I'm reading a book with that title written by Edna O'Brien. The story is a fictionalized first person account of a Nigerian girl kidnapped by the Boko Haram. It's not a comfortable read, but it's powerfully written. It's all the more amazing as Edna O'Brien is an Irish woman around 90 who has lived almost all of her life in the UK. It's a tremendous work. One reviewer put it this way:
"Fiction does not pretend that having written or read about some calamitous subject the writer or the reader has now lived that experience. But as, in both its creation and experience, fiction is an act of daring imagination — it gives readers the tools to imagine a faithful simulacrum of the emotional and psychological contours of the particulars it describes."
However, I can imagine the voices of those I've come to describe as the professionally indignant suggesting that is somehow an affront that an Irish woman somehow dare to imagine what it was like to be kidnapped by the Boko Haram. "Write what you know" has evolved to: "Stay in your own lane." and not doing so is now an act of arrogance, bigotry or theft. "Only those who are like us are like us Only those who are like us can understand us - or even try."
To be fair, cultural appropriation probably has taken place when someone claims to speak for any group to which they do not belong. But should an attempt to communicate about things of value outside one's own direct experience fail in some way, let's assign any blame to be assigned to the lack of skill of the communicator, not on the motive. But the tribalists will not let it be so. And tribalism in the world continues to grow. And the world grows smaller as a consequence.
