The Right to Write: Who owns a story, the person who lives it or the person who writes it?
July 2, 2014 Leave a comment
JUNE 28, 2014 2:39 PM 47 Comments
I sat on a panel once with another novelist and a distinguished African-American critic, to discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The critic said, “Of course, as a white woman, Stowe had no right to write the black experience.” The other novelist said lightly, “No, of course not. And I had no right to write about 14th-century Scandinavians. Which I did.”
The exchange made me wonder: who has the right to our stories?
For centuries, African-Americans couldn’t fully participate in the literary conversation, since for many of them literacy was forbidden. Why wouldn’t they resent the fact that their stories were told by whites? But does this mean that, as novelists, we can write stories only of our own race, our own gender, our own subcultural niche?
Stowe used other people’s stories as sources, but what drove her to write was her own outraged response to slavery. She has the right to that response. Isn’t it better that Stowe wrote her book, instead of staying respectfully mute because the stories were not hers to tell? It was the narrative strands about the black experience that gave the book such emotional potency, and made it such a powerful abolitionist force.
Who owns the story, the person who lives it or the person who writes it?
Read more at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/28/the-right-to-write/?ref=opinion
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