RICK MOODY: I think the pressing question of the PEN World Voices Festival is “Why, exactly, are we bothering?” The United States of America has become a culture that exports and no longer imports. If I were to project up here a graph of literature in translation published in the United States, you would see, over the last twenty-five years, a steep decline in the number of titles published in this country in translation. It’s now hovering near the 5 percent mark of the twenty thousand–odd books published annually in this country, and that includes engineering manuals and the like. So in terms of literature, the art of what we do in language, an infinitesimal number of books are being published in English. Personally, I think that’s political. I think it has a lot to do with a general trend in the culture away from intellectual investigation and toward a kind of recoiling from the rest of the world.

That’s part of what the PEN World Voices Festival is trying to address, and it’s what I’m going to try to address with these panelists tonight. The Believer came up with a great topic for the discussion: the rules of cross-cultural appropriation. The late ’70s and early ’80s, when I was first writing, was a period when identity politics was as forceful as it ever got. And there was a real unwritten law that certain kinds of cultural appropriation were not to be done. In other words, a man writing first person from a woman’s point of view was considered faintly distasteful and inadvisable; a white writer trying to write from a black point of view was considered inadvisable; a first-world writer writing about the third world—same kind of thing. That has loosened up a bit, I think, these days. Imagination is given a slightly freer rein, but in a cultural context, literature is taken less seriously and translation barely happens in this country at all.

Chimamanda, do you think that there are rules of cross-cultural appropriation or rules for composition in fiction at all? Your novel Purple Hibiscus was written in English and seems, even though it’s about post-colonial Nigeria, influenced in some ways by Western novel writing, and I’m curious if you thought about that while you were writing it.

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE: First of all, I’m ambivalent about the idea of rules when it comes to literature because I think that fiction, and literature in general, should be magical and you should let yourself be free. But going back to your examples of cross-cultural appropriation—men writing from the point of view of women and white people writing from the point of view of black people not being seen as good—I think it’s important to keep things in context. I come from a place that for a long time has been grossly misrepresented by people who have written about it. When I read a book about Africa by a non-African, I’m very careful and oftentimes resentful because I think that people go into Africa and bend the reality of Africa to fit their preconceived notions. I think the same could be said for writing about women when you’re a man, writing about blackness when you’re white, and while I think such writing should be done, it requires sensitivity. It’s easy to say that we should do whatever we want because we’re writing fiction, but it’s also important to remember context and to be circumspect.

MOODY: Chimamanda, can you give us examples of works where you feel the representation issue is particularly troubling?

ADICHIE: The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski has a little blurb on the cover that describes it as the greatest intelligence to bear on Africa since Conrad. And I really was insulted by that, because it isn’t the greatest intelligence to bear on Africa, and I didn’t think, by the way, that Conrad was particularly writing Africa as Africa was. What’s troubling is that this claim sets the norm for how we see Africa: If you’re going to walk in Africa, you’re told to read that book to understand Africa. But this is really not what Africa is, at least not from the point of view of Africans in Africa, which I think is an important point of view. These books distort reality—there are many examples. Maybe I shouldn’t name names because it’s less about the specific people and more about the larger phenomenon of writing without an open mind.

MOODY: So there are some rules in some cases, or at least sensitivities that we have to think about in these moments when we try to write about other cultures.

PATRICK ROTH: I feel we have to judge case by case. I mean, there is a novel, Amerika, by Franz Kafka, and you’re not going to tell me that he wasn’t allowed to write about America. A couple of years ago, I read about a German writer who supposedly wrote a novel that took place in the former East German Republic and I thought that was wonderful. When I read it, I thought, That’s a great idea, because we all had fantasies about the East German Republic at the time. Why wouldn’t it be legit for us to broach that subject? Why not write a novel from the point of view of a woman, using the female part in yourself as a man—I mean, why not? Who would want to put a limit on that? It would be literary suicide to limit yourself in that case.

MOODY: Isn’t it true that Kafka had never been to America when he wrote Amerika?

ROTH: That’s the whole point. Exactly.

MOODY: So it’s all about imagination.

TSITSI DANGAREMBGA: I’m not sure whether it’s all about imagination because imagination is informed. How is general imagination about Africa informed in this part of the world? I agree with Chimamanda that there must be some limits. A young lady in my part of the world, in South Africa, wrote a short story about a maid on her Sunday off. This young lady was a white South African. She went to one of the best schools, which meant she must have been one of the 10 percent in terms of earning power—upper class—and she chooses to have, as her character, a lower-class African maid. What could she possibly know about this person? The writer was so young, she obviously hadn’t had the chance to think about the implications of what she was doing, but it seemed to her like the kind of story that would win her acclaim, which it did: She got a prize in a short-story competition. But the way she represented this character was so completely false.

I had the same experience some years ago when a writer from this country wrote about a girl in my part of the world. She named this girl Nhamo, a word that means negative things in many contexts, but especially in the sense of grief. The title of this book about Nhamo was A Girl Named Disaster. Now, grief and trouble: There are similarities, but the essence—the nuances—are quite different.

Interestingly enough, this book was translated into German and the German translators had some qualms, so they asked me to read the book and write a foreword, which I did. I gave my opinion that actually the translation of this word that was the girl’s name, Nhamo, was not adequate in the title. Of course they had to go back to the writer to ask her to endorse my foreword and she refused. As a Zimbabwean who understands what the German people were trying to do, and the English, I had said, “Well, let’s put a preface to this that would give it a different context,” and the writer refused. I think that kind of cross-cultural appropriation is really illegitimate, but there is no way to stop it. There are no rules to cross-cultural appropriation.

ADICHIE: I want to respond to Patrick. I’m not at all advocating limiting anybody or anything—not at all. As I said, I really don’t believe in rules. A writer like John Gregory Dunne, who is somebody I really admire, has written a book from the point of view of a woman, which I believed as a woman. But at the same time, I do think that it’s too easy to simply say, “Why not? Why not use the imagination? Why not let the imagination run free?” I think there is something to be said for authenticity, that if you’re going to write about a particular experience in specifics, then the least you can do is to learn about it.

MINAE MIZUMURA: Can I just shift the topic? Right now, people are using the word “appropriation” and supposing that the people who appropriate are the dominant people—white people appropriating black discourse or African discourse or men appropriating women’s discourse, et cetera. The verb “appropriate” has a force that makes you believe it’s the dominant subject who is doing it. Yet if you look at the history of humanity from two or three thousand years back, it’s the dominated cultures that do the appropriating. I’m thinking of Japanese literature: Twenty years after major restorations, we appropriated Western literature and that became our literature and we transformed ourselves through the literature. That sort of asymmetrical process still continues and, one hundred years later, we continue to appropriate American culture.  

Now, when a Japanese writer is writing in Japanese, she might use a certain alphabet for Japanese characters that was once used only for Western names, because it sounds more modern, more American, more global, more international. The ironic fact is that this literature that appropriates American literature but doesn’t really speak truth about Japan is what gets reappropriated into America, because it’s the easiest to translate. What I think is the best of Japanese literature hardly ever gets translated. It’s the easiest and the already appropriated Japanese literature that gets reappropriated.

DANGAREMBGA: I would argue also that in the term “appropriation,” there is a notion of force. If a person is assimilating a literature—for example, Francophone Africans were assimilated into the French culture—can we then say that they have appropriated the culture? I think being assimilated and having your culture appropriated are two different things.

In Zimbabwe now we have two opposed parties: one very nationalist and one more, according to Western norms, liberal. I was talking to some younger people in this liberal party and I said to them, “Do you know what you’re taking on? We are veterans; we’ve been through the whole colonial rigmarole. Do you know what we are taking on?” And I quoted to them this limerick: “There was a young lady of Niger/ Who rode on the back of a tiger/ They came back from the ride with the lady inside/ And a smile on the face of the tiger.” They said, “Yes, Tsitsi, we know the West is a tiger, but we think we’re strong enough—we can tame the tiger.” This is in the same sense of not understanding the difference between appropriation and assimilation. Perhaps we think we are appropriating, but we are actually being assimilated. This is problematic—we need to know where we stand so that we can have authentic voices. It’s a kind of alienation if you think you’re appropriating and actually you’re being assimilated; your voice cannot be authentic.

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