Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid is often described as “angry.” Kincaid is best known for her candid and overtly critical approach to themes such as colonialism, racism, and gender. In her 1988 novel A Small Place, Kincaid condemns the colonial legacy of Antigua, extends her criticism to the modern tourist industry, and even criticizes her reader. In a polemic second person point of view, she asks, “Have you ever wondered why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants?” Later, with equal bluntness, she states, “You will have to accept that this is mostly your fault.”
However, with the publication of her novel See Now Then in 2013, after ten years of silence, Kincaid dared to stray away from a direct discussion of colonialism. Instead, she narrowed her lens to refocus on the travails of middle age and married life. Her novel is set in Bennington, Vermont and explores the fall-out from a mismatched and ultimately unsuccessful marriage. The protagonist, Jamaica Sweet, is a novelist from the West Indies. Sweet’s husband, like Kincaid’s own, is a short, white, musical man from New York who ultimately leaves his wife for a younger woman. It may be understandable, then, that most of Kincaid’s critics focused on the autobiographical aspects of the novel. In one negative review published in the New York Times, critic Dwight Garner prefaces his discussion of the novel’s autobiographical nature with the question, “Ms. Kincaid has denied that the book is strongly autobiographical, but then what was she going to say?”
And yet, as Kincaid herself explained in an interview with Guernica, an online literary magazine, “What I was describing wasn’t my own life—I was trying to understand all sorts of things beyond that, about time, about what happens to people … I was trying to understand the thing people call ‘the existential,’ or existentialism. And it was as if some reviewers decided that I, a black woman, had no right to think about life in such a speculative way. That I was only entitled to write about the hardship of racism.”
Attempting to narrowly define an author’s work is especially familiar to those writers who are considered “non-Western.” This term is often used liberally to denote any writers who are not ethnically and culturally part of Western Europe or North America. Critics allege that it implies Western centrality and defines such a diverse collection of individuals under one umbrella, based on what they are not. The term underlies the problem in our treatment of literature that Kincaid pointed out in her interview with Guernica: non-Western writers are, by definition, not part of the “Western” culture that functions as a default model of the world to many Western readers. As a result, Western audiences narrow their interpretations of such works to one-dimensional exemplars of distant cultures rather than full depictions of the human experience.
The Mechanics of Culture
When Western readers approach a non-Western narrative, they inevitably carry a certain set of preexisting assumptions about that culture that affects their interpretation of the work. By comparison, Western readers approaching a Western work are less likely to encounter this kind of barrier. Instead, they are more easily able to take the text at face value and read it not for its commentary on a specific culture, but for the sake of its observations about life in general. Thus, as Kincaid observed earlier in her interview, Philip Roth’s heavily autobiographical novel My Life as a Man is not pigeonholed by its reflections on his personal life, but is rather appreciated on its own merit as a poignant commentary on contemporary life in general. As a white American male, Roth may seem less alien and interesting to his Western readers; he distinguishes himself not by his race, culture, or gender, but rather by his ideas. Kincaid feels that most readers do not afford her the same opportunity to matter in the realm of ideas; rather, they remain hung up on what she looks like and where she is from.
The relationship between reader and text is not one-sided; while a reader’s assumptions affect his or her interpretation of the text, the ideas contained within a text shape that reader’s future beliefs. This interplay affords literature its power to effect social change. However, when applied to a non-Western work, it may also leave room for readers to develop stereotypes that stunt their understanding of other cultures.
Cultural essentialism is difficult to pinpoint or break down into a clear chain of blame or causality. It is especially challenging to assign blame when many of our well-meaning attempts to incorporate non-Western literature into historically homogeneous arenas may actually contribute to potentially harmful stereotyping. One of the biggest offenders in the creation and promulgation of these cultural stereotypes may be the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 1988, Nagib Mahfouz became the first Arab writer to win this prestigious award. The honor that the Nobel Prize brought to him and his work also helped bring greater recognition to Arabic literature in general. However, a curious phenomenon soon appeared: much of the fiction coming out of Mahfouz’s native Egypt began to look just like his. Western readers who thought they were consuming more of Arabic literature were really just consuming more of Mahfouz.
In an interview with the HPR, professional translator and Temple University professor Lawrence Venuti observed, “Prize-giving is important because it creates patterns.” The official recognition the Nobel Prize committee granted Mahfouz led publishers to look for other Egyptian writers like him because they knew that that style was guaranteed to sell. In turn, more Egyptian writers began to mimic Mahfouz’s style, and the market for Egyptian literature in Western countries became saturated with these imitations. This created a limited view of Egyptian literature; readers who were only exposed to Egyptian novels like those of Mahfouz understandably came to associate his style with all of Egyptian literature. A stereotype of Egyptian literature was eventually born, beginning with a prize that affected publishers’ expectations of the general public’s taste in literature.
Reading Mindfully
However, greater exposure to the literature of cultures outside the West does have the potential to greatly expand our worldview. In an interview with the HPR, Harvard professor David Damrosch observed, “This is a dynamic time in literary studies—until recently, world literature only referred to certain European literature. Now we have a vastly more open field.” With this expansion comes the opportunity to open the minds of Western readers to the non-Western world. As Damrosch explained, all it took to spark his daughter’s passionate interest in Japanese culture and lead her to pursue extensive studies of Japan was an elementary school tea ceremony.
However, Harvard professor Karen Thornber points out that stereotypes can still abound, even in this more open atmosphere. Although the tea ceremony may have inspired one girl in an elementary school class to expand her knowledge of Japan, what happens to the students who did not pursue any further studies? Such a limited glimpse into such a complex culture has the potential to develop into cultural essentialism. When students’ knowledge of Japan is shaped by tea ceremonies and images of cherry blossoms, they develop a specific idée fixe of Japanese culture that is both limited in scope and inaccurate in its assumption of universal applicability to all Japanese people. And when those students go on to become teachers, they pass on this limited cultural knowledge to another generation. This phenomenon is part and product of literature that presents little more than snapshots or carefully curated vignettes of complex and multifaceted cultures. To some, this might spark interest in reading further about a culture, but to most, this might be a sufficient exploration. The latter reading is harmful.
Thornber proposes a simple way of combating this trend: “We should be more mindful of how we talk about literature, and not jump to conclusions that we know everything about a given culture from having read a couple of texts.” It can be difficult to apply such mindfulness to the initial reading of any given text. “People look for what is familiar to them. That is almost inevitable, and can be a first stage of reading a work,” Damrosch acknowledges. “But in a second stage, you become self-critical and think about how the text is framed.” Getting to this second stage not only allows readers to think critically and glean more information from a text, but also pushes them to recognize what they do not know. Ideally, this recognition can spark interest in a text’s culture of origin and push readers to delve deeper into a culture other than their own. Thus, readers can actively combat stereotypes.
The Significance of the Non-Western
The power of literature to create or dispel stereotypes has more practical repercussions than may be immediately apparent. For example, during China and Japan’s political battles over various small islands, the Chinese government took Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s works off of bookshelves in part because they provided a positive representation of Japan. On the other hand, Thornber explains that Koreans and Taiwanese highly regarded Japanese literature in spite of the atrocities these countries had endured and the national animosity they harbored against Japan—cultural exchange flourished separately from political or military conflict. In many cases, this kind of interaction can help to soften attitudes and ease political tensions.
However, non-Western literature does not always strive offer explicit cultural commentary. Reading the works of non-Western authors solely through the lens of their culture or ethnicity can create a problematic gap between our approaches to the Western and the non-Western.
In her interview with Guernica, Kincaid succinctly illustrated her personal struggles with this disparity by reflecting on her experience with a psychiatrist who asked her to draw a picture of her family. After drawing standard stick figures for her three family members, she began to draw herself, but soon gave up. “And I gave the psychiatrist the piece of paper, and she showed it back to me and said, ‘Can you see anything wrong with this? Can you see anything missing?’ And I said ‘No, I’m sorry, I just can’t draw.’ And finally, she had to point out to me that three of the figures were complete, but the figure representing myself was only a head, that I had no body.”
Kincaid does not conceive of herself in terms of her “body,” which represents the race and gender that many of her readers cannot look past. Instead, she thinks of herself as a “head”—an author with a rich inner life that does not depend solely on her outward appearance or the experiences that her bodily characteristics—race, gender, sexuality—bring with them. Instead of regarding Kincaid as a “body,” readers must acknowledge the primacy of her head. In the same way, readers must remain cautious and vigilant about approaching non-Western literature in reductive and limiting ways.
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