À propos Of Appropriation

Who, Me?

Writing about identity when you’re a white CIS gendered female can seem a bit fraught.

Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash.

But what about when you’ve spent the last thirty years surrounded by a culture other than your own? What about having listened to its traditions and embraced its teachings in order to support and encourage your son, an “official” member of that culture?

When my son entered college, I was deeply grateful for the funding available for him through various bursaries and stipends. As a single mother, without that financial support, it would have been so much more challenging to put him through school.

So when I encountered a young un-homed woman on a Toronto sidewalk, the desire to give her what my son had benfitted from surged through me. She accepted my offer of something to eat with a shy, surprised smile. What I wanted was to get her home to her reserve in Cape Croker, find out her interests, enroll her in college or university, and apply for grants. At the very least I wanted to let her know that she needn’t live on the street—there were OPTIONS. I didn’t do any of that, of course. I bought her a damn sandwich, a big submarine so she could save some for later, a cookie, and a soft drink. When she asked if it would be all right if she ate her meal outside, I wilted. What was I thinking? I sat staring out at the empty sidewalk with a sandwich I couldn’t eat, choking down tears. Who I was crying for, I couldn’t say.

She likely didn’t need my help. Who the hell did I think I was?

I was in the middle of an Ellen Bass poetry workshop, writing a poem that day about how filtered my vision had been when I met and married my son’s father. How I’d projected a romanticized version of him onto the man he was, and how ashamed I was for having disregarded so many warning signs. That afternoon I bled all over the page and put my head down on the long white table where I wrote. It was a shitty poem no one wanted to publish.

What stayed with me from that day wasn’t the poem, but that young woman. So I put her in a story. I suppose I didn’t want to admit how naïve I’d been at almost forty when I met the man who would be my husband, so I made my protagonist young—not quite fifteen.

Around that time, I’d been moved by a number of suicides and attempted suicides that had left children and young adults behind. People I knew and others I knew who’d been close with those who’d taken their own lives. One in particular had torn the skin from my heart—on his thirteenth birthday, my son’s friend’s cousin had come upon his father hanging in the garage.

I wanted to explore the emotional and psychological fallout for Carrie, a girl who loses her mother that way. A mother she couldn’t save. Impulsively, after meeting a young Indigenous woman on the street, she decides to “save” her by getting her to her home reserve.

Is it a surprise that no agent or indie publisher will touch this story? Did I appropriate or stereotype? I don’t know. I simply wrote what I knew—from that settler girl’s point of view. And no, although the Anishinaabe kwe does get home, she is not “rescued.” She merely agrees to go along with Carrie. Which is the sort of response to offers and suggestions I’ve often witnessed.

A few years after we married, I read Rupert Ross’s book, Dancing With a Ghost about his own waking up to the way Indigenous people respond. It explained so much that had puzzled me about my husband’s behaviour, in that he didn’t ask questions and he never argued, traits I’d interpreted as not caring and passive aggression, but were indications of inherent respect.

In a sideways twist, Carrie herself gets rescued, but I did not want it to be a cliched type of “wise Indian” trope. She just gets her eyes opened.

Anyway. I’ve stopped submitting it, even though the story is still alive in me. It is my story. Although it’s irrelevant, I think the ending is somewhat elegant and respectful.

I’m not whining, merely recognizing the current climate. And as I read Yellowface, oh my goodness, I’m stepping even further away from trying to get that particular book published. Yikes. Imagine, Yellowface is written by an Asian writer in the voice of a non-Asian woman who has appropriated her dead Asian almost-friend’s novel. (It’s a breathlessly fantastic read, by the way. It lays bare some awful truths about the publishing world. Sigh.)

Okay, on to current projects.

What intrigues me is identity. Beyond gender or enculturation. I’ve been asking the question, What makes us who we are? We may identify with our nation, gender, religion, family, or ideology, believing one or more of these constitutes our “I”. But what is the essence of being human? That’s what I’m after—to explore what lies under the skin.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

The story I’m currently chasing is about a fifty-one-year-old woman who’s received the heart and lungs of a twenty-five-year-old man. I’ve taken the experiences of Claire Sylvia, author of the memoir, A CHANGE OF HEART, where she details the stunning changes she experienced after a double transplant, and doubled down. I read this story years ago and found it remarkable that this wasn’t a mind or brain transplant, but that somehow tastes, desires and even dreams had been transported along with the donor’s heart and lungs. Huh, I thought. Huh.

As storytellers often do, I asked the question, “What if…?” What if not only the preferences came with the organs, but the entire personality remained alive and conscious?

It began as a short story, but I’ve continued to mine this vein, turning up gleaming bits of ore as I go. I’m a pantser, so I tend to let the story reveal itself as I write. This way, almost every scene has a surprise in store for me.

Okay, so I haven’t had a transplant, nor have I donated organs. I do know what it’s like to undergo surgery and to have bits removed. And I have flown in a light plane. Otherwise, this isn’t “my” story. It’s speculative and a hell of a lot of fun to write.

Once it’s ready to submit, who knows how tight the grip will be on what’s acceptable. Right now, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means…” as Joan Didion once famously remarked.

And now I’ll ask you a question writers are often asked, one whose answer can shift from project to project: Who do you write for? Yourself alone? Yourself with the hope others will find it useful entertaining, or enlightening? Or do you write with a specific audience in mind? (There’s no wrong answer, by the way.)