"ethnic literature"

Lately, I've been trying to articulate in my mind (harder than usual!) how I feel about ethnic voices in literature... how I feel about writing as a person of color. How I am really drawn to writing about my mom, identity, hers and mine, language- this clunky, shifting object, and food, which is so connected to family and childhood. How I can get away from these topics for a little while but somehow always want to return back. How I feel guilty and boring for worrying these same topics yet still love them. How fish bones and tea leaves keep appearing everywhere. How I love and don't love the cultural references, idiosyncrasies, the gift and responsibility of explaining them. How maybe they shouldn't have to be explained. How some things can stand on their own and others can't. How I need to define myself as a person of color. How color is at one end of the spectrum... and white is at the other? colorblindness at the other? How I feel about stereotypes: they're boxes but sometimes good (or the only) starting points.

Krys Lee, who writes short stories, says in an interview: It’s important for writers to give voices to those that are underrepresented in books, but what’s most important is that writers write from a need and respond to the material that feels urgent and personal. I’m suspicious of books that tackle ?ig’ themes or identities that don’t seem to be driven by anything more than sensationalism or timeliness, but books that give voice to the underrepresented and help us see them as individuals within the larger context of time and the historical moment that delineates our lives will always be important. 

I really love this quote, which acknowledges cultural and historical structures (that seem immovable) and their personal, human counterparts- stories that feel like blood and water. Things that are dramatic and life-giving. I like how culture and history exist and are important in this perspective, but aren't necessarily defining. Literature and language, in their ability to do things and go places, can work with these structures, view them from above, become bigger than them. The only thing about this quote is I wish I knew what ?ig' was! "Big" maybe?