Questions of legitimacy and appropriation are coming up all the time in the literary world as well as in the world at large. The sudden rush of book banning or attempted book banning seems to me to be a questioning of legitimacy: who has the right to put ideas in our heads or in our children’s heads? Ideas are dangerous: it’s of their very nature, and it’s a danger that permeates the world of reading and writing.
I first encountered it years ago with one of my first short stories, “Luke,” written from the point of view of a black servant who knows and sees all, a story I would not write today and which would not be published. I was a young writer, and fearless, and I remain fearless about the vast range of my imagination.
Since many of my first short stories and one novel, Straight Man, from those years were written from a male point of view, I learned quickly that unless I found a way in the first sentences to identify the narrator as male, most readers assumed in spite of many hints that the narrator was female. In those years of the apparently unquestioned power of men, it is easy to understand why I chose that point of view. One of the blessings of feminism is that it opened my imagination to the enormous power and importance of women; here in North Carolina, I remember the long-forgotten women who as wives, sisters, and daughters made the Bingham School work. They didn’t teach the Latin or Greek of history, although sometimes they gave piano lessons to the boy students.
I understand the unspoken assumption that women writers only write about and from the point of view of women but I reject it utterly. I’m attaching a yet unpublished story called “Roquefixade”—the name of a town in south-western France—to test this hypothesis. What do you assume when you begin to read it?
Roquefixade
When I came into the valley of Roquefixade in Southern France, walking down the long spine of the hills with the ruined castle watchful in the distance, I felt I’d known the place before—the Buttercups and Forget-Me-Nots looked like those I’d see growing along streams in Columbia County where we spent the summers. I stopped to sketch the gray cattle browsing along the hillside. A calf was pulling on its mother’s teat, and in the distance a salmon-colored village I couldn’t name and didn’t need to lay in a fold of the…
And for the rest of the story, you’ll have to wait until it’s published…
James Ozyvort Maland says
As for my assumptions, I would guess there is a relationship between the fictional name Roquefixade and the actual name of Rocamadour—this excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for Rocamadour supports the assumption: // In 1618, on a map of the diocese of Cahors by Jean Tarde, the name of Roquemadour appeared. //