Chimamanda Adichie...

...speaks here of cultural authenticity.

She tells the story of one of her American professors who, on reading a draft of her first novel, remarked that her Africans were not "authentic"; they weren't poor or dying of starvation or under siege from ethnic militants, but, on the contrary, were well-adjusted, middle-class Africans who drove cars and got divorces in middle-age. Adichie deplores this behavior, ascribing it to the poverty of a single conception of a Nigerian or African reality, and is out in her fiction to set the record on Nigeria straight. Nigerians, she may say* through her characters, are more like you than you might think. If they suffer from poverty, they also suffer from iPod tinnitus. If some of their women are bare-breasted in public, others proudly display their cleavage. If some shake fruits from trees, others prefer to shop at WalMart. Implicit to her point of view is the contention that she, a Nigerian woman brought up in Nigeria, is more qualified to speak for her "people"; which is to say, more qualified to invent fictions about them through which she can explore her uniquely Nigerian themes.

This is all bollocks, of course. The current American fictional monolith, fraught as it is with an excess of White American, is obsessed with the question of cultural authenticity; it treats the non-White as a sort of journalist whose material for fictional reportage lies in his repressed past. MFA programs encourage in such writers a mining of lived experience, leading to a number of "stories" which are more-or-less autobiographical and more-or-less thematically transparent. The "best" fictional magazines---The New Yorker, Tin House, Paris Review--- are, almost by definition, ones in which your uniquely cultural background, heralded by your deliciously unusual name (Bezmozgis; Adichie; Scibona; Mueenuddin), will afford you the sort of treatment that would beggar any writer of the previous generation. Your success as an ethnic writer is largely governed by how well you evoke your own cultural past; conversely, if your past is not as culturally interesting as it can be, your fiction is ignored.

This anxiety for authenticity subscribes to the writing-workshop edict: "Write what you know!". It is the anxiety of a Developed Society in which the boundaries between lived and second-hand experience are vanishing. For most middle-class Americans, it is easier today to watch a documentary about Lagos than to walk a mile to the nearest convenience store; easier to understand the plight of slum-dwellers in Lucknow than to attend Mass on Sunday; easier to survey Lowe's employment figures than to drive to its nearest outlet. The writer who values lived experience will be confronted by how little of it abounds in his own life, and will thus be drawn to those of his colleagues who seem to possess more of it; drawn to his ethnic counterparts, who are more authentic simply because more of what is "natural" has been available to them.

Is lived experience more authentic? To ask this question is itself to subvert a great deal of contemporary fiction. There is no doubt that there is a certain frisson about someone's saying "It really happened", or about the jauntily sombre "Based on a true story" labels that underscore today's movie titles. But is there something fundamental that prevents me---an Indian brought up in a very Indian household---from creating a fiction about a Slav zookeeper or a Malagasy mother of seven? Something that renders me unable to understand their cultural concerns as well as I'm supposed to my own? Or, and more importantly, is my origin the final sign of my cultural authority? Is there something that disqualifies a Karaite Jew from writing about my recent out-of-caste wedding and its impact on my orthodox family?

These are important questions, and there is no sign, in its spate of celebrations of ethnic writers in the past few decades, that the American literary firmament has an eye on their fictional explorations; no sign indeed that the people at its helm know what such an exploration might look like, or whether they will not reject an example of it---even a rather deficient one---out of hand. In fact, people like Adichie, who "know" that the only true fiction is one that is about their "people", have begun to make modern literature seem like some benignant inversion of the United Nations, in which the most marginalized, by virtue of their experience, assume the greatest primacy. It's safe to say that no good can come of this.

*Disclaimer: I have read none of Adichie's writing.