I'm too Gringa to set foot on Identity Island?

On how to write about ghosts or strangers

Hi my dear readers,

When I dig deeper into why writing about Cheryl stumps me so badly, one of the first thoughts that comes to mind is my identity.

I stand in the muggy waters of the in-betweens, having never found footing on Identity Island. I straddle the fences of many sub-cultures, yet do not fully belong to either. I’m too gringa to be Puerto Rican, too dark to be white, too light to be Black. Too assimilated in some circles and still too “rough around the edges” for other circles. I’m too hearing to be Deaf and too hard of hearing to consider myself a hearing person. I wrote about my hearing loss before in HuffPost.

These nuances have affected my career, education, and life. I am too blended to fit into any one category and haven’t even begun to truly dissect how fully I have assimilated just as my grandparents wanted me to. The spoken word video by Jaylene Clark Owens “Code Switching” which I listened to this week describes something I do unconsciously and highlights the reason why it is done. These small and yet exhausting ways of existing in this world take such a heavy toll on Blacks and people of color.

I’ve faced racism as a tanned skin Puerto Rican, as an immigrant child who took years of ESOL classes despite being born in NY, as the child of a Deaf adult, as a hard-of-hearing woman, as a formerly incarcerated person, as a socio-economic disadvantaged human being in the states, and as a victim of domestic violence and houselessness. But I have also benefited from some privileges and those privileges come with a price and responsibility.

What I’ve faced doesn’t compare to the racism Black women face in the United States, especially when they suffer from addiction and houselessness or other illnesses.

I am not here to compare the depth of our traumas. All trauma is deeply felt and harmful. What stumps me is that I cannot fully imagine the layers of racism Cheryl faced purely based on the color of her skin. And when I write about her, I feel I am doing her a disservice by not including her struggles.

And still, I can also imagine if I had ever just walked up to a stranger and told her that her existence and all the assumptions I’ve made about it has impacted my life, she’d probably cuss me out or rightfully think I’ve lost my mind.

But it happens. Has a stranger you’ve passed by ever reminded you of something profound? Have you, my dear reader, ever sat at a restaurant and seen a couple and made assumptions that made you change something about yourself? Have you ever just briefly met someone and knew you could be best friends or enemies?

The death of strangers majorly influenced two decisions in my life. One was Cheryl. When my houselessness experience took me into the violence of men’s sexual lives, what happened to Cheryl reminded me of the dire consequences of being a woman on the streets. The other time a man, whose name I don’t know, was drunk and drove into my Suburban truck. He died on impact. That evening, after I woke up in the hospital, I resolved to get a divorce. And I did.

How do I express gratitude, outside of candles and prayers, to the ghosts who unknowingly saved me, if not by writing about them?

Ken Liu shared some gold nuggets about writing fiction in the Words of Resistance & Restoration Fellowship event I attended this week. Some of what he mentioned applies wholeheartedly to nonfiction too. He suggested the best way to improve character development is to read a lot of primary sources, not secondary ones, to learn about people from their own accounts. For his book Paper Menagerie, he said he read personal accounts of women who have married for the benefit of leaving their countries.

But Ken’s suggestion prompted a fellow to question, “What is the responsibility of the writer for the character that she creates?”

Ken agreed the question is complex and unanswerable.

On one side, we have evolved as humans to have empathy.

Sidenote: I don’t know if I fully agree with the theory that humans have evolved that much or that we innately, based on evolution, have a sense of empathy, but that’s another essay.

Ken Liu said that our responsibility as writers is to get as close to the truth as possible. I have not read the book Paper Manegerie so I can’t attest to how true he got to the characters. And that, I believe is a judgment that only women who have been in that type of situation can make.

At the same time, Ken continued to state, “The reader’s experience is not completely up to us.” He provided a metaphor that I absolutely love.

We build a house that is a story, however, we are not responsible for the lifestyle of its inhabitants.

I guess that if I can dissect this metaphor, I can then imagine that I’ll find holes. If I don’t build a bathroom, for example, how will the residents use it? I, as a house builder, can’t forget to build the roof. So, in that, I see how I must build a story that will show Cheryl’s layers as a human, and only a woman who has been in Cheryl’s shoes can then tell me the rooms I didn’t build.

Still, as Ken reminded me and others in the event, “The reader comes with their own baggage. Thus, their experiences influence the reading and you’re not responsible for their entire experience.”

He went further to say, that we must not minimize the experience of victims of abuse, but at the same time, we must not discount agency either.”

It is hard for me to release control. It is hard for me to accept, as Ken said, that “art has room for misinterpretation and the messiness that life is actually about.”

This may be at the heart of my issue. I want to control how the readers view Cheryl because I care how others view women who have experienced houselessness. I care about this population as a collective specifically because has been judged and ignored to death, literally.

I know I must find peace, or at least acceptance, in this tug-of-war that pulls me between writing a complex, fully human character as close to Cheryl’s truth as possible and releasing the attempt to control the reader’s experience and interpretation of what’s on the page.

I guess many writers go through this and I am not alone. I’d love to hear what are some of your writing struggles and how you approach them.

Thank you for reading my dear readers. I hope you have a peaceful and safe week.