If there were an ambassador for those who say “political correctness gone mad”, it would be Lionel Shriver. In a keynote speech on fiction and identity politics at a literary event in Brisbane, the author began with the premise that the rise of identity politics threatens “our” right to write fiction, went on to not only dismiss the concept of cultural appropriation, but also deny the existence of identity at all, saying, “Those who embrace a vast range of “identities” – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege and disability – are now encouraged to be possessive of their experience and to regard other peoples’ attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft.”

It is actually illuminating to have Shriver illustrate so clearly not why cultural appropriation doesn’t exist, as was her intention, but why it is problematic. Shriver sneers at the idea of asking permission to write a character from another race and culture, wondering whether writers should approach “passers by with a clipboard, getting signatures that grant limited rights”. It’s not about permission. And it’s not about technical boundaries. It’s about the humility with which a writer approaches such a character.

As Lionel Shriver made light of identity, I had no choice but to walk out on her | Yassmin Abdel-Magied Read more

And Shriver’s mockery, under the guise of “being provocative”’, shows perfectly why acknowledgment of power dynamics is important. She is a hugely successful white author with a platform, and her vantage point has blinded her to the validity of others.

She trips herself up when she dismisses minority characters in popular culture as “tokenism”, then going on to say she cannot write a minority character without getting flak for it. Unexamined, entitled and just plain ignorant, Shriver’s speech collapses all the nuances of the sensitivity required when approaching experiences or issues that might be dear and delicate to others, into “political correctness gone mad”.

Sneering at identity politics is a depressingly common position, portraying those who dare to point out the intangible soft means of discrimination (such as language) as precious snowflakes, mollycoddled by a politically correct establishment which allows free expression and academic enquiry to be undermined. One of those who walked out of Shriver’s speech was Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a writer. She wrote about it, essentially arguing that people should write only within the confines of their experience and identity.

While Shriver’s speech was disrespectful, the conclusions drawn by Abdel-Magied are not sound. Here I must pause and urge you not to conflate a disagreement with those conclusions with agreement with Shriver, or a denial that cultural appropriation under the guise of universalism is a thing. It is very much a thing. It is, in fact, one of the most frustrating and complicated things to explain and justify to those who have the luxury (I would say privilege, it is technically the right term, but it triggers those who have it; snowflakes come in every colour) of living a life that no one, in the present or historically, has plundered.

An opinion, a belief, a feeling, an imagination, need not arise from, or be justified to a wider public by, experience.

But the lived experience is on its way to becoming the superior and most veracious form of truth. Are you an “as a”? You know, “as a woman”, “as a Muslim”, “as an immigrant”? Then whatever you have to say must be framed in your qualification to say it. In what is probably a genuine effort to amplify more voices, the media ends up inadvertently limiting these voices to a pen of minority representation. It makes us lazy, because, both unable and not allowed to comment on or imagine lives beyond our own, or question how we perceive the world, the fact that we perceive it at all is enough. “As a” both impoverishes and diminishes, meaning that Shriver and her critic have ended up in the same place – segregated. No identity at all exists in the Shriver camp, only identity exists in the other.

“As a” is a trick, a con, a double bluff. We should fight against it rather than protect it. If you pay attention, those who feel the need (or are forced to feel the need) to shore up their position by resorting to their identity are not the powerful – the male, white, and wealthy. The implication is that their words do not need experience to give them wisdom. It is a lesson I have tried to learn over the years – that an opinion, a belief, a feeling, an imagination, need not arise from, nor be justified and validated by some authentic experience.

To demand that writers not encroach upon the experience of others is a death sentence that seeks to limit us not only by what we know, but also by our place in a hierarchy of inequality. The most valuable literature not only teaches us what we do not know about others (and ourselves), but also reminds us that common human traits – love, fear, loss, family – bind us together both vertically throughout history but also horizontally across race, gender, disability and sexual orientation.

Abdel-Magied writes: “It’s not always OK if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can’t get published or reviewed to begin with.”

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But will discouraging people from writing about these things necessarily open up the opportunity for others to do so? The answer is to make sure more voices are amplified to both challenge stereotypes by white or male writers, and also tell their own stories. If anything, minority writers complain that they get no traction with publishers unless their stories are somehow “native”. Want to write a sweeping epic about the human condition? We have William Boyd for that.

Abdel-Magied says that what she heard from Shriver was, “Your experience is simply a tool for me to use, because you are less human than me. You are less than human.” But to suggest that you are not knowable to another who is different and more powerful than you also suggests that you are less than human. As Kamila Shamsie put it “‘You – other – are unimaginable’ is a far more problematic attitude than ‘You are imaginable’.”