Another literary hoax. This one is particularly bad, and also particularly juicylicious at least for me because I am certain a bunch of people I know actually know this guy, who was in the late 70s-80s leather scene in SF. So certainly Dr. Bit would know him. And I bet Doss knows him. And there's a photo of him by Michael Rosen right in this article. Snort. Anyway that's the strangely juicy gossip part of it.
I consider this hoax to be totally unethical and awful. There's no room here to claim the protection of performativity or literary hoaxes as Art or how white people can write from non-white identites, there's no room for that. The dude cranked the handle of fake ethnicity and stole money, major awards - the PEN award given to a Native American writer - and claimed to be speaking for people he had no right to speak for. And to make it even worse, he got so many things wrong, and cranked the worst sorts of stereotypes.
I think a lot about appropriation and making cultural capital because I'm a translator. I'm from the U.S. And I'm taking work from other countries and cultures and presenting it to people in the U.S. So I feel like I have to be particularly careful not to claim to speak for the people I'm presenting and translating, careful in how I frame things, careful in stating what I don't know, etc. And I feel like I still make mistakes, huge mistakes, in participating in this certain yucky exoticization of the "other" that goes on, in this other-izing, and that's not my goal.
I also think with stomach-churning horror of actual people who have children with health problems or terminal illnesses, and how fucking obnoxious it is for this dude to yank that chain and claim to speak for them. I'm super perturbed that "Nasdijj"'s wife Tina Giovanni runs the autism911 site. I wonder if my own friends have relied on it for information or support? How nauseating...
Again, if it were fiction, fine. We could criticize it from knowing it was fiction, it was an attempt to approximate, it was this guy's understanding from a distance. I want to make it clear, I like lying, I love the lies of fiction, but I want to know they're lying, I want that information. I guess this is where Layne crossed the line for people too, when she wrote about her experience of rape, and people responded. It is because memoir writing is TESTIMONY. We write testimony before an imaginary courtroom of witnesses, something that was made suddenly clear to me by listening to Beatrice Sarlo talk about testimony and memoir in Argentina, in the Dirty War... When our belief in one person's testimony is destroyed, it violates a sort of social contract, and all testimony is undermined, and I believe that to be the worst and strongest effect of this kind of lie.
Anyway, back to "Nasdijj" - which apparently actual Navajo or Dine people have been pointing out is not even a name in their language, it's gibberish - And this really gets me angry beyond belief, that all these people have been pointing out the insanity, and the mistakes, for years -- and the publishers ignored it. I mean, they were making money. They had a lot invested in protecting the fake identity of Nasidjj. Oh, but the egregious errors! And how the guy's kid's symptoms were obviously NOT fetal alcohol syndrome, it's just like no one bothered to check the most basic of obvious facts. PLUS the dude was a complete lunatic, from his blog. And "Nasidjj" clearly knew what he was doing, as he wrote:
I agree. He is a murderer of culture. Mixing cultures, and fiction, and trying to approximate and interpret even when it's kind of problematic, that's all good. But man, this crosses the line SO hard. What a total asshole.
Also, it is not about whiteness, though in this case it is. For example if the world were to find out that all along, Buchi Emcheta were a very upper class Egyptian man, that would be just as fucking heinous. And it wouldn't be quite as heinous if John Updike's stories about whiny upperclass US dudes were actually written by Buchi Emcheta, though it would still be lying and violation of the social contract, but I think there's something worse about privilege and claiming to speak for people who are less privileged, though I'm not clear in my mind about this or how to explain it. Both would be bad, but there are many, many other instances of upperclass US white guy for us to refer to, so it's not like Emcheta would be speaking *instead of* or representing in the way I'm criticizing...
I have one more thing to say about testimony, identity, and social contracts. I have been writing with my laughably non-anonymous "veil of mystery" for a while now, and have had pseudonyms for 20 years. But I stand behind all my pseudonyms. And I also think here is a case where technology, where the net, has helped to verify truth of identity - if you read the whole article revealing Tim Barrus (and you should read it all) then you see how googling, online reviews, and online author lists helped to expose Barrus. I think about the possibilities of identity verification I heard at places like BarCamp. There, identity verification even through layers of anonymity was valuable I think mostly to protect monetary transactions. But I was interested in identity for the reasons I outline above, about lying, identity, and the importance of our ability to believe in testimony as a form of truth. Money and currency are, in a way, a metaphor for all that.
Even if I have several identites online, and my opinons vary from hour to hour, they're all ultimately backed up by whatever "Me" is. It's other people's knowledge and testimony that exposed Barrus as bogus. I hope that social network software people think about this! About the ways that social trust is established and what it means when people decide it's been violated.
Also in the juicy gossip column, "Nasidjj" grew up in my hometown.
Posted by: lori | January 26, 2006 at 01:46 PM