Fear of Insult: Why I rarely write in a voice other than a first-world Caucasian person

Fear of Insult: Why I rarely write in a voice other than a first-world Caucasian person

Throughout the years, I have written (or more accurately started writing) many a story about a young girl in a first-world country. I never specify that she is Caucasian, a female, or living in first world country, but that is the assumed situation. Most of the time, I will write in this way accidentally, but once I started writing for assessments, I started to realise that maybe there’s a reason for my writing coming out the way it does. I am afraid.

Throughout my years of writing, I never even thought about writing from the perspective of someone other than ‘myself’, and it has occurred to me, throughout this course in particular, that the reasoning for that is because I am always trying to avoid offense in my writing. We are currently living in a time where political correctness is key to creating a kind world, and multiculturalism is more seen as something that’s attempted, but not necessarily achieved? As in, here we are in Australia, a country that claims to be multicultural, but most people who are born here speak only one language, and you see a lot of racism and discrimination publicised. Sometimes it’s not obvious (like someone moving seats on a train because a person who looks Muslim has sat down next to them), but then there are situations where people are loudly shunned for their ethnicity, or what someone thinks their ethnicity is (“go back to where you came from”). Something that has stood out for me in this course is the fact that I can’t bring myself to write a piece in the voice of someone who isn’t my ethnicity, religion, or culture, because I worry that I’m going to end up writing something disrespectful because I don’t have the appropriate knowledge of that culture. Yes, there is the option to do the research, which is very important to writing a piece that centralises around a culture that isn’t your own, but in that there is still the possibility to misinterpret something.

There is also the fact that I’ve grown up hearing the phrase “write what you know”, and of course, I know very little about other cultures, so how can I write about them? Truthfully though, I think of it less as “write what you know”, and more “write what you’re comfortable with”. I feel like I’m unable to write about other cultures in a personal way, because I don’t have enough knowledge of those cultures to feel comfortable doing so. However, I think I would be comfortable writing about a culture from an outsider’s perspective. So, I can still do the research into the culture, but writing in the voice of a visitor rather than a resident would mean that if I did accidentally write something about a culture that is inaccurate, I would be less afraid of judgement.

Another part of this fear comes from the idea that writing about the struggles of another culture in my own words might overpower the actual people of that culture. It’s like when some people stand up against a racist comment when they’re not of that race. It sort of overshadows the person who’s actually been insulted, and can mean that they have had their voice stolen from them. In my opinion (though I wouldn’t currently do it for fear of doing it wrong), it’s perfectly okay to write about another culture’s story, so long as your voice doesn’t overpower the voices of those who’ve actually experienced the situation. This is where the whole ‘writing as an outsider’ thing comes in again.

One of the pieces I wrote early on in this semester was a couple of poems based on the ideas of cosmopolitanism and prejudice, and basically, what happened was that I wrote these as if they were definitions, and one of the points I made in the second poem was that there is a distinct difference between can’t and don’t. That’s something that I’ve learned more about through some of the readings, namely Multi-Culti Literati by Xu Xi, and A Case for Contamination by Kwame Anthony Appiah. It was very interesting reading those two together, because they both have a similar base idea, but their arguments seemed to differ a bit. I came out of it preferring Appiah’s opinions over Xu Xi’s, simply because I could understand the logic behind them better. Appiah’s writing definitely fuelled a lot of the thought processes that have gone into my writing over the course of the semester, namely because I found his take on cosmopolitanism really interesting. It made me think a lot about my own opinions and how I go about my writing. His writing is part of the reason I realised why I never wrote in the voice of other cultures. He highlights the fact that people quite often don’t ask what someone of a particular culture actually wants to do with themselves – whether they want to follow their culture to a tee or whether they want to branch out a bit and do their own thing. One thing I like about Appiah’s piece is the fact that he talks about universality, but more as an idea of everyone following their own cultures but still combining to be more together. Rather than being a whole bunch of separated cultures, we can integrate parts of other cultures into our own to create a sort of sub-culture, and I think that’s kind of cool. But I’m not quite there yet in my writing. Even in writing my piece inspired by the interview with Matthew, I stuck to writing from an Australian female’s perspective (at least, I think she’s Australian, I’m not 100% sure). I did however try to write about superheroes and war, which is something I’ve never been comfortable with before. Usually I stick to teenage romance or fantasy, but I was inspired by Matthew’s interest in the comic Watchmen, which I did a bit more research into (as I didn’t really know anything about it before now) and found that it inspired me to write about something I never thought I would write about. So, who knows, maybe someday I’ll be able to write about other cultures comfortably.

Anyway, in summation, I personally don’t think I’d be able to write about a culture other than my own (from a personal perspective) for a very long time, but I have great respect for those who do.