When I told my friend, a writer, that my fantasy novel's main character was an 18-year-old black girl, he cut me off right away. "You can't do it." I fought, I resisted, I got defensive, but I knew he was right. After all, Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark is one of two reasons I majored in English. The other reason was the Vietnam War, which I'll elaborate on in another post. My ancestry is French and Irish. What would I know of the inner life of a teenager raised in Hollywood by her Haitian ex-model mother and Brazilian producer father? But is the question of whether I should write this book a cultural or racial one? I don't think my hesitation, and my friend's warning, goes much further than skin deep. Cherie's experience isn't rooted culturally in the African-American community. Or is it? How much of her life in Beverly Hills would be different from her blonde besties'? I don't know. She is a mystery to me. Every bit of her life is a mystery to me, as I have only been to LA once.
The reasons I am writing this book includes the reasons it shouldn't be written at all. I don't know if I can pull it off. I don't know if I will make some egregious errors that I am inherently blind to, by my whiteness. It's entirely possible. Probably probable. Caucasian writers have created characters of color for years, that is nothing new. But how successfully? There is a range. Zora Neale Hurston, whom I consider my literary grandmother, for her writing has most changed my life, has most given me permission, no, an invitation, to write, was horrendously panned for her attempt at writing about a Southern white couple in Seraph on the Suwannee. This is her one piece I can't bring myself to read. Ironically, I should read it immediately before I get any further inFaerieWolf. We are all limited by the lens through which we see the world, and that lens gets manipulated and distorted based on how society treats us. I can take a hammer to my lens, and try to see the world through a myriad of perspectives, but it is my eyes, always, peering through.
The problem is, I don't just want to write a book about Cherie, who appeared to me, fully formed, on Ft. Myers Beach, I want to write her successfully. I want Cherie to be seen clearly by the reader for the person she is, not just the things about her. There are pieces of her that I don't really understand, can't really relate to. She is, after all, a fictional character, and not me. Most of those pieces have nothing to do with race, ethnicity, or culture. They have to do with her personal worldview and the way she interacts with the world around her. Our race, ethnicity, and culture inform who we are as people, but they are not who we are as people. We do not exist in homogenous groups based on demographics.
At the end of the day, we all write what we know. But we challenge ourselves as well. Isn't that what writing's about? Challenging the norms of the day? Seeking to elicit some fragment of truth within ourselves and share it with the world? Find one, just one, honest sentence? What I know of the world, the story I choose to tell that world has to do with many things, not simply race. This is not just a fantasy novel about a black female heroine written by a white female writer. That's something about it, but it's just one thing.
