By Fredric Dannen
There’s an early episode of “The Sopranos” I can’t get out of my mind these days. Two members of a Mafia crew, Paul “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri and Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero walk into a fictional Seattle & Tacoma Roasters coffeehouse in New Jersey, obviously modeled on Starbucks. The shop is raking in money and Paulie is fuming. “Italian people, how did we miss out on this?” he says. “Espresso, cappuccino. We invented this [stuff], and all these [people] are getting rich off it! All our food: pizza, calzone, buffalo mozzarella, olive oil. These [people] had nothing! They ate puzzi before we gave them the gift of our cuisine!”
This was 1999. If only it had been a decade later and Paulie had a Twitter account, he would have known the vogue term to express his rage. That term is “cultural appropriation.”
It is a term that I believe is misguided–worse, reactionary–especially when applied to literature and music, the two areas to which I will confine myself in this column. (I will leave the debate over the term’s use in the fine arts, dance, fashion, hairstyles, cuisine, and so forth, to someone else.) The practice of cultural appropriation is said to occur when a member of one culture uses the stories or idioms of another culture.
I reject the term because appropriation means theft. If George Gershwin, for instance, was stealing when he used the African American blues idiom to write the second of his Three Preludes for piano solo, then it was Promethean theft–stealing for the purpose of creating–which is not theft at all. It is the very definition of art.
I prefer the non-accusatory term of transculturalism, which is defined as “seeing oneself in the other.” I might also propose the Buddhist concept of interdependence, the idea that we are all linked, in considering how art is created.
Gershwin provides a perfect example. No doubt he used African American musical idioms, not only basic blues, but boogie-woogie, in his song “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise,” and Gullah shout in “Porgy and Bess.” Let’s say he “took” those elements. But he also gave back. The late poet and jazz critic Stanley Crouch astutely made that case in a 1998 op-ed in The New York Times. He noted that the harmonic sequences in Gershwin’s song “I Got Rhythm”–the so-called “rhythm changes,” known to every jazz musician–were used chord for chord by a host of jazz greats, from Sidney Bechet to Charlie Parker. “So one could argue that black musicians have done much more profitable, literal stealing from Gershwin than he did from them, which, in his case, amounts to nothing more than inspired borrowing,” Crouch wrote.
Inspired borrowing. I’ll take that term over cultural appropriation. Does anyone seriously want to argue that Mozart was a thief when he composed his “Rondo alla Turca,” or Haydn when he wrote Roma-inspired music? Would the world be better off if Aaron Copland had never composed “El Salón México”?
When it comes to literature, the discussion can get more heated, because music is abstract, and stories are not. Jeanine Cummins found this out in January 2020 when Flatiron Books released her novel “American Dirt,” about Mexican migrants. Flatiron had to cancel her book tour after both the publisher and author received threats. Cummins’ crime? She isn’t Mexican. As Vox, the so-called “explanatory journalism” website put it, “Cummins had written a story that was not hers.”
But the story was hers because it came from her imagination. That, at least, is the position of PEN International, the writers’ organization created “to stand for freedom of expression and act as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, silenced, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.” In 2015, when the brilliant Mexican American novelist and poet Jennifer Clement, a parttime resident of San Miguel, began her six-year term as the first, and so far only, woman president of PEN, she took that charter seriously. In October 2019, under her leadership, PEN delegates unanimously passed “The Democracy of the Imagination Manifesto,” which states the following: “1. We defend the imagination and believe it to be as free as dreams. 2. We recognize and seek to counter the limits faced by so many in telling their own stories. 3. We believe the imagination accesses all human experience, and reject restrictions of time, place, or origin. 4. We know attempts to control the imagination may lead to xenophobia, hatred and division. 5. Literature crosses all real and imagined frontiers and is always in the realm of the universal.”
Do the people at Vox not understand that putting restrictions on what a writer can write about is an illiberal concept? Or does that need explaining?
Let me conclude with two other quotations. The first is from John McWhorter, the African American linguistics professor and New York Times columnist. In an opinion piece published in the Times on September 16, 2022, he wrote: “I think the idea that only Black people should depict Black people in art and fiction is less antiracist than anti-human, in forbidding the empathy and even admiration that can motivate respectful attempts to create a literary character.”
Lastly, here is the great Mexican novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes, in a 1993 interview for Canal 22: “The idea of Originality is a modern Western evil…. I have never believed in it, because I deeply believe that we are part of a tradition–that books are the children of other books, and that everything that has been said can be traced back to Homer, to an anonymous Chinese poet, to a forgotten Japanese scribe…. The great books are written by everyone.”
