TRICK OR TREAT Part 1
In which the novelist Lionel Shriver puts on a sombrero, and brings down hell on her head
1
The year is 2015, and in a bedroom somewhere in America a young white woman, Annah Anti-Palindrome (a pseudonym, one suspects) is about to come to a momentous decision about her life – or rather, about the dreadlocks she has been cultivating for several years. Events, she realises, have been leading her to the decision step-by-step, until now, she can no longer avoid it. Should the dreadlocks stay or should they go? Annah is pretty sure she knows the answer.
But why does this young white woman have dreadlocks to begin with?
Well, she tells us, having been assailed and oppressed throughout her teens by “unattainable” notions of “heteronormative femininity” she deliberately let herself go to the dogs. She started hanging with “(mostly white) girls who were shirking their feminine hygiene routines in order to really “stick it the patriarchy.” She let her leg and armpit hair grow and the hair on her head “spiral into a nest of cords, matts and tangles.”
Having dreadlocks, she said, was “what allowed me to stop obsessing over my appearance” – a form of self-help, then, and also self-harm. Besides, she adds, being a white girl with dreads, “as well as someone who wore clothing scrappily held together by safety pins, dental floss and band patches”, hadn”t really damaged her social standing: she “was still considered employable and trustworthy.”
Then people started hectoring Annah about her dreads and she went on a spiritual journey. “I realized that I was participating in the shitty reality that, for centuries, white people have felt entitled to taking pretty much anything their hearts desire – entire continents, human bodies, land resources, and, yes, whatever cultural trappings of the communities they colonized that were thought to be intriguing at the time.”
Her friends of colour agree with her: “You are an oppression tourist… a white girl who always has an escape route back to the open arms of white supremacy once she is through rebelling. You can cut them off at any time.”
So Annah Anti-Palindrome picks up some scissors and stares into the mirror. She’s going to do exactly that.
2
A year later, on the other side of the world, a UK-based American writer is about to make a decision even more fateful. She has been invited to speak at the Brisbane Literary Festival and, having cleared it with the Festival Organisers, has chosen to explore the theme – increasingly ubiquitous - of Cultural Appropriation.
This is the notion that to write of any ethnic or sexual group not one’s own - without first seeking permission from the community itself - is a form of theft. Hitherto applied with effect to the worlds of music and fashion, it now seems to be shifting its sights towards literature, and the writer in question wants to spell out to fellow authors what this will mean for their craft. The festival is on the other side of the world and our novelist, along with her toothbrush and passport, packs one strange and baffling item: a Mexican sombrero hat.
The author’s name is Lionel Shriver, and a lot of people she’s never heard of are about to become her enemy.
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Around the time that the film version of the award winning novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) came out at the cinema, we began to hear the name Lionel Shriver more and more. The novel on which the film was based – about a school massacre by crossbow and the emotional trajectory of the teenage perpetrator’s mother – had won the 2005 Orange Prize and gone on to sell a million copies. This may have looked like overnight success, but wasn’t. Shriver, working away in the half-light, had published five books before this one, and recognition was long overdue.
But who exactly was he?
Well, she was a novelist, born in 1957 in North Carolina, who had changed her name from Margaret Ann at the age of 15. Though as a child she’d been a tomboy, the switch from Margaret Anne to Lionel wasn’t down to any longing for a change of sex. Rather, she said, she “felt alienated from [her] given name… which sounded girly” and – especially in North Carolina – “a little hick… The nice thing about choosing your own name is that it’s not an appellation you’re simply resigned to; it’s one that you actively love.” And one aspect which she loved about the name, she said, was the androgyny of it.
One must point out too that America has been fortunate in its associations here. They have Richie and Barrymore. We have the dancer and quiz-show contestant Lionel Blair.
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A similar non-conformity came through in her tastes. Even before the commercial success of We Need to Talk About Kevin, the topics of her novels included, she wrote, “anthropology and first love, rock-and-roll drumming and immigration, the Northern Irish troubles (she spent 12 years in Belfast before moving to London, where she has lived ever since) demography and epidemiology, inheritance, tennis and spousal competition, terrorism and cults of personality.” The post-Kevin novels have continued to deal with weighty themes: the failings of American Health Care, morbid obesity, the Western Cult of Fitness, and the challenge of extended life-expectancy.
The seriousness of these subjects, and a certain gravitas of tone, lead many to expect a towering Valkyrie when they meet her. But in fact she is relatively tiny – 5”2” – and, as a result of poor circulation in her extremities, wears gloves even indoors.
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What strangers also expect her to be is frightening, or “austere, terrifying, disquieting,” as Tara Brady put it in the Irish Times, speaking for many. “There are a couple of words that get attached to me,” Shriver explained later. “One is ‘scary’ and the other is ‘stern’. I take that as an insult. ‘Stern’ sounds humourless, judgmental, aloof, chiding.” But there might, she admitted, be something “direct and unapologetic in my presentation of myself”.
Certainly, Brady was proved wrong. Meeting Shriver for an interview, she described her as “almost shy in demeanour”, going on to enthuse about her immediacy and friendliness. Journalists did this quite a lot with Lionel Shriver. They went expecting a once-over from a disapproving aunt and found themselves at a sleepover with a rebel-cousin. Even journalist Lynn Barber, the razor-taloned Queen of the Hatchet Job – with whom almost no one ever won an interview – found herself beguiled. “She is tiny and androgynous,” she half-gushed in 2007, “with a thin, hard body, fierce eyebrows, muscled arms, calloused hands. She is wearing tomboy clothes and carrying a backpack…”
Shriver also seems like she might be Harrison Ford’s little sister – who would adore her older brother but give him the bumpiest of rides. They look similar and have the same manner: dry humour, moral introspection and a notable absence of gush.
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There’s also, unmistakably, a strong element of irony in her manner. Shriver in filmed interview seems not just mildly ironic but to live and swim in the quality. Answers are delivered solemnly but with a glint in the eye, as though her interlocutor is in on the joke. In her books, certainly, she’s keen to explore the ironies of her protagonists, the ways they depart from orthodoxy. Her characters, she once said “have to be interesting more than nice, and often interesting, to me, is not very nice… I like wickedness, I like saying things you’re not supposed to say, and I probably value the quality of humour over any other – a quality that, in my opinion, is intrinsically amoral.”
In an interview with me for the Critic magazine, she was to put it more explicitly:
“In literature the perfectly virtuous character is improbable, inhuman, boring, and often, counterintuitively, unlikeable….But… this issue is larger than fiction. I can be as sanctimonious as the next person, but in the big picture virtue is not the only quality I care about. I also savour beauty, wit, intelligence, eloquence, mischief…. Given a choice, I’d far prefer to suffer from an excess of irony than to drown in sincerity.”
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Shriver’s politics too are heterodox, as is often the case with those who have travelled extensively (and apart from her dozen years in Belfast – a boot-camp against dogma if ever there were one – she’s spent time in Bangkok, Nairobi and Israel). Writing in the New York Times in 2016 she teased out the discrepancies of her world view, which she said put her on the left and right simultaneously.
She is, she said, against the idea of hate-crime and hate-speech legislation, anti-“fat taxes”, opposes the smoking ban, and is into small government: she “resists the welfare state and affirmative action.”
But she is also, she pointed out, “pro-choice and endorses same sex marriage”, “opposes school prayer”, and is “outraged about abuse of police powers, particularly in black communities.” She is anti-state-surveillance and would decriminalize prostitution and most recreational drugs. She “believes anyone should be free to publish visual depictions of Mohammed” and is “sceptical” of most of the American military interventions of her lifetime.
Underneath it all, one suspects, is a hatred of labels and pigeonholes, from that name-change onwards. Her breakthrough novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), was the story of a mother almost physically allergic to her teenage son. This alone made it a puncturer of one of those Myths We Live By. Of motherhood itself, in an interview with The Atlantic (Alyssa Rosenberg, 2012), Shriver had this to say:
“It’s the main thing that women do that men don’t. And anyone who has a broader sense of themselves, any woman who has a broader sense of herself, must have a moment of feeling confined, constrained, limited in some way by this defining task. We’ve got a lot of ideas of what mothers are, and what mothers are supposed to be. And if you’ve never thought of yourself as that nurturing, cuddling, soft, eternally giving gooey sort, then it’s really jarring.”
As the second decade of the 21st Century progressed and a clutch of further novels came out, Lionel Shriver seemed fit to thrive. The novels were generally well-reviewed, interviews respectful and curious. She was now a fixture on the London literary scene, one of the metropolitan Great and Good.
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“Because who is the appropriator par excellence, really? Who assumes other people’s voices, accents, patois, and distinctive idioms? Who literally puts words into the mouths of people different from themselves?... The fiction writer, that’s who.” (Lionel Shriver, Brisbane Writers” Festival, 2016)
But to explain the ructions that followed the Brisbane speech, to explain the decision itself, we must go back in time, to the genesis of an idea Shriver must once have thought had very little do with her but with which, after 2016, she became inextricably linked. And here is where Lionel Shriver’s and Annah Anti-Palindrome’s stories start – fatefully – to intersect.
“Cultural Appropriation”: the term may have become common in the last ten years, but nobody could say exactly where it had come from. Different sources attribute it to the Palestinian Edward Said, or the art historian Kenneth Coutts Smith – though all agree the expression made its debut in the 1970s.
In the 1990s the idea had begun to gain traction : the Lakota Indians of California and South Dakota declared war on anyone making incorrect use of “the sacred traditions and spiritual practices of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people.” There were similar controversies brewing in Australia regarding Aboriginal culture and the exploitation thereof, which led to debates about intellectual property, and changes in copyright law. Yet it remained strictly a fringe issue – something happening somewhere else.
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But there were clearly people agitating for it go much further. In 2006 Susan Scafidi, an American lawyer and legal scholar, wrote an article entitled “Who Owns Culture?” in which she defined what the term “Cultural Appropriation” meant.
It was, she said, “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.” Quite how this “authorisation” was supposed to take place, and who would be presumptuous enough to anoint themselves nominal representative of an entire culture were questions which went unanswered. The point, perhaps, was to open up a new theatre of war, in which grievances could be nurtured, and blame assigned and paid for - in breast-beating apologies if not money.
Scafidi, incidentally, now runs the “Fashion Law Institute” at Fordham University. There were careers to be made from this.
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A year after Scafidi’s article, there appeared another in the U.S. journal Qualitative Sociology (volume 30). It was entitled “Unmasking Racism: Halloween Costuming and Engagement of the Racial Other.” The colon that scissored the title should have alerted people that the article meant business. Indeed, it was to prove something of a bacillus in years to come.
“Whites,” the abstract said, “contemporarily engage Halloween as a sort of “ritual of rebellion”…that ultimately reinforces white dominance.” It was an event “in which typically hidden backstage behaviors [by which they meant, presumably, racial prejudice] are celebrated in the frontstage through the use of humor and play.”
Here is a more concentrated taste of its tone:
Significantly, the goal of Halloween humor and play is often achieved at the expense of a target, for example, an individual or group that is mocked. While a costume may represent an ultimately aggressive judgment about its target, the joking nature of this practice makes acceptable the sharing of information, which in its unadulterated form might be considered unacceptable (Freud, 1960). Because both masquerader and his or her audience identify the humor as the principal feature of the costume, they are able to circumvent any judicious assessment of the negative images of the racial other being shared. It is for precisely these reasons that humor is such an effective tool in communicating racist thoughts, particularly in the contemporary post-Civil Rights era where open, frontstage expression of such ideas is considered socially taboo (Bonilla-Silva, 2003; Dundes, 1987; Feagin, 2006; Picca & Feagin, forthcoming)….
Put into normal English, this seemed to mean the following:
1) Halloween costumes were often at some group’s expense and were thus an act of aggression.
2) Halloween was consequently one of the few ways real racists could safely express their real racism, now that the Civil Rights Era has quashed their freedom to do it more overtly.
3) Implied: “Humour and play” themselves were to be accordingly scrutinised and mistrusted.
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This idea incubated for a few years and then, in 2011, moved off the page and into daily life. It was at this time, as if to usher in the tone of the decade just a little late, that a series of posters appeared on campus at Ohio University. A group named STARS – “ Students Teaching about Racism in Society” - was behind it.
The series was called “We’re a culture, not a costume”, and it featured a set of po-faced youths from different minorities. All of them fixed the viewer with a glower full of accusation and carried a photo of a traditional Halloween costume. An Arab boy held up a picture of a partygoer in full keffiyeh, about to ignite a suicide bomb. A dark-skinned youth in t-shirt and medallion skewered us with a photo of a moustached, sombreroed Mexican. A Chinese girl, eyes down in mortified shame on our behalf, sullenly flourished a Hallowe’en Geisha Girl.
“This is not who I am,” a slogan on each poster said, “And this is not okay.”
The photos were little windows of passive-aggression, and there was a phony feeling about them too. Surely no one minded that much about fancy dress costumes, unless they’d been told to. Surely people had better things to worry about. Surely, they didn’t…
But this, we were going to find, was the decade in which “Surely not…?” was usually followed by the answer “Actually, yes.” The posters, far from being a hoax, were meant to be treated with a solemnity even their models couldn’t have felt.
Later Sarah Williams, president of STARS, explained. “During Halloween, we see offensive costumes…. We wanted to do a campaign about it saying, ‘Hey, think about this. It’s offensive…’ The best way to get rid of stereotypes and racism is to have a discussion, and raise awareness…”
The Dean of Students at Ohio was at least more realistic and didn’t pussyfoot around with weasel words like “discussion” at all. He supported the poster-campaign, he said. It was a “clean, succinct” way of “delivering an important message.”
He sounded not unlike Michael Corleone.
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Naturally there was pushback to STARS’ “This is not who I am” campaign, and some of it was funny. A series of memes appeared on the internet featuring a Halloween Dalek, an Egyptian Mummy and a Vampire, all demanding the same cultural reverence. Beside the phrase “For shame, for shame you pony folk…This is my culture and this is not a joke,” cavorted a pantomime horse.
One of the key battlegrounds of the 2010s had opened up – between those who wanted to see the world with a kind of deadening moral earnestness, and those to whom this was a straight provocation. To many, organisations like STARS seemed funnier and funnier the more they frowned and pressed their grievances. But the prevailing wind was now behind the non-laughers.
The campaign against Halloween costumes would rage and flourish over the next few years. Articles began to appear with dreary regularity:
“Are you wearing a racist Halloween costume? Are you sure?” (Southern California Press, 2013)
“Is your Halloween costume racist?” (Everyday Feminism, 2013)
“Halloween: Is your costume racist? Where”s the line? (LA Times, 2013);
“A Halloween Risk: Racism in Disguise” (New York Times, 2013)
“Racist Halloween Costumes that are actually made for kids” (Huffington Post, 2015),
“2014”s Most Offensive Halloween Costumes” (MSNBC, 2014);
“Need to know if your Halloween Costume is racist: UMass will help” (Washington Examiner 2016);
“When Halloween Costumes cross the line” (UBC News 2016).
That most of these headlines appeared in distinguished publications was, depending on your point of view, either a heartening sign of the decade’s progressiveness or a depressing indicator of triviality. Certainly, it was gift to any journalist or editor stuck for an opinion piece as October rolled around (if you doubt me, type ‘Halloween’ and ‘Racist’ into Google’s search engine and ponder that infinity of articles for a moment.)
That you couldn’t believe anyone in their right mind had nothing better to think about was beside the point. This was the game of the decade, and you had to have a stake in it. It was another Ohio academic Dr.Akil Houston, Professor-of-Cultural-and-Media-Studies-in-the-Department-of-African-American-Studies, who spelled out the rule-change in an ex-cathedra announcement. “Cultural Appropriation’ he said, was ‘the use of another culture or cultural symbols to support of justify one’s need for self-expression or sense of freedom. Quite simply, it is theft.”