A symposium on who should be speaking for whom THE ISSUE OF appropriation of voice, of the use of the treasured contents and modes of expression of one culture by writers from another, is currently being intensely debated in the Canadian literary community. At stake are important questions of imaginative freedom and authorial responsibility central to the development of a truly multicultural national literature. Books in Canada asked a number of writers for their thoughts on the subject. Sandra Birdsell: Writers can and must write whatever they choose to write. Publishers can decline to publish it. Readers to read it. In fact, this writer would tend to want to write the very thing she was told she must not write. To say that certain points of view are off limits is to agree to censorship. No doubt you will receive many passionate replies to this debate. The typical guilt-ridden, hand-wringing responses expected from the clean, white, washed, bleeding-heart middle-class Canadian writer. One need not fear putting words into the mouths of the Native people. I believe that their articulate, calm, and sane public response to the Meech Lake fiasco should put an end to that fear. They do not need our patronage. What we might correctly or incorrectly portray while writing from their point of view or any other point of view that differs from our own will not make a shred of difference. We flatter ourselves if we think so. There will always be those among us who will go for the quick fix - the stereotype - and those of us who will search deeply for what we don`t understand. But the question reveals our tendency as writers to become preoccupied with limp issues. When a radio broadcaster in Winnipeg suggested that white people attend the Native Solidarity day at the Manitoba legislature, he also suggested that they wear a feather in a show of support. I did not agree with his suggestion to wear a feather. Then someone called in to his talk show to protest. We should think of the declining population of eagles, they said, and cruelty to our feathered friends. It was suggested that a found pigeon feather would do. Then someone brought it to our attention that pigeons are carriers of many and various diseases. In light of the many issues we might discuss, this one is a feather issue. George Bowering: Before recent days I had never heard of "literary rights." Apparently they are what you violate if you write a story in which your central character is something that you are not. In Canada in recent times you are violating "literary rights" if you are of Scottish extraction but write about an immigrant from Haiti or a member of the Douglas Lake Indian band. I think that men are prohibited from writing about women, too. When I was a young wanna-be novelist I read James Baldwin`s Giovanni`s Room. It was the first novel openly about homosexual life that I had ever read. I felt as if I had learned a lot, and read some really good prose. It did not strike me as anything but interesting that the author was Black while the main characters were white. I had seen that earlier in Willard otley`s Knock on Any Door. When my parents were reading the swashbuckling book-of the-month novels of Frank Yerby (who lived in Spain), I don`t think they even guessed that he was Black. ("Check the colour under that bodice you`re ripping, fella!") One of my favourite Black writers is Ishmael Reed. In an essay called "Before the War, Poems as They Happened" (in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, 1978), Reed praises the cultural gain made by the "admixture of symbols, textures, images, and rhythms arising from the poet`s exposure to more than one culture" Here is what he says about people trying to exclude other people from writing about their lives: What all this goes to show is that anyone who tries to keep his cultural experience to himself is like a miser, moribund in a rooming house, uneaten beef stew lying on a table, and lonely except for the monotonous tick tock of a drugstore clock - all that gold stashed in the closet doing no one any good. We don`t need any Amos`n Andy Black people or Amos`n Frank Indian people, but here is the way to get rid of that foul stuff. let the writer or publisher know what`s wrong with it. Don`t ban all writing by white people about Black and vice versa. Don`t throw out William Eastlake`s Indians along with Tonto. That "literary rights" business reminds me of a phrase that came from the literary nationalists a few years ago - "birthright Canadian" It reminds me too much of the phrase Quebeckers used to hear 30 years ago - "speak white" It reminds me of Hitter`s idea that Jews could not write music to be performed by "Aryan" orchestras. A lot of fascist notions come from minorities that threaten to become powerful. I mean, come on. "The Flintstones" was written by a JapaneseAmerican. Whose literary rights was he usurping? Marilyn Bowering: Both views: plot and character as racial/gender property, and that of a deified imagination all-seeing, all knowing, are absurd. I find it difficult to believe that censorship and self censorship are seriously being considered as solutions to the problems minority writers face. It is the bureaucratic mentality gone mad and the last thing it will do is help any writer. What do we want to do? Set up a mirror image of old-fashioned eastern European writing and publishing, with full-time employees checking the racial right of an author to a character or plot? Native and Black writers need support and encouragement to get their stories written and read, and writers, publishers, editors, and so on are part of this process. There is a distinct parallel with the recent (last 25 years) development of "Canadian" writing as a whole. It is a process of education for both writers and readers. There were few "Canadian" novels, plays, poems when I was going to school. Nobody stole these plays, poems, novels in potential, not even the European and American writers who made use of what we now consider "Canadian!` writing territory and some of which we found offensive. We don`t think of that very often now because we have so much else in its place. Beth Brant: My people are an oral people. This means that our stories, our history, our value systems have been handed down to us by the spoken, not the written word. And because our words were spoken and not written, it was important that we listen very carefully to what was being said. Those of us who are Native have a difficult time. We are always in a state of translation. Those of you for whom English is a second language will understand. Not only do we have to write in a language that is not our own, we have to write in the enemy`s language. This means we must be even more careful and responsible for what we say. When I sit in front of my typewriter there are times I literally cannot find the words that will describe what I want to say. And that is because the word I want to use is a Mohawk word. But my Mohawk language was destroyed. My people were taught it was a bad thing. And after hundreds of years of emotional and physical assault on us for using the language our Creator gave us, we find it in our best interests to try and communicate with the language the enemy forced on us. Therefore, I sit at my typewriter and try to bend and shape this hated language into a toot that I can use to make truth. Because the language of the enemy was a weapon used to perpetuate hate and racism, I have to forge it in a new way, a weapon of love. Because - I don`t write for you who are white. I write for my own people. I think I have to say that again. I don`t write for you who are white. I write for my own people. This leads me to ask you who are white to listen to me and my Native sisters and brothers. Because what you will hear from us is the truth of how it is with us. The truth is not told in the books of Lynn Andrews, Tony Hillerman, W. P. Kinsella, and the many white writers who use their hundreds of years of colonial supremacy to speak for us. No one can speak for us but us. I am telling you the truth. No one can speak fur us but us. I do not say that only Indians can write about Indians. But you can`t steal my stories and call them your own. You car* steal my spirit and call it your own. This is the history of North America stolen property, stolen lives, stolen dreams, stolen spirituality. If your history is one of cultural dominance you must be aware and truthful about that history. You must own that history before you can get permission to write about me. I charge you who are white to take responsibility in your writing if you feel you must introduce characters or images that are from my culture. You have to tell the truth and that means you have to tell the truth about your role, your history, your internalized domination and supremacy. We are trying very hard to hold on to what is still intact in us - our spirit, our strength. And if I must use the enemy`s language to hold on to what keeps me sane - my identity as a Mohawk lesbian writer - I will use that language and make it my own. My tool. My instrument. My power. (Excerpts from remarks made as a member of the panel "From the Outside Looking In: Racism and Writing," Gay Cultural Festival, Vancouver, August 1990). George Elliott Clarke: Being writers of colour, we must not merely protest the blithe appropriation and distortion of our cultures by sortie white writers. Rather, we must rage against our lack of ownership of the means of cultural propagation. It is this dispossession, caused by the ethnocentrism of the majority, which threatens us with literary extinction. For instance, we do not own publishing houses (save for Williams-Wallace International). We do not own distribution networks. We do not possess legions of scholars and reviewers to shout our praises and sing our aesthetics (politics). Because we have been locked out, we fear and envy those who, given their easy access to media, can present our cultures as they please, either sensitively or scandalously, but always with imperious impunity. Even so, we cannot adopt a defensive fascism, to argue that only Blacks must write about Blacks, whites about whites, and so on. No people owns the truth, and all fiction is distortion. Thus, we must seize the means of cultural propagation; we must fight to achieve the grants, the reviews, the public readings, the writer-in-residenceships, the media invitations, the university chairs... All Canadians have tales to tell and poems to sing. Whose literature is it, anyway? Don Coles: The argument that a writer can write "truthfully" only about members of his or her own racial group, and that others dare not poach, is clearly untenable. A great Inuit writer or a first-generation Canadian-Bengali writer could appear any day whose work on, say, the Presbyterians of Western Ontario or the Mohawks of Oka would so far transcend anything written by either Presbyterian or Mohawk as to make the earlier work of members of either of those cultures appear puerile and blinkered by comparison. And any reader of this journal can list a score of writers whose best work has relied upon a cosmopolitan and multicultural content; it`s a point we needn`t embarrass ourselves by debating. All the same. I find it easy to sympathize with a (to use your phrase) "Black or Native" spokesperson who asks people like me (White ... ) to refrain from using her or his ("Black or Native`) culture as a seed-bed for invigorated imagery or a quirkily less-familiar dramatis penonae. Examples of glib and irresponsible behaviour of this nature aren`t hard to think of-, wed all be better off without more of them. (Having made that point, I`d like to name one honourable exception to it: it is M. T. Kelly`s A Dream Like Mine.) So what am I saying, that there`s much to be said on both sides? Yes, but a bit more than that too. Trying to look realistically at our situation, it seems to me that persons writing out of a culture that has a long and established literary tradition, as opposed to the oral tradition in which the Native peoples of North America were more firmly centred, might do well to acknowledge that difference; and might, following upon that acknowledgement, decide to grant to Native writers a kind of prior right to, for an indeterminate number of years, the materials of their own culture. (I`m clearly not speaking of any binding decision to be made by any League! No, but of a private undertaking that an individual writer might allow herself or himself to come into sight of, to receive into her or his consciousness and let it linger there for a good long while.) It`s apparent that there`s an upsurge in the readiness of Native writers (I seem to be focusing on these only by now; so be it) to express in stories and plays and poetry the long-suppressed (in terms of written materials) stories and awarenesses of their peoples. That can only enrich all of us in terms of our shaky sense of who we are in this space we inhabit. 1 don`t think, and 1 am not saying, that a white writer need feel forever excluded from writing about matters pertaining to the early history of this place and its early people, but I think that such a writer had better be preternaturally sure that she/he isn`t invoking any of this frivolously. And here`s a last suggestion that I really don`t know enough about to make too securely, so I`ll make it insecurely. I think Native writers should be assisted through a separate Canada Council granting committee in a proportion well beyond that accorded to the generality. This suggestion I make neither out of charity nor as a sop to conscience, but because I am, as Ive said above, persuaded that the fallout from such a program could be of interest and benefit to us all. Cyril Dabydeen: The appropriation of voice debate is continually forming and unforming. The rational mind abhors it; politics welcomes it. Can a a Native writer write about the Black experience? Can Joyce Carol Oates really write about a male Vietnam veteran in her story "Out of Place` with authenticity? All things are possible in the intuitive leap; while the voice of politics repudiates the numinous. But Native people have been exploited for generations. Ask the Mohawk lawyer Patricia Monture about her peoples struggle for self determination, and about the white man`s law always being adversarial; in her language, law means "the way that is nicest" This too is absolute truth; as much as W. P. Kinsella`s creation of the Hobbema Indians is his own fictional territory. Who makes it authentic anyway? "Authentic" is the same as the concept of the universal - which the deconstructionists threw out the window a long time ago. The true voice is close to one`s self, no more or less; no one can really speak for the community. It is defined only in a given setting; time and geography integrated. The voice of the forest, the Great Spirit`s - as an Ojibwa sits next to me in Quetico National Park, and mutters about planting trees, because the forest is his. Piss on the white man, if he thinks we are polluting the forest because you car* throw out an empty beer can. The heart`s tentative ways, yearning for experience; self determination. And sugar-cane fields also bum in my mind; while I too yearn some day to win the Booker Prize, because the Booker brothers owned the largest sugar plantations where I grew up. My angst, or coping with post-colonialism. Is there such a thing as the literary rights of one group or another? A totem pole stands tall, wavering in a West Coast wind, the symbol of the enduring spirit. I sing of it with the rhythm and cadence of my dialect: my free-wheeling imagination, or liberalism`s legacy. So why not place an embargo on white writers, and let`s hear only of the Third World and other oppressed peoples` voices, all the shit that needs to be ventilated so we can all be truly free. Out of the smithy of my soul, as Joyce would have it - he understood the passion for the self`s freedom; or the pornography of silencing. Naive or apolitical, I am yet sufficiently astute to recognize that there are legitimate concerns about appropriation of voice. Rereading Rudy Wiebe, I understand the responsibility of the creative artist better than ever. And of power elites: whose voice should really be heard? For me nothing really begins or ends; is only forming. Has E. M. Forster created a true or probable Indian in Dr. Aziz in A Passage to India? Forster, I feet, shows sympathy for Indians. And while others expunge the "white man`s burden," I am still an "exotic" writer in Canada, according to the Ottawa Citizen. Literary and non-literary categories: never shall the twain meet. White or Black as the writer may be - we expand the boundaries, so the world never shrinks or stultifies because of impending war. It`s the singular beauty and terror, only- all transparent, or false; but always ringing true. Beverley Daurio: If we find the idea of censorship abhorrent; if we even find the idea of one writer (of whatever race or belief) dictating to another what is permissible, allowable, or right equally abhorrent, then what is left, if we also believe that people of colour, women, Native people, and others are consistently misrepresented in what is written and, especially, published in our culture? Is it even possible to "write truthfully" or to create anything approaching "accurate portrayal"? Might it be useful to speak not of "accuracy" and "truth" (in the sense of a transfer of "reality" to the page), but of responsibility in representation? - on the part of the community as a whole; on the part of publishers and editors; and on the part of writers. Most important at this time, it seems to me, is the debate itself. Those who are currently in positions of cultural power have to open their ears to what is being said to them about that privilege, and examine how the status quo benefits them, how that privilege itself maintains oppression. We will not have a society completely free of sexism, racism, homophobia, etc., in out lifetimes; but we could quite conceivably have a society in which equal representation of voice exists, in which all writers are invited to give public readings, to review, to submit work, to publish, equally. It should be possible to make certain that writing is criticized, not just on the basis of an abstract aesthetics, but on the basis of the content of that work. It should be possible to have, if not perfection, then at least a general and constant questioning of assumptions: about our rights as writers, about who is privileged to speak in books, magazines, and newspapers, about who is published in this country and why. I believe, perhaps naively, that the act of making art is sacrosanct; but I also believe that the acts of publishing, editing, and criticism are public and political acts that should be subject to all and any scrutiny and discussion. Louis Dudek: This is a foolish issue. On the proposed view, I should write only about myself because I am bound to misrepresent others if I write about them, and I am actually intruding on their lives if I do. The result of such a policy would be solipsism, or self isolation of each individual and each community. Clearly, the issue is whether we are to be isolated from one another, out of fear and suspicion, or whether we can live together, participate, and share in each other`s lives. Only a gulp of kindness and trust can resolve this kind of unnecessary contentiousness. 1 hope we can find it in us to laugh it off - and relax. Maggie Helwig: I think perhaps (and as usual?) we are asking the wrong question. The writer must always speak in whatever voice demands to be spoken. And I am sure there are times when a Black or Native voice may demand to be spoken through a white writer. But usually this is a way of avoiding the much more difficult, more painful, and immensely more fascinating job of addressing our own condition. What, after all, does it mean to be, structurally, the oppressor - as I am, as you the reader more likely are? The writing of the oppressed is a known thing, easy to imitate in many ways, a simple way of making a "statement." But what is the writing of the oppressor who has become aware, who is striving not to be such but knows that the structure is always there, that we always have the choice to go back and do it all over again - that this is our moral issue and we cannot escape it? How do we write this? How often have we even tried? "Truly we must locate ourselves" is a line I wrote recently, in a poem called "Graffiti for J. J. Harper." It is about the police shooting of a Native leader, but it is also my attempt to locate myself in relation to things like this. To locate myself, a young white woman in the middle of the video culture that enables a white cop to shoot a Native man and suddenly realize afterwards that "It`s not like on TV ... it`s a bad feeling." It was a difficult, exhilarating piece to write; as it was also when I tried to deal with the slaughter of the Inca by writing about St. John of the Cross and El Greco and the anorexic, masochistic European girl who became St. Rose of Lima. Our own sadness, our own guilt-whict-is-not-quite-guilt, our own pain, is our hardest and best material; and I think it is usually what we are demanded to write. This is not a rule. There are no rules. But it is, at least, a challenge. M. T. Kelly: The idea of imaginative freedom is an article of faith to many writers, but whenever I hear this issue discussed I can`t help but think of a deeper, more wrenching reality regarding the appropriation of the Native voice. I can`t help but think about what has really gone on, and how abstract principles don`t address it. Who has ever heard of Fred Wheatley`s grandfather? Many people who have read Diamond Jenness`s seminal work, The Indians of Canada, are aware of his sympathetic - for the time - view of Native people. Yet the large section of the book that concerns Algonquians, and another of Jenness`s works, The Ojibway Indians of Parry Sound, would never have been possible without his translator and guide, Wheatley`s grandfather. And who knows that because of Jenness`s rather "stern" demeanour, as Fred Wheatley told me, Wheatley`s grandfather "never really talked Indian to him"? Many students of anthropology know of Irving Hallowell`s informants, but even as empathetic a man as Hallowell treats his informants like specimens. Again and again, papers have been written, careers built, tenure granted, royalties issued, and yet the people upon whom this is based are left behind on the reserves with nothing. In books like Medicine Woman, the Manitoba shamans who were so generous with their information do not share in its American author`s earnings, not by a long shot. Yet Lynn Andrews made all that her own, in spite of the fact that the harrowing myths of the Nord, are profoundly unlike certain kinds of more commercial mysticism. This is a difficult issue, and I can only go by my feelings. When I wrote my novel A Dream like Mine, I deliberately wrote it in the first person, from a white person`s point of view, because I wanted to avoid taking a Native point of view. I thought the book would be truer that way. I also showed the manuscript to Indian friends one of whom had publicly objected to Lynn Sallot and Tom Peltier`s novel Bearwalk - not out of fear or self censorship, but because I wanted to get it right. Too much has been made in literature of authors "creating" characters. In a sense every word, every sentence, every character is the author. I`ll conclude with my own article of faith. I profoundly believe that the Native voice is the very breath of the Americas, and that it can tell us about our place here like no other. If we are to survive we must listen to it. But let`s listen honestly, and not make that voice a reflection of our own. Daniel David Moses: Native people should tell Native stories. Why has such a simple statement been the cause of controversy? Across the country members of the writing community have reacted with varying degrees of surprise, dismay, anger, and disgust. Many others, of course, show either no interest or a studied disinterest in this statement and want only to get on with the business of writing; but still journalists ask questions about censorship, and science-fictioners defend the freedom of the imagination, and literary and popular novelists slug it out in the media, and columnists question the talents, nerve, and sanity of the variety of Native people who have made this statement. And at least one poor writer of a letter to the editor has complained of feeling sick. The question of censorship, freedom of speech, and freedom of the imagination seem in the Canadian context excellent examples of the proverbial red herring. Native people are few in number and mostly dispossessed of political power. We are not likely, like a Conservative government with a majority, to waste our time trying to pass laws limiting anyone`s subject matter or opinions. And at this point in history the few of us of that small number who can and do speak out seem unlikely to have any discernible effect on the conventions of the free liberal imagination. Journalists have asked me if I condone censorship, if I don`t want my story to be told, as if my only choices were to be lied about or to be ignored. I wish to exercise a third option: I can and will tell my own stories myself You too can try to tell Native stories if you dare, but you better be prepared to go Native, to own and be owned by these stories as we are, to do them justice. For us it is not a question of the business of writing, the free market of speech, and therapeutic fantasy, but the art of storytelling and the meaning, the spirit, of the lives of our communities and our histories. The issue is one of our common humanity and our particular Native expressions of it. You are not us - and if you would permit us to be human too, you must have the good manners to listen and learn our language and forget about interpretation, even when it appears to be English were speaking. Then we can talk. (From a statement prepared for the Small Press Book Fair held in Toronto last spring). Marlene Nourbese Philip: Used in this context, I understand "appropriation" to mean the abuse of power by one group in exploiting indiscriminately, for their own economic advantage, the cultural resources of other groups. Often, earlier economic exploitation would already have laid the groundwork for the later cultural appropriation. Appropriation has always been an integral part of how the Western world has functioned culturally, and Africans have borne their share of providing the raw material for the excesses of power that are at the heart of this particular form of exploitation. One of the earliest and most significant examples of appropriation was that by the early Greeks of Egyptian culture, which then became the foundation of classic Greek civilization (Martin Bernal`s Black Athena is a useful exploration of this issue). The appropriation of African aesthetics by the modernist art movement leading to the fame and wealth of artists like Picasso, -and the appropriation of African music to form the backbone of the multimillion-dollar industry of rock music, are more modern examples of the same process. Between Europeans and Africans, therefore, cultural appropriation has always been a significant marker of their relations; as a form of racial and cultural exploitation it cannot he dismissed, and must he challenged whenever possible. However, to define the issue of racism as it applies to writing and publishing in Canada in the way Books in Canada has defined it solely as one of appropriation - is to set up a false dichotomy and establish a surrogate issue. The danger with this rather crude and simplistic formulation of the argument is that it becomes a red flag to the protectionist bulls of censorship, or a spoored trail to a pack of baying censorship hounds, who are prepared only to see censorship at work in all other circumstances but those having to do with racism. The possible political shock value of phrasing the argument in such a way is, therefore, short-lived. The real issue in Canada is the systemic racism in the publishing industry - what J. M. Coetzee calls the superstructure of writing, reviewing, and publishing - and in the funding systems providing assistance to writers. Contrary to what many would like to believe, the great part of publishing in Canada is not market-driven; it is heavily subsidized by different levels of government through mechanisms ranging from outright grants to loan guarantees. This fact alone ought to mean that such publishers as receive public support should be made more responsible to the various racial and ethnic communities that comprise this country, including the so-called "non-commercial minorities," as Graeme Gibson (in Chatelaine, November 1990) was recently quoted as describing writers outside the mainstream. There ought, in fact, to he a multi-level government-supported affirmative action program in publishing in Canada, aimed at these very "non-commercial minorities." To those who will begin to scream that this is literature by fiat, and that such programs will not produce "good literature," let me remind them that the CanLit industry began as literature by fiat - the fiat of bureaucrats in the 1950s. Such a program has managed to produce writers who -are now recognized both domestically arid internationally, and I anticipate the same will happen with "non-commercial minorities" Why do I suspect, however, that there will be any number of arguments as to why the same approach cannot be used when it comes to correcting the omission and neglect of African, Asian, and Native writers in Canada? H. R. Percy: While I have great sympathy for the position of writers who are members of minority groups, especially in the matter of difficulty in reaching their public, I do not believe that setting boundaries in which the creative imagination may work is an acceptable solution; nor do I believe that any person who is a true fiction writer or poet would suggest the imposition of such boundaries. Surely the essence of imagination is the transcending of the limits of personal experience. Were this not so, we could write of no characters but ourselves. The answer is not to restrict any writer`s range. If minority writers want their distinctive stories told, and illuminated in the telling by their unique perspective, they should and must go ahead and tell them; but if they want them to be understood and appreciated by readers not of their culture, they must be made comprehensible to those readers. Meanwhile, the treatment of those stories, and of Black and Native subjects in general, from other perspectives can only be beneficial. The world`s great stories - even sacred stories -have been told over and over again by a succession of writers from very different backgrounds, and literature has been greatly enriched thereby. Did Charles and Mary Lamb`s Tales from Shakespeare "steal" from Shakespeare, or diminish his achievement? The only offence is inferiority of execution, and that proclaims itself. James Reaney: First of all, straight off, I object to political interference with poets, playwrights, storytellers whether telling them not to, or telling them to. It always backfires and, it seems to me, is some smart person`s way to a lot of power games and mastery. As a boy, I was always being told that I played the piano too loud. But, having said that, I can see the justice behind serious complaints about distorted portraits of minority groups and women Rita Hayworth used to say that they went to bed with Rita Mayworth (a doll packaged by male exploiters at MGM) "and woke up with me" When the viewpoint is carefully established, surely writers can write about the opposite sex and racial groups not their own. For example, Mark Twain`s Finn gives us a white boy`s authentic portrait of the Black Jim; but in Tom Sawyer, Twain`s Injun Joe should be withdrawn, probably? Que Pensez-vous? Currer Bell and his brother Ellis gave us great male portraits Rochester and Heathcliff. but they are seen through a woman`s eyes. Charlotte Bronte signed herself "Charles Thunder" I`d hate to tell Shakespeare that he couldn`t do Othello - nor Shylock. As Northrop Frye recently suggested, Shakespeare had one interest -being theatrical; our bourgeois high-mindedness would cripple the very force that, despite the unfairness of Somerville and Ross`s comic Irish peasants in the fiinniest book I`ve ever read - Some Experiences of an Irish R. M. - will eventually, with the magic of storytelling, make us all brothers and sisters and help us transcend what Blake calls "the sexual garments" Libby Scheier: 1 learned something in my two years as chair of the Writers` Union Rights and Freedoms Committee. When Black parents complained about Huckleberry Finn and Jewish parents about The Merchant of Venice, it was often after their child had experienced racial harassment in the classroom when these books were taught. With few exceptions, civil-libertarian defenders of these and other books failed to address the- issue of racism in the classroom and in the larger society, but ploughed full steam ahead on the anti-censorship issue, creating a false polarization - the anti-racists on one side, the freedom-of expression forces on the other - when these progressive groups should be natural allies. 1 came to feel that, pragmatically, it was foolish and, as a matter of principle, wrong to fail to address the racism issue when opposing the banning of these books. Similarly, 1 think it`s wrong to oppose the position that white writers should not write in non-white voice, without simultaneously decrying the racist injustices that underlie the debate. Where does racism in publishing begin? Not in the reading of manuscripts that arrive over the transom; they don`t arrive in colourcoded packages, as one publisher has remarked. But very little writing gets published via the transom. Most publishing begins with ones social circle, ones success at becoming part of a network whose members have access to publishing venues. Call it the "schmooze factor." Most writers of colour have not been in the same social circles as white writers, and have not benefited from the schmooze factor. The society we live in is racist; this racism necessarily affects all socio-economic sectors, including publishing. There are no simple, clearly defined solutions. But, one has to start somewhere. And complaining loudly about whose books are published and whose are not is a start. 1 cannot bring myself to support prescriptive or proscriptive guidelines for writers. I`m against it, probably for the same reasons that I`m against state censorship of pornography that degrades women. History shows that the censor`s broom sweeps widely, and the wrong things get censored. But neither can 1 get on a high anticensorship horse about writers of colour whose frustrations in not being heard have led them to be angry at those voices that are being given the platform, especially when the stories the white voices tell are about people of colour. 1 do make a distinction between the anger of oppressed groups and that of socially dominant ones, and am sympathetic with the former. Cultural appropriation happens; it`s not an off-the-wall idea. What Pm in favour of is a dropping of defences, an admission that racism is a social problem and a problem in publishing, that we are all implicated, and that affirmative action should be undertaken. Any anti-censorship movement that does not also take up racism which, through its exclusionism, is a form of censorship - leaves itself open to charges of being racist. M. G. Vassanji: 1 do not believe that stories of Black, Native, or other peoples should be the preserve only of writers who are members of these groups. But 1 would like to add some comments without which my above statement is incomplete. What disturbs me about this subject is that too often it has been addressed with platitudes that are patronizing and insulting, and reflect rather poorly on the intellectual climate that produces them. How easy it is to cry "Censorship!" or "Art is universal!" and then sit back smugly - and safely. Many people who take the question seriously surely agree that it cannot be divorced from histories of oppression - colonialism, slavery, even genocide. There are many peoples whose stories have not been told while stories of those who dominated them have been stuffed down their throats ad nauseam. Only last summer, while the drama at Oka was being played out, a Canadian noncommercial station showed a Hollywood cowboys-and-Indians movie, with Native peoples played by Hollywood extras, and the usual stereotyping. It is when people have been colonized or worse, when their stories and even languages have long been suppressed, and are sold in the market-place by those belonging to dominant cultures, that the issue becomes charged and terms like "stealing" obtain currency. But, as I said, I do not believe one should feel (or be - by whom?) compelled to write only from the perspective of the community or people one comes from. It is of course a risk to write from a viewpoint one is not familiar with. To take contentious examples (i.e. other than the whites-representing-non-whites type): Black and Asian Caribbean writers have created characters from each other`s communities, and I am sure the subject is sensitive, taking into account the racial and political realities in the area; Ngugi wa Thiong`o has created white (though minor) characters who are rather one-dimensional. I believe that one should operate from strength rather than ask for sorrow and pity. Black, Native, Asian, and other peoples should tell their stories, and tell them in abundance. They should get into small magazines, small publishers` lists, big publishers` lists; start their own publishing institutions; publish outside the country. And they should continue to expose misrepresentations and stereotyping with all the vigour with which they are currently doing it.