2019t get it, because it was alien and they didn\u2019t understand, or because they didn\u2019t think it had an appropriate use in the type of high-minded literature that undergraduate students in a first year writing workshop like to think that they are producing.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nResponding to this were the editors of Abyss and Apex<\/cite>, a speculative fiction magazine you may know from wikihistory<\/a>. They had their own struggles with finding a balance<\/a> between using dialect and keeping a story accesible for readings who don’t speak said dialect:\n<\/p>\n

\nWe wanted our readers, who span the English-speaking world, to feel as if they were transported to the Caribbean \u2013 but without constantly feeling like they needed to stop for directions. We looked to Grenadian author Tobias S. Buckell (Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose) as an example of an author who used authentic island patois without overwhelming the story to the point where he alienated a large portion of his non-Caribbean readers. The St. Thomas-born, US-residing author of \u201cName Calling\u201d worked with our Canadian-born, Trinidad-raised editor Tonya Liburd to make this happen.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nTo further illustrate their point, they published both the edited and unedited versions of Celeste Rita Baker’s Name Calling<\/a>. reading both versions, Amal El-Mohtar summed it up as<\/a> “One reading took me to an island. The other brought the island to me”.\n<\/p>\n

\nTobias Buckell, cited in the editorial as somebody who had gotten that balance right, had his own response<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\nPlease do not hold me up in this way. For one, it is dangerous to other writers seeking to find their voices. It\u2019s dangerous to me, as you sell me out as a brick in the wall. And it adds to a potentially dangerous view that there is a proper way to do dialect at all. I\u2019m one way, and I\u2019m always flattered and humbled when I\u2019m held up as an example. But only that. *An* example.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nStrange Horizons<\/cite>, which has always championed more diversity in science fiction, was quick to apologise in the comments to the review (and also rounded up the various responses<\/a> to the review on their blog):\n<\/p>\n

\nI think our editorial failure here was in not encouraging Katherine to consider those nuances when developing her argument — for which we apologise to her as well as to our readers. In the context of a review of a collection with Long Hidden’s stated mission, it was inappropriate to frame writing dialect as a “literary trick” and to pass over the whole topic so briefly.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the New Yorker Junot Diaz talks about MFA vs POC. From what I saw the plurality of students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis, Francine Prose, or Alice Munro\u2014and not at all in the traditions of Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,230,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-art","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5218"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5219,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5218\/revisions\/5219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}