“American Dirt” by Jeannine Cummins recounts the harrowing journey of a Mexican woman, Lydia, and her young son, Luca, who flee from their home in Acapulco after the brutal murder of sixteen members of their family in a drug cartel retaliation for her journalist husband’s expose of the cartel’s leader.

Convinced their only chance for escaping the fate of their family is to get to America (“el norte)”, Lydia and Luca pose as illegal immigrants and attempt to join the desperate multitudes who travel atop “La Bestia, an infamous freight train that travels from southern Mexico to the US border. As Lydia is painfully aware, this is a journey fraught with many risks, from falling to their deaths, to being arrested by immigration authorities to being murdered by drug cartel hit men. From the very first page, the story grabs the reader’s attention and holds it throughout the many plot twists that follow.

Megahype is the best word to describe the reception of “American Dirt”. Even before its release it was hailed as the biggest book of the season and garnered rapturous acclaim, being described as a “Grapes of Wrath” for our times and a “new American classic”. In a playing out of every aspiring writer’s dream, it became the subject of a bidding war by publishers, attracted a seven-figure advance from the winning publisher, Flatiron Books, which mounted a massive publicity campaign, in itself a rarity in these days of book marketing frugality. It’s also been optioned for a movie.

As with many things bookish, it was Oprah Winfrey, the unparalleled arbiter of America’s literary taste, who sparked what she expected would be a stampede to bookstores by nominating the book as her latest Book Club pick. She also posted a video on Twitter saying “I was opened, I was shook up, it woke me up, and I feel that everybody who reads this book is actually going to be immersed in the experience of what it means to be a migrant on the run for freedom.” A rallying cry to the woke if ever there was one, but one which precipitated an unexpected backlash, with early readers slamming the book for “opportunistically, selfishly, and parasitically” telling a story the author had no right to tell.

An upsurge of negativity followed, the major points of contention being that the book demonstrated Cummins’s inadequate knowledge of her subject, portrayed Latinos in a stereotypical manner and took a complex and controversial situation and made it into “trauma porn”, in order to hawk it to a primarily white readership.

As a result, according to Vulture Magazine, Oprah was forced to rescind or at least water down her initial endorsement and attempt to “bring people together from all sides to talk about this book, and who gets to publish what stories.” Subsequently Flatiron cancelled the planned book tour and acknowledged that some of the marketing around the book was insensitive to the concerns expressed by its detractors.

Storms blowing up around publication of a book are hardly unprecedented in the publishing world, but the fact that this particular storm appears to have been utterly unforeseen by the publishers and the whole marketing and promotional machine backing them up isn’t so much (or not entirely) a case of PC blindness but a reflection of the acute sensitivity towards the bogeyman of cultural appropriation. 

That Oprah Winfrey declared the book made her see “what it means to be a migrant in a whole new way” held no sway with the many who judged it inauthentic.

As Miliann Kang writes in a Tropics of Meta article, “authenticity is a hard thing to prove and it is no guarantee against bad writing, let alone against cultural appropriation.” Inevitably critiques of any book vary depending on the critic (objectivity is not only a hard thing to prove but a hard thing to practice when it comes to literary criticism). In the same article she notes that what the Latinx community reject most strongly about the book is the author’s stated purpose to give a face to “the faceless brown mass”, on the grounds that the Latinx community is perfectly able to do this for itself, although they “do not receive comparable seven-figure contracts”.

In another article in Tropics of Meta https://tropicsofmeta.com/2019/12/12/pendeja-you-aint-steinbeck-my-bronca-with-fake-ass-social-justice-literature/ Myriam Gurba argues that “Unlike the narcos she vilifies, Cummins exudes neither grace nor flair. Instead she bumbles with Trumpian tackiness ……….she operates opportunistically, selfishly, and parasitically. Cummins identified the gringo appetite for Mexican pain and found a way to exploit it. With her ambition in place, she shoved the ‘faceless’ out of her way, ran for the microphone and ripped it out of our hands …”

She continues “By her own admission, Cummins lacked the qualifications to write ‘Dirt’. And she did it anyways. For a seven-figure sum. As Bart Simpson used to say, ‘Ay caramba!’”

 With respect to both writers and their obvious passion for the rights of minorities, the seven-figure sum does seem to touch an equally raw nerve. Money of course tends to galvanise debate, never more so when it’s perceived as being unfairly earned.

Regardless, overt and blatant politicisation of literature, however disseminated and in the name of whatever cause or minority, smacks of censorship. Reduced to its essence, this furore is about who has the right to decide who can tell which stories? An author’s freedom to write any story they want is becoming increasingly compromised by this argument. 

Authors are being condemned for usurping identities and experiences that are not their own, with ownership being determined by some vague collective who just might become upset (or angry, or envious). The ever-shifting members of these collectives appear to have missed the point that the story in question is fiction. Fiction is story and the story-teller gets to make it up. Exploitation for personal gain, whether of minority groups, the young, the aged, the weak, the powerless is wrong. As is misrepresentation, trading in racial stereotypes and the objectification of the disadvantaged.

But this is not what Cummins has done. She’s been accused of writing to a “white audience”. Writers must envision an audience in conceptualising a book so this may be true. But is it wrong? To speak to an audience about characters and experiences different from their own (and different from those of the author) is at the heart of all fiction. If a writer can tell a convincing story credibly, soundly, skilfully while remaining as faithful as possible to the version of reality they’ve chosen to depict, should they also have to validate their authority to tell it? If so, it tends to render all historical fiction subject to the same theoretical restrictions. Let alone fantasy, science fiction, horror and the list goes on. Good fiction is about world building. If the worlds a writer is permitted to build are restricted to only those they know intimately, their creative scope is going to be impossibly narrowed.

In the Tropics of Meta article referred to above, Miliann Kang remarks “Ultimately the question of who gets to tell what stories is not unimportant, but it overshadows more productive and urgent questions about which stories are told, how they circulate, and who they impact.” If authors are compelled to factor in these prerogatives before they even begin, most will be discouraged from beginning at all. Writing fiction is hard enough. Writing fiction that sells is even harder.

Kang goes on to say “asking why certain individual storytellers are anointed also begs the question of why collective histories and whole bodies of work are ignored”. The answer to this question can only be duh? Whole bodies of work, collective histories (and stories and books and poetry) are ignored because that’s the nature of the world. Some make it and some don’t. It’s not fair. And never less fair than in publishing. 

Weighing into these arguments is arguably presumptuous on my part. I’m not remotely familiar with the political complexities of the American-Mexican border crisis, the plight of migrants, the desperation, the fear and the horror that affect the characters in this novel, nor (thankfully) have I ever experienced the injustices done to minorities. But I can comment on the merits of the book. It is powerful, gripping storytelling. Its message is a moral and a humane one. Cummins writes that her intention was “to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear”. And need to hear. It’s the stories we, who don’t know them and can’t experience them, should hear. So that we may understand and, when given the opportunity, speak out about them to those who have the power to effect change. This is self-evident.

As noted by Sheree Strange in Primer, the book “showcases both the very worst of humanity, the brutality and trauma that cause Lydia and Luca to flee, and the very best, in the generosity and kindness of those that help them along the way.” It showcases also a mother’s love for her child, that fierce emotion that compels her to risk everything so that he may have a future, to shield him, if necessary, with her own life.

In her Author’s Note Cummins tells us that “In 2017, a migrant died every twenty-one hours along the United States-Mexico border” and “there are currently around forty thousand people reported missing across Mexico, and investigators routinely find mass graves containing dozens, sometimes hundreds, of bodies”. In choosing to tell this story she wanted to focus on the moral and humanitarian aspects of migration which are so often obscured in the political dust storm that renders migrants as “one faceless brown mass”.

Fiction, in particular, Cummins said, “has the potential to broaden and deepen readers’ understanding of an issue that many Americans are only peripherally engaged with, if at all.” And I would broaden that to include everyone, American or not. That’s the unique power and beauty of fiction. It’s not collective history, it’s not intended to speak with the authority of the masses, it’s not pretending to be anything other than a story, but by virtue of its ability to move people, to engage their powers of identification, empathy, and “get inside someone else’s skin” it has the potential to make us think beyond our own small worlds and consider perspectives bigger than the trivia of our day-to-day existences. This is why, I believe, authors should be free to create worlds to which they are not necessarily bound by race, birth, gender, sexual preference or anything other than their own powers of imagination.