The Times Magazine 27‘death threats’; we’d said ‘threats of violence’,”
Cummins sighs. “But then they put this
out implying we’d made the whole thing up,
because we were racist and imagined a violent
Latino mob was coming to destroy us.”
There was yet more misinformed outrage
after Cummins tweeted a shot of an Australian
book blogger’s nails, intricately decorated with
a reproduction of her book cover, a pattern
of Mexican tiles and barbed wire. (For the
paperback published next week, the jacket’s
been changed to feature an innocuous dove.)
“This racist bitch using [immigrant] pain
to make a dollar,” tweeted one. “The vulgar
pleasure of proudly wearing this exact symbol
of oppression as a fashion statement and
claiming it’s ‘pretty’ is literally making me
nauseous,” bellowed another. “This bitch is
foul as f***,” said a third.
“They weren’t even my fingernails. I just
retweeted the picture,” Cummins exclaims. “So
stupid of me – everyone assumed they were
mine. It was all crazy.”
Much of the toxicity centred on the fact
that while Cummins “identified as white”
(an admission she made in a 2015 article),
her marketing literature made much of her
having a Puerto-Rican grandmother. Both
statements were true, but many claimed
Cummins had invented the second bit. “That
was one of the most painful parts – this
accusation that took shape and grew wings
that I was a fraud, that I had only come to
my Latina identity to cash in on it,” Cummins
says. “I recognise the privilege conferred by
my whiteness but it does not somehow erase
the equal effect of my being Puerto Rican,
and I couldn’t believe, in this day and age,
I kept having to explain to people that you
could be both. And anyway, what right does
anyone have to weigh in on whether my
identity is valid and if I tick the boxes they
think necessary to write this novel? But
I inadvertently opened the doors to that
conversation, which I regret.”
She opened the doors by writing an
author’s note for the first edition (subsequent
editions omitted it) to answer publishers’
continual questions why she had written
the book. “The subtext was, ‘Why the woman
with the white face?’ ” she says wryly. Yet
this only gave the mob further fuel, with
them seizing on Cummins’s explanation
that she “had a dog in the fight” because her
husband was formerly an “undocumented
immigrant”. “All the years we were dating,
we lived in fear that he could be deported
at a moment’s notice,” she wrote “Once... a
policeman pulled us over for driving with a
broken tail light. The minutes that followed
were some of the most excruciating of my life.
I thought I would lose him.”
What Cummins didn’t mention was that
her husband was an Irish structural engineer,who’d arrived for a holiday but – after meeting
her – never left. (It took him 13 years to become
a US citizen.) “I never, ever pretended that
my husband’s experience was similar to the
experiences I wrote about, because he’s white,
a native English speaker,” Cummins says.
“However, it’s not irrelevant, when you love
someone who is undocumented and begin a
family with them, that this is an objectively
terrifying way to live. He could have been
deported at any time and that was scary. Our
experiences with the monstrous, opaque and
broken immigration system in this country
absolutely influenced my desire to write about
the subject.”
Also relevant, Cummins feels, was her
experience of trauma. Her 2004 memoir, A
Rip in Heaven, relates how in 1991 two of her
cousins were raped and murdered (her brother
narrowly survived) by a gang of strangers,
three of whom ended up on death row, with
one eventually executed (Gurba called the
book “highly racialised true crime”).The story was, says Cummins, “wholly
usurped by the perpetrators. They had
reporters giving them a platform to talk about
their suffering as a death-row inmate. And it
made me feel so impotent with rage,” she says.
“So I’d always wanted to tell victims’ stories
and these factors influenced the way I thought
about this story. But I also think it’s important
to say they didn’t have to have influenced me.
At the end of the day, I made up a story.”
Even so, the book is far from the sloppy
fantasy her critics claimed. Cummins spent five
years visiting migrant shelters and orphanages,
interviewing hundreds of migrants and the
people who helped them. “And what really
cheered me up was realising that the narrative
that Latino people hated the book was a total
oversimplification. In fact, many hundreds
of thousands have loved it and have written
to me, saying, ‘I’m so glad you wrote this. It
sounds so like my mother’s story.’ It’s only a
very small, vocal cross-section who, frankly,
are not migrants themselves, that have a
problem with it. But everyone was reporting
those voices as if they represented the
pantheon of the Latino response.”
What also really cheers Cummins is the
fact that – to date – American Dirt has sold
1.5 million copies worldwide. “If, after all that
hatred, the book had failed, I don’t know if I
would ever have recovered. I don’t know if
I would have been up to writing another book.”
Instead, she’s now embarked on the next one.
“I wanted to be sure I could do it without
censoring myself. I don’t want to shape the
narrative according to my fear of what just
happened in this cultural moment. But now
I am at peace with what happened.”
I hope she chooses as controversial a
subject as possible, I say, only half-joking. “My
poor agent, I’ve told her, ‘Take a deep breath,’ ”
Cummins responds, laughing. “I’m not looking
to be provocative but the stories I care about
are social justice stories. Why should the onus
for writing about injustice be only on people
of colour? Why shouldn’t white writers have to
grapple with racism? We need every voice on
the table. I don’t want to be the loudest voice- that was accidental – but I want to be part of
the chorus, even if not everyone welcomes me.
“What has happened has made me
stronger,” she continues. “I know now that
people will say whatever they want to say
about me, and sometimes it will be untrue and
painful and disturbing. But having withstood
the hatred of Twitter has been liberating. They
have already done their worst, so it can never
be that bad again. Other writers might be
afraid to poke the beast, so maybe now I am
the only writer who has the freedom to write
whatever she wants.” n
Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt is out now
in paperback (Tinder Press, £8.99)‘They implied we’d made
up death threats because
we were racist and
imagined a violent Latino
mob coming to destroy us’
From top: the picture of a blogger’s nails that Cummins
retweeted; with her husbandJEANINECUMMINS/TWITTER