Sometimes in life we come across those wonderful questions which seem simple enough at first, but on closer examination, prove themselves to spiral in tremendous and vicious circles. Questions which draw us in and then drag us around and around till our heads hurt and we feel farther from resolution than we did at the beginning. Recently, I’ve been working on a novel with an ATAR literature student who I tutor… and we’ve run into one such question. “Can writers write outside their own experience?”, or as Kit de Waal put it in her 2018 article for the Irish Times, can they "dip [their] pen in someone else's blood?". The immediate response is usually an emphatic “yes!”, of course they can. This is in any case the fundamental basis of fiction - that we ‘create’ characters and inhabit their minds to write them. This confidence however, may not last when specifics are introduced. Can a woman write a man? Can an adult write a child? Can a person of privilege write a pauper? Can a white person write a black person? Can the coloniser write the oppressed? Some of these scenarios seem more fraught with moral, ethical and indeed logistical dilemmas than others, which raises the question of why. When is it ok to write the ‘other’ and when is it not? Or is this the wrong question? Perhaps we should not be asking if we ’should’, but ‘why’ we want to in the first place? My student fell far down the rabbit hole with this one as it pertained to her study of Kate Grenville’s fascinating novel, The Secret River. This novel has courted controversy as well as critical claim since its publication in 2005. Grenville has drawn both acclaim and ire for the way in which she handled the writing of the Indigenous characters in her novel. She herself readily acknowledges the ethical minefield she traversed in coming to conclusions about who to include, and who to give voice to (see her memoir, Searching for the Secret River). Despite extensive research that saw her travel to the far north of Western Australia and spend time learning from Aboriginal elders, she ultimately decided not to write the Indigenous perspective into her book, and instead write exclusively through the eyes of her convict protagonist, William Thornhill. Where Greville ultimately decided that it wasn’t her place to inhabit these characters or tell their story, this omission perpetuates a silencing of Aboriginal perspectives that pervades Australian literature. Did she make the right choice? And so the spiral goes on. So what could this question look like in the classroom?The beauty of this discussion is in the way it invariably challenges our thinking and forces us to acknowledge and try to incorporate new ideas and perspectives (and this for me is the goal of a great classroom discussion!) As a result, I’d like to get students thinking about the smaller issues first and then build up to the more gritty elements.
CLASS ACTIVITY One of my favourite activities to do in the classroom is to line students up along ‘opinion continuums’ where they get up and move around the classroom till they find their place along a line which represents their position on a given topic. Here is where I’d like to introduce the notion of whether a non-Indigenous author can write an Indigenous character. Ask the students to line themselves up from yes to no and then defend their choice. Image by BSK from Free Images Hopefully this question interests you and your students as much as it has me and mine! Below is a list of resources that have been fantastic in helping to unpack the issue further. Please let me know if you have any questions, concerns or feedback - I welcome them all! useful resources
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About meI'm a teacher, student and advocate for better education through ongoing questioning, thinking and learning.
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