That's not your story

When is cultural appropriation inappropriate?

It may surprise you to learn that I am not a poor old woman living in Mumbai. Mrs Patel, however, is. (Or would be, if she existed outside my imagination and the world of Mrs Patel and the Secret Agent.)

Mrs Patel. (Photo I found on Flickr about 15 years ago.)

This has caused me a great deal of authorial angst - should I be telling Mrs Patel’s story, or am I committing the unforgivable sin of cultural appropriation? Am I about to let myself in for a world of politically correct fury? And should I do it anyway?

This isn’t just woke liberal hand-wringing, though. It actually goes to the heart of some of the things I believe about storytelling and about who we are as human beings.

Okay, deep breath.

For me, one of the most important things a storyteller does is to enable their readers or listeners to imagine themselves as someone else. When they’re telling a story, they’re asking their audience to put themselves in someone else’s position, to feel what they’re feeling, to understand why they think and feel as they do. The story brings the reader a new perspective.

I know that many people say you should write about what you know, but that seems to be a remarkably limiting approach, and the world would be much poorer if that’s all we did. Writing about people who aren’t like us is something that authors have always done, will always do, and should always continue to do. After all, Agatha Christie wasn’t a fussy little Belgian detective. JK Rowling wasn’t a teenage boy. Charles Dickens wasn’t a 22 year old girl. Shakespeare wasn’t a Danish prince.¹ And most Europeans and Americans would probably know nothing about The Arabian Nights if it wasn’t for Galland and Burton.

My lifelong love of world mythology didn’t come from reading stories written by Greeks, Norwegians, Italians or Egyptians. It came from the very British Roger Lancelyn Green, who retold their stories for an English audience.

The more varied the stories we tell, read, or listen to, the better. Seeing the world from new perspectives helps us to understand one another and increase our awareness of what’s going on outside our own limited existence. Much as travel broadens the mind, so do stories. And stories, of course, have the added advantage that they’re not limited by budget, the passing of time, or reality: we can tell stories about the past, the future, or worlds that never existed.

Relatability vs authenticity

And there’s where the problem lies. When we tell stories about times or cultures other than our own, we almost always get it wrong.² And that annoys people. Sometimes, it offends them.

For example, as a mostly bi-lingual British and American speaker, it always irks me when American writers try to write British dialogue and get it wrong. Typically, they use words or phrases that just aren’t the way a British person would speak, or else they end up writing stereotypical characters that sound utterly ludicrous to me. Or they get regional dialects wrong: Yorkshiremen who speak like Cockneys, or vice versa. I’ve given up on many books simply because of this one reason. (For some reason, cozy mysteries set in 1920s English stately homes or Victorian mansions appear to suffer from this more than most.)

I have no doubt that Indians will find my depiction of Mrs Patel and her world equally ludicrous. I’ve spent a little time in Mumbai, and I’ve worked with many Indians, and I’ve tried to do my research, but on the whole, my Mrs Patel owes more to Bollywood than reality.

But what’s important to remember here is that the primary audience for these stories isn’t from the culture they’re reading about. Our mystery writer from Missouri is writing for other Americans, not for Brits. I’m not writing for Indians, I’m writing for Westerners.

That has two very important implications.

One, most of the target audience doesn’t care about the details. They don’t know enough to know whether you’re right or wrong, and they don’t care enough to worry about it. That doesn’t just apply to cultural details, it’s pretty much everything. What they care about is the story. So what if Sir Henry rides from Bristol to London in an afternoon? (It’s 120 miles, so it’s not possible.) Or if Major Dankworth takes the train from King’s Cross to Cornwall? (He should have gone from Paddington.) Or Corporal Smithers polishes the brass buttons on his uniform? (Sorry, in 1835, the Rutland Regiment had black buttons!³)

And two, the job of the author is to tell the story in a way that makes sense to the reader. They’re not teaching history or geography or metallurgy or whatever. They’re telling an entertaining made-up story. If that means simplifying or adapting the facts so that it’s easier for the reader to understand and enjoy, so be it. When you’re reading a cozy mystery set in a 1920s English stately home, you probably don’t want a nuanced or detailed discussion of class, politics, economy, housekeeping techniques, or whatever. You just want enough of the feel of the setting that you can immerse yourself in the story. Feeling right is more important than being right. In fact, being scrupulously authentic can be off-putting, because it’s not necessarily what your readers expect or want.

A digression about swords

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to work with a guy who did sword fight choreography for major Hollywood movies. He taught me one of the most important things I ever learned about filming action sequences: fight choreography is nothing like actual fighting.

What the audience wants from a sword fight is something that looks exciting. They want flashy swordplay, people spinning round and leaping all over the place, and all that fun stuff. Trying any of that stuff in a real fight just wouldn’t work - your opponent would probably kill you almost instantaneously - as he demonstrated.

So why don’t they do real sword fighting in movies? Instead of explaining, we filmed and edited a short fight sequence using authentic sword techniques. It was all over in a few seconds, and really boring to watch. Completely accurate, but lacking in any entertainment value.

At around the same time, I was friendly with another guy who was building a videogame based on authentic Renaissance sword techniques. It was an interesting idea in theory, but in practice, it was pretty much unplayable and boring unless you were really, really into the details of 16th century Italian and German swordsmanship.

In other words, reality isn’t necessarily fun. Sometimes, you need to take liberties with reality in order to give your audience a good time. Dammit Jim, I’m a storyteller, not a social anthropologist!⁴

Truth in fiction: do mistakes matter?

I know this is going to sound heretical and annoy a lot of purists, but I don’t believe that the setting is what’s most important about a story. It needs to provide a sufficiently convincing and reasonable background to enable the author and reader can focus more on the plot and the characters.

Kafka had never visited America when he wrote The Man Who Disappeared (aka Amerika). He got a lot of things wrong, but it’s still a good story. Most importantly, it’s not actually a story about America: it’s a story about finding yourself in a foreign country, feeling bewildered, and trying to find your feet. The specific details don’t really matter too much.

And, how about the TV adaptation of Bridgerton, or My Lady Jane, or Gentleman in Moscow, or The Great… historical tosh, every one of them, but thoroughly enjoyable and, paradoxically, remarkably educational.

Likewise, Mrs Patel and the Secret Agent isn’t a story about being an elderly Mumbai street seller. It’s a story about power, helplessness, and perseverance in the face of bureaucracy.⁵ Mrs Patel’s Mumbai is a fantasy of my own creation, loosely inspired by the real Mumbai. Mrs Patel herself represents the people we ignore: she’s no more realistic than the titular secret agent, who has more in common with Bond, Bourne or a Jason Statham character than an actual employee of MI6 or the CIA. As it says in the front matter of every work of fiction, all these places and people are used fictitiously.

Because, ultimately, this is the true magic of storytelling. We create imaginary, unreal worlds filled with imaginary, unreal people, we persuade our readers to accept them even though we all know they’re not real, and then we use all this made up stuff to tell them something which is actually true.

All culture is appropriated

Okay, I’ve been skirting the real issue. It’s not about whether I got Mrs Patel right or wrong, it’s about whether I should be telling her story at all.

But here’s the thing. As I mentioned above,⁶ I’m a social anthropologist at heart, and I firmly believe that the single most important thing about human culture is that it’s always a mixture of many different cultures. We all take influences from everywhere, adapt them, play with them, remix them, and turn them into something new. Culturally, we’re all mongrels, with the possible exception of a few remote Pacific or Amazonian tribes. And even those are getting few and far between these days: it’s not unusual to see Yanomami tribesmen wearing European soccer jerseys, for example.

And Hot Wheels, apparently.

One of the most important things that any artist can do is to take things from one culture, refashion them, and present them to people of another culture. That is literally how we build culture. That is how every single thing in the history of the world has come about. Books, music, clothing, food, movies, sports, home decor, painting - everything. We see somebody else do something, we are inspired by it, we copy it (imperfectly), and we make it our own.

To me, borrowing from another culture is wrong only if it’s done in a spirit of mockery or is intended to offend. When it’s done from love or respect, it’s a sign that we’re learning from each other, and appreciating each others’ culture. And that, surely, has to be a good thing.

Cui malo?

Ultimately, however, it was one of my writers’ group who put my mind at rest. “Did you push an old Indian woman out of the way to get a publishing deal?” he asked. “Because if you didn’t, you’re not depriving anyone of their voice. And maybe you’ll get some people thinking about what it must be like for the Mrs Patels of the world.”

And that, in all honesty, is all I want to do.

1. Probably not, anyway. But with Shakespeare, who knows?

2. Of course, it’s easy enough to get it wrong when we’re writing about our own time as well, but that’s a whole different topic.

3. No, they didn’t, because I made them up. But sheesh, military buffs are the absolute worst for nit-picking. Anyway, who’s to say that Smithers wasn’t wearing an old 1832 pattern jacket with the brass buttons? In fact, maybe that’s an important character point that clearly went over the reader’s head. Ha!

4. Err… actually, I am a social anthropologist. That is, I have a degree in it. But that’s not the point.

5. Yes, there was a reason for referencing Kafka above.

6. Or should that be below? Footnotes are confusing sometimes. Especially if you don’t read them.