Widening the Opening
Widening the Opening
Eréndira Ramírez-Ortega
I’m aware of the curiosity that is surfacing fervently about the creative work of people of color. We hear about how “our voices need to be heard,” or “our stories need to be shared.” To us, it seems we are living our ordinary lives, but being ordinary doesn’t seem to be tragic enough.
It appears the ordinary among us have become a novelty because the moment someone who looks like us does something great, we are asked about it from the emotional (how does it feel?) to the intellectual (why do you think there aren’t more people who look like you in the industry?).
Truth is, we need to postpone our walks to the park to toss a football with our children in order to answer all these things. Our opinions are elicited when something sinister is afoot, like when there is another explosive exposé into some event that happened in the industry, or when someone who looks like us is appointed into the echelons of the highest court of the land, despite our political inclinations, or when they receive an award in the literary or publishing machine and the gatekeepers—publishers, editors, agents, conference directors, writing department heads, Christian writers—are barely learning about it.
We’re in a reckoning, it seems, literarily speaking.
We’re asked to indulge now, and ruminate on our feelings about the reckoning—the coded “everything that is going on right now in the publishing world.” Someone somewhere got harassed or got paid less or was misrepresented and because we look like that person, the rest of us, by default, are expected to react.
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I recall the halls of the academe, how they towered with authority and imposition, insisting the believer conform to the philosophies of the spirit of the age, the kindling fire that beseeched me to “beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”
I earned my MFA in creative writing at Mills College, a female institution in the bay area. I was forewarned as I beheld mounted figureheads of the thought leaders that navigated me through treacherous waters, toward unknown destinations.
And yet, I awoke shipwrecked, so I designed makeshift fortresses to protect myself—and from what exactly?
Those of us who emerged from MFA programs confronted a mainstream literary culture that was unforgiving and relentless. While it was rewarding to have been published successively during and after the MFA, the price was brutal.
I didn’t quite know then what course my life would take but I persevered. I was successful in the various academic institutions where I taught writing. Mills College served as a microcosm of what I eventually experienced in academia as an instructor and, ultimately, in the corporate world. The MFA also served as a microcosm of publishing, where prejudice and bias were pervasive.
I recall an office-hours meeting with a tenured faculty in the MFA, a woman of color, who stated that the application pool was lacking inclusion. “But there you were,” she said, referring to my application, gesturing with her hand as if plucking a ticket out of a hat. I remember that same faculty singing the praises of my writing during a workshop and a classmate, another woman of color who had been a mentor to me at the time, called me that afternoon to say she didn’t think the professor’s praise was warranted because it only served to “pin us against each other.”
When certain things happen to us, we wrestle. We ask ourselves, “is this tokenism or what?” At Mills College, it felt as if people of color were not supposed to be there, and it was natural for us to heap loads of pressure on ourselves to be better than the next person in order to achieve success.
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The banal call for diversity in literature isn’t as glamorous and noble as we may believe. The writer treating on Christian themes is seldom invited to contribute her work or participate in any mainstream discourse—unless it vilifies the biblical institution.
I can only surmise that because the characters in our fiction walk the line of Christian faith, they are deemed irrelevant to the culture. They are “other” because their source of influence is reduced in society. Editors don’t offer full disclosure as to why these literary pieces get cast out early, or later in the tier—they have feedback parameters in place. But when you read literary journals devoid of authentic Christian themes, a deficit is notable. It isn’t because Christian writers are scarce—we do earn our MFAs after all.
It's unnerving that in the literary world—when it comes to matters of Christian polemic—depictions of morality and faith continue to be oversimplified or overlooked entirely. These treatments stump the work’s full potential.
As a Christian who writes, what drives my creative work is to bring significance to the value of my faith. As a reader, I am intrigued by work that achieves this. Generally speaking, I look at Christian literature with a critical eye because most of what I’ve read in the mainstream that is tangentially religious is rife with superficial tropes and cliché and is mostly written by non-believers or outsiders. It isn’t written right—there is no evidence of empathy, no suggestion of close observation. Most of it lacks dimension, most of it is a mere caricature. Thus, the story suffers, and the credibility of faith is jettisoned. It is easy to spot these inconsistencies, these failed attempts at depiction. Although characterizations may be substantiated in the story, the spiritual context, when it is diminished, alters its trustworthiness.
Critical thinking is necessary when handling this type of writing. References to faith ought to be taken seriously and editors would be wise to push this particular point further. Authenticity in literature is found wanting and the onus is on the writer to get it right—a hard sell to a secular editor. This critical thinking on Christian concepts is hard to find in contemporary literature—it requires work and publishers assume, potentially correctly, that readers don’t want to do the work. They want to be entertained. They want to off-load analysis and symbolism to the workshop space, or to literary criticism—but not to publishing.
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Writers of color are not, generally, sought to speak at writers’ conferences on topics that go beyond the ethnocentric, cultural themes. The mainstream astute gatekeeper looks for us to talk about the box we find ourselves in, centered around race and iniquity, and not on the topics of the writing process, the MFA experience, the craft of writing.
In her essay, “What White Publishers Won’t Print”, Zora Neale Hurston articulated the idea of gatekeepers keeping a tight lock on who gets access and who doesn’t—it’s uncanny how relevant her piece is today: “They know the skepticism in general about the complicated emotions in the minorities. The average American just cannot conceive of it, and would be apt to reject the notion, and publishers and producers take the stand that they are not in the business to educate, but to make money. Sympathetic as they might be, they cannot afford to be crusaders. In proof of this, you can note various publishers and producers edging forward a little, and ready to go even further when the trial balloons show that the public is ready for it… The question naturally arises as to the why of this indifference, not to say skepticism, to the internal life of educated minorities.”
She further declares, poignantly, where an answer to this indifference lies: “The answer lies in what we call the American Museum of Unnatural History. This is an intangible built on token belief. It is assumed that all non-Anglo-Saxons are uncomplicated stereotypes. Everybody knows all about them. They are lay figures mounted in the museum where all may take them in at a glance. They are made of bent wires without insides at all. So how could anybody write a book about the non-existent?”
Today, we’re witnessing a hunger, so it seems, for us to penetrate the bent wires and dig out our insides, pluck out our heart from our chest so the world can see. Why a sharp, morbid interest now?
Hurston wrote: “The fact that there is no demand for incisive and full-dress stories around Negroes above the servant class is indicative of something of vast importance to this nation. This blank is not filled by the fiction built around upper-class Negroes exploiting the race problem. Rather it tends to point up. A college-bred Negro still is not a person like other folks, but an interesting problem, more or less.”
Hurston knew the extremities of racial bias and the undermining of the intellect when she described a slave master who stated that a teacher to a slave can “turn a useful savage into a dangerous beast.”
It is disconcerting to imagine history repeating itself, subtly, in unsuspecting forms to the casual writer of color. We’re put in categories of sales-worthiness. Our viability depends on the insufferable social media platform as the litmus test, lest we are passed up by the popular darling in the crowd of meet-and-greets at Christian Writers’ Conferences.
Some of the most remarkable firsthand observations I’ll never forget during my experience at a well-known (now defunct) Christian Writers’ Conference in northern California came from gatekeepers.
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An agent, when I asked if he receives manuscripts from writers of color: “I do represent one woman of color already and I do get manuscripts from people of color, but they’re just not good enough.”
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An editor, when I asked if she would be interested in reading my proposal: “Do you know any influencers? How many follow you? I’ve heard your name before, but do influencers know you?”
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An agent, when I asked if my pitch was of interest to her: “You should consider starting your story by placing yourself say, on a beach, reflecting on the life you’re about to share with your reader.”
These conversations took place in 2017 and I’d like to believe a lot has changed in the span of four years. The reckoning would demand it so.
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In a lecture, the late Toni Morrison described good and evil and how it is dressed in contemporary literature: “Contemporary literature is not interested in goodness on a large or even limited scale. When it appears, it is with a note of apology in its hand and has trouble speaking its name. Evil is dressed up with a tuxedo and a top hat, while goodness lurks backstage and bites its tongue. Evil is constant. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good—and that’s complicated.”
I realize that the fight for morality in literature is paper thin. In his essay “Why Is American Fiction in Its Current Dismal State?”, Anis Shivani wrote: “The individual fiction writer would have to be strong enough to take the moral offensive against writing that deludes the reader into thinking that his private ignominies are worth celebration and memorialization. He must buck the trend by going against the monopoly on career rewards currently held by the writing industry (which for all intents and purposes blacklists and boycotts real outsiders, although of course the terms of the game can’t be framed so bluntly), and by fighting the herd mentality of publishers whose interest is no longer to discover great fiction and build writers’ careers, but who only want to replicate the last great sensation… To come to writing from a strong moral position, some belief in universal values that makes one sleepless and distraught, will be like a fat, bald, ugly man crashing in on a slumber party of blonde supermodels.”
Shivani is right. Taking a strong moral position is a disruption. Little is expected of novels because readers crave more vulgarity, more immorality, more profanity, and more cynicism. In a writer’s forum, an author stated: “So many contemporary novels seem manic, agitated, escapist, goofy, fantastically un-serious, and concerned with nothing of lasting value.”
The struggle of race has more appeal, it seems, to the gatekeepers at mainstream conferences, and maybe at Christian conferences as well, if at all. Hurston identifies this idea as the folklore of reversion to type: “This curious doctrine has such a wide acceptance that it is tragic. One has only to examine the huge literature on it to be convinced. No matter how high we may seem to climb, put us under strain and we revert to type, that is, to the bush. Under a superficial layer of western culture, the jungle drums throb in our veins.”
For the Mexican-American writer, the experience seems to be limited and confined to one dominant narrative, whether echoed through our own voices, or other voices: the plight of migration across borders.
Literature and the gatekeepers have exploited the languishing immigrant type enough, courting it to the mainstream, reducing it to mere folklore. But to some of us who live the experience, either firsthand, or indirectly as a second-generation Mexican immigrant (as in my case), this archetype is not all we represent. Generations of readers are entertained by this theme—the tradition binds our stories as quaint, enshrining the Mexican-American writer to the immigrant experience, memorializing the plight of crossing borders, negotiating new languages.
Jessica Pineda
Hurston knew that as artists, there was more to us than our ethnic identity. She wrote: “But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that minorities do think, and think about something other than the race problem. That they are very human and internally, according to natural endowment, are just like everybody else. So long as this is not conceived, there must remain that feeling of insurmountable difference, and difference to the average man means something bad. If people were made right, they would be just like him.”
New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal examined book reviewers of the past whose critiques of writers of color were detrimentally flawed. We can confer her assessment of literary critics to literary gatekeepers. She writes about fluorescent condescension and stereotype, “the pleasant and dubious satisfaction of feeling superior to the past” and “the sensitive assessments” by critic John Leonard, who wrote: “American Indians do not write novels and poetry as a rule or teach English in top-ranking universities either. But we cannot be patronizing.” She described a 1932 book review written by Elizabeth Brown about Countee Cullen’s One Way to Heaven. Brown wrote: “Most of us have not yet reached the stage where we can appreciate any story about colored people at its face value without always straining to find in it some sort of presentation of ‘Negro life.’ It is, therefore, from one who frankly knows little about the subject, an impertinence to say that Mr. Cullen paints a convincing picture of life in Harlem but one can at least say that the picture is sometimes amusing, sometimes very moving, and at all times interesting.”
As Sehgal critically examines the legacy of The New York Times Book Review and its critiques of writers of color, she asserts: “That’s what these pieces do. They hover and mock, or patronize, the reviewer keeping his hands in his pockets all the while. He builds no case—he feels no need; the identity of the writer, the source of that obsessive fascination, appears to be all the evidence required for his scorn. We hear little of style, of argument or technique. They might stand in harsh judgment of the writer, but as examples of writing they’re soft. They rarely quote the book or offer more than perfunctory summary…Where Black writers are concerned, another pattern can be detected. Reviewers might impute cultural importance to the work, but aesthetic significance only rarely. And if aesthetic significance was conferred, it often hinged on one particular quality: authenticity.”
It appears that work by a writer of color requires a literary critic to validate its authenticity. Moreover, gatekeepers are given license to object to the view of the world as it is observed through the eyes of the writer of color.
Toni Morrison sums up the effects of literary criticism: “My complaint about letters now would be the state of criticism. I have yet to read criticism that understands my work or is prepared to understand it. I don’t care if the critic likes or dislikes it. I would just like to feel less isolated.” Furthermore, Maxine Hong Kingston echoes a similar sentiment: “I don’t mean they praise my work more, I mean that they understand what the work is about and there is more willingness now to read a book by a minority person and to criticize it as literature and not just see it as anthropology.”
Until writing by people of color ceases to be viewed as a work of anthropology, its aesthetic value will diminish. Sehgal writes: “That presumption — that the work of the Black writer was always coded autobiography, and only coded autobiography — was so entrenched, it feels startling to see the Black novelist praised purely for technique and inventiveness, to see an artistic lineage located…”
Gatekeepers possess the keys that are inaccessible for the writer of color. I surmise that a good amount of writing has been incorrectly interpreted and underestimated for generations. One can’t help but wonder at this time how many masterpieces of creative writing have been discarded, how many careers have been thwarted.
The presumption, however, that there is consensus among gatekeepers should be handled with care, by both the gatekeeper and the writer. If the industry is to reform itself by shedding its biases, its typecasting of writers of color, it needs to be contemptuous of gatekeeping and rethink who is made steward over the keys. Gatekeepers cannot be so pompous as to believe that they are omniscient agents and that readers are vacuous followers beholden to their leading them to the finest literature. Gatekeepers cannot underestimate the intelligence of readers, those intolerant of banal literature, by examining work with caution, possessing boldness and style in the process. When gatekeepers eschew the perpetuation of typecasting writers of color by acknowledging that we create art and have more to offer than a discussion about race in America, then we’ll be called to speak at conferences, conventions, round tables, forums, and podcasts on the topic of our craft, and only when better criticism is written will we read books that go beyond type.
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The pursuit of publishing means bearing the burden of ethnic bias. Rather than continue to ponder what can be done, how this can all be reconciled, it is more urgent to define the present-day landscape of publishing. To be keenly aware of our position in the culture and discern what sets us apart, and to observe our environment and our behaviors, these become the edicts that measure our success in publishing.
But only Christ can unite. Christ brings a different reconciliation than what the world and culture proselytizes, through all our grievances, our shameful histories, and our oppressions. Fortunately, as believers, we are reconciled in Christ—equal members of God’s household, as Ephesians states: “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace: And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God;” (Ephesians 2: 14-19)
So when we see a new canon arise as a prescription to ethnic bias, we need to be skeptical. In lieu of being advised to seek the scriptures, especially Ephesians 2, we’re prescribed a list of sociology books, texts that promise to increase our sensibilities and awareness about race in America.
I’ve seen Christians finish their prescribed reading repertoire only to receive applause for “having done their homework.” Do they receive a gold star for learning about an ethnic people, examining them as specimens—anthropological texts to classify and exhibit on lists? Prescriptive approaches are a superficial antidote because what reading a book in the canon does is rigidly fix uniformity on a culture and removes individuality. People of color are distinct persons and are not a monolith, a stereotype, a collective. To say that you read and did your homework on the Mexican experience is not the solution to our racial woes because as believers, we need to look only to the cross.
It’s problematic to give permission for the canon to inform the Bible. The Bible is sufficient in all matters of faith and practice and is enough to sustain brotherhood and fellowship. The unity of Christ’s body is what brings us together.
A few years prior to getting married, I attended a Spanish-speaking church. I got married in a Spanish speaking church, I presented my first-born child in a Spanish speaking church, and when my husband and I decided to go to an English-speaking church, we did it with the intention of raising a family among brethren that represent the kingdom of heaven. We didn’t want to isolate ourselves culturally in an ethnocentric church, but the paradigm shift came at a cost—mainly confronting unfamiliarity and tactlessness from English speakers who couldn’t pronounce my name (a problem I certainly didn’t have before), among other cultural and language differences. It was important for our growing family to thrive spiritually in a church that teaches sound doctrine and congregate in a biblically, family integrated church that encourages fathers to lead the discipleship of their families.
We’re at home in the presence of our multi-ethnic family in Christ, brothers and sisters who share a heavenly Father with us. We don’t need a new canon of literature to help us build structures that will support or unite us, that will help us learn about each other. If we have Jesus, He is our cornerstone, and the unity of co-laboring with our brothers and sisters in the church body is all sufficient.
Eréndira Ramírez-Ortega
Writer & Poet
Eréndira writes fiction, essays, and poetry. She’s writing a novel. Find her list of published work here: www.erortega.com/writings
Photography by Jessica Pineda
