Recently reading Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha got me thinking about our current attitude to authors who write about ethnicities and cultures other than their own. I studied a post-colonial module in university and it wasn’t a conversation that regularly appeared in 2013, but ten years down the line, I think society – especially western society – is a lot more conscious about the need for white authors to steer away from poor representations of non-white people.

It’s always funny to me to see ‘men who write women‘ online. The paradoic ‘She boobed boobily down the stairs’ is great, but there are real examples:

Her legs, he thought, were almost certainly the legs of a virgin, dry and without hair,

The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

Indeed, ask any mother to show you her sodden, hairy legs. I’ve seen some awfully written women, to the point where it’s embarrassing and I’ve had to put the book down. What strikes me is that it comes from a lack of education, whether it’s basic sex education, or interaction with women. Men who write women poorly clearly have not put in enough effort to engage with women, and instead present an idea of what womanhood is in their own head, often drawn from stereotypes.

And this is exactly what happens when white authors write about the experiences of non-white people.

JK Rowling is notorious for having other cultures as stereotyped side characters in her Harry Potter series. Cho Chang, the Patel sisters, Seamus Finnigan whose ‘dad’s a muggle and mum’s a witch’, who has a strange habit of blowing things up – Irish commentary anyone? The novel series is set in the 90s, where the white population of the UK was around 90% (as identified in the 2001 census), that would likely be reflected in a wizard school setting.

Rowling’s main characters are white, described as such, or by notable aspects of their appearance, like Ron’s red hair. Hermione’s ethnicity is sometimes interpreted as black or mixed race, but based on Rowling’s habit of stereotyping other characters, I’m not convinced it was her intention to have Hermione anything other than white. The non white characters are tokens – using one of the most common surnames of each ethnicity (Patel, Chang, Finnigan) or given ragingly problematic names like ‘Shacklebolt’. In my opinion, it’s a lazy, tokenistic attempt to present a ‘diverse’ school, reflective of the 90s.

But those characters are not the focus of the novels. The series is set in the UK, a western, predominantly white country, and more specifically set in Scotland, the home of Rowling herself. The Hogwarts structure is similar to the private school experience of the UK. The political structure of the Wizarding World is reflective of the UK political scene. Rowling writes about what she knows, just a ‘copy and paste’ into a fantasy world.

So what about when a white author sets their novel in another country? When it’s done well, it’s done well, right?

Arthur Golden’s prose in Memoirs of a Geisha is beautiful, reflecting what we as western readers imagine Japan to be in a romanticised way. One description that stands out is the main character’s interaction with nature: the moment she reflects on the life of a moth in comparison to herself as a river. It gave me chills to read, and I was sure that Golden’s depiction of Japanese culture was at least accurate, if it couldn’t be truly authentic.

But Golden was sued for defamation. It was only once I’d finished the novel and started my own research into the culture of geisha in Japan that I realised that the plot had been concocted from interviews with Mineko Iwasaki, who wrote her own memoir Geisha of Gion in 2003 in response to his novel. Memoirs of a Geisha was also poorly received in Japan, due to Golden’s embellishment of geisha culture with the inclusion of the mizuage ritual and other implications that geisha are essentially escorts, highly trained sex workers.

I remember one of the greatest criticisms of the books discussed in the post-colonial module was the inauthenticity, the underlying racism from authors. We read Kim by Rudyard Kipling, an author who set many of his novels in India, who was born in India, but returned to England at five years old. Again, he presented a stereotypical, sometimes romanticised, sometimes offensive attitude to life in India, offering a surface level understanding of culture and society.

Then books like The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy provide a more complex insight into life. Why? Well, she lives it. Roy was born and has lived in India her whole life, enabling her to write about Indian culture with honesty, authenticity, accuracy – all things that a white, western author can’t achieve, no matter how much ‘research’ they do. A white man – or woman – does not know what it’s like to be a Japanese woman, or an Indian boy, let alone one in a specific aspect of the country’s culture.

Then there are the frustrations of non-white authors in the publishing industry. In comparison to white authors, it’s been near on impossible for authors of non-white ethnicities to break into the mainstream. I’ve always been a supporter of Barthes’ Death of the Author theory – that the meaning of a text is not determined by the author’s intention but by the reader’s interpretation – but when it comes to literature in a post-colonial world, I think we need to be conscious that popular novels about non-western cultures written by western authors aren’t necessarily accurate representations, and we should start looking to pick up books written by authors from those cultures instead.