Photograph from Copperman's old blog of students from Carver Upper Elementary School

The email from the editor of the literary journal started out promisingly enough, noting that they liked my story very much. I knew that couldn’t be all, for the story I’d submitted was a dialect piece, and I knew from long experience that no editor would accept a story deploying a form of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) without some confirmation of authenticity: they would try to verify my racial background and personal history, especially in the absence of publications I didn’t possess because no editor would accept a story written in AAVE without…guarantees. And there it was:

Our editors have concerns about how you colonize this young girl’s voice.

I took a deep breath, wishing polemic came easier to me, and started to type.

My novel was about a naïve, idealistic young Japanese man who went to teach in the rural black public schools of the Delta, and the children he encountered there, sometimes from their own point of view as rendered in their own voices. I’d submitted my fiction on this material to over a hundred magazines, and had almost a 50% personalized, encouraging rejection rate—the better the venue, in fact, the more likely I was to hear back about the merit of the material, though eventually there would be some mention of the ‘originality’ of ‘representation,’ my laudable willingness to ‘transgress.’ If I’d sent a dialect piece, the note would mention the ‘boldness of the formal choices,’ the bravery of my ‘risk with voice,’ the way this was clearly ‘not at all an MFA story.’

For perhaps the first couple years, I was encouraged: I was hearing back from the finest literary magazines in the country. And then it began to sink in: what these editors were commending was the exact features of my work they were rejecting. They weren’t comfortable with my Japanese-American narrator because he didn’t exhibit any characteristics they associated with, as one editor noted, ‘his oriental culture.’ They weren’t comfortable with first-person stories rendered in a system for representing black Delta dialect. They weren’t sure if it was adequately authentic (i.e., Was I black?), and simultaneously, they weren’t sure how to confront unfamiliar representations of race (i.e., Why wasn’t this narrator more ‘culturally Japanese’?).  They weren’t sure if I was ‘reinscribing stereotypes’ or failing to conform to acceptable, established narratives, but they weren’t comfortable with the work. This was the age of Obama, post-raciality and post-identity politics and infinite hope were the order of the day, and this material was too—too something for them. Not easily digestible, perhaps. Not optimistic enough concerning the possibilities of black youth born into poverty. Not quite to their aesthetic. That was it. Great work, clearly something there, but sorry. Just a matter of taste.

As a writer and as a multiracial, Japanese-Hawaiian Russo-Polish secular Jew, I claim the right to know of a young man who like myself went to teach in the poorest and blackest part of the poorest and blackest state in the nation. And I would like my work considered on its merits, and judged in terms of its craft; on the written page, I maintain that craft constitutes representation. No editor has ever told me that my system for dialect is flawed, or claimed a piece failed because I privileged voice above the need to expose a character’s need adequately, or insisted I failed to get at anything that mattered. Those are the right reasons to reject a story, and when I read Alice Munro, Chekhov, Isaac Babel, Andre Dubus, Bernard Malamud, and Flannery O’Connor I recognize my ability as a fiction writer is small in comparison to what I aspire to do. I want my work judged on that criteria, not because of societal discomfort about race, or because the editors of a literary magazine have ideological objections to dialect’s potential to reify extant stereotypes of African-Americans.

The question of authenticity, then, especially authorial authority conferred on the basis of phenotype or racial background, is the wrong line of inquiry. I agree with Flannery O’Connor that “conviction without experience makes for harshness.” I would never claim to know the ‘black experience’, or to speak for African-Americans. I do know the lives of fourth grade children at Carver-Upper Elementary in Indianola, Mississippi, who were born into severe poverty.  I spent two years listening to them speak ten and twelve hours a day, five days a week, as I worked to offer them a different opportunity against all odds. I know their voices and their particular experiences, the distance between what a nine-year-old says and what is meant, what can be indicated by averted eyes or a long pause if you’ve known that child long enough and taken the time to listen to them. I have something to say about those children, and about what I lost wanting too much to help them without anything adequate to offer.

After six years of submitting, I have been lucky to finally find editors at The Oxford American, Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, Copper Nickel, 34th Parallel, The Arkansas Review, Unsaid and Southword who will publish the work, and the support of a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts to encourage it. I have high hopes. But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.