What an Oscar Winner Teaches Us About Telling Other People’s Stories
In my quest to be fair and balanced, I like to read commentary from a range of sources. Moderate publications are springing up in the ongoing battle to counter the views of the political extremes. One of those is Persuasion, an online publication that bills itself as being Centrist. I get the free articles delivered to my inbox and they’re usually thought provoking. This morning’s article brought me back to one of my blog posts from a couple of months ago – Wrestling with POV – where I grappled with the thorny question of writers telling the stories of communities to which they don’t belong. Who are your characters? Who are you to be writing about them and their worlds?
The Persuasion article, Who Are You to Tell That Story, written by Nadia Gill, focuses on Oscar winner Chloe Zhao who won Best Director for Nomadland. From the article (emphasis added):
Though complete objectivity is unattainable, Zhao understands that, in search of truth, a filmmaker must decentralize their own perspective. Zhao’s openness, social and intellectual curiosity, tolerance, and quiet ego help her transcend the distance between her world and the one she is portraying. In the arts, where activism and ideology are becoming all-important, this way of seeing the world is disappearing.
Zhao and her trio of films about the American West teach us that identity alone cannot predict who is able to see and share the truth. Some abilities are hidden from plain view: They are of the heart and the mind. If we wish to create a rich environment for storytelling that enhances our understanding of communities that are not our own, we would be wise to care more about the filmmaker’s character than their identity.
One of the tenets of the phenomenological research that I used to do requires the researcher to bracket their own experiences. Basically, they use strategies to set aside their own experiences so their personal opinions don’t color the data collection or skew the data analysis. Zhao says that she has to “resist wanting to say something about how I think they could be better, or how I think the government has wronged them.” In other words, she has to find a way to bracket her own opinions. Zhao manages to keep her own perspective out of the work by blending “the real and the fictional by casting nonprofessional actors, incorporating their real-life stories into her scripts, and encouraging on-screen improvisation.”
Gill’s point about caring more about the filmmaker’s character than their identity is well taken. Maybe staying in your lane isn’t the best approach, although I still think writers need to interrogate point-of-view by asking themselves who are their characters and who are they to be writing about them and their worlds. Those two questions are a good yardstick to measure the line between appropriation and appreciation, between duplicity and authenticity.
Before we pile on when an artist is being taken to task for telling the story of a community other than their own, maybe we should take a step back and use those two questions to analyze the author’s heart and mind as well as their character. In our own work, we can use those two questions to move beyond our own identity and reflect on our own motives, our own character, our own hearts and minds.