Writing Other

Would you be angry if I wrote about you? 

What if I write only bad things? Change the way people look at you?

What if I wrote only good things about you, can I use you then? Take your voice and make it my own?

Let’s forget good and bad for a minute and focus on if it’s truthful or untruthful. Let’s forget that even and get down to the bare authenticity.

Would you be angry if you had a story to tell and I told it for you, but some of the details weren’t right, and I didn’t really understand you? Your motives, feelings, and actions unclear to me, yet still I write you, and people read you.

Would you be angry if I my voice was louder and clearer than yours, but not as honest, and people listened to me? If I became you, but not a real you, a one-dimensional figment of imitation with no real guts inside me?

Let’s start again, with those questions in mind.

Who can write whom? Speaking quite plainly, anyone can. But just because one can do something, doesn’t mean it should be done. Writing culture ethically comes with a set of moral complexities that one must discern before touching ink to paper.

Writing ‘other’ comes in a loop. This loop consists of:

à I want more ‘other’ culture in literature (PoC, LGBT+, disabled, customarily alien)

àIn order for there to be more ‘other’ culture in literature, I must write it

à I am not ‘other’ so I don’t know how it works.

à I want more ‘other’ culture in literature.

So on so forth.

Naturally, writing ‘other’ means knowing ‘other’ to the best of one’s capabilities. Getting as close to ‘other’ as is culturally acceptable. Don’t just study how ‘other’ sits in place and space, understand the nuances that ‘other’ has, what led them to where they are, and where they are headed.  Breathe it in for a long time.

If you aren’t prepared to do that work, then don’t even touch ‘other’. For you, stick to what you know best because the only thing worse than having no literature is having misconceiving, superficial, and implausible literature. People are fragile, the land is fragile, and history is fragile, prone to scattering itself to the wind away from you if you don’t handle with care.

Second, no matter how much you know, if the ‘other’ wishes to speak, then you must do nothing else but listen. Your voice may enable for the other to have a pedestal to shine on, but it is ultimately not yours. If you are not indigenous to the land, disposition or state of being, you have no business in speaking over the top of someone who is, unless you are giving them a platform to showcase their story. Buy the books, read the stories, listen to the authors. Always be mindful of supporting and appreciating the native literature alongside the alternative.

And if it is your culture? If you are the ‘other’?  Still, take these morals in your stride, but let your genuine experience guide the way. There is never an end to learning.

Mutate Habitus

Habitus—the economized guide to narrowing down everything into a box.

Habitus— the key to understanding how everyone who lives in that box has an individual experience.

Habitus—the chicken pen that you live in, the hand that feeds you grain, the other feathers in your coop, the place you sleep at night, the foxes that watch you.

.

What is habitus? A way to define or to show that definitions mean nothing? Everything is habitus, the people, the parenting, the food, the culture, the body.

I inhabit my body while my body inhabits its habitus. It is multiple, I am a first child in a nuclear family, I am a queer with very few queer friends. I stand with my chin tall. I’m not overly beautiful, but not overtly ugly. I consume media with a majority of my generational peers.  I can’t afford lunch, but I’ve been overseas. I’m expected to get married and have children.

 I am a writer in a big city.

How does my writing engage habitus? Through aesthetic values, I brand myself in my individual style, cut and copied from writers before me.

I dislike long and overbearing sentences that hold no information in them that is gleaned to me as interesting. I prefer short. Punchy.

I like multi-faceted characters. I try and write interesting and relatable people with an edge of humor. I like moral conflicts in a story and try to avoid having my characters ever be too 'good', by the traditional standards.

I dislike heteronormative and conforming, but my style is very cookie cutter. In my state of old habitus, consistent conforming to the norm was key to a good story. Over and over again a recycled romance is spun in my hands.

It’s unsurprising, considering in my old habitus all I would ever consume was paranormal YA romance. We are talking twilight levels of straight teens with angst issues. It was good if it made me feel good.

I have changed habitus. Schooling has changed my habitus, though I feel like the potential to change had to already be under my skin. An appreciation of arts and culture from my mother perhaps?

Breeding a new habitus becomes easy when you welcome change. The re-calibration of my habitus was a smooth transition from the comfortable to the unknown.  Consuming new media, from cultures, bodies, and mind vastly different to my own.

The next step to transformation of habitus would be movement of self. Consuming more media that influences the creative output is a way to travel the world without leaving my environment.

However, confronting things and experiencing a consciousness unlike my own is how I would want to mutate my habitus.