A Series of Bulletproof Strategies for the Appropriately Naive, Cynical, or Desperate Diasporic Writer

The diaspora poet is back on the chopping block. Recently, a series of reviews concerning Ocean Vuong’s latest novel The Emperor of Gladness resuscitated a conversation that’s been going on for as long as I can remember. A conversation that, as of late, has adopted a more openly hostile, sardonic tone. Clichés leave a sour taste in the mouth. The reaction against a well-worn cliché arrives like bankruptcy: slowly, and then at all once. The diaspora poet is, however, a resilient cliché. We persist, endure, survive these increasingly frequent bashings. The tides may turn, but come morning, we’ll build our sandcastles again. We have no other way.

I’ve never been a fan of Ocean Vuong’s writing. I don’t think he’s a terrible writer, and his brand of watery sentimentalism isn’t a crime. To be fair, people can’t seem to decide whether we need less or more sincerity these days. Yet, the backlash he’s been receiving in the chaotically democratised space that is social media reveals a lot more about the state of contemporary criticism than it does about him. A sudden critical blitz is often a sign that readers are irritatingly bored by a widespread sensibility, not just the work of one writer. It’s a vent of air released from a pressure valve. (I wonder who will be next though). It’s easy to welcome these moments, but let’s be real, snarky netizens shouldn’t be taking on the job actual critics should have been doing years ago.

We know capital wreaks havoc on the imagination. To protect yourself, to provide for yourself, you seek shelter, professionalise, credentialise, become indebted to institutions, networks, scenes, counterpublics, communities. The message is clear. There’s little room for outliers, mavericks, eccentrics, or the kind of disheveled egomaniacs needed to invigorate literary culture. There’s little room for risk. These moribund conditions produce a glut of mediocrities, an eerily homogeneous climate where writers from disparate backgrounds all write, think, react, dream alike. When the “diaspora poet” epithet can be directed at a hyphenated writer hailing from East Africa just as easily as one from South Asia, you know something’s gone very wrong. Still, moving targets are harder to hit. Critical pushback is more painful when you’re standing still.

Our period of critical stagnation has been especially harmful for the diasporic writer. At least one generation and a half of English-language writers at the intersection of Buzzfeed and Barthes have reached a creative dead end. Consider the mutated offspring of the poetry slam and the poetry workshop. The margin and the centre. Writers trapped in a web of dogmas and disavowals, unable to let go, unable to see through their personal mythologies, or move beyond the coordinates of their identities, unwilling to relinquish their affiliations (if only for a little while). Their friendships, fealties, and professional relationships demand the kind of conformity that suffocates thinking. Their communities demand even more. Conformity is a kind of perverse loyalty. Diasporic writers become fearfully loyal. They don’t want to betray themselves. A nervous ecosystem of agents, editors, and publishers doesn't encourage the growth of these writers. If critics don’t step in, no one will.

But hey, if you can’t win, at least game the system. Here’s a corrective you can use as a writing prompt. Alternatively, think of it as a business plan.

A Series of Bulletproof Strategies for the Appropriately Naive, Cynical, or Desperate Diasporic Writer

• You own your country. It’s a loving squint in the distance. An unchanging flatness. A landscape of stilted memory.

• The 20th century happened to your parents. It didn’t happen to you. Before that time is a stretch of memory, a murky universe where wise ancestors reside.

• Authority is an inheritance. You’ve been denied so much already, it’s only right to take what’s yours.

• Write as if culpability has a geographical address.

• The mother is the world and the world is the mother. You will run out of things to say to your mother quicker than you run out of things to write about her.

• The institution is the patriarch we all love to hate and hate to love. Prepare for a lifetime of pretending not to need his approval.

• Subvert those pesky stereotypes. Reinforce them when it suits you. Grief has no internal consistency.

• The children of the wretched and the affluent all sit around the same lunch table. They compare wounds, laugh at the same jokes. Write like a bulldozer. Your job is to demolish these distinctions.

• Attack every infraction whiteness commits against your language, especially when you don’t speak it yourself. Chai tea is an intolerable atrocity. Your postcolonial idols may have had to eventually humble themselves in middle age, like Edward Said rolling up his sleeves and studying Arabic philology in his forties under the stern gaze of a retired Lebanese scholar. That might be a step too far. Remember, Duolingo doesn’t exist.

• You are a border guard. Police the boundaries of your culture, its expressions, tastes, sounds, pleasures, boredoms, frivolities.

• The East burns a hole in your pocket. You are not part of the West. Repeat this until you convince yourself.

• Difference is both your currency and the truth you try to evade. Strike a balance.

• Your people are strong, worthy, righteous, hardworking, long-suffering, possessed with a deeply intuitive spirituality and ancestral wisdom. They simply feel more than those colonizers. They are never difficult, ungraspable, churlish, bigoted, embittered, ungrateful, lazy, misanthropic. Conveniently, you share the best of their qualities and none of the worst.

• You are owed the very notion of “a people.”

• All forms of conflict in your community that complicate this picture are unwelcome. Your narrative must stay neat. The audience wants pathos. They want to see the blood on your hands. No one cares if it’s not yours.

• Your country of origin, in whose fractured image you have crafted a practice of survival, has no contemporary writers, translators, public intellectuals, potential collaborators, starving poets, overfed propagandists, or really any lively intercultural dialogue of its own. Luckily, it has you.

• Choose the right peers. Take great care to ignore writers stalking the peripheries, those writing from within the old country. Avoid those who remind you of yourself. They are mirrors to your inadequacy.

• If you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a beartrap of the mind, you should be paid handsomely for it.

• Your gluttony is a kind of love too. Don’t let them tell you any different.