It’s the job of artists to imagine others’ minds, others’ lives, others’ souls outside of their own.


Charges of cultural appropriation cropped up recently in response to the publication, in The Nation, of “How-To,” a poem by a white poet from the point of view of a homeless person who speaks in a black vernacular. The Nation's poetry editors subsequently apologized "for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem."

This is a subject that drives me bonkers, in no small measure because I once was accused of appropriating.

I’m white and Jewish. Post-college, I wrote about people who look like me. Then I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I volunteered in an AIDS hospice, largely among African-American, underprivileged, full-Gospel Christians. I sat with them, held their hands, and heard their stories. I did this for 10 years, and when I moved back east, I turned their real lives into fiction.

Was I guilty of cultural appropriation? A few people who read the book said I was. But those in the hospice who read my book thanked me. To this day, I’m glad I did what I did, because if I hadn’t written about this one tiny corner of humanity, then nobody would have.

True, I had little in common with the people who inspired the characters I conjured — other than, you know, we all bleed red.

Who has the right to write it?

If artists shied away from using the specifics of cultures other than their own, including oppressed and marginalized ones, the world would not have works such as "Sophie’s Choice," "Sounder," "The Canterbury Tales," "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," "Othello," "Tobacco Road" or "Heart of Darkness." So what if George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) was about as Jewish as George Washington? Had she not been the genius she was and dreamed up the conflicted English Jew Daniel Deronda, he, and his book, would simply not exist.

Yet many smart people are appalled by "cultural appropriation," comparing it to a kind of "stealing." If whites (or members of other privileged groups) borrow bits of a minority or oppressed group’s culture, they say, they’re depriving that group of the chance to tell its own stories.

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But is that really true? The fact that Stevie Ray Vaughan (who was white) sang the blues certainly didn’t mean that B.B. King (who was black) couldn’t sing them, too. John Updike (who was a gentile) wrote several books featuring Jewish characters, but that sure didn’t mean that Philip Roth (who was Jewish) couldn’t write about them, too.

Can cultural appropriation cause pain?

Others who raise the red flag of "cultural appropriation" point to the pain it causes. Is it possible that language (not including language deployed to incite violence) can actually cause pain, as The Nation editors wrote?

Of course it can. I’ve actually lost sleep over books. So what? If literary art is worth its weight in pixels, at the very least it should jolt us now and then.

Part of what makes America the source of so much great art is that we’re all mixed up together in a brew of differing linguistic, cultural, racial, national, ethnic, culinary and religious traditions. Not incorporating some of our neighbors' cultures would be unnatural. It's the job of artists to imagine others' minds, others' lives, others' souls outside of their own. To be prohibited from writing or creating art from outside one’s own personal experience is to be constrained to a very thin kind of art — or even, at its extreme worst, art as propaganda.

The next time the wrong person writes the right poem, I’d suggest that we look deeply into what all mortals share, and applaud the efficacy of literature to bring to light the most remote corners of our commonly beating hearts.

Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of four books, including "Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou," and "Visiting Hours." She writes for numerous newspapers and magazines.





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