American Dirt

Normally, I would save my discussion of any books that I’ve read for my end-of-month roundup of my reading. I thought, however, that this book warranted a more thorough discussion, for a few reasons. The first reason was my initial reaction to the book, so here goes…

My Initial Reaction

This book was breathtaking. Sitting at around 500 pages, it’s quite a substantial read. I inhaled it frantically in all of two days. When I was trying to work, it was all I could think about. I had dreams about it. It was so gripping and emotive, it stayed with me even when I was busy doing other things.

But let’s back up for a second. I knew nothing about the subject matter or author Jeanine Cummins when I started American Dirt; I had just heard from a friend that they enjoyed it a lot, so decided to buy it second hand. The story follows a mother Lydia and her 8-year-old son, Luca. After their family are killed by drug cartels in their home city of Acapulco, they have to flee north in the hope of reaching the US; this journey forms the narrative of the story.

This is such an important story to tell. The highly emotive power of Cummins’ writing brings awareness to a narrative that isn’t often enough told; the discourse surrounding migrants is always from the point of view of the (usually more affluent) country that they are seeking refuge in. Stories like Cummins' humanise and bring empathy to migrant populations against the aggressively dehumanising language used by governments and media, language of ‘swarms’ and ‘masses’.

The book also cleverly creates a questioning of the word ‘American’, and who has claim to it. The Spanish-speaking characters use the word estadounidense to refer to US citizens: literally United-Statesian. When we say ‘American’, we mean people from the US, but we forget (or subconsciously choose to ignore) that the Americas also include Central and South Americans. 'American' is a broader term than we have been led to believe. The dominance of language which centres the US furthers the othering of these Central and South American countries and their peoples. Cummins’ book disrupts this, crafting an important critique of our assumptions about who, and what, counts as ‘American’.

Another important thing that the novel documents is just how much migrants go through before they have even reached the US border, highlighting even more starkly the brutal inhumanity of migrant detention centres. How can anyone justify separating parents and children and holding people in cages like animals full stop, let alone when they have already been through some of the scariest and most traumatic things imaginable?

I cried while reading this book; I wept for the inhumanity and harshness of our world, and for the people who fall victim to the worst of it, even once they reach the countries that they believe will help them. I have always been passionate about advocating for refugees and migrants, but this book stoked the fire. I cried as soon as I had finished it, not only because of its emotive nature, but because of the catharsis of finishing something that I had been so intensely consumed by during the 48 hours that it took me to read it.

As soon as I was done, I felt like I had to tell people about it. I had to share it, to get people to feel the way that I had, to immerse them in this experience of reading, of briefly living, this narrative. Before that though, I decided to give it a quick online search. I enjoy reading book reviews and reactions; it creates a shared experience of reading, and there is a comfort in finding that someone had the same reaction to a book. It's also interesting when someone found things in a book that you didn’t, to hear of other people’s varying experiences of the same words and phrases on the page.

The Public Reaction

Upon searching American Dirt, though, I found that there has been a great deal of controversy surrounding it. The main reason for this stems from the frustration of Mexican and Mexican-American writers and immigrants who claim that Cummins' depictions of the immigrant experience, and of life in Mexico, are inaccurate and appropriative. Cummins, aside from a Puerto Rican grandmother, has no claim to Latin American heritage, and certainly no experience of what it is to be a Mexican immigrant.

To give Cummins credit, she did her research for this book (four years of it). But in an essay that she wrote about American Dirt, she says that her husband was an undocumented immigrant, but fails to mention that he came originally from Ireland. In doing this, she manipulates the reader's assumptions of her closeness to the subject matter. She does acknowledge her position of privilege, saying that she wishes someone browner than her could have written this story. The thing is, and as I discovered after reading up on the controversy, these people are writing their stories. But none of them have managed to secure huge publishing deals as Cummins has.

Cummins also notes that, when she expressed her concern about her position as a white writer of non-white issues, her editor told her that this narrative needs every voice it can get. I agree with this; people with positions of privilege should absolutely be using their platforms to advocate for causes, to speak up for groups whose voices are continually silenced by institutional prejudice. But I think what her editor failed to acknowledge was that some voices are more easily heard than others; they failed to mitigate for the unavoidable fact that by using her voice, Cummins could be silencing others. So how far can fiction go? How useful can a representation of a situation be if the author is so far removed from the authenticity of the experience? At what point does advocacy spill into appropriation where fiction is concerned?

I have to admit that I had a moment of selfishness and frustration that a book that had produced such a visceral reaction in me could be rooted in such privilege and controversy. I felt like I’d been fooled. How was I meant to feel about it now? How I felt about it while reading it: captivated and passionate? Or how I felt about it now: resentful and disillusioned?

My privilege is that, because I sit outside the marginalised groups in the novel, I didn’t realise any of the inaccuracies. I wasn’t in a position to know whether the Spanish used in some parts of the dialogue was accurate and colloquial (it is neither, it turns out). I took the narrative, while I knew that it was fictional, at face value. I can have sympathy for Cummins because I too tread this privileged line: of wanting to advocate and to speak up for people less fortunate than myself, but not stray over into speaking for them. Perhaps Cummins has just overstepped this line.

Cummins and her editors should have thought more critically about the implications of her writing a narrative such as this, about how they could have mitigated for the dominance of a white voice in an already-very-white publishing industry. They could have pointed the reader towards books by Mexican and Mexican-American authors, given them publishing deals too, even just named them in the acknowledgements.

I still think this story is important. Anything that could change someone’s mind about this oppressive and dehumanising migrant narrative is surely a force for good. But, saying that, even the most well-intentioned stories, when told by the wrong person, can contribute to the further oppression. Wouldn’t we all love to live in a world where anyone could write fiction about any experience, any population? However, it’s important to acknowledge that we currently don’t, that not all narratives are equal. Maybe Cummins was only wrong to write this book because of her position in a society and a publishing industry that rewards white voices on minority topics more than it does minority voices on their own experience. But she can’t deny this inequality, and it has informed the success of her book.

I felt, and still feel, paralysed by my feelings towards this novel, by the complete captivation I felt, and then by the intense disillusionment which bitterly descended over it like a dark cloak. But I’m going to hold on to both of these feelings. I’m going to use them in my advocacy, to read and promote the works of the authors who felt frustrated by the ease with which Cummins’ voice was heard on the matter. My writing about this is part of my processing these conflicting emotions; holding opposing standpoints and acknowledging that they can both be true is important to me. I think that a book can be powerfully important as well as highly problematic; the two are not always mutually exclusive. Stories, and how people receive them, are important, but so are the experiences of the authors who write them.