Christine Otten on writing The Last Poets, empathy and cultural appropriation

“When I look at you, I see myself,” Umar Bin Hassan, one of the founding members of The Last Poets, the legendary African-American poets of the black power era and godfathers of hiphop, said to me one day. It was 2003; I was deeply involved in the research for the novel I wished to write, based on the turbulent lives of Umar and the other Last Poets. Although I was a women, 15 years younger then Umar and from the Netherlands, it didn’t strike me as an odd thing to say. I felt the same about him. Somehow that (mutual) identification, which I didn’t completely understand at the time, had evoked the idea of writing the novel.

I thought of this when I read all the comments about “cultural appropriation”, following the lecture by the American author Lionel Shriver in Brisbane on ficton and identity politics. Shriver stated, after being accused of portraying stereotypical African-American and Mexican characters in her novel The Mandibles, that fiction writers were no longer free to write whatever they want because of politically correct thinking. “I am now much more anxious about depicting characters of different races, and accents make me nervous.”

Furious reactions followed. The Australian writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied wrote: “Cultural appropriation is a ‘thing’ because of our histories. The history of colonisation, where everything was taken from a people, the world over. Land, wealth, dignity… and now identity is to be taken as well?”

Of course this made me question my own work. As a white female author, I wrote The Last Poets completely from a black (male, American) perspective. I thought I could do that: getting under the skin of poets who wrote classic, revolutionary poems like Niggers Are Scared Of Revolution, and became world famous; young black men from the ghettos of America, who emancipated themselves through their work, who fought with each other about money and rights; who almost killed each other, in a time where the black movement was infiltrated by FBI agents; who struggled with drugs and disappointments, but also found the courage to fight back. Writing from their – “black” – perspective came naturally to me, I felt. But this didn’t happen overnight. It started with a meeting with Umar in Harlem, New York in 2000, that changed my life.

It was my (then) 11-year-old son, a hiphop fan, who introduced me to The Last Poets. I’d never heard about them. I saw a documentary about the cultural backgrounds of rap music my son got from a friend, in which, among people like Muhammaed Ali, Martin Luther King, James Brown and Tupac, Bin Hassan was introduced. I was hungry for a new subject to write about. I wanted to go to America. This is how it began.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Umar answered the phone rather grumpily. He had forgotten our appointment. “I like your poetry,” I answered timidly. The next day we met in Harlem. Bin Umar talked and I listened, for an hour and a half, me asking a question every now and then. Something happened which I found magical at the time, as if I somehow were coming home in that apartment at Morningside Drive, overlooking Harlem.

Talking under his breath, with a warm melodious voice, Umar dragged me into his world. “The Last Poets are the microcosm of black America.” Soon he started talking about his father, Sonny, who had been a brilliant trumpet player, but also abusive at times because of drinking. He couldn’t keep a job. Umar said that at the age of 11, he had tried to kill his father, after he had beaten up his mum again. He had bought a little hatchet but his mum caught him with it. “My dad saw my mum with the hatchet and beat her up again. But when he left, he looked at me, as if he wanted to say: I knew it was you.”

This story hit me hard. The hurt I heard behind the words; the guilt. I recognised that from my own childhood. My own father, like Umar’s, had become mentally ill. Not because of racism and exclusion, but from poverty and neglect. Unnoticed, our fathers had passed their feelings of shame and inferiority to us. We recognised that in each other that night. I had never tried to kill my father, but I had refused him entrance to our home at 15, when he had ran away from a psychiatric ward. “Demons,” Umar called his detructive feelings. That little voice in the back of your head that tells you “you ain’t shit”, (as his grandmother used to say). “Niggers love anything but themselves,” Umar would later write.

This was what made me want to write The Last Poets: trying to understand why a brilliant poet and a loving person like Umar had been so destructive and left his wife and children for drugs. I wanted to understand what racism, poverty and exclusion do to the soul of a person. And what gave Umar the strength to come back.

In hindsight I think: I wanted to understand my father, and myself, my own demons. That was the underlying drive that had not so much to do with skin colour, but everyting with identification and curiosity. Sometimes it’s easier to understand oneself through someone else, an apparent stranger from another world, another culture. Fiction is such a great tool for that. The novel is one of the rare places complete strangers can become deeply intimate with one another, because you can experience someone else’s feelings and thoughts.

After that first meeting with Umar, I started to immerse myself in African American culture and history. I read novels from Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Clarence Cooper, listened to jazz, soul, andR & B. I read the works of Malcolm X, WEB Dubois and Martin Luther King. But I learned most from talking to The Last Poets and their relatives, women mostly. There was nothing trivial about the “deal” Umar and I had. In return for his stories and friendship he demanded a kind of complicity. The right to defy me; treat me as a stranger from one moment to the next, as if he wanted to test my liability and intergrity. And he was right to do so: until I met The Last Poets I had lived in a white bubble. Even after living in a multicultural city like Amsterdam for 15 years, my look was still white, meaning: I registered mostly white people. When I started to write The Last Poets, I felt like a fish, swimming from one life to the other, my “I” fluid as water. That felt like a personal liberation.

It is not that an author should ask permission to create a character from a different race, but the humility towards such a character is what’s important, the Sudanese-born writer Nesrine Malik stated. She’s so right. An author should always be humble towards his characters. Only when you are prepared to completely deliver yourself to your characters as a writer, give yourself up almost, and link yourself completely with them, they will tell you something you didn’t know already. Only then something changes. That’s not the same as appropriating someone else’s identity. It has more to do with empathy. Without empathy there is no good fiction, and also no real connection between people from whatever background. Real human contact means change, because what arises from it is not you or the other, but something new. That unnameable “something” that connects us. “When I look at you, I see myself.”

The Last Poets by Christine Otten is published by World Editions, £12.99