How do I write for the majority, without alienating my minority?
This is something of a companion question to How does one write from a minority culture? A question on cultural references
I have recently had a somewhat unpleasant experience reading Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver. (Loved the book, but still.) My first response upon meeting the Jewish protagonist was "ooh, finally! A fantasy book about me!" However, very soon I saw that the book might be about me, but it is not for me. For example:
My people didn't make a special virtue of dying for our religion -- we found it unnecessary -- and you were supposed to break Shabbat to save a life, including your own. (Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver, chapter 11)
The first-person narrator isn't speaking to me when she says "my people", though she is speaking about me - she is speaking to a presumed Christian audience. The explanation would indeed be needed by the non-Jewish audience, but when the narrator says so loudly "this story is not for you", it's jarring.
In other instances, Novik over-simplified Jewish ritual to make it easier for the presumed Christian audience to grasp, but making it in fact patently wrong in ways that are very obvious even to an unobserving Jew. (She states she is half-Jewish, so this has to be a conscious choice rather than a mistake.) Again, this does make the story more accessible, I can't deny it, but at the same time it says "you're not the target audience of this story". When the story is about a Jewish girl.
How do I avoid this in the story I'm telling? How do I provide the majority-reader the information they would need, without suggesting to the minority reader that I'm not talking to them? How do I avoid "here we observe the common Jew in its natural habitat"?
(Question is not restricted to the Jewish minority, but about any cultural minority. This one just happens to be mine.)
3 answers
I find it somewhat problematic that people seem to desire fantasy books not merely about relatable protagonists, but them in particular. I personally shrug it off; I don't think there's ever gonna be a tale about a quarter-Brahmin Indian, three-quarters-British undergrad with a career completely unrelated to his degree and hobbies alike, but that's neither here or there.
Because frankly, if you're going to do the representation thing for any culture, minority or majority alike, you should ideally strive for accuracy. I would actually go as far as to say 'fuck the majority readers' in this case; they wanna read a book with a Jewish protagonist, welp, they should expect to be exposed to Jewish culture. Maybe they could learn something, heaven forbid.
So my advice is thus: Don't be afraid to challenge the reader. I'd much rather get an accurate, albeit harsh depiction of, say, a woman's life in Saudi Arabia, than have it whitewashed to make it better adhere to western romanticism.
All I can say is thank God I write fantastical cultures, because the representation debate is a tangle of legitimate concerns (such as misrepresentation and lack of research) and illegitimate concerns (like believing that readers only want to read books about themselves).
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/45722. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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You should be able to use memory (or flashbacks, but I dislike them); or tell it from the Jewish girl's POV, but give her a reason to have conversations with a non-Jew, e.g. a teammate, an ambassador's daughter she befriends, or an American businessman's daughter. Or son, if you are inclined in that story direction.
Listening to the poor fools on TV, she thought, How blind a faith! She was reminded of her lessons; there was no special virtue in dying for your religion. Even Shabbat should be broken, to save a life, including your own. Should you be forced to choose between sins, avoid the worst one!
Having a conversational partner (that doesn't already know the religion) is even better, because they can provide friendly disagreement, misunderstanding and sometimes friendly laughter, along with setting (like walking, or playing a game) all of which provide conflicts and distraction for the reader from a block of exposition on some ritual that is important to her.
Another way of accomplishing that might be volunteering at her synagogue to teach children, they may not know anything either. Then your exposition can be framed in a children's story, like on the origin of a ritual. The reader feels like the MC is not talking to them, she is teaching the children. Again (depending on the traditions of Judaism, which I don't know) there might be room for interruption, by children or adults, or other minor conflicts. And the stories can be embellished to make them stories, so it is not "just the facts" of the ritual, but a longer and more entertaining version of it.
A lot of this is "show don't tell", which is always longer. But anytime you need to convey some facts to orient the reader, conveying them in an entertaining fashion is going to take more text. I personally embrace that. If the facts take half a page, dilute them into four pages of story, and nobody will even notice they learned something!
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Amadeus and Logan's answers are already good. I'd like to expand a bit about the "no explanation needed" that Logan presented.
Your assumption is that the majority-readers needs explanation. This is not true: as humans, we are good at drawing lines between dots and dealing with missing or partial information.
If a read of a jewish character performing a ritual, I actually wouldn't expect to understand everything, nor to grasp all the intricacies of a religion I don't know. If I wanted to understand everything about jewish culture and/or religion, I wouldn't be reading narrative. I would be reading essays, historical sources, and guides on the topic.
Compare this with how a lot of eastern culture is alluring to the western audiences exactly because it feels foreign.
So, if a character does X in a certain minority cultural context, majority readers are likely to accept it no explanation needed, while minority readers will understand and feel represented.
You need to explain things to majority readers only if your plot and character development heavily relies on the cultural background you're portraying. If your plot revolves around the rules of Sabbath, you want your majority readers understand them enough to make the plot effective - and in this case, Amadeus' suggestions come in handy.
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