Should We Decenter the American Gaze?

WHAT WOULD OUR WRITING LOOK LIKE?

One day, I showed my class a video. These are post-graduate college students, all of them international, none of them have been in Canada for more than a year.

In this video, stick figures were used to tell a super short, inspirational story. After the video was done, I asked the class what they thought and they all gave thoughtful answers that related to the video’s theme.

Then I showed them the comments…

Because the stick figures were black and white, much of the conversation was dominated by racial assumptions. None of my students picked up on those assumptions and were shocked that anyone would come to that conclusion.

We’ll come back to this point in a bit…

My first introduction to America was through hip hop. Snoop told me what it was like to be from California. Biggie and Nas told me what it was like to live in New York. I knew about Phili cheesesteaks years before I ever set foot in Philadelphia.

By the time I was in high school, TV and movies meant I knew as much about American history as I did Canadian. I cheered for American sports teams, read American authors, listened to American music. All the culture I consumed was through the lens of the U.S.

More currently, I am watching Kendrick Lamar and Drake tear each other apart, all in the name of…hip hop? Not only am I watching it, but initially, I was enjoying them dissing each other. I laughed at some of the demeaning lyrics. I looked forward to how disrespectful the other could get.

But why? None of that even aligns with my value systems. But I was raised on getting excited about rap beef. Seeing 50 Cent rip apart Ja Rule was entertainment for me. The rap battle culture has been ingrained in me since childhood.

Now, as an adult going through my own self-reflection, my own changes, my own realizations, I notice how much of a struggle it is to recognize culture outside of the American gaze.

When I watched that video I showed my students, I knew exactly what the comments would be before I read a single one. I knew that despite the creators best intentions, he made one stick character white and the other one black. The gaze immediately tells you that no matter what the video is about, it is racial.

But I wonder…

Would I have recognized the racial undertones so vividly if it wasn’t for the American gaze? Or would I have reacted like my students and simply observed the intended themes of the video?

I take this concept one step further: what has this gaze done to my writing? When I am creating these stories, building these worlds, establishing new characters, am I doing it from a space of unbound freedom or are my stories somehow reflective of this gaze?

I have found myself fighting against the validity of this theory for years. I intentionally leave race out of my novels, meaning even though the characters are black, the stories have nothing to do with their blackness.

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With my most recent novel, And Then There Was Us, I had a discussion with my publisher about what it meant having a black girl on the cover. I absolutely love the cover of my novel, but I didn’t want readers, American readers particularly, to feel like picking up my novel was some kind of revolutionary act. That reading a novel with a black girl on the cover made some kind of statement about their beliefs, about their politics, about their existence in general. I just want people to give the book a chance, especially since the story has absolutely nothing to do with racial tensions.

But race is just one type of American gaze.

I look at entertainment. The songs that blow up, the movies we call classic, the people I look up to. I think about all the books I’ve read — all of my favourite authors are American.

But what if there was no center? What if I grew up reading Russian novels and watching African movies and listening to Hispanic music? What if early on in life, I was made to understand Middle Eastern politics and exposed to Nordic folktales?

As writers, our output is far more dependent on our input than we’d like to admit. What we consume — actively and subconsciously — finds its way into our stories.

We’re now in a time where we are able to choose our own center. It still takes work, but access to culture isn’t predetermined by your geography anymore. And as we search for stories to tell, stories that fill our souls and hopefully touch other’s hearts, we should seriously consider finding a different center and creating from a different gaze.

Not because the American gaze is bad, it’s just been dominant. And maybe if we shift, we’ll find new ways to understand our existence and express that understanding through our writing.

It’s just a thought, but what do you think? Is this gaze something that can be shifted?