murder.booklocker.com

I had the odd experience last night of having someone read my own words to me. A black woman. I was astounded by how different they sounded with her inflection as opposed to how they had sounded in my head as I was writing.

I’ve never consciously thought about my readers beyond wanting to connect with them as human beings. Sure, I realize that some things just won’t translate into other cultures. Like in my novel, none of the murderers at the senior center used a gun as a weapon. The centers with which I’m familiar are primarily white suburban centers. I’m guessing - could be my own bias - that most of the members don’t carry guns.

But how odd to think that someone in a senior center, perhaps in a city, would find my book “stupid” - or something like that, maybe “naive” - because I didn’t simply have the murderer shoot his victim. We talked a bit about that last night on the radio. Well, I mentioned the recent shooting over cards at a senior residence in Chicago.

We also talked about something that struck Dr. Ni as peculiar, which was my use of “the Spanish-speaking woman.” I confess I used it too often but for the life of me could not think of another way to identify her without being crude. I grew up in the whitest of white neighborhoods. The closest we came to persons of color were when the stray migrant child was plopped into school for the brief time that their parents worked on nearby farms. Mexican was used in a derogatory (two gs or one?) fashion.

Besides I couldn’t use “Mexican” generically - although I guess that my parents might. Spanish-speaking folk come from everywhere. I just read this morning in the DePaul Alumni news that Chicago has the third largest Spanish-speaking population - ahead of Miami!

Dr. Ni said that coming from California as she did her choice would have been chicana or latina. Duh! Never occured to me. But I do know enough not to use those interchangeably. Latina meaning someone of Hispanic descent born outside the U.S. Chicana is reserved for someone born here. [I hope I've got that right].

Ah me. So much to consider.