Dear Oprah Winfrey: 82 Writers Ask You to Reconsider American Dirt
Dear Oprah Winfrey,
As writers from diverse backgrounds, we deeply appreciate your support for books, and your lifting up of voices and authors. You have been and are a powerful force for good, a champion for justice, change, and literature. Thank you.
In light of all the good that you have done, we believe that American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins should not be honored as your book-club pick. The book club provides a seal of approval that can still, we hope, be changed. As you might know by now, there has been a widespread outcry from many writers—including Mexican American and other Latinx writers and thinkers—about the lack of complexity of this immigration story, and the harm this book can and will do. Others have already written many critiques that very persuasively lay out the problems inherent to this book; there will be many more. One of the earliest critiques is written by Myriam Gurba, and can be read here. Parul Sehgal also outlined her concerns about American Dirt in her recent review in the New York Times.
Many of us have firsthand experience with migration and its difficulties and traumas; some of us are Mexican immigrants, and have even more direct experience with the migrations Cummins purports to represent in American Dirt. Cummins’s book is, yes, a work of fiction. Many of us are also fiction writers, and we believe in the right to write outside of our own experiences: writing fiction is essentially impossible to do without imagining people who are not ourselves. However, when writing about experiences that are not our own, especially when writing about the experiences of marginalized people, still more especially when these lived experiences are heavily politicized, oppressed, threatened, and disbelieved—when this is the case, the writer’s duty to imagine well, responsibly, and with complexity becomes even more critical.
In the informed opinions of many, many Mexican American and Latinx immigrant writers, American Dirt has not been imagined well nor responsibly, nor has it been effectively researched. The book is widely and strongly believed to be exploitative, oversimplified, and ill-informed, too often erring on the side of trauma fetishization and sensationalization of migration and of Mexican life and culture. In addition, there are now accusations of heavy use of other Latinx writers’ work.
We, the undersigned, do not see a faceless brown mass. We, ourselves, are not faceless, nor are we voiceless.
As Cummins puts it in the author’s note to American Dirt: “At worst, we perceive [migrants] as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.” A painful, central question arises: who is this we imagined by Cummins, who is this them? We, the undersigned, do not see a faceless brown mass. We, ourselves, are not faceless, nor are we voiceless.
This letter is not written to attack Cummins, a fellow writer whose intentions we can’t know. But good intentions do not make good literature, particularly not when the execution is so faulty, and the outcome so harmful. Here is one example of ill-considered execution: already, at a celebratory American Dirt book party hosted by the novel’s publisher, with Cummins at the table, barbed-wire centerpieces were displayed as decorations, the machinery of US immigration used as festive adornment. Cummins publicized these photos herself, with evident delight. These images are difficult to look at, and for those of us who have undergone migration they are callous and insensitive. We can only imagine how many more such parties will take place if this novel continues its life as an Oprah book-club pick.
This is not a letter calling for silencing, nor censoring. But in a time of widespread misinformation, fearmongering, and white-supremacist propaganda related to immigration and to our border, in a time when adults and children are dying in US immigration cages, we believe that a novel blundering so badly in its depiction of marginalized, oppressed people should not be lifted up.
We are asking only that you remove the influential imprimatur of Oprah’s Book Club, as you have in the past upon learning that a book you’d championed wasn’t what it first seemed to be. Your openness to changing your mind, to incorporating additional information, has been inspiring and powerful. We speak to that openness now.
The undersigned alphabetical list includes many prominent, bestselling, prizewinning writers. All of us know you to be a public figure who believes in change and empathy. We write with dismay, but also with long-standing admiration, and with hope.
Thank you for listening.
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Eloisa Amezcua, author of From the Inside Quietly
Alice Bag, author of Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story
Jennifer Baker, editor of the short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life
Rosebud Ben-Oni, author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS
Chaya Bhuvaneswar, author of White Dancing Elephants
Sara Campos, writer, lawyer, co-director of The New American Story Project
Jennine Capó Crucet, author of Make Your Home Among Strangers
Joseph Cassara, author of The House of Impossible Beauties
Cathy Linh Che, author of Split
Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Kirstin Chen, author of Bury What We Cannot Take
Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know
Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
Naima Coster, author of Halsey Street
Carolina De Robertis, author of Cantoras
Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls
Omar El Akkad, author of American War
Patricia Engel, author of The Veins of the Ocean
Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina
Chris Feliciano Arnold, author of The Third Bank of the River
Carolyn Forché, author of What You Have Heard is True
V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage
Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name
Jasmine Guillory, author of The Wedding Date
Myriam Gurba, author of Mean
Daisy Hernandez, author of A Cup of Water Under My Bed
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Children of the Land
Brandon Hobson, author of Where the Dead Sit Talking
Luis Jaramillo, author of The Doctor’s Wife
Randa Jarrar, author of Him, Me, Muhammad Ali
Stephanie Jimenez, author of They Could Have Named Her Anything
Laleh Khadivi, author of A Good Country
Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek
Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir
Alberto Ledesma, author of Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer
Aya de León, author of Side Chick Nation
Ada Limón, author of The Carrying
Roberto Lovato, author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Revolution and Redemption
Valeria Luiselli, author of the novel Lost Children Archive
Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
Terese Mailhot, author of Heart Berries: A Memoir
Lauren Markham, author of The Far Away Brothers
Caille Millner, author of The Golden Road: Notes on my Gentrification
Fatima Farheen Mirza, author of A Place for Us
Tomás Q. Morín, author of Patient Zero
Nayomi Munaweera, author of What Lies Between Us
Beth (Bich Minh) Nguyen, author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the novel The Sympathizer
Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
Achy Obejas, author of The Tower of the Antilles
Daniel José Older, author of Shadowshaper
Daniel A. Olivas, author of The King of Lighting Fixtures
Tochi Onyebuchi, author of War Girls and Riot Baby
Tommy Orange, author of There There
Wendy C. Ortiz, author of Excavation: A Memoir
Daniel Peña, author of BANG: A Novel
Frances de Pontes Peebles, author of The Air You Breathe
Lilliam Rivera, author of Dealing In Dreams
Melissa Rivero, author of The Affairs of the Falcóns
Ivelisse Rodriguez, author of Love War Stories
Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Fruit of the Drunken Tree
Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, author of Barefoot Dogs
Raquel Salas Rivera, author of lo terciario / the tertiary
Shanthi Sekaran, author of Lucky Boy
Namwali Serpell, author of The Old Drift
Rebecca Solnit, author of Whose Story is This?
Analicia Sotelo, author of Virgin
Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of Bangkok Wakes to the Rain
Natalia Sylvester, author of Everyone Knows You Go Home
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of Heads of the Colored People
Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
Jose Antonio Vargas, author of Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen
Oscar Villalon, Managing Editor of Zyzzyva
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, daughter of formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants, author of Beast Meridian
Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
Naomi Williams, author of Landfalls
Javier Zamora, emigrated from El Salvador when he was nine, author of Unaccompanied
Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
