Writers inevitably learn bitter lessons, including one about readers who will be wounded, hurt, or at least deeply offended by their work. There is usually more than one group of these, for people become upset for reasons that are many and varied. Such is the case in the reaction to Jeanine Cummins’ fourth book, American Dirt. Cummins has been variously accused of stereotyping, racism, narcissism, and of lacking in empathy.
It is also alleged that she failed to ‘vet’ her book, in that she did not hire a ‘sensitivity reader.’ Some people even consider her book downright harmful and exploitative: the list goes on. When I started reading Cummins’ novel, I had no idea of the controversy, but it wasn’t long before I was instructed via the voluminous amount of material on the Internet.
I usually read at a fairly fast rate, probably too fast on occasion. But not this time. So harrowing was this book that I kept putting it down and picking it up again when I felt I had the strength to cope with the subject matter and the unfolding story. The protagonists are Lydia, resident in Acapulco, and her 8-year-old son, Luca. Lydia’s husband, Luca’s father, is a crusading journalist, who one day writes a newspaper piece about the leader of a cartel, despite being very aware of organised crime and its violent actions against critics. Soon afterwards, journalist Sebastian and fifteen members of the extended family are murdered during a birthday party. Lydia and Luca are the only survivors: the crucial complication is that Lydia has unwittingly formed a friendship with the head of the cartel, and so realises that she and Luca are in deadly danger. There is nothing to do but cope with overwhelming grief and trauma somehow, flee the scene, and try to reach the USA.
It is a nightmare journey, during which mother and son join the thousands thronging the route to America, and fall in with some young people who have already endured terrible experiences: girls are particularly vulnerable, being routinely robbed and raped along the way. Together with their new friends, Lydia and Luca ride on the roof of La Bestia (The Beast), the freight train that travels from southern Mexico to the US border. Getting on and off the train is highly dangerous, and so is much of the company sharing the journey. At the end of the ride, they have little choice but to hire a coyote, a people smuggler, who guides them through the desert, and is skilled in the ways of avoiding border police. The reader heaves a sigh of relief when the novel ends satisfactorily. Well, this reader did.
The much-hyped work took four years to research, with Cummins visiting the relevant places and checking recent findings and developments: she did her grim homework because she had become frustrated by the public discourse on the topic of migration, which concentrated on policy rather than on the fate of fellow human beings, or on moral or humanitarian issues. This seems to be a world-wide governmental trend, and is very obvious in Australia. In the Author’s Note at the end of the book, Cummins states that in 2017 a migrant died every 90 minutes, and that 40,000 people were missing in Mexico. She adds that these estimates may be conservative.
'American Dirt, even in the controversy it has stirred up, has achieved its aim: it has made readers at least ponder a terrible problem.'
Despite being praised by the likes of Stephen King, John Grisham, and Tracy Chevalier, the hype bubble did not take long to burst. Cummins’ author tour was cancelled and Oprah Winfrey put together a television special to discuss the book with the author. Of the long list of trenchant criticisms perhaps the most prominent one was that of cultural appropriation: Cummins is not Mexican, so should not have contemplated writing about Mexico or creating Mexican characters. (She had a Puerto Rican grandmother, and her Irish husband was an undocumented immigrant for years.) Cummins herself wondered whether she should attempt the novel, but was encouraged by an academic of Mexican extraction who told her that Mexicans and migrants needed as many people as possible to tell this story.
This criticism of cultural appropriation opens out into broader questions: should writers write only about what they know? Who is allowed to tell whose stories? My own feeling is that writing is about freedom, and that writers should be able to exercise that freedom. Novelist Lionel Shriver is of the opinion that if writers of fiction cannot use their imaginations and deploy their gifts of empathy, then memoir is all that is left. (Not that there is anything wrong with memoir, but it’s a different kind of writing.) I agree with Shriver. I also note novelist Penelope Lively’s recent statement that ‘Writers are always trying to imagine worlds that aren’t theirs.’
Once upon a time, I became a migrant. My moving from Australia to Greece was unexpected, but fairly simple, in that I did not suffer the well-documented hardships. No lack of food, work or shelter for me. And certainly no detention or threat to my life. But it was still hard, which is one reason for my continuing interest in the whole matter of migration. I started writing about my own experience soon after I arrived in Greece, and my first book, A Foreign Wife, was published in 1986. I have to admit now that I never thought about whether or not I was entitled to write about the rural village in which I was living. (My friends tell me I am not very street-wise.) I simply wanted to write the book, and so I did. (All writers are narcissistic, I think, otherwise they would never write a word.) There were mixed reactions: unsurprisingly, Greek men in Australia, resentful of the breaking of their rose-coloured spectacles, were often very critical, the women supportive. And an Athenian woman upbraided me for not being, as she said, ‘tough enough.’
Various ‘buzz phrases’ (and accompanying attitudes) have evolved since then. Political correctness, virtue-signalling, moral gate-keeping are some of these. Human nature, it seems to me, finds it difficult to achieve a reasonably happy medium. And so we have a Massachusetts university discouraging the use of the word picnic, because picnics have been associated with lynchings. Phrases such as take a shot at and trigger warning also feature on its Oppressive Language List. Statues of now-controversial figures are being dismantled or rolled into rivers.
Such gestures have the effect of creating or exacerbating more divisions in society. One is that between the woke and the unwoke, whatever those terms mean precisely: a presumption of superiority on the part of the former? One group seems to be prescribing how others are to think about various issues, while ignoring the complexity of nuances, doubts and shades of feeling.
American Dirt, even in the controversy it has stirred up, has achieved its aim: it has made readers at least ponder a terrible problem. The novel is a polemic, and the stronger for it.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.
Main image: American Dirt first editon cover (Macmillan)