If you can be a bridge…

When Jeanine Cummins wrote the novel, American Dirt, she wrote a brief epilog about her reasons for writing the book, trying to explain how she could take on the task of writing about a Mexican family trying to smuggle themselves across the border into the US, when Cummin herself had never been raised in that culture or actually had that experience. One reason, she said, is that she thought, “If you’re a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a a bridge?”

Good advice, but ironic considering the firestorm of hateful criticism directed at Cummin when American Dirt was published – so hateful, in fact, that her book publisher cancelled her book tour out of fear of demonstrations by those who claimed to be outraged at the author’s arrogance. Imagine writing a story about people whose lives you, the author, have not actually lived yourself.

Her book, by the way, was terrific – compelling and very convincing. Cummins did her homework.

The whole incident resonated with me, of course, because I, a white Jewish guy, have dared to write two novels about a French-Canadian women and her Indian allies in colonial America. It’s certainly not a life I have lived. But I can learn facts about that period, plenty of facts. What’s more, I have the capacity to imagine how it might have felt for my characters to live at that time and in those places I have described in the novels, and that is my point.

You can criticize my work if you’ve read it and don’t like it. But do not criticize my right to write it. I have honored my characters. I have done the homework. I have earned the right to be a bridge.