Appropriation or Fair Use

As a person of mixed heritage and culture (female, old, German, Kiowa Apache, American, fat, single mother, poor, formerly homeless, pet owner, gardener, scientist), I usually can get away with writing about a wider variety of characters than other writers can, specifically white male writers. I can write about Europeans because I have a European birth heritage. I can write about Native Americans because I have a Native American birth heritage (I usually stick to the tribes I know best: Desert and Plains Indians). I can write about Americans because America is my home. I can write about women without complaints of appropriating “womanness “. Oddly enough, I can also write about men because I was a mother and raised boy children to manhood. I can write about people of any age because I’ve lived through all but the oldest years. I can write about fat people and skinny ones, because I’ve been both.

I am in that group of people who can – literally – write about almost any group of people and not be accused of appropriating the culture for my nefarious needs.

And, yanno, I think that’s skewed.

One of the most important things a writer, an artist, can do is step outside themselves to view the world through eyes of other people, particularly other people of other cultures. To “walk a mile” in someone’s life – anyone else’s life, allows us to form connections, to achieve levels of understanding and respect that we cannot get through isolationist methods. That distance between them sets up a barrier to friendship as well as to community.

When an artist creates something that partakes of cultures outside their own narrow one, they are, more often than not, not stealing the culture from the indigenous people. They are attempting to make connections, to build bridges between us and them, to bring the voices of the other culture to visibility within their own culture. It is not an appropriation so much as it is a representation: This is how we currently perceive these people. If it makes you uncomfortable to see them this way, why are you uncomfortable? If it makes them uncomfortable to be seen this way, ask why? Can we talk about it? Reach some place where you are comfortable being seen by us, and we are comfortable seeing you?

I would agree that it would be appropriation if the original Culture X were not allowed to speak up about Culture Y’s use, to say: This is not us. We aren’t like that. This is used wrongly and it makes us uncomfortable to see it misused or Heya, you nailed it, dude. That is so true, and we are pleased you actually get it.

Silencing culture X so culture Y can say what they will with no conversation, no check, no communication – that’s appropriation.

So long as Culture X can talk about what Culture Y is doing, can offer up explanations and correct misconceptions, it’s not appropriation. It’s education, it’s representation, it’s opening the way between the people. It’s fair use.

As a person of such mixed heritage, I often get told that while I can write what I do, others can’t. There are, however, cultures that people don’t want me writing about – Australian aboriginals, Africans (not African-Germans, or African-Americans, just African-Africans), Chinese, Japanese, Middle-Easterners – because I am not from those cultures, and apparently, I’m not supposed to have friends or family in those cultures. Nor am I supposed to use my imagination to place people of these diverse cultures into contact with one another and into situations of diverse types.

That’s one reason I write about aliens so much – the Turpenii, the Terukan and the Agarwaen, the Phrenics, the myriad species of the Alliance and the Council of Worlds. The aliens can’t accuse me of appropriating their worlds and cultures. In fact, they seem pleased that I am interested enough in them to bring them to the notice of others, to share what I know of their ways so we can peaceably interact instead of making huge, insulting faux pas.

Sure, there’s the possibility that I might get it wrong. Since I haven’t appropriated their culture, they can speak up and say: Yo, you! We so do not think the Nodding Feddy is a god. And where did you get the totally idiotic idea that we approve of violence just because we dedicate our entire civilization to the martial arts? We haven’t had a war in generations – which is more than we can say for you.

Next time you see someone of Culture Y write about, draw, sculpt, paint, or otherwise represent someone of Culture X in their artistic work, think. Are they taking it and preventing Culture X from responding? If the answer is “yes”, then it is appropriation and should be condemned.

Does the work attempt to “walk a mile”, to demonstrate a conflict between Cultures X and Y, or demonstrate brotherhood between them, or place them matter-of-factly within the piece of art, or highlight a feature of one or the other or both, or in some way open eyes or mouths in knowledge and conversation about the piece and the participants in them? Then it is fair use. For Culture X to get upset about it when used in this way is to demonstrate they want to remain isolated and aloof from other cultures.

But, as one who embodies so many minority cultures, I personally feel that unless the artist from Culture Y is repressing those from Culture X, then the artist has not just a right, but perhaps even an obligation to represent Culture X in their works of art. Culture X can complain all they want, but they are talking about it – and that, in my opinion, is a Good Thing.

I think profiting is a fair use. To insist on “no profit” would be to deny the world such art as “The End of the Trail” sculpture by James Earl Fraser (not a Cherokee, or even a Native American). A lot of other art would not exist if the artist didn’t have a reasonable expectation of profiting from it.

Construing something in a manner that isn’t actually accurate may fall under “artistic license”. Sometimes art does misuse something in order to shake up perceptions or to focus attention upon it; that is, after all, one of the purposes of art. Or it may have been a matter of misunderstanding, which is certainly not an intentional act, and may be part of the “invisible, undeniable process” of assimilation and adulteration that all cultures experience when they come into contact with one another.

The art of being a writer is to develope all these different characters – different colors, different sizes, different careers and wealth, different cultures, then put the poor dears into impossible situations and see what happens.

I am flabbergasted when my (male) writer cohorts complain about having a story shot down because they came from the “wrong” culture to write about it. I’ve only gotten that a few times, a sort of disdainful sniff and a “you’re obviouly not Japanese/African/rich” to dismiss what I’d written.

I tend to extend this into all the arts – at the most recent local arts festival, there was this young man who made gorgeous small paintings of the romanticized west, and included some Indian tribes in them – lots of research to make sure he got the clothing details and such right, but still kind of a fantasy Old West, and he had a group of noisy women berating him for daring to paint Indians when he clearly wasn’t one himself. What killed me was that there was a man who looked vaguely Asian who did less romantic, but still not realistic, paintings of the Old West, too, and no one was calling him on it. It was just the blue-eyed blond man who got hassled.

Klingon Love Poem

I sometimes like to irritate Klingons by dressing as a Klingon, except I wear white leathers, and lots of pastel floaty chiffons, and have piercings in my brow ridges with pretty shiny things in them. Worse still, I recite Klingon Love Poetry to them, in Klingon, English, and Sanskrit – just to show that not all Klingons are tough and ill-educated in anything but war.

Valentine’s Day has been embraced by Klingon Love Poets to display the tender side of Klingons for your delectation. Any Klingons who fail to survive this exposure deserve what happens next. With spicy barbecue sauce.

While I have written several Klingon Love Operas, there really isn’t proper space here to share them, so I will instead simply provide a single shorter Love Poem.

Klingons, of course, can handle such classics as “Speak Daggers to Me”, “Warbirds Mating on High”, “Breathtaking Beauty of Pain”, and “Love Arm’d”, but Humans will be treated to a milder love poem that has been filtered for their more tender sensibilities.

By Night

By night, I tie your heart to mine
so the two together in bondage
will defeat the enemy like the war drums of Kamoorai,
pounding, pounding the walls of Nykbetam.

The black flame of our passion
snips the strangling vines of Xanthar,
punctual as the bloodlust of the shadowmites that would
devour all flesh, relentlessly.

In darkness and blood, I bind your heart to mine
so the constancy of their beat might
answer the star’s demands of conquest
And bring honor to our name.

Together, we are a single key, a mighty force
To unlock the wealth and power of the universe.

Ongoing Project

This has been sort of a background, on-going project of mine for several decades. It began 25-30 years ago while standing in yet another line, waiting for my turn. Being the chatty person I am, I started talking to the woman in front of me, and by the time it was her turn, I knew most of her life story.

If that had been the sole instance, or if such things had remained rare, I might never have given it another thought.

But, time and again, people would spill their dreams and life stories in my ear while doing the boring things we often do – waiting in line, waiting in waiting rooms, waiting for our turn at something we felt we had to do.

It was a long time before I decided to “collect” these gifts, so the early day stories are jumbled and mishmashed with others. It was an even longer time before I knew how I wanted to display this collection.

In recent years, it sort of came together in the way that patterns do, and I knew I wanted to showcase these ordinary lives in a novel. I’ve never written a contemporary novel before. My forte has been either children’s stories, mythic stories, or science fictional stories with just a soupcon of fantasy. But these stories want telling. They are the stories of the average American, woven into an almost mythic framework. These are stories from young women, old women, women my age, men, boys, black, white, red, yellow, brown, mixed. These stories cross economic lines as well – becasue sometimes even the wealthy have to wait.

I’ve always been comfortable in myself, and willing to listen to anyone who talks to me. I’m not a psychologist or a psychotherapist. I’m not offering any analysis of these stories, I just want to tell them, in the framework most familiar to me.

I want to call this novel The Fruit of the Stone, but feel it may be too obscure. A good, alternative title might be Voyage to the Next Room, but I’m also attracted to the appropriate image of Tears Full of Song.I have the last line written, and the opening sequence. I also have hundreds of ordinary stories to put into the framework, and I think I only have room for maybe a baker’s dozen or two.