Inappropriate

The conversation is everywhere and yes, I’m late to the party, mainly because I have hesitated to step into a conversation that is so full of protectionism and defensiveness and guilt with a long and complicated history of colonialism and power imbalance.

Late, because it’s important that a conversation happen, and because I want to ensure my contribution to it is not the written equivalent of a Molotov cocktail thrown into this dinner party of prose.

Cultural appropriation is a complicated issue. So much so it seems even those who would enforce its usage are not completely clear on its meaning. After all, we live in a multicultural society. What would it mean if each of us were to keep to our own kind, neither appreciating nor making any attempt to understand the other? No, indeed it’s the duty of the most privileged among us to make an effort to understand those whose cultures have been oppressed and suppressed.

In North America, that’s virtually every ethnic minority, although most commonly Indigenous people and those of African and Asian descent. This, of course, covers a wide swath of the planet and therefore many smaller cultures, but despite the hypocrisy (in this context) of lumping so many cultures together, I will do so for the sake of expediency.

The cultures of these many people came to us by force. Through colonialism, slavery and cruel and discriminatory immigration and foreign labour policies. The many traditional practices, languages, art and foods we have discovered were not shared properly. They come to us without nuance or context.

Many such practices were proscribed—generations of Canada’s Indigenous people were forced to speak English, practice Christian religions, cut their hair and eat European foods, for example— before, with the permission of a mainly white society, those same practices were cherry-picked, brought back because they were en vogue.

That is cultural appropriation because of its nature. Not to be confused with simply enjoying the fruits of another culture on equal footing. It is awful for the people who have experienced the crushing of their culture’s fruit to witness their oppressors drinking the wine. It should be up to those people to decide when and how to share that wine. The unoppressed don’t get to complain.

There is a flaw, of course. A question of how far the idea of cultural appropriation should go. When does a minority culture, desperate to protect itself from oblivion, step over the line and alienate itself completely?

Some lines are clear: don’t wear traditional clothing to a costume party unless you belong to that tradition. Others are less so: white writers, artists, even chefs have recently gotten flak for venturing into the lives and traditions of minorities. And some cultural artefacts have become so entrenched they are difficult to pick apart: rock and roll, operas like Madame Butterfly, movies like Peter Pan and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, books like The Good Earth and Huckleberry Finn.

In the end, an artist wishing to ally themselves with an oppressed group, to understand and celebrate their culture needs to listen first, and then keep listening. I recently learned a phrase that makes for a good rule of thumb: “nothing about us without us.”

mihal@mihalzada.com