Rotten eggs
Originally published June 17, 2020
You know when you’re baking, cracking eggs into a bowl and one is rotten? This happened to me once: the green and grey ooze slipped between my fingers, the sulphur turned my stomach. A bad book is a rotten egg. That stink, it lingers. When I say bad book I don’t mean purple prose or dud dialogue. When I say bad, I mean dangerous. Recently I had the ill luck of what seemed like a carton, a rash of rotten eggs.
Crimes against fiction: an incomplete catalogue
There was the historical fiction wherein the only Indigenous characters were dead, their ghosts floating around. The book where every female character was either a virgin or a whore. (The writer is a misogynist, I texted a friend. That’s it. That’s the review.) And the YA I can only describe as a smorgasbord fit for a glutton for punishment. The cast included a predatory gay man, a gay kid whose sexual assault was a weak plot device in service to the straight protagonist’s betterment, and a one-note single mother with a neglected child (Black, natch). By contrast, the two-dimensional trans character was a relief. At least the kid didn’t get killed or beaten up. The whole mess, slap-dash and badly written, reeked of what it likely was: a cishet author trying to capitalize on #trends and a publisher asleep at the wheel. Or worse: rotten egging the author on.
Then came the novel about two urbanites - a Black transgender woman and a bi-racial man - who, on a whim, take a cycling holiday in rural Spain. Naturally, the author is an old white guy. And like Lionel Shriver delivering a keynote in a Sombrero, every beat of his book twanged false. From the conceit of the trip to the characters’ ease on the trail to the cringe-worthy rap lyrics to the way the man repeatedly thought of his best friend as if she was a man. Trans women are women. The end. If you’re going to write about characters who are nothing like you, do your homework. Google hiking + Black and traveling while trans for a start. I get it. The book was an elaborate troll, the literary equivalent of Black face. Hint: if you drip contempt for Black and Trans people in real life, it’s going to show in your fiction. What’s amazing to me is a publisher (in 2019!) gave this pathetic temper tantrum a platform.
The heart breaker was the book by an author whose work I’d previously enjoyed. For 200+ pages it had me. Excellent prose. A propulsive plot. An Indigenous point-of-view character with a redemption story arc. But if you know even one true thing about the way Indigenous people are treated, you’ll guess what came next. The Indigenous character, the only one in the book, was murdered by the white protagonists who drugged him first to make it look like he was drunk, then set the building on fire, so that after he burned inside everyone thought he’d caused the accident. It was played off to the reader as a mistaken case of “self defence.” This is why Indigenous authors get up in arms when settlers write about them. THIS IS WHY. Because it’s not enough they are being murdered by cops and civilians in real life, writers must kill them on the page too. Look, I’m sure the author’s intentions were good. But you can’t be ham-fisted about Indigenous justice. You can’t prioritize plot twists over politics, not when the real life stakes are so high.
What’s the harm? It’s only fiction, sure.
In this, the year of Our Lord twenty bloody twenty, I can’t believe I still need to spell this out:
The unrelenting imagery of dead Indigenous people in fiction desensitizes us to their deaths in real life so that we don’t hold killers or governments or oil and mining companies accountable, so we don’t demand justice.
Trans people are still fighting for basic equality because society refuses to recognize their genders. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Books that get this twisted, books featuring characters who confuse their best friend’s gender, are piling on to the problem, preventing trans people from having basic human rights.
Perpetuating the myth of the predatory gay man makes straights hysterical about their children’s real life teachers or the man next door.
Reading is a powerful education/ miseducation tool. Through a story, we step into someone else’s body and experience the world as them. And if we go gallivanting in Spain with two Black characters, one of whom is trans, who don’t at any point fear for their safety or get dirty looks or hassled at the airport then when the Black and trans people in our lives or on the news tell us about the bigotry they experienced, we are less likely to believe them.
Readers trust authors
But…but…I hear someone say. Yeah, you there in the front, Satan’s Advocate. I hear you arguing readers aren’t stupid. They know fiction is imaginary. Sure they do. That must be why readers assume every debut novel is autobiography, why people keep asking if I was an immigration lawyer. That must be why the husband of an author I know got dirty looks after she published a story about an affair.
A couple of years ago, I was at a literary festival watching an author read a passage from her novel. It was a sex scene between a woman and her Indigenous lover. He was described in animalistic terms. There may even have been references to bestiality. I was sitting with a group of Indigenous authors. I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me. I can’t begin to imagine what they felt, hearing this white lady read this passage and knowing that everyone else in the packed theatre (mostly other white people) was hearing it too. We were all made complicit then, in that display of settler arrogance, as we listened to yet another incarnation of the Noble Savage fever dream. Afterward, at the signing table, readers came up to the author and asked “So is this accurate? Is this what life is like in the North?” “Yes,” she said, and blithely scribbled her name in their books.
Tell the truth
“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.”
There is a contract we enter into when we read a story. The author assumes authority; the reader suspends disbelief. Using the tools of craft we train the reader to trust us, to accept every word on the page. Fiction shapes the way readers understand the world, thereby influencing the world itself. We have a responsibility then to tell the truth.
The truth is not a tired trope or a dangerous stereotype. The truth is something you discover with humility, research, empathy, and the wise counsel of Subject Matter Experts (or as some people call them, Sensitivity Readers). When you don’t tell the truth—
Sorry. Let me rephrase that.
When you lie.
When you lie and claim that Black people are as safe as white people in all spaces. That queer people enjoy the same privileges as straight people. When you stubbornly insist a woman is a man. When you perpetuate the idea that the only good Indian is a dead one or a Noble Savage. When you tell these lies in black ink, with the authority of the printed page, you are either incredibly irresponsible or an asshole. Take your pick. And in telling these lies, you are making actual people’s real lives more difficult, more fraught, more dangerous.
How to do it then, how to write from outside your perspective? Glad you asked.
