The Hubris of Color

Topic: Writing Ethnic or Culture Fiction

Culture Source: the movie, The Visitor, written by Thomas McCarthy

I admit it. I have been self-indulgent. I started this blog with the best intentions. This blog is based on a class that I taught at the Loft Writer’s Center in Minneapolis, so it’s not as if I have to dig for material or even for inspiration. Yet, blog topics have been consumed by politics and off-subject musings. Such preoccupation ends now. As a consumer of media in many forms, I genuinely believe this topic to be timely. While the rapidly aging Baby Boomer generation was homogeneous in culture and ethnic makeup, Gen-X, Gen- Y, and Generation Millennials, are far more diverse ethnically, culturally, and ideologically. If you’re trying to build or maintain a career in writing, this is important because it will impact what agents and editors are buying.
So, as a reminder, this blog examines methods and techniques for writing ethnic and culture stories. The methodology is a result of opinion and of research. I will use examples from books, movies, and other aspects of pop culture to provide support for the viewpoints. However, the views and critiques expressed are opinion only. Please feel free to share your own views and opinions.

With our purpose firmly in mind, this week’s topic is the 5 deadly sins in writing Ethnic and Culture Fiction. While I don’t have the space to cover everything in this posting, over the next five weeks we will examine each of the sins. So, to begin at the beginning, the 5 Deadly Sins in writing ethnic or culture fiction are:

1. The Hubris of Color
2. Ethnicity as character
3. Outdated message models
4. Co-opted culture
5. And finally, incongruent touch points.

This week, we’ll examine the Hubris of Color. This particular deadly writing sin is one of the most difficult to conquer because it comes from a place deep within. Linda Seger, author of Making a Good Writer Great, calls this place the writer’s shadow. The writer’s shadow can act as powerful force either for good or bad in our writing. In essence, the writer’s shadow is personal perspective. That perspective may be accurate or inaccurate, but it is always shaped by a writer’s personal world view. Some of the best writers harness the writer’s shadow to deliver compelling, dramatic stories that connect with readers or audience members. However, the only way to use this force effectively is to understand your shadow. Understanding your writer’s shadow is even more important in writing ethnic and culture fiction. Why? Well, let’s just be clear about the tools we writers draw from to shape our stories. One of the strongest influences in our imagination arsenal is the real world. Writers use elements from the real world to construct a fictional world. In matters dealing with ethnicity and culture, we all know that in the real world, fairly or unfairly, skin color carries implications. What kind of implications? That’s the hard part. In the real world, the “implications” of color arise from complicated layers of thought and emotion both of which are influenced by transmitted culture (transmitted culture meaning what we are taught). In a fictional world, it is the author’s responsibility to determine the implications of color or culture and to transmit that meaning to the reader. This responsibility should not be taken lightly because using care in creating a fictional world with well-conceived ethnic touch points or authentic culture markers gives your story an edge that other stories won’t necessarily have. Using care also prevents you from inadvertently sending a negative or dismissive message to your reader or audience.

Let’s take a look at our culture source to examine the Hubris of Color idea more thoroughly. In the movie, The Visitor, written by Tom McCarthy, the story protagonist Walter Vale is a white male widower. Walter lives the comfortable, if bland life, of an academic in Connecticut. A teacher of economic theory, he seems to have a connection and interest in music. Still, at the beginning of his character arc, Walter lacks both passion and purpose. This changes when he interacts with an illegal immigrant couple he discovers squatting in his New York apartment (they are victims of a real estate scam). Friendship grows between Walter and the young Syrian man Tarek Khalil. It turns out that Tarek is a musician, as was Walter’s deceased wife. Tarek’s instrument of choice is the doumbek, or African drum. McCarthy uses the drum as a leitmotif. It provides the rhythm and energy that Walter lacks in his bland, colorless life. Tarek teaches Walter how to play the doumbek, taking Walter with him around the city to those places that, presumably, white academics do not go. This sharing of a new and different way of life enables Walter to regain passion for his own life. By the way, that’s one of the reasons this story is a culture story. It shows Walter interacting with a culture that is unfamiliar to him. One of the primary ideas of a culture story is that we can learn from others. I’d also like to point out that Tarek has apparently taken this culture journey, as he has mastered the doumbek, an African drum. Tarek is not African, he is Syrian. However, Zainab, Tarek’s girlfriend, is from the African country of Senegal. When Tarek’s mother, Mouna, sees Zainab for the first time, she makes a remark about the darkness of Zainab’s skin. This seems incongruent with the rest of the thematic sensibility of the story. After all, Mouna is Syrian. She has been living illegally in America for many years. Has she never seen a dark-complexioned person of African heritage? Is her comment based on color prejudice? If so, why is she presented as a possible love interest to a man who benefits from the talents and energies of two people, Zainab and Tarek, with skin colors that are darker than his. This mistake reflects the fifth deadly sin, incongruent touch points, but we’ll examine that sin later.

Back to Walter, it is his story upon which the plot builds, and yet, as Walter’s story continues, it is Walter’s lack as a character that prevents the story from soaring beyond mediocrity. The reason for this failing has nothing to do with the acting, the setting, or the movie direction. The story is leeched of vitality because it is told from the viewpoint of the wrong character. Without Tarek, without Mouna, without Zainab, Walter Vale will go back to his boring life as a professor. At the end of the story, at the end of the movie, Walter is happier, but for how long? He achieved . . . scratch that, Walter didn’t really achieve anything. He didn’t work for his happiness. He didn’t really even have the goal of achieving happiness. Moments of happiness fall into his lap and Walter’s only grace is that he doesn’t resist them. Contrast this marshmallow heroism with the drama inherent in Tarek’s situation. He is in the country illegally. He wants to avoid deportation. He doesn’t want to be separated from Zainab, or cause her to be deported. He doesn’t want to bring trouble to his mother, or cause her to be deported. Tarek has the most to gain or lose. Tarek’s goals affect other characters in the story. While the movie presents Tarek as a little irresponsible, Tarek’s character has goals, yielding to motivations, which could have been explored in a truly evocative manner. Walter’s goal, if you can call it that, only affects himself. Remove Walter from the story and you still have a story. Remove Tarek from the story and you do not. Tarek is essential to this story. He provides a flash point, an intersection of goal, motivation, and conflict necessary to the main character and to the building of drama. Despite Tarek’s value in this story, midway through, he is sidelined, placed in a detention center. Tarek’s arrest gives Walter the opportunity to become a hero, but instead, Walter, true to his character, mills around and does nothing more than shout a bit. After that, he turns his attention back to his own life. With the loss of Tarek, the plot falters and must be angled in another direction. Tarek is in a detention center. Zainab leaves Walter’s apartment, disappearing almost completely from the story, and Walter, renewed by what he has learned from Tarek, now engages in a mild flirtation with Tarek’s mother. Walter the character is like a slowly opening bud. He is once again reaching for what life has to offer him, but, with the imminent deportation of Tarek, and with Mouna following her son back to Syria, the best life has to offer Walter Vale is a return to his drone-like existence, still devoid of color, character, and interest.

Don’t get me wrong, McCarthy is an able storyteller. He deserves credit for his ability to force interest around an only mildly interesting character. The problem for McCarthy and The Visitor is that the very interesting visitor is axed from the movie leaving us with a resident who is boring. Walter teaches us little because he has little to teach. If Walter could express his character arc in words, it might go something like: My wife died. I lost interest in life. I was forced to go to New York. There were some people living in my apartment without my knowledge or consent, but hey, I’m a nice guy. I let them stay. I learned how to play African drums. Learning to play the drums made me feel better. End of story.

Perhaps the The Visitor was meant to be lyrical, a sort of American Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, but inserting the unbridled energy of Tarek into such lyricism made me want more. That’s always true of audiences and culture stories. We watch movies like The Visitor for the same reason that Walter finds Tarek and Zainab interesting. We want to experience more than the banality of our own, sometimes bland lives. We’re eager for the rhythm and vibrancy inherent in the beat of the drums and the swirling color of the new and different. Walter can’t give that to us. He is as much of an audience to that energy and vibrancy as we are because he does not really learn what Tarek has to teach. He experiences Tarek, Zainab, and Mouna, as a tourist experiences a trip to a far-flung exotic locale. There is a trip, but no journey. Walter merely exists within the framework of a culture story. He is a beneficiary of characters with real journeys. Their stories are human stories. Their stories come from being Syrian or Senegalese in America. Their stories come from being in America illegally. Their stories come from what they have learned, how they are treated, and how they cope. Their stories can teach us about life. Yet McCarthy places the character without the story in the primary role. This isn’t the case of Walter being a narrator who relates what another character learns. Walter’s viewpoint is all that we get. In a movie teeming with human stories, the guy without anything to teach is the main character. Perhaps that’s why McCarthy made Walter a teacher. It’s an honorary title. McCarthy isn’t alone in using WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) characters to tell the stories of others. Many writers, especially screenwriters, seem to believe that audiences will only be interested in the lives of non-WASPs if their story is framed by a WASP. Examples of this conceit abound: We are All Welcome Here, The Secret Life of Bees, The Last Samurai, Outsourced, and even Hairspray (though Hairspray handles the culture elements far better than the stories cited).

Because of its Hubris of Color, The Visitor colonizes Tarek, Mouna, and Zainab, thieving their cultural value and unashamedly transferring their treasure to an undeserving Walter. Ultimately, as much as it is a culture story, The Visitor only respects one culture, the WASP culture. Had McCarthy chosen to tell The Visitor from Tarek’s point of view, he might have had a Slumdog Millionaire on his hands, rather than just another small, but well-received independent film.

Ancient Writer Wisdom
1. Ancient wisdom says to make your protagonist the character with the most compelling story.

2. Ancient wisdom says in a fictional world, it is the author’s responsibility to determine the implications of color or culture and to transmit that meaning to the reader.

3. Ancient wisdom says in a culture story, do not transfer cultural value to undeserving characters

May the wisdom of the Ancients carry you forward in your writing journey.


References:
www.thevisitorfilm.com

www.ehow.com/video_2372574_origins-doumbek-african-drum.html

www.mechelleavey.com
www.lindaseger.com/index.html