Viola Clune
A Letter to, for, on the Other
If you’ve ever written a story, you have probably heard the advice “write what you know.” Although originally an import of wisdom from the quintessential writer of the American experience, Mark Twain, this idiom has grown grainy over the years—used too much and too imprecisely to have a clear meaning. Should we only write about experiences we have had? Or identities we hold? Emotions we’ve felt? What purpose does this seeming restriction serve? Or is it not a restriction at all, but an opening? And even if we could intuit what Twain really meant, would we agree with him?
In the film Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, another quintessential writer of the American experience throws out Twain’s idea altogether. When she taught a creative writing course at Princeton, she told her students “I do not want you to write anything about your little life. I know you have been taught to write what you know. I’m telling you, don’t do that. You don’t know anything.” Ultimately, she found that her students “took it and ran with it. It was almost like a door opened.”
If you have read any of Morrison’s novels, particularly their forewords, you might find this position a bit surprising. Take for instance The Bluest Eye. In its foreword, Morrison reveals that the novel’s protagonist, Pecola Breedlove—a suffered, abused, and abandoned little girl—is modeled after a girl Morrison once knew and played with during her own childhood. It sounds, then, like the novel that is to follow will adhere to Twain’s advice, not run from it. But if you read closer and further, The Bluest Eye is nothing at all about what Morrison knows, but entirely about what she does not. When Morrison’s schoolyard friend wished for blue eyes, it stumped her, “and twenty years later, [she] was still wondering about how one learns that.” She asks, then, the enormous question (and hopes that the novel will answer): “how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society.” Her narrative project—to accomplish some sort of answer, for herself and her readers, and to do so in an “indisputably black way—” is, she says, as difficult today as it was then.
Morrison’s dispute of the “write what you know” paradigm does not simply reflect a petty disagreement on approach between two masters of their craft. Instead, in her reflections we find a plethora of wisdoms on what literature, storytelling, and the craft of writing are meant to achieve, as well as where we, as historically marginalized people fit into that story. As people to be written about, as writers, as the Other. We, the Other.
“The Other” initially entered our vocabulary as a critique of ethnocentric anthropology. In this formulation, certain anthropologists observed, studied, and wrote about other cultures in a manner that cast this culture as an out-group, as strange, and generally abnormal. To other a person or a group, then, was to perpetuate the supremacy of one’s own culture (typically rooted in white Christian patriarchy). Surely, we can agree that ‘othering’ is unacceptable and altogether outdated, but does that mean that we should throw out the paradigm of ‘the other’ altogether. Is it not useful to our understanding of who we are and who we are not? And in the context of our writing, does it not lend itself to understanding what it is we know and what we do not. Surely, there is a self and there is the other. And it would be naive, in America, to believe that our national identity was built on anything other than othering—a conception of who ‘they’ are that tells us who ‘we’ are not.
In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers ends her opening paragraph with the following lines: “My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.” In Spiller’s configuration, the theft of African bodies signals a new terrain in which “the [black] female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver.” Once the body has been made into a thing, “the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness.’” In other words, Power made meaning of who we, the young United States, would be by drawing meanings upon the landscape the enslaved bodies it had stolen provided. Black female bodies, as the physical vessels needed for the perpetuation of chattel slavery, were particularly important for this work. As Spillers says, “my country needs me.” In this conceptualization, America, at the core of its identity, is an inverse of everything it has cast the Black woman, the ultimate Other, to be.
It is unhelpful, then, to pretend that we can escape the Other in our 21st century American lives, especially in our writing. It is a fact of our existence that demands grappling with, and there is perhaps no better way than through the stories we write and the tales we read.
Perhaps it is the implication of safety that “write what you know” carries that Morrison so strongly objected to. Though Morrison herself was a Black woman, her writing began from a place of questions—questions that grappled with her own othering—with answers that were far from obvious. What we write should come from a place of uncertainty and leave us at a point of reckoning. We know nothing, but our writing is one of the only tools we have that can get us some answers.
Whether we would be considered the Other or not in this grand American grammar book, we live with the Other—its histories and its afterlives—and therefore bear the responsibility of coming closer to it, understanding what it means for all of us. There is no better medium, then—which allows us to step outside of ourselves, to bend reality and let it be bent—than storytelling for this endeavor. In the words of James Baldwin, “You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” Alternatively, then you write.