Let’s talk about AMERICAN DIRT
Stephen King endorsed it. Oprah has anointed it for her coveted book club, the gold ticket to skyrocketing sales. It’s been optioned for the movies. Many booksellers are fawning over it — the potential for a huge money-maker in this dire fiction market can’t be underestimated. And the publisher has leveled the full power of its marketing machine to promote it, something very few novels ever receive. Sold for seven figures in a reportedly ferocious auction, the winning editor touts it as The Novel “that gives voice to the faceless masses” at the border — a direct quote from her letter in the advanced reading copy. The author herself claims she wanted to be a bridge, while readily admitting in her author’s note that she worried she might not be the ideal person to tell this story, which is both self-effacing and calculated to incite interest. In sum, it’s the type of major publishing event we rarely see anymore, with the author positioned to assume her niche in the literary pantheon of the widely acclaimed and overpaid.
Allegedly, AMERICAN DIRT shines much-needed compassionate light, albeit fictionalized, on the crisis that’s seized international headlines and has harrowing humanitarian consequences as our president continues to vilify undocumented Latino immigrants, particularly those from Mexico and Central America. It’s certainly not the first novel to depict the plight of immigrants, but it is the first to generate such media attention and outraged furor, both for the errors in its content and its author’s questionable behavior.
On principle, I resist author pile-ups. In our social media age of everyone-has- to-air-their-opinion, it’s far too easy to subscribe to the mob mentality and trash whatever doesn’t happen to scratch our fickle itch. Books are by their nature subjective; one reader’s pleasure is another’s poison. Being a published writer myself, I’ve had to endure the trolling mob at times, and trust me, it’s not pretty. I always assume that no writer ever sets out to write a flawed book, but we’re fallible humans, and invariably we will make mistakes.
However. This particular novel has more than its share of mistakes. I’m no expert on Mexico, so I’ll leave the elucidation of those errors to others. I’m also not Latino, though I am of Spanish descent (my mom was born in Spain and I was raised there) so I’ll also respectfully defer the cultural and social issues to those better equipped to address them. The rage of those who know these subjects intimately may seem extreme to anyone who’s not in the thick of it, but cultural appropriation is a hot-button topic, particularly when those being appropriated aren’t allowed to speak for themselves.
I do know something about immigration. My mother immigrated from Spain when she married my father. My husband is a Central American immigrant. When I first met him, I had zero knowledge of the circumstances that immigrants from Latin America endure to reach the United States and even less knowledge of the challenges they face once, or if, they get here. Going through the process with him taught me invaluable lessons that opened my eyes to the fact that despite my experiences as the son of an immigrant, who holds fast to his Spanish roots, I’m still a privileged white U.S. citizen who really hasn’t a clue as to what impoverished immigrants of color suffer. And while my husband’s immigration experience was by no means easy, neither he nor I would ever compare it to trudging through miles of parched desert, prey to violence, exploitation, and the very real threat of death.
Even when you belong to a community, your personal experience can never be reflective of that community as a whole, because myriad social and cultural underpinnings affect us in different ways. It’s tough to understand this, and even tougher to incorporate it into our we-know-best-because-we-saw-it-on-Facebook mindset, but we all need to get with the program airing in the 21st century. Just because you’re married to an immigrant doesn’t mean you can speak authoritatively for other immigrants. We carry our individual baggage, so the best we can do is be empathetic and realize one thing is not like the other, while refraining from preaching personal experience as inarguable gospel that can be applied to all.
In her zeal to celebrate her success, the author of AMERICAN DIRT has done some rather troubling things. She compared her husband’s past status as an undocumented immigrant as one that gives her “a dog in the fight”. That may be so, but having a dog in the fight — a metaphor that’s not exactly humane — doesn’t mean you own the fight ring. Moreover, her husband is Irish, so while deportation was a scary possibility, detention in a camp for months on end was certainly not. In her description of a traffic stop where the cop could have discovered her husband’s status, she calls it one of the “most excruciating” moments of her life. No doubt, but it’s hardly comparable to being hauled by I.C.E. out of your home in the middle of the night or being forcibly separated from your children at the border. She’s called herself white in the past, but then declared her Puerto Rican heritage classifies her as Latinx. I can understand her confusion on this point. When I was younger, upon my family’s return to the U.S., I was derided for my Castilian accent in Spanish, so I started identifying as Latino, because it was the only Spanish-speaking community around me and I desperately wanted to be part of it in a country that still felt alien to me, despite the U.S. being my place of birth. Eventually, I got a grip and ceased the pretense (maturity helped), because I’m not Latino. Just because I long to identify as part of a community doesn’t make it so.
More problematically, the author has displayed overt instances of insensitivity toward the very subject she purports to illuminate, as evidenced by her tweeting a photo of the barbed wire-block centerpieces at her bookseller dinner (below) and having her nails manicured with the image of barbed wire and birds, featured on her book cover (above). The latter is the kind of giddy, if slightly nauseating, reaction one might expect from an author who realizes she’s on the highway to Big Fame. The former is less justifiable.
In both cases, what’s striking is her apparent obliviousness to the impact exerted by this universal symbol of brutal repression. It raises the question of how truly understanding she is of the issues she says inspired her to write this book. The fact that she’s worked in publishing doesn’t abet her cause. The tone-deaf marketing campaign is cringe-worthy, so one can’t help but wonder if her actions are the clumsy missteps of an overly-enthusiastic author who’s hit the jackpot or deliberate manipulation geared to maximize commercial gain.
Writers can, and should, write about whatever moves them. Part of writing fiction is imagining lives that aren’t our own. It’s perfectly acceptable to inhabit characters who in no way resemble the writer, because that’s what makes writing fiction so exciting. The author’s decision to tell the story of a Mexican woman forced to flee her homeland isn’t the issue. The issue is if she should have done so in an extremely inflammatory climate, where taking on the responsibility of a people whose very existence is under attack demands that you get it absolutely right. Moreover, if you’re going to be so bold as to fictionalize such a painful and current subject, and you know you’re not part of the affected community — as indeed, this writer acknowledges in her author’s note — it goes without saying that your responsibility becomes even more onerous. Any banal mistake turns egregious under these circumstances.
In an interview in The New York Times, the author stated that censorship can silence voices, which is true. What she failed to address is whether in not voluntarily silencing her particular voice on a subject that may not be entirely her right to tell, she, in turn, has contributed to the silencing of a swath of voices who might best deserve to write it instead. In the final say, hers is not one of the affected voices; she remains a spectator, no matter how much research she undertook. And while wanting to act as a bridge for others is very noble, the inference that a white person can act as a mouthpiece for those of color has bitter historical precedents. With all this in mind, she should have at least foreseen that adorning her nails with barbed wire and advertising it on social media would be a very bad move: this is, after all, a novel based on the anguish of hundreds of real human beings, detained for the sole reason of seeking a better life — an anguish she’s profited rather handsomely from. It also bears mentioning that to date, she’s made no statement that she intends to contribute some of her new-gained wealth to charities that assist migrants, though she’s since landed a second seven-figure deal for a new novel at the same house. Far be it for me to tell anyone what to do with their earnings, but again, it begs the question of how much of a bridge she actually intended to build.
AMERICAN DIRT been dubbed a modern-day Grapes of Wrath (hyperbolic, perhaps) and “trauma porn” (excessive, perhaps). It has benefited from a publisher-driven campaign that most writers in this business would cut off their left arm to enjoy. With the majority of traditionally published fiction flung into the marketplace like leftovers, to see the amount of effort and money expended on a single novel’s behalf has been quite the stomach-churner for those of us who’ll likely never see anything approximating it for our own work. But envy in publishing is endemic, so that quibble must be set aside. Of course, we envy her million-dollar advance and Oprah coronet; I’d be lying if I said we didn’t. Nevertheless, countless Mexican writers with authentic stories to tell about their country will never receive this kind of attention and indeed, probably never even get an offer from a U.S. publisher, though theirs are the stories we most need to read. Actual voices who deeply know their heritage, their culture, and the challenges facing those who must immigrate. No amount of research can be a substitute for living it. We can only hope if this novel proves the runaway bestseller it’s poised to be, the copy-cat syndrome that reigns in publishing will initiate a race to discover the next AMERICAN DIRT and it will be written by an actual Mexican immigrant.
So, can the novel be everything the hype claims? Of course not. Nothing can possibly equal such exaggeration. To compare it to a classic is at the very least pretentious and at the very worst, insulting. Has it stirred controversy? Most definitely — and that’s something publishers know they can take to the bank. Is the author seeking to give voice to those she believes lack it or is she a clueless opportunist without the validity to hoist her petard?
These, I fear, are questions that most readers, blinded by the fanfare and accolades, will never ask.
