"The editor of the Writers’ Union of Canada’s magazine has resigned after complaints over an article he wrote in which he said he doesn’t believe in cultural appropriation."

I'm trying to figure out how lame this is and what's the lamest thing about it... that writers have a union, that the union has a magazine, that writers care what's in their union magazine, that a guy who edited a writers' union magazine put the teensiest edge into some damned opinion column and the rank-and-file writers — people presumably earnest about the interests of writers as employees — got him ousted from his job... or that picture of the editor, the downcast outcast.

But let's look at the details. In a column that was published in a special issue about "indigenous writing," Hal Niedzviecki wrote:

"In my opinion, anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities. I’d go so far as to say there should even be an award for doing so — the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren’t even remotely like her or him.”

He went on to argue that Canadian literature remains “exhaustingly white and middle class” because writers are discouraged from writing about people and places they don’t know....

Apologizing "unequivocally" for Niedzviecki's column, The Writer’s Union of Canada said:

“The intention behind the magazine is to offer space for honest and challenging discussion and to be sincerely encouraging to all voices. The Union recognizes that intention is not enough, and that we failed in execution in this instance. We offer the magazine itself as a space to examine the pain this article has caused, and to take this conversation forward with honesty and respect,” the statement concluded.

Of course, "all voices" does not include the voice that says a writer can imagine and depict all sorts of characters and isn't confined to the old write-what-you-know advice. But the criticism of Niedzviecki doesn't seem to be about the crusty old advice. It's about getting out of the way so that the people who are in the know will have a better chance at gaining a readership. It's: You need to shut up so I can be heard.

That said, it was kind of awkward to stick that essay in a special issue devoted to writing by indigenous authors. I haven't seen the magazine, but it seems that one of the articles in it — by Alicia Elliott (an "indigenous Tuscarora author") — was about cultural appropriation. Niedzvieki edited her piece and then put his own opinion in the same issue, undercutting her.

Writers and cultural appropriation — we talked about this subject last September, when the writer Lionel Shriver gave a speech at Fiction and Identity Politics conference in Australia. She caught hell after saying things like:

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.

Yet were their authors honouring the new rules against helping yourself to what doesn’t belong to you, we would not have Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. We wouldn’t have most of Graham Greene’s novels, many of which are set in what for the author were foreign countries, and which therefore have Real Foreigners in them, who speak and act like foreigners, too.

In his masterwork English Passengers, Matthew Kneale would have restrained himself from including chapters written in an Aboriginal’s voice – though these are some of the richest, most compelling passages in that novel. If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled – because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to “appropriate” the isolation of a paraplegic – we wouldn’t have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.