Representation with Guest Editor, Amy Mae Baxter
“I still don’t know if it’s important to see myself in a book. I think it’s important to see my communities, my intersectionalities, my friends, and their identities represented in books. Not because I need to be reminded of what I look like, but so others can see and engage with people they may never meet elsewhere.”
I have never seen myself in a book. I am a white-passing, half-Indian, half-English, second generation immigrant from Uganda who went to private school. I have never thought of this as particularly oppressive, though. Do I really need to see myself – my specific racial identity in a book?
Representation in literature is a funny concept. In a world where the focus is ultimately on words – how we use them and where we place them – the inability of the publishing industry and readers at large to differentiate between descriptive representation and substantive representation is at best laughable, at worst, highly disturbing. It is tempting for anyone to wax lyrical about the power of representation – the anecdotes nearly always seem to be about ‘the first time I saw myself in a book’, but rarely do we as marginalised groups have the space to discuss whether we feel this representation is substantive. Is having a character that looks like me more important than a character who engages with my politics, socialisation, religion, existence? We all know the answer to this. But in the world of books, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked.
The Bookseller found that, in 2016, less than 100 books by British ‘BAME’ authors were published throughout the year, despite almost 800 books being published every day. Therein lies the problem – when we publish authors from marginalised communities in such small numbers, it is difficult to critique the books that are published. If I see a brown author on the shelf, my first instinct is to support not tear down these authors because I know publishing is a capitalist business, and that every book sold is a giant flag to editors that they should publish more brown authors, in order to make more profit. Unfortunately, until there is more representation in the book industry in general, it is hard to critique any that don’t offer substantive representation.
When I spoke to the wonderful Kasim Ali, debut author of Good Intentions, a few weeks ago, he was also struggling with the concept of adequate representation, as a Muslim author writing about Muslim characters.
‘It’s interesting we’re in this moment when we’re talking about representation, and I think a lot of people seem to see representation as the most positive iteration of something. If there’s a Muslim character, it has to be the perfect Muslim character – you can’t have them be complex, complicated people who sometimes f*** up – they have to be the most perfect iteration of a Muslim person. I fundamentally disagree with that.’
Here lies the difficulty. It can often be uncomfortable, if not outright embarrassing, to see the worst parts of your community represented in books, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t publish substantively representative books. Ali’s Good Intentions is the perfect example of this phenomenon. The book follows the relationship between Nur and Yasmina, a happy couple who have been together for four years. We follow their relationship from Nur’s perspective, jumping between time periods, and we discover all is not well. Although Nur and Yasmina are exquisitely happy together, there is a problem: Nur’s parents don’t know that Yasmina is Black. And that, to the Muslim Pakistani community, is a problem. It’s not a particularly fashionable topic for a novel – anti-Blackness in brown communities isn’t something often discussed in fiction, but Ali handles the topic with grace and candour that is oftentimes uncomfortable to read. But to me, that is what makes it the perfect example of representation in books. It is truthful, beautifully written, and devastating to read. How wonderful!
I still don’t know if it’s important to see myself in a book. I think it’s important to see my communities, my intersectionalities, my friends, and their identities represented in books. Not because I need to be reminded of what I look like, but so others can see and engage with people they may never meet elsewhere. The beautiful part of reading is how much is grounded in our own imaginings of what characters feel like. What we take from the page is so much more than entertainment – books, especially fictional ones, are doorways to an entirely new world of understanding you may never have thought was open to you.
I don’t need a book about a white-passing, half-Indian, half-English, second generation immigrant from Uganda who went to private school. I do need more books that represent where I am coming from.
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