Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018. 272 pages. $29.95.
In an age of ascendant white supremacy and racism, backlash against the demographic changes of a country becoming majority minority, writers of color refuse to be silenced or consigned to the margins. Yet the process of finding one’s voice and learning craft has long occurred in the context of overwhelming literary whiteness—white MFA professors teaching a white canon to predominantly white cohorts of students. In his new book on creative writing and diversity, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing, David Mura examines the damage such programs can do to young writers and argues for a pedagogy and craft that recognizes the ways race and culture are fundamental in the creation of literary fiction and nonfiction.
Mura offers a model for creative writing pedagogy centered around close reading that shows the ways race is built into the structures through which white writers and writers of color tell their stories. Traditional creative writing instruction accepts the literary practice that white characters do not need to be identified racially because the audience assumes their whiteness and is itself white; Mura insists that we note this practice as an unnatural social construction that accepts whiteness as natural default, while simultaneously insisting that racial otherness be central to any character of color’s identity. His convincing close readings of Jonathan Franzen, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Shawn Wong demonstrate the flaws inherent in these assumptions, revealing the richness, nuance, and complication in the work of writers of color. Mura explores the reasons white writers tend to believe that only writers of color are being “political” when they write about race, when in fact “white writers’ avoidance of race is decidedly political.” He argues that understanding the ways literary whiteness functions is exactly what white writers, teachers, and students alike need to understand in the age of Trump, which has ended any illusions regarding the neutrality of whiteness. All writers, Mura asserts, must prepare to write for a browning America, where the audience of the future will not be white and the work of white writers will be to interrogate and redefine white identity.
In clear, direct prose, he lays out the ways writing is a search for identity, and how for many writers of color, “an investigation into the political nature of their enterprise {is} absolutely crucial to their growth.” He uses Adrienne Rich, James Baldwin, and Edward Said to arrive at a radical definition of creative writing as “the search for and creation of a language that will express what the writer unconsciously knows but does not yet have a language to express.” For minority writers, this act is necessarily transgressive, as it requires contradicting the idealized, universal portraits centered in the dominant whiteness’s colonialism, imperialism, racism, and sexism. He explains how this process challenges the writer, whose “greatest struggle is often with personal fears, personal internal silencings.” In an essay concerning the workshop experience of students of color, Mura says: “you are not crazy or misperceiving what is before and around you. You are in hostile territory . . . your presence, your mind, and your creativity represent an alien presence, at odds with the powers that be. . . . Stay strong. You are not alone.”
Mura’s book is the one I needed fifteen years ago to survive and persist; things have not changed all that much, after all. In 2004, I entered a MFA program at the University of Oregon—Japanese and Jewish (and phenotypically Asian), I was the only student of color. The writers celebrated in the program were Chekhov, Fitzgerald, and O’Connor; acceptable diversity extended only as far as Babel and Malamud. When I wrote stories which considered race and racism in any way, my white classmates disputed the plausibility of the racism my protagonists faced (though the scenes were usually thinly veiled autobiography)—they “didn’t buy it,” or insisted the depiction of racist white people was “stereotypical.” At the same time, they questioned why my protagonists were Asian, when they failed to “act” Asian in ways they could immediately identify. Why didn’t I either write more “universally” or, conversely, represent characters whose cultural and ethnic identity was recognizably Asian? Silenced during workshop, I learned that my work, and by extension my experiences, was not valuable as literature. Mura’s book alone might have saved me the ten years after graduation it took to mute the voices of workshop, and trust myself again.
One of the strengths of A Stranger’s Journey is that it is not only about race and identity, but also is a practical craft guide centered in questions of story, structure, and technique as applied to exemplar texts of diverse writers of both fiction and nonfiction. Mura argues, above all, for a decolonial model of reading and writing—and then reveals what such work looks like in the practices of extraordinary contemporary writers of color like ZZ Packer, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Garrett Hongo, as well as writers of a previous generation like James Baldwin and V.S. Naipaul. Mura’s insight into the deep narrative structures of drama and mythology is reified by the diversity of his heroes, whose stories we have not heard before—and this exploration is further enriched by the constant juxtaposition and comparison of memoir and fiction craft. He observes, for example, that “at times . . . writers write against an enforced silence they are aware of; at other times, they write against an enforced silence in themselves that they might not be aware of.”
A Stranger’s Journey went to print before scandal engulfed Sherman Alexie and Junot Díaz, and Mura uses short stories by both writers as models for close reading. This review cannot resolve the debate concerning whether we should strike male writers of color from contemporary reading lists for evidencing the same misogyny and sexism that canonized white male writers have long displayed; for my part, I do not find arguments that equivocate violences to be exculpatory, and am inclined to center the experiences of the many women (many of them writers of color) both men harmed. However, Díaz and Alexie’s behavior is not reason to dismiss A Stranger’s Journey—the chapters concerning Díaz and Alexie’s stories were chosen in innocence and remain a small part of a large project. Their presence does remind us that the project Mura begins here can and should be continued—for while Mura includes many women, and routinely refers to the hypothetical writer as “her,” his project primarily concerns race and identity. Perhaps soon a writer—maybe even a writer of color whose voice Mura has empowered—can help us consider the assumptions and privileges of gender as well.