Black authorship and the "right to write"

Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison

Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Jessica Maya Jones reflects on the ethics of authorship and the persistent lack of diversity in the publishing industry.

As the current movement of Black Lives Matter plays out across the world, it seems relevant to reflect on the black writers that have captured black experiences. Maya Angelou, the prolific poet, author, and activist, depicted the beauty and strength of African Americans in constant celebration of their human spirit. Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for giving “life to an essential aspect of American reality”, lyrically illustrating the female African American voice in her novels The Bluest Eye (1970) and Song of Solomon (1977). Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist, civil rights activist, and author is remembered for her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. This book became a staple of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that enabled black writers and artists to regain control in representing their own experiences to the Western masses. 

However, further investigation into black narratives and their authors invites us to question, can only black writers write about black experiences? 

In theory, to narrate the nuance of another’s experience requires the imagination, thorough research, and understanding of that chosen culture or character. Writing rarely remains confined to the socio-economic, gendered, or racial identity of an author; creativity tends to transcend the restrictive boundaries imposed by reality. That being said, the relaying of another’s experience, particularly an oppressive experience, can easily plunge a writer into the debate of appreciation versus appropriation. 

During Irish writer Kit de Waal’s 2018 talk on cultural appropriation at the International Literature Festival in Dublin, she mentioned  her desire for writers to steer away from what she calls “the Stockett treatment”, referring to Kathryn Stockett, the white American author of the bestselling novel, The Help. The book is written in a sociolinguistic dialect that intends to recreate the voice and vernacular of the uneducated African American “help”.  Despite the novel’s literary and cinematic success, it sparked widespread criticism, with many challenging her “right to write”. Although The Help tells a black story, the protagonist who enables the advancement and liberation of black voices is a white woman named Skeeter, falling into the problematic cultural cliché of the white saviour complex found throughout film and literature. Kit de Waal summarises her stance on writing across racial boundaries by warning her audience, “don’t dip your pen in someone else’s blood.” 

However, to limit black stories to black writers would further expose the inequality of diversity within the publishing industry. To illustrate, only 8% of British young adult novels were written by BAME authors between 2006 and 2016. The 2018 State of Diversity in Romance Publishing report revealed that for every 100 books published by leading romance publishers in 2018, only 7.7 were written by people of colour. This week, following the surge in interest in black authors, Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other) and Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race) became the first black British women to ever top the UK’s fiction and non-fiction paperback charts.

If all novelists were then required to “stay in their lane”, the fight for the expansion of marginalised voices in publishing could be drowned out even further by predominantly white narratives.  This theoretical limitation would also pigeon-hole black writers into only writing their stories through the lens of race, inhibiting the full freedom of literary expression.  

So, what gives an author the “right to write”?  The answer remains up in the air. Though most importantly, diversifying publishing and learning opportunities for BAME authors will help reduce the current disparity, creating more diverse (and perhaps less controversial) protagonists in fiction.  

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