The “American Dirt” Controversy: Lessons for Writers on Getting Cultures Right
Author Jeanine Cummins has been attacked on social media for sensationalizing the Mexican migration with lurid violence and stereotypical characters in her book. Photo courtesy of Flatiron Books
The American Dirt Controversy: Lessons for Writers on Getting Cultures Right
A conversation with Cuban-American author Dariel Suarez (GRS’12), education director at creative writing center GrubStreet
Not many people have a more informed perspective on the controversy swirling around American Dirt, the wildly hyped best-selling novel about a Mexican mother and her son escaping to the United States, than Latino writer Dariel Suarez.
American Dirt’s author, Jeanine Cummins, identifies herself as white and Latina. She received a seven-figure advance for her book, which has raised questions about how the publishing industry chooses which books, and writers, to aggressively promote, how authors approach writing about marginalized people from other cultures, and how the story of immigration, one of the most politically charged issues in the United States today, gets told.
As education director at GrubStreet, a nonprofit writing center in Boston, Suarez (GRS’12), who has an MFA in creative writing, spends a lot of time thinking about these kinds of questions.
Cummins has been attacked on social media for sensationalizing the Mexican migration with lurid violence and stereotypical characters. Her publisher, Flatiron, was criticized for promoting a soap opera-ish page turner as the immigration novel of our times—and throwing a book party with barbed-wire-festooned centerpieces—while overlooking talented Latinx authors who have written about the subject with greater nuance and complexity. Flatiron has since apologized for how it positioned and publicized the novel, and its parent company, Macmillan, has pledged to substantially increase its numbers of Latinx authors and staff.
Suarez was recently awarded first prize at the International Latino Book Awards for Best Collection of Short Stories in English for A Kind of Solitude (Willow Springs Press, 2019). His first novel, about a Cuban family navigating government censorship, social media, and migration, is due out next year from Red Hen Press.
BU Today sat down with Suarez to talk about American Dirt and what he tells students who want to write about people who are different from them.
Q&A
With Dariel Suarez
Bostonia: Some people say that this is about cultural appropriation, that a white American woman shouldn’t have written a novel about the Mexican migration. How do you feel about that?
Suarez: I have a fundamental problem with framing the conversation through the lens of how do people write in the call-out culture—are folks allowed to write about people who are different from them—because that’s just code for, “Can white people write about people who are not like them—who are not from the same race or culture—without getting criticism?”
To me, that’s centering the conversation on whiteness. It’s complicated. It’s not just POC [people of color] calling people out on Twitter, which is one part of it, but it’s also POC having more of a voice, which I think is a good thing… Now you have to consider a larger, more diverse audience if you want to be a good writer.
My perspective—and I think that of most critics and most readers—is that we aren’t saying you can’t write about a person who’s different from you, who’s from a different culture. That’s not what this is about.
Taking one for the team this week. Was curious about the season’s supposed big, breakout novel. If only books could be reviewed for their intention not execution.. https://t.co/0Ski959YHY
— Parul Sehgal (@parul_sehgal) January 17, 2020
Bostonia: Are you talking about fiction?
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Bostonia: Have you made changes in your writing based on that feedback?
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Suarez: But the bigger point is—there is a community of people telling you there’s something wrong with this book. And you should listen and say, “Let me engage, let me see where I failed because obviously it’s not resonating with the community that I’m writing about.” But that’s often not their [the writers’] reaction and I think that’s where people get frustrated.
Bostonia: What do you tell your students about writing about the so-called other?
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You should write about what you don’t know as a way to learn, as a way to inhabit other people and to develop empathy.
Suarez: It’s all complicated and it’s never going to be perfect. I think our approach, which is starting to come more to the forefront, is, hopefully, creating generations of writers who will be more aware of the cultural importance of their work and their audience. I think what happens to a lot of these writers: they grow up in a bubble, they study and get feedback and praise in a bubble, and then reality hits when the book comes out and people say, “Hey, you forgot about us, you didn’t take into account how we would feel about your book.”
This is not about censorship. Any writer is susceptible to a Twitter storm. Unfortunately, that’s the reality that we live in. It’s how you respond and how you engage with it and how you grow from it and how you improve your work that I think matters. And I think that’s also often not central to the conversation.
Bostonia: Have you read American Dirt?
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