I have a friend who used to live as a homeless heroin addict on the streets of San Francisco when she was a teenager. Periodically, she writes about her experiences. People in workshops tend to respond by telling her that the experiences aren’t “realistic.”
So, it’s interesting: narratively, the fake homeless teens of our popular imagination seem to have grown stronger than the reality. Homeless teens look like they do in Charles de Lint, we think. When presented with the real thing, we balk.
Another friend of mine calls it the “tyranny of the middle class.” We have this narrative about what life is. Contrary data is discarded. The power of story, of the narratives we tell ourselves about the world, trumps lived experience from the world itself.
Would we recognize reality if we saw it?
Why do I write? I write to present the subaltern points of view. Why don’t I write realism? Because realism is only another set of formalized conventions, and subaltern life already seems unreal.
De-lurking because I read something very interesting which relates to this.
Libby Brooks, a children’s rights activist in Britain, wrote a book called The Story of Childhood: Growing Up in Modern Britain in which she interviewed different children/youths about their experiences. The final chapter featured a teenage mother, who had become pregnant accidentally, decided to have the child and continued through school with the help of her family. Needless to say she had to make quite a few lifestyle adjustments compared to before her pregnancy, and took her child very seriously.
At some point during their conversation she (the teenage mother) fiercely criticises the other, allegedly numerous, teenage mothers who have children as a means of getting benefits off the state. This despite the fact that her own experience is so contrary to this – as are those of the other teenage mothers whom she knows personally. Although absolutely nothing she has encountered supports these fears, she swallows the tabloid line entirely. It was pretty fascinating.
Reality is unrealistic.
I hope you’ll write some details about what middle class people falsely believe about homeless kids.
What did your friend’s workshops consider “unrealistic”? Can you explain it without violating your friend’s privacy? I’m just curious why a group of people would automatically reject a personal story as “unrealistic” when real life is much, much stranger than fiction. Seems pretty presumptuous to me.
It’s very odd when people declare other people’s personal stories untrue or unrealistic. The best argument one could make against another person’s experience is that it is unrepresentative – but only occasionally is that argument actually relevant; and no one’s experience is the same as any other’s anyway.
I also am interested in what the real and unreal stories are on this issue – if you cannot provide details would you be able to recommend a good site with real personal stories of homeless teenagers or kids?
I don’t understand why this is the “tyranny of the middle class” however – what about the tyranny of the upper class? Why does everyone go on about the middle class? How do you work out which class you’re in? Why are there only three? Why assume all middle-class or lower-class or upper-class experiences and opinions are the same? None of those questions need be answered; they are semi-rhetorical – I’m having a violent reaction against categorisation of people this month.
Who’s Charles de lint…?
Seconded the question about ‘unrealistic’ – what do they mean? That it doesn’t match what they think a street kid’s life is like? Or is it a case of truth being stranger than fiction? (You know – “That may have happened in real life but nobody would believe it if you put it in a novel.”)
I’d also be curious to know more about the other workshop attendance. Do the criticisms break down by class? Is it all white middle-class people saying “that isn’t realistic”?
There is nothing unusual about this. As an international student, I had to take ‘English’ classes. It became quickly obvious that I did not belong in any of the ESL classes, but no one seemed to be able to remove the requirement. I ended up getting a minor in Creative Writing from the classes I was taking because my English was supposed to be subpar.
After every story of mine that I read in my first class, I was told that I was not supposed to write fiction. If I remember correctly, the first story was about kids exploring and playing in a huge, half-completed building, the second about the way that the purge of Communists from law enforcement created organized crime overnight, and the third about the ethnic troubles in Southwestern Bulgaria. All three were 100% factual, but some people had trouble believing, for example, that construction projects in the middle of a major city would be left unfenced and unguarded for seasons at a time. Or that anyone would be idiotic enough to fire, en block, whole departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, while passing a law that the newly unemployed could not work in most industries.
But why go so far back? On this very blog, someone who usually displays a lot of insight in his posts, stated that some plot was unrealistic. No one would leave those she cares about in order to protect them from the harm that may result from their association with her, right? Wrong, but we all judge by what we know. And frankly, your friend’s experience may have been quite unrepresentative. But I’m curious to learn what seemed so strange to the other students.
I have seen this a lot on disability blogs. In a past blog where I was anonymous and talked about my then job as a hospital worker, people threatened all the time that I was making stuff up or that I wasn’t really disabled. My current blog, I am just a mom and I’m not so anonymous, I don’t have that much trouble, but everyonce in a while a particular post (mostly about my partner’s experiences in health care or with the nursing home/homebound situation) where people don’t think that could really happen in America. They sometimes accuse my partner of not managing his health/healthcare/insurance right or that he is otherwise not doing something right in order to have these experiences. Nope. Healthcare for the disabled really does suck, sometimes on catastrophic levels, and yes, it really happens in America.
But I, too, am a little lost by this post without the advantage of examples. If possible, I would also like to know what middle class people thought about what homeless kid, etc.
They think homeless kids are all gutter punks basically. Kids who choose to be homeless for the thrill of it (it happens. Have a few friends who are professionals at this, and started in their early teens…) or kids who dont want to get after school jobs so they spare change the public to fund drinking/drugs. And while this does happen, it’s no excuse to generalize every homeless kid you see. They aren’t all gangbanging, hitchhiking gutter punks from middle class homes who are just spoiled and out to con the public.
My assumption by “workshops” is that you are referring to some sort of creative writing workshop. Please correct me if I’m wrong; I have no idea what you’re referring to otherwise with “writing” and “workshop”.
If this is the case, I’m not surprised by this occurrence. A lot of people don’t know how to give useful feedback on writing, but workshops require participants to attempt this anyway. I’ve often seen people grasp at anything they can say, simply so they can say they are participating — and saying that they can’t believe the story is really easy. I suspect the bias has a lot to do with knowing that you’re working with fiction, so you end up with 15 occurrences of “hey, I’m participating, and your fiction is way too… fictional, man. Expound on this? Uh, I’m just not relating to your character. I’d never do that.”
(This is why it’s so special when you find someone who can give you good feedback on your writing.)
I’ve had that experience from my own family–denying what I lived with as a child. (I bet most children who were abused have had it, so it’s not that uncommon.)
Who’s Charles de lint…?
Google.
Unless trained to look otherwise we reference everything from what we know.
The Bigot is the one who when presented with verifiable, repeated evidence denies what is before them, or seeks to discredit the evidence quickly and then refuses to hear any further discussion.
Real life rarely occurs in nice neat categories it slops back and forth. Is one homeless? Define homeless. One person may live in a “home” “constructed” of discarded shipping crates. The same individual will often seek to deny the label homeless unless the label it self is a gateway to a specific benifit.
If you have a place to stay on weekdays but are out on the street on weekends are you homeless? If you live in your car parked at night in a fixed building with a mail box are you homeless, some say yes some say your whining but I say you are homeless.
If you can wash your hair, clothes and skin, don’t smell and have clothes that match but live in your vehicle, does that disqualify you from being attended to as a homeless person ?
Anyway I am attracted to poking logicals holes in common bigotry from all sides …. I hope you can relate