Writing about oppressive systems

How to bring an anti-oppression politics into the historical fiction we write

I want to turn today to the question of how to write about oppressive systems in historical fiction. I believe this is a question that every historical novelist must confront because the past, like our present, is so pervaded by oppressive hierarchies of class, gender, race, sexuality, disability, nationality, and so on. This poses a challenging task for any historical novelist who is motivated by an anti-oppression politics: how do we represent those oppressive systems in a way that critiques them, opposes them, and puts forward a vision for a better future?

The easy way out of this quandary would be to represent a fantasy version of the past where oppressive systems are softened, represented as less violent, less extreme than they truly were. But I think this route would be a betrayal of our responsibility as historical novelists to capture historical truth. One might object that historical fiction is fiction and not fact. But I believe that part of what makes historical fiction different from, say, speculative fiction is the need to be true to the reality of history, even if the particular characters and stories that occur within that reality are made up. More than that, I believe that as historical novelists we have a responsibility to the human beings of the past. We have a responsibility to represent their lives with accuracy and authenticity. If we fail to represent past oppressive systems as they were, we risk distorting or erasing the experiences of those who lived under those systems.

But there’s a real challenge here. How do we represent oppressive systems in our fiction without simply reproducing those oppressive dynamics uncritically? How do we represent, say, racism or sexism or homophobia, without replicating the logic of racism, sexism, or homophobia?

To try to answer this question, I want to turn to a theoretical text that might give us some insight into the dynamics of oppression and how it can be overcome: Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I first read this text a few years ago while I was studying to be a history teacher and I’m rereading it now in my MFA program for a class on the teaching of writing. On my second reading I’ve realized just how influential this text has been on the themes of my novel series.

Freire provides the following definition of oppression: “Any situation in which ‘A’ objectively exploits ‘B’ or hinders his or her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence […] because it interferes with the individual’s ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human” (Freire 51).

What does Freire mean by being more fully human? I’ll admit that I’m sometimes wary of the language of humanization or dehumanization. On one level, all human beings are already, by definition, fully human; they don’t need anyone else to “humanize” them, nor can any amount of oppression or exploitation “dehumanize” them. On the other hand, I think we can understand what Freire means by humanization, dehumanization, and being more fully human if we think a bit more critically about these terms. What makes human beings uniquely human?

Speaking as a Marxist humanist, I would say that human beings have a unique capacity for creative labor. To this I would add that human beings also have a unique capacity to cooperate with each other and to empathize with each other. These human traits are precisely the qualities that are distorted under an oppressive system. Instead of engaging in fulfilling, creative labor, human beings under an exploitative class society are forced to engage in alienated labor. Instead of cooperating and empathizing with one another, human beings are pitted against one another through capitalist competition and oppressive ideologies of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on.

With that in mind, what would it mean for us to become more fully human? I think it would mean to more fully reach our own individual potential. To live in a society where we can fully express our creativity, where our work is satisfying and autonomous rather than alienating, where our relationships with other human beings are mutually cooperative rather than exploitative.

To be “more fully human,” then, means to reach our full potential as individual human beings. An anti-oppression politics, as Freire conceives it, means opposing all those conditions that limit any human being’s fulfillment of their own potential.

Freire goes on to write: “Although the situation of oppression is a dehumanized and dehumanizing totality affecting both the oppressors and those whom they oppress, it is the latter who must, from their stifled humanity, wage for both the struggle for a fuller humanity; the oppressor, who is himself dehumanized because he dehumanizes others, is unable to lead this struggle” (Freire 45).

This is a key insight in Freire. Oppressors, by dehumanizing others, also dehumanize themselves. Or in other words, to demystify that language of “dehumanization”: those who limit the human potential of others also limit their own potential. This makes sense if we think about all the ways that oppressing others requires a blunting of those qualities that make us uniquely human, such as sympathy, compassion, empathy for others, and so on.

According to Freire, both the oppressed and the oppressor are dehumanized by oppression, but only the oppressed are capable of changing the system, of overthrowing the existing system to create a better one in which everyone’s humanity may be more fully realized. This is because the oppressors as a class, although they are in fact damaged by the oppressive system they uphold, do not recognize this fact, existing instead in a state of false consciousness where they believe themselves to be beneficiaries of the system. They may in fact benefit materially from the oppressive system, even as they are damaged on a deeper spiritual level.

How can we bring this insight into the historical fiction that we write? We can think carefully about the positionality of our characters, where they exist within various axes of oppression. We can think about the extent to which our characters buy into the ideologies surrounding those oppressive systems: do they question those ideologies? Or do they accept them uncritically?

If a character is part of the oppressor class, then we can show the ways in which their acceptance of oppressive ideologies damages their own human potential as well as those they oppress. If a character is part of the oppressed class, then we may want to be realistic about the ways in which that character may have internalized oppressive ideologies about themselves. But at the same time we want to allow those characters agency in resisting those oppressive systems.

Characters who are part of the oppressed class may have access to a clearer understanding of the power structures they inhabit because they are not as blinded by ideology as those in the oppressor class. The oppressor class has an interest in convincing themselves that they are in the right; the oppressed have no such interest. Therefore characters who are part of the oppressed class can have a clearer understanding of the injustice of the system and thus more motivation and interest in resisting it.

As writers we need to be aware not only of the positionality of our characters within oppressive systems but also our own positionality as authors within those systems. If we belong to a dominant group along an axis of oppression, there might be a great deal of ideological unlearning we need to do in order to write accurately about that form of oppression. I do not think that this is an impossible task, but it is a difficult one which requires a great deal of intellectual humility.

One way to approach this challenge is to read or listen to as many primary sources as possible from people who belong to the group you’re trying to write about. I don’t want to suggest that this method allows some kind of unmediated access into the perspective of another person with an identity different from one’s own; as any historian will attest, the knowledge provided by primary sources is always limited in some way or another. But it’s still the best way to try to overcome the limitations of one’s own subject position and to understand the perspective of another.

Another way to approach this challenge is to read theoretical texts about the form of oppression you’re writing about, to get a more objective sense of the underlying ideological dynamics. This sort of theoretical research allows the writer to gain a more systematic understanding and to overcome some of the potential ideological blindnesses of their own subject position.

I realize that so far, this post has been fairly abstract. In the interests of acknowledging my own positionality as a writer, I’d like to be a little more vulnerable, a little more personal now. I’m a white American who writes about the history of American slavery. This is a culturally fraught position to be in, and it’s made me think a great deal about how to ethically write about oppressive systems in fiction, especially as a member of a dominant group.

Part of my research process involved reading hundreds of slave narratives to try to understand the system from the perspective of the oppressed. This gave me an insight into the lived reality of slavery—as limited as that secondhand knowledge might be compared to direct experience.

I also read theoretical accounts of race, such as Barbara and Karen Fields’s Racecraft, Theodore Allen’s The Invention of the White Race, David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness, and Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People. This allowed me to gain a more objective, historicized perspective on how racial ideologies formed and what function they serve. This, in turn, enabled me to more critically think about how my own position has affected my view of the world.

But doing one’s due diligence with research is only one part of the challenge. It’s also important to keep one’s positionality as an author in mind when making craft decisions about one’s work.

I decided from a very early point in writing my novel series that it would be a story not so much about the Black American experience of slavery but rather more so about the white Americans who created and upheld the system. As a descendant of white Southerners complicit in slavery, I was very much writing about my own cultural inheritance.

After I made this choice, I had to take the uncomfortable leap of imagining and writing from enslavers’ perspectives. This was a necessary leap to take, if my aim was to critique white supremacy from the inside, to understand the internal workings of oppressive ideologies.

But I could not tell the story from enslavers’ perspectives alone, because otherwise their worldview of white supremacy would go unchallenged. So I also had to delve into the perspectives of enslaved characters. Only by placing their perspectives alongside the perspectives of enslavers could I undercut the enslavers’ ideology of white supremacy.

My positionality affected not just my choices with POV, but also the themes of my novel series. As a member of a dominant class, it was critical for me to explore the impact of oppressive ideologies on members of the oppressor class. I do so from Paulo Freire’s framework that the oppressors are themselves dehumanized because they dehumanize others. Or, as James Baldwin put it, “Whoever debases others is debasing himself.” So, I show how my characters who are at the apex of this social system suffer, even destroy themselves, through their oppression of others.

But again, it was important for me to center the perspective of the oppressed. So I never let the reader forget that the suffering of the oppressed was far greater than that of the oppressor.

I also wanted to center the agency of the oppressed in resisting their oppression. This is a challenge because a system like American slavery is so powerful when it comes to crushing those who resist. I needed to be realistic about just how difficult it was to resist the system. This has led to some readers complaining that too many of the escape attempts and other acts of resistance in my series end in failure. But most acts of resistance against oppression in human history do end in failure. This does not change the fact that they are still liberatory acts.

By dramatizing how oppressive systems can be resisted, we can offer hope for a better future within our historical fiction—a future in which we can all be fully human.

Tell me in the comments:

• What challenges, if any, have you faced in writing about oppressive systems in your historical fiction?

• What historical fiction have you read that’s dealt with these challenges particularly well?

Book recommendations—these are the next three books I’ll be close-reading for the newsletter & podcast!

• John Keene’s Counternarratives

  “Ranging from the 17th century to the present and crossing multiple continents, Counternarratives’ novellas and stories draw upon memoirs, newspaper accounts, detective stories, interrogation transcripts, and speculative fiction to create new and strange perspectives on our past and present.” —New Directions

• Octavia Butler’s Kindred

  “The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.” —Beacon Press

• Percival Everett’s James

  “A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.” —Penguin Random House