30 | The Writer • October 2019
I N
the fall of 2018, I partic-
ipated in a writing
workshop at a liberal
arts college where one of
my white peers wrote a
stereotypical Asian-
American protagonist
for their piece.
When critique rolled around, and a
fellow student pointed out the stereo-
types at play in the author’s work –
namely how the protagonist was
displayed as an overly docile mathema-
tician – the author was stunned.
They asked, “What? Am I not
allowed to write POC characters?”
My answer is simple:
No.
OK, maybe I exaggerated the sim-
plicity of my answer.
Anyone can write any type of mar-
ginalized characters. If your writing is
to reflect the world around you, then
you’re going to have characters who
fall into groups that you aren’t a part
of. That goes deeper than including
people of color; it includes also queer
people, trans people, disabled people,
and more. But if the first question you
have about writing marginalized char-
acters is “Am I allowed to write them?”
then you’re asking the wrong question.
A sign that you’re just not ready.
Yet.
When it comes to writing outside
the margins, questions of permission,
like the one above, often come in bad
faith. They reflect a fear of being ostra-
cized by the wider book community, of
having their career marred by bad
press, more than they do a fear of
doing wrong by the community the
writer aims to represent.
But that raises the question: What
should you be asking?
“First, you need to ask yourself if
you’re taking the space of someone
with that marginalized identity who
might want to tell a similar story. Are
you the best person to write this
story?” says SJ Sindu, the queer, gen-
derqueer author of color behind the
novel Marriage of a Thousand Lies. “A
lot of times, the answer is no.”
Some stories are best told by mem-
bers of the community they represent.
Take Sindu’s novel – a narrative cen-
tered around the navigation of queer-
ness as a Sri Lankan-American, the
protagonist’s brownness and queerness
threatening each other the whole way
through. That is a story that would be
pretty hard for a straight or non-Desi
to tackle.
After all, when members of a
community look for themselves in
their media, authenticity is the
difference between positive
representation and tokenism.
Ahmad Danny Ramadan, author of
The Clothesline Swing, offers this
example. “Say you want to write about
a gay man of color, and you’re a
straight white woman. If you wrote
that character based on your experi-
ences meeting your two best friends
who happened to be gay, you’re only
painting with wide strokes, and in a
way generalizing the gay lived experi-
ence. That, in a way, leads to stereo-
typing, and suddenly you’re writing
yet another gay fashionista with
oppressive shopping habits who
screams ‘yass queen’ whenever any-
thing tickles his fancy. To avoid that,
actively seek people from the commu-
nity you want to write about (the
more, the merrier), ask them mean-
ingful questions and be curious about
their lived experiences, and be per-
sonal – and accept that sometimes
they might not answer your questions.
Finally, pay them for their time – even
with a bag of home-baked cookies.”
In the search for authenticity, the
thing marginalized readers are pick-
ing up on, Sindu and Ramadan argue,
is intimacy. That experience with the
life about which you’re writing. Read-
ers recognize that intimacy as authen-
ticity, and they are looking for it.
After all, that is the heart of the
#OwnVoices movement, right? The
desire for authenticity.
“I can think of five books whose
main characters are Syrian refugees,”Ramadan says. “None of them did jus-
tice to the portrait of refugees, and all
of them were written by people outside
of the refugee community.”
That doesn’t mean a cisgender
author won’t or shouldn’t write a trans-
gender protagonist or an abled author
write a disabled protagonist. There are
cases in which you may find you have
particular stances, knowledge, experi-
ence, or ideas that you feel equipped toACR–
CAN WE TELL THE
STORIES OF MARGINALIZED
COMMUNITIES IF WE
AREN’T PART OF THEM?