The Guardian reports on Jumi Bello’s essay, "I Plagiarized Parts of My Debut Novel."
In her essay, Bello writes about her determination to finish her novel, about a young Black woman who becomes pregnant. She remembers wanting to add “literary descriptions” of pregnancy, which she had not experienced, and seeking outside material.
“I tell myself I’m just borrowing and changing the language. I tell myself I will rewrite these parts later during the editorial phase. I will make this story mine again,” she wrote. “I would have told myself anything at that point. I would go to sleep at 8am because of keyed-up nerves and wake up at midnight. I stay up all night, writing through the days. I just want to get through it, to a place where I can sleep again. Looking back on this moment, I ignored my instincts. I ignored the voice inside that said quietly, this is wrong wrong wrong."
Plagiarizing your writing about plagiarism — very meta.
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She should become President, of The United States!
She has qualifications the current Resident has!
Write what you know.
If you don't know enough, don't write at all.
The rule can be broken, but only by those who are gifted enough to really get away with it.
"I would go to sleep at 8am because of keyed-up nerves and wake up at midnight. I stay up all night, writing through the days."
And she's really bad at coherence.
Didn't she just improperly* use footnotes? Isn't that what they say, these days?
improperly* you can't get much more improper use, than the complete absence thereof
I'm trying to finish a book myself. I just can't decide who's work to borrow just to help me get it finished already. Just to fill in the missing last 20 chapters. I'm thinking Joseph Heller, but I dunno. I just need to get it done and I can change it up before final copy. There is a catch, though.
The bigger question is why the unoriginal plagiarizing plagiarist got published twice. The answer is--oh, well.
How much of this self-excusing mediocrity are we supposed to read, buy, care about? Or --here in Althouse Blog-- talk about?
Serious questions. We all live with a quantum of bullshit in our lives; we all have to detect it and filter it and dispose of it; and that process is not automatic, it benefits from reflection (from "why did I waste time on THAT clickbait?" to "what IS bullshit, anyway?"). So I'm not rejecting out of hand the study undertaken here. But it needs to be (ahem) "contextualized." Is it worth 3 or 30 minutes of my remaining time on the planet, to get up close with this particular fraud and hack and her Soulful Struggle Toward True Self-Expression?
Let me guess, her writer's block and various vapors were all due to systemic white patriarchal oppression?
Jumi Bello’s plagiarism. It's another form of affirmation action. Getting something you don't deserve while depriving another of that rightful credit. Or rightful seat in college or job.
It is still plagiarism even if you change the "wording" enough to make it look like it isn't.
Bello, in the essay itself, clearly doesn't understand the basics. This is something my freshman composition professor made on the very first day- the essayists in his class could use, quote, and cite anyone they wanted in support of their arguments, but they had better not take passages and change random words to use in the body of the arguments, or it would be an instant fail. Not everyone in the class listened to this warning, and this was in the age before Google.
Blogger Owen said...
How much of this self-excusing mediocrity are we supposed to read, buy, care about? Or --here in Althouse Blog-- talk about?
The author is black.
Who does she think she is?? Joe Biden??
Are we sure this person is black and female? I wouldn't want to waste time opinionating on her case if she's actually some kind of Dolezal white chick. She could even be a guy! Or a fictional character. made up by the Guardian. Hell, she could be a plagiarized fictional character!
Look, has she had body parts removed or added? Mutilation, or I ain't got the time for it.
Perfectly captures modern journalism as a mirror of the entitlement culture of Millenials and Generation Z. My story about [something else] is All About Me.
But should someone make her feel "uncomfortable" about this she will see them canceled.
Who does she think she is, Joe Biden?
Just what the world needs...another novel about a young black girl (is she sure?) who 'becomes' pregnant.
Notice the passive voice? It just 'happened'...
You've got to admire her dedication and purity of purpose. A lot of people would have become disheartened and given up after that first failure, but she stuck to her guns and, like Hillary, she persevered. Again, more bad luck, but she's got character enough to keep at it. I look forward to her next novel, a sweeping historical novel about Napoleon's invasion of Egypt told from the viewpoint of a bespectacled Mameluke slave named Pierre.
“About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.” Quote by Josh Billings
The concept of "plagiarism" is rooted in the white supremacist notion of "property." Bello is just a solid antiracist.
Without plagiarism there would be no culture.
Well, much of life is finding what you are good at...
It's probably just a stuttering problem.
If the book was successful, the publisher simply needs to pay all gross profits, and a multiplier of profits as a penalty, to those victimized by the plagiarism, rather than paying royalties to the author/thief. And maybe thus be incentivized to run the text through a search engine comparing it with previous published works. The technology exists, use it. That would seem to me a required, automatic step in publishing books these days.
I recall when Solomon's new Organic Chemistry textbook was introduced in the late 1970s, and its author and publisher were immediately charged with plagiarism by Morrison & Boyd, authors of the most eminent, and highly profitable, OC text until then. The trial ended in Solomon's favor after Solomon demonstrated his ability to recite from memory essentially all technical content of his book, and also recreated the text to go along with the chemical equations wile testifying. Sometimes similar isn't copying, it is just how reality works.
https://www.leagle.com/decision/1980712494fsupp2181671
Then there was the presidential candidate who copied Kinnock, what a horse's backside he was!
She's being ridiculous, but it isn't too late. It's easy. Say, "The truth? It's part of my rage. I don't accept the white man's claim that words are property. They never learned this, but people are not property, and words are not property. As a matter of principle I always use other people's words in my writing. Words want to be free."
From one of her web pages:
"Jumi has just completed her debut novel and is working on a nonfiction book about mental illness, race and police brutality. Jumi’s work fights to show the marginalized that our stories matter."
She received a fellowship to study fiction at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop.
A music composition professor told his class: If you can't think of what to write, take somebody else's piece and write it backwards.
The following week:
Professor: This composition you handed in for your assignment is Beethoven's Fifth!
Student: I just took your last published piece and wrote it backwards.
I had a student argue with me that she didn't plagiarize because she copied her essay off the internet.
I had to stop and think about that.
It’s dangerous to insert quotes in your work uncredited because you intend to go back later and change them.
"... working on a nonfiction book about mental illness, race and police brutality."
Funny how those topics just seem to go together!
“About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.” Quote by Josh Billings
I wonder who he heard that from?
"Plagiarizing your writing about plagiarism — very meta."
I'm stealing that.
I'm guessing Jumi's book is outselling the recently released fictions by Dr. Jill and Megan McCain?
Way back in the the Devonian, when the Intertubes and I were young, I was active on an ACWABAWS newsgroup--oh, it was fun for a few years. One lady contributor discovered that some descriptive portion of Thomas Keneally's "Confederates" was plagiarized from Phoebe Pember's memoir, and boy was she (the lady contributor, not Phoebe Pember) mad.
She tried to recruit us academics to "do something about it."
One of my grad school profs loved telling the story of the great book review he got from a student once--as he told the student, it was still as good as when he, the professor, wrote it.
She is one melaninated privileged people. She can do whatever she wants and still be called a "hero"
So she followed the age-old advice to authors: Write what you faux.
why not re-credit the source-author of the plagiary and name-shame the plagiarizing author?
will that be too much Streisand effect ? but in whose favor ? or copy-right violation of a different sort?
Plagiarizing your writing about plagiarism. That is very meta.
(meta meta comment!)
So vert Joe Biden - law school and Neil Kinnock.
Semper in excretia, sumus solim profundum variat.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/feb/09/alex-haley-roots-reputation-authenticity
Writing is tough enough even for people who like to write.
If writing is this much of a chore to her, I suggest another field of work.
Or just get on the dole.
a young black girl who 'becomes' pregnant
I was assuming that one of two scenarios would pertain here. Either she was raped - could definitely have been date raped, could have been drugged and raped, could have been violently raped but probably not by a stranger, because that makes the story too easy - or her very responsible use of birth control failed her through no reason of her own. Basically I was assuming that it wouldn't be her fault, one way or another. I'm not, however, so cynical as to think she was going to write about a girl in a stable long-term relationship who not only was using birth control herself but whose fella was perfectly willing to - in fact insisted on - wearing a condom, maybe two, and an event cascade occurred that resulted in a single spermatozoon getting through.
In my high school it seemed to me that the main reason provided for pregnancies was "he says he can't feel anything if he wears one." This was back in the '80s and on an Air Force base in England; you couldn't get on the Pill unless you had the active help of at least one parent, probably your mom, who would tell one of the base docs (unless you also had money and could go off-base) that your periods were wildly irregular. It was a Dept. of Defense school and all our dads' and some of our moms' careers were on the line, so I don't recall ever seeing a pregnant girl at school. I know of three in my class of 48 people who either were or thought they were; the two who were got abortions and the third turned out not to be but was headed that way if she had been.
Anyway. Plagiarism.
Probably why essays and memoirs are so popar now. She may have had enough material for an essay or a memoir about being Nigerian-American or about being young, black, female, and American in China, but not enough to make up a novel with a real plot.
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