In | Appropriate: Interviews with Canadian authors on the writing of difference

In | Appropriate is a collection of interviews with Canadian authors, exploring how they work through questions of difference, identity, and appropriation in their writing.

Edited by Kim Davids Mandar, and introduced by Daniel Heath Justice, the collection features interviews with Ian Williams, Ayelet Tsabari, Sanchari Sur, Eden Robinson, Jael Richardson, Waubgeshig Rice, Amanda Leduc, Chelene Knight, Mahak Jain, Wayne Grady, Alicia Elliott, Farzana Doctor, Michael Crummey, Arif Anwar, and Angie Abdou.

The interviews address questions of appropriation that go beyond race and culture, extending also to gender, sexuality, ability, age, and other categories of difference. They ask how writers work to represent an increasingly diverse and complex culture in ways that avoid falling into appropriation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gordon Hill Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781774220108

Book preview

Ayelet Tsabari

January 16, 2019

Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a family of Yemeni descent. She grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv, served in the Israeli army, and travelled extensively throughout South East Asia, Europe, North America, before moving to Vancouver, Canada in 1998. She is the author of The Best Place on Earth. A graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, Ayelet teaches at the University of King’s College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and at Tel Aviv University.

K: In The Best Place on Earth you crafted such a diversity of characters. Can you speak to how you made those choices, and how you went about writing them?

A: There’s a lot more freedom in writing a collection of short stories. It allowed me to attempt things that I wouldn’t dream of attempting in a novel. It’s just one of the reasons I love the short story as a form. You can write about places you only know a little bit. I would never dream of doing that in a book length form, so writing a collection of stories was an opportunity for me to experiment with multiple viewpoints and perspectives and try things that I always wanted to try.

Often when writing fiction, there’s a voice that presents itself to me; it speaks and needs to be heard, and I follow it. Sometimes I would question, later on, Why this voice? But there’s an initial spark of magic and mystery that happens when you begin to write, and it’s wonderful, and I’m in love with it. With the first story, Tikkun, that’s kind of what happened. And then I did question that. I asked myself, Why am I writing this story from this guy’s point of view, and not, say, from the religious ex-girlfriend’s point of view? That’s a good, interesting, female point of view. Why not tell her story? And I realized that despite the fact that she’s a woman and I’m supposed to feel and to relate to her more, that wasn’t the case. The character of Lior and the voice of Lior were much more alive in my head and resonated with me so much more than hers. It was always him.

I say that I questioned why I wrote in his voice, and I did, but I didn’t question my ability to write from a male point of view, and I was surprised when someone on social media actually commented on that negatively. He hadn’t read the story, but when the trailer came out we included an excerpt from that story, read by a male actor, and someone commented on a friend’s post, saying, Why does she do that? Why does she write from a male point of view? What gives her the right? or something along those lines. I was stunned by that. Because despite being aware of the issue of appropriation—I mean, obviously; you kind of have to be when your own voice has been appropriated from the time you could read – writing from a male point of view didn’t cross my mind in that context. I didn’t see it as an issue at all.

When I write from a man’s point of view, I do rely a lot on my partner. With this story in particular, because it was first person, and the voice had to be bang on, he did make some helpful suggestions in terms of voice and authenticity. Anytime I write young men’s characters, I ask him to weigh in. Also, being a native English speaker—I’m English as a second language—he helps me, sometimes, to hone the dialogue. I would ask him, Does that sound right? Do you buy this? and sometimes he does, and sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he makes suggestions. And I do that whenever I write a character that’s very different from me. I guess now we call those sensitivity readers.

K: There’s a lot of diversity within a group: how do you know when you’ve nailed it and written it in a respectful way? Is it more than one sensitivity reader? Is it two? Does it depend who it is? Or do you just have a feeling?

A: It really depends. The question of whether you nailed it—man, that’s something you ask yourself constantly, even when you’re writing about someone who is very much like you, even when you write about your own community. It’s still your perspective, and it may differ from others in the community. As a writer, you constantly wonder. It never goes away. We constantly strive for precision in writing; that’s a part of the deal. You have to rely on an intuition, I suppose—whether something feels right or whether it still needs to be investigated. There’s no good answer. Every story is different.

K: In your acknowledgements for your collection, you acknowledged Camilla Gibb, who was your mentor at the time, and Camilla’s background is anthropology. She also answered, I believe, in an interview, questions about cultural representation because she writes about different cultures. Was discussing accurate representation part of your mentorship?

A: She did say once, and I don’t remember if she said it to me personally or if she said it in a different setting, Shouldn’t we at least try and fail sometimes? And I thought that was very astute. It stayed with me, and I’ve repeated that since: Shouldn’t we at least try? There’s something about the idea that we’re all basically human, and that we share some feelings, emotions, struggles, pains, the physical bodies that we live in (although that also, of course, varies). There’s something about that that rang true to me, that I found comforting.

K: Why should we try? What’s the benefit?

A: Because fiction has the ability to promote empathy. Writing is an act of empathy, and reading is an act of empathy, and I love fiction for that. In part, it’s going back to the idea of goodness, I think. And I know a lot of writers who would say fiction is not about goodness, that it shouldn’t be; and some of the best fiction is disturbed and dark, with characters that are ethically and morally corrupt, and I agree completely—fiction can do all kinds of things to all kinds of people. Personally, and that’s just my own personal affinity, I want people to feel deeply, and I want to feel deeply when I read. That’s what I seek, and that’s what I want to evoke. Fiction does that, by zooming in closer.

When I talk about Israel in particular, and how when we’re reading about war-torn countries or watching news items about them, we see a newscaster standing on a rooftop overlooking the smoky city, and it’s so general and one dimensional and shows the people as a mass. Fiction zooms in, and gives voice to one family, to one house, and makes the other seem less other. In small ways, even writing from the point of view of an elderly Yemeni woman in Brit Milah, a woman whose views are very different from my own, was an exercise in empathy. Yes, I’m Yemeni, but I’m a youngish woman, and the traditional views Reuma holds are very foreign to me. Writing that story through her point of view, and not through the point of view of her daughter, whose views are in line with my own—that was, to me, an act of empathy. To understand Reuma, to try and embody her, and to portray her in an empathetic and authentic way was important to me, and, on a craft level, more challenging to me as a writer, which is a good thing. Writing it from Ofra’s point of view, there was no challenge there. I don’t think the story would have been as strong.

K: Did you have sensitivity readers for that?

A: I did not. I did not. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just that I don’t know elderly Jewish Yemeni born women who read English? Maybe I was too scared, because I was writing about such a taboo in Jewish society. The idea of not circumcising is very loaded. Maybe because I was writing about elderly women I felt I knew well, older aunties and women from my community. I realize as I say this now that this is a poor excuse. And to be honest, I was really scared of it being out in the world. I was really terrified.

K: What has been the response?

A: The response was amazing—I was blown away. You know, I really thought that this was the one story that people were going to give me heat over, because of the way circumcision is treated in Jewish tradition, I guess in Muslim tradition as well. It’s almost not questioned. It’s just what has to be done. So I was expecting to get a lot of pushback from people. And surprisingly, and maybe that was because I chose Reuma’s point of view, and not her daughter, a lot of elderly Jewish moms—not just Yemeni or Israelis—told me how much it touched them. They said, My son did this, My daughter did this, and it was clear that they didn’t agree with that choice. But they were just so relieved to find that story, their story, being told.

K: You mentioned the consequences of experiencing your own voice being appropriated your entire life, and not being able to read authentic representation of your own culture. What are the consequences of that?

A: Oh my goodness. Cultural appropriation is a part of a larger issue. It’s a reflection of a power dynamic and an imbalance in society. So, it’s hard for me to speak of it in isolation. It’s a representation and a subset of a larger problem. Growing up, what I found in literature in terms of a representation of my culture and community, and I didn’t find much, was often a caricature. As a child I read everything in sight, and I remember the day I picked up a random children’s book, and I remember there was a Doctor Tsabari in it, and I was blown away. Blown away! I couldn’t believe that there was a doctor in this book that had my last name. That was inconceivable to me. The fact that I still remember that, after all these years, shows you how rare it was for me to encounter a Yemeni doctor—with my last name no less!—in a book. It was such a small act. It was such a tiny thing that this author did, and it was amazing for me.

You know, when writers talk about how, out of fear of appropriation, they choose not to include any characters of colour or any marginalized or diverse characters—this is a great example of why they should. It was a very minor character, but it affected me so strongly. I was so shocked to see that this could happen, that there could be a Doctor Tsabari in literature.

K: So, beyond the shock, what other emotions did it evoke? Was there an outrage, like, How dare you write about this?

A: No, I was so pleased! I was so pleased that it wasn’t the regular stereotypical caricature, like the primitive, poverty stricken Yemeni grandma, who lives in a poor neighbourhood, and her grandson, trying to be more Israeli, finds her so embarrassing. It wasn’t the Yemeni maid cleaning the rich people’s homes, or the working man, or the criminal, or the over-sexualized exotic brown-skinned young woman. It wasn’t what I expected when I saw Yemeni characters portrayed. It was different. And it was a doctor! So, that’s a really good example of how a tiny act of inclusion can make such an impact on a child’s life.

In literature and in movies, Mizrahi characters, Jews of Arab lands, Jews of middle eastern or east African descent, are often portrayed in a very one-dimensional way. It’s always a stereotype. And there were no books by Yemeni authors that I knew of to offset that. It’s a reflection of a power dynamic in a larger, systematic problem. This representation—brought forth by White authors—was the only thing I was exposed to. It’s very, very damaging. As a child who wanted to be a writer, in particular, it made me think that there was no room for my voice and that there was no place for my family in literature because I didn’t see it. It didn’t seem possible to write about people like me in fiction.

Earlier on I said that there’s a mystery element to writing, where the voices will present themselves to you and you end up telling the story as it comes to you. But the decision to feature Mizrahi characters—Yemenis mostly, but others as well, Moroccans, Iraqis, Tunisians, because this was a book of short stories, I wanted the range—was a very calculated decision. This was a mission. I was writing the book I wanted to read, as Toni Morrison famously said. I was writing the stories I wasn’t exposed to. This is my—and I know I’m writing it in English, and I know it’s all backwards, but still—it was my way to rectify that childhood experience.

Even after I started writing The Best Place on Earth, for example, every time I was writing a female object of desire, I found myself falling back into the old trap: she was White, she was fair-skinned, she was often blonde. I had to catch myself, and that was another shocking realization for me. This is, again, going back to the damage of not seeing yourself portrayed in literature or seeing yourself only as one thing. So, where I could, I went back and corrected that, and to me, that’s no different than doing any editorial work. Sometimes we edit for style, sometimes we edit for pace, and yeah, sometimes we edit for cultural appropriation and inclusiveness—that’s another element that I think all writers should consider.

K: How can a writer do that? Your Filipina caregiver, for example, was so powerfully written. When you’re doing the cultural appropriation edit, sensitivity readers are part of that. Did you do anything else?

A: Yeah. That’s another story that I worried about, for sure. Again, I was pleased with so many people telling me how much it resonated with them. What did I do with that one? I spoke to people. And I researched as much as I could, and I tried (I don’t want to sound cliché) to be highly aware of what I was doing and of my intention. I identified deeply with the character of Rosalynn and the woman who inspired her. And still, I worried. And I still sometimes worry since it’s been published. I worry, and I sometimes question myself. But then I go back to the reactions, to what people are saying. And I’m like, well, obviously this was an important story to be told.

This particular story was something that was haunting me for a really long time before I wrote it. It was based on three people that I knew well. When I write fiction I sometimes take real scenarios, things that are true or factual in their basis, and then let the story take flight. It’s fictional, of course; I save my non-fiction for non-fiction. So it was based on those people, and that love story, and the family that was created with three misfits who were living on the margins of Israeli society. It was in my heart—for years. I think I started thinking about it fifteen years ago. Those characters just haunted me. Their story had to be told.

K: You’ve brought up your creative non-fiction writing, and your memoir is coming out—The Art of Leaving. How does writing difference well in these two genres compare? Is there a different process in fiction, do you think? Are the stakes lower in fiction for accurate representation, or respectful representation, than they are in creative non-fiction? This question brings up the idea of audience—does the marketplace consume fiction differently than it would consume a creative non-fiction product?

A: Yeah, I do think people experience it very differently. Sometimes I resist that, and I wish that they wouldn’t. Especially since people often assume that fiction isn’t really fiction. And then, you write non-fiction, and people think it’s too bizarre to be true. There’s always that doubt.

K: That’s so weird, isn’t it?

A: It’s so weird! I’ve had so many people ask me, Who are you? out of my fictional characters—or even just making assumptions like, Oh, so you were a trouble-maker in the army, after reading say, Casualties, and I’m like, Oh, no, no—I mean, yes, actually, I was a trouble-maker, but I was a very different trouble-maker. I just wrote about another trouble-maker—I know, it’s shocking [laughter]—but actually I was nothing like her.

On one hand, the boundaries start to blur, but on the other hand people really seem to want boundaries. And a part of me wishes there were none, just so I could protect myself from the exposure [laughter] that I’m going to experience in six months when my entire life is going to be on display. What the hell was I thinking [laughter]?

I never considered there might be appropriation in my act of writing memoir. It’s so interesting. Like, I’m writing my story, how can I appropriate anything here? This is my story, this is my life. But then, there’s always the concern about other people’s privacy. And what I did was, I sent relevant essays to people—not to everyone, only to people who were in touch with me and I could easily locate and who wanted to see them. None of them corrected me. None of them had any issues. One of them corrected my Italian [laughter], but that’s it. But, I’m still terrified. Especially when it comes to family, because my story is entangled with their stories. I’m aware of that, and I try as much as I can to protect them, but there’s only so much I can do.

K: Michael Crummey’s Henry Kreisel lecture was broadcast on CBC on Ideas. In this lecture, he described his experience of going to a literary festival in the United States and somebody asking him where he was from. He said, Newfoundland. and the person responded by saying, Oh, I know Newfoundland. They had read a book called The Bird Artist, which was set in Michael’s hometown. When he heard that, he was crestfallen. He told them, Okay, you know nothing about Newfoundland from that book.

A: And who wrote that book? Someone’s who’s from Newfoundland?

K: No, someone in the United States—a novelist.

A: I have a very similar story. A book was written about the Yemeni community—a book of fiction—and there were errors in it. And things that just didn’t feel true to the spirit of the community. That’s what I was saying before too, that I would never dare to write an entire book from Rosalynn’s point of view, even though I identified so strongly with this character. I wouldn’t. Again, the short story, the shorter span, allows for a little more freedom. I could never do that in a novel form. A novel digs in such a deep and broad way into the lives of people. How can you get it right? How could someone who is not Yemeni possibly get it right? There are just so many subtleties, so much depth and history, to a community. To any community. Like, maybe if you’ve lived amongst them for a long time, and studied them. Maybe,