The Vancouver skyline, viewed through a rain-spattered window.robertnowland
When Sadia Shepard first read Mavis Gallant’s short story The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street, she thought to herself, “This feels so Pakistani!”
Gallant’s 1963 story contains no outward nods to Pakistan. It features a Canadian couple in Switzerland and their friendship with a young woman − another Canadian. To Shepard, a Pakistani-American filmmaker and writer, their situation mirrored those of many Pakistanis living abroad. She was inspired.
Foreign-Returned, Shepard’s first published story − it appeared this January in The New Yorker, as Gallant’s did 55 years before − flaunted the Canadian literary legend’s influence. In Shepard’s piece, the Canadians in Geneva have become Pakistanis in New Jersey. Key plot points − and sentences − are also distinctly echoed.
In a high school English class, this approach gets you an F. But in the literary world, Shepard’s story arrives alongside a number of acclaimed retellings of classic literature − such as Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire − that serve as a counterpoint to the issue of cultural appropriation.
In these examples, writers from minority communities “borrow” from the towering works of the Western canon to create new writing that both affirms the universality of the original and expands its field of imaginative vision.
Shepard’s story hews closely to an original storyline and characters, similar to a cover of a hit song. Other retellings grift so loosely from the original’s themes and plot points that they might go unnoticed. Shamsie’s Home Fire, a revisioning of Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone as a Pakistani-British family saga in the age of the Islamic State, falls in this category.
“You need to put the old text aside,” Shamsie advised in an interview with Foyles bookstore. “It wasn’t as though Antigone was in the structure or skeleton of the book. Antigone was in the marrow.”
Another common approach is to “remix” the story, creating a new story from underlooked characters or elements in the original. In her 1968 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys foregrounds a tertiary figure in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre named Bertha Mason. Literally the madwoman in the attic in Bronte’s 1847 novel, this character of Creole heritage (renamed Antoinette Cosway) becomes the keyhole through which Rhys, a Dominican-born British writer, explores racism and colonialism.
A robust reboot aerates through a classic’s blind spots. Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation arose from Albert Camus’s inability to imprint humanity on the unnamed Arab murdered by Meursault, the existential anti-hero of his first novel, L’Étranger. Daoud’s novel not only gives a name and family to the Arab, but situates them in the Algerian Independence movement. “With the anonymous Arab,” Daoud told The Los Angeles Review of Books, “I saw a breach in this classic of 20th-century literature.”
In his 2011 novel, Pym, Mat Johnson responds to Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. While Poe’s 1838 Arctic adventure novel is obscure, its influence − and its Gothic caricatures of racial categories − can be traced to everything from H.P. Lovecraft’s work to John Carpenter’s film The Thing.
Speaking about the 18th- and 19th-century U.S. literature he’s absorbed as both a middle-class, university-educated American and a descendant of slaves, Johnson says, “I have inherited the keys to the house, though it was never explicitly built for me.”
For my latest book, The Plague, I reworked (in “cover version” mode) Camus’s 1947 novel, La Peste. Reading this existentialist classic in university, I saw it as a font of high culture that might cleanse me of the social awkwardness and claustrophobia of my immigrant upbringing.
By updating Camus, I knew it was necessary to contextualize his tale of disease and exile in our day and age. In my version of a city quarantined during an epidemic, I set the story in Vancouver, where it could be used as a metaphor for present-day malaises such as inequality and an unchecked opioid crisis. All of the main characters in Camus’s original were Frenchmen; they needed more colour and gender balance to accurately reflect my world.
Lauded in some circles, this type of cross-cultural, revisionist appropriation has also elicited calls of plagiarism. In 1999, the U.S. publication of Italian writer Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary was halted for copyright infringement: It was written from the point of view of the underage love object in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. A lawyer representing the Nabokov estate dismissed it as “inferior and amateurish merchandise.” Pera’s American publishers argued her work fell under the country’s “fair use” guidelines. (A settlement eventually allowed the book to be published with a preface by Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, and half the author’s royalties donated to charity.)
In Sadia Shepard’s case, the author acknowledged the debt owed to Gallant in an interview with her editor posted alongside her story. “My aim was to make my intentions clear,” Shepard says by e-mail, “and, for those unfamiliar with Gallant’s story, perhaps even encourage readers to discover [the original] and draw parallels and comparisons between two different time periods, settings and expatriate experiences.“
Despite these efforts, the novelist Francine Prose criticized Shepard’s close borrowing.“Is it really acceptable to change the names and the identities of fictional characters and then claim the story as one’s own original work?” she asked in a letter published in The New Yorker. “Why, then, do we bother having copyright laws?”
Asked about Prose’s response, Shepard cites one scholarly defence of her story that imagines, from a poststructuralist lens, every text overlaid by a reader’s personal and socio-historical experience. “The idea that a reader might ‘author’ text as s/he reads it in a postcolonial context is one that resonates with my own experiences as both a reader and a writer,” she adds.
Given this pushback, however, you could play it safe. Borrow only from long-dead authors such as Jane Austen (hello, Bridget Jones). Bypass politically charged themes. But that means taking a knee on the broader discussions of representation and inclusion in popular culture.
In my retrofit of a classic, I had not only those discussions in mind, but also the students in my undergraduate creative writing classes at UBC. Some come to me previously “woke,” asking for more writers of colour on the syllabus. Others, however, submit stories set in a cartoonish version of Manhattan starring characters with WASPy names unlike their own. Because that’s how literature “reads” to them.
When I think of the non-white characters in my novel, I see myself photobombing a classic novel. I hope it allows others to see that possibility, too.