In Response to American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

As a former English major, I love a good book controversy. I love a hearty discussion about what constitutes art, reading old “problematic” books with contemporary eyes, deciding how to reconcile literary masterpieces with their racist or sexist themes, and thinking about who gets to decide what constitutes a “masterpiece” anyway. The controversy over Jeanine Cummins’ new novel American Dirt fits that criteria. Hailed by literary critics with lots of publicity and buzz as an important look into the migrant crisis, American Crisis was named to Oprah’s Book Club 2020. And then came the controversy. Latinx writers and people of color criticized Cummins for writing a tragic, dark book about the trials and tribulations of the migrant experience as a white woman (although Cummins previously agreed with the label of white in prior interviews, she now has attempted to claim the heritage of her grandmother’s Puerto Rican ethnicity to lend authenticity to the book, a rather bold move). Critics, primarily women of color, called the book racist and stated that it relied on outdated stereotypes of Mexicans to gain traction with white audiences. It was “torture porn,” showing the suffering of flat, uni-dimensional characters without the nuance and “grey” that a Latinx writer could bring to this experience. 

I won’t try to rehash these arguments as I won’t be able to adequately portray the nuance as aptly as Latinx community members who are better able to describe their beef with this book than I ever will be able to (see Roxane Gay and Myriam Gurba). Does giving my opinion as a white person in this debate even really matter? I am clearly not the best person to judge the authenticity of this novel. My limited experience with migrant populations is based on working with patients as a medical student at Free Clinic and Bellevue Hospital, a public city hospital in New York City. I have also read migrants stories by doing chart review on the migrant experiences of Empower patients who suffered unspeakable tragedy in their journeys north. These experiences are admittedly an extremely biased sample of Mexican and migrant experiences. As a voracious reader, I can say that American Dirt is not a literary masterpiece. The characters are fairly uni-dimensional; the writing good but not great. I am on level two of Duolingo Spanish and I could recognize most (if not all) of the random Spanish words that Cummins would throw into the book, a fact that I am sure made true Spanish speakers cringe at her attempts to appear culturally knowledgeable. I wouldn’t call the book a literary masterpiece but I am also not sure that without the public controversy I would have stopped to think about the book as racist. I don’t know if calling the book uninspired means that it is also racist. Could is just be a rather poor work of art? 

The controversy engendered from this book does cause me to pause over the nature of the work we do in Empower Lab and specifically on the research study I am currently helping to lead, examining narratives of Female Genital Cutting (FGC). While different than creating a fictional work of art, I am, as a white person, working to publicize and research the narratives of African Muslim women who have experienced FGC. In what ways does my inherent ignorance of these African cultures reduce this research work to stereotypes? Does this mean that as a white person I cannot do research on these topics because I am not “of the culture?” What would that mean for under-researched minority populations if only minority researchers from their culture could do research on them (especially considering the gross lack of diversity in medicine)? 

Cummins describes in her afterword about the years of research she spent in migrant camps talking with migrants about their experiences. This research is evident in the novel where she seems to write knowledgeably about the logistics of migration through Mexico. Does reading and learning as much as I can about FGC mean that I can truly be an expert on it? Or, will I in some way fall short, as Cummins does in her novel, and end up reducing my patients to stereotypes in my research?

I was asked to give a capstone presentation at the end of one of my away rotations in gynecologic surgery. I worked for an entire month on a presentation about FGC. I learned the intricacies of classification of the types of FGC, the physical and mental health sequalae, and the available surgical treatments. Yet still, I was unprepared for the questions at the end of my presentation which I could best summarize as questions concerning cultural relativism. After summarizing various medical organizations’ stances against FGC (including the WHO, FIGO, and ACOG), one of my residents piped up and ask:

“Do you think we as Americans have a right to judge these practices which are culturally situated in an environment different than that of the United States?” 

I was floored. I am not sure I know the answer to that question. After spending these past couple of weeks reading the narratives of Empower patients decrying their experiences of FGC as deeply traumatizing, perhaps I feel comfortable passing judgment on this practice. Yet I know that my sample size is biased. These are patients in a Western country, oftentimes applying for asylum basing a case on the FGC they experienced or at threat of experiencing. These stories, while important and deserving to be heard, are not representative of every woman’s experience of FGC. 

I wish I could end this with an easy answer. Cummins example is evidence that just being aware of your white privilege in telling this story is not enough (she spends a large part of her afterword describing her trepidation in writing this story as a white person and then her ultimate decision to write it anyway). I feel convicted that the stories of Empower patients deserve to be told and that the medical community needs to know more about the practice of FGC in order to provide the best care to our patients. Yet, it is important to remind myself and my audience that there is nuance and gray that cannot be easily captured in raw numbers and statistics. There is no easy answer. Maybe that is the answer.