Whose Voices Count

There is an article that has been giving me pause the past few weeks. Titled, “How Your Brain Can Trick You Into Trusting People,” it is a short but sweet article written by Tim Herrera and published by the New York Times. Its premise is simple: through a repetition of habits, we develop an unconscious bias towards people who speak confidently about a subject. There are a great deal of other applications this can be connected to, including discrimination through race or gender, but I want to concentrate on one aspect of voice: a writer’s voice.

Books, I have found, are a conversation. You pick one up and read for a little while. Sometimes the conversation connects deeply with you and you feel an urgency to reach its conclusion the same night you started reading. Sometimes you find that one chapter is enough to give you time to react and respond before you move on to the next one. No matter what, our brains absorb the information that is presented to us in text and we carry it with us.

The reason why books are so successful at this is because each book or audiobook has its own particular voice. There are times when I am reading or listening to a book and become so enraged at the main character that I start yelling at them. I want to talk back, explain to them why they are acting like idiots. There are books I have had to stop reading because my exasperated eye rolls at the voice in the book prevented me from keeping my eyes on the page. There are books I have fallen in love with. It is the author’s goal to have their book carry a voice that is so strong, so confident, that the reader is forced to sit and listen to the book for several hundred pages.

Discerning which voices will have sway with a large population of consumers is the difficult task of every agent and publisher. This is the plight every author who wishes to be traditionally published faces: that it is not their accomplishment of craft, but their voice that sells the book. It is why the voices of the historically disenfranchised are so desired now after waiting for their turn for so long, because now is when everyone in America feels some degree of disenfranchisement, whether it’s because our jobs are being lost or we are losing human rights we had thought were permanent. We want to have the conversations that will help us endure what we have never had to endure before. We want books with diverse voices that defy our current perspectives because our current perspectives have been proven untrustworthy. We want someone to tell us, with confidence, that this blip in history has a purpose beyond what we can understand ourselves.

As a white-skinned, English-speaking woman in America, I have undoubtedly benefited from my voice. My first short story publication happened when I was sixteen years old because I read it aloud in front of an audience in which the editor of the magazine had been attending. Possible employers have admitted to me, in secret, that I interview so well that they considered me for positions I was very clearly unqualified for. I am able to control rooms full of toddlers and teenagers regularly and convince parents that their 5th grader should, indeed, be allowed to read graphic novels because they are a higher reading level than they expect.

But the reason I am so very good at presenting myself, the reason beyond my skin color or disarming personality, is because I first had to learn that my voice didn’t matter. From an early age, I was taught that a woman is prized by her silence. Although I saw men speaking every week on Sunday mornings, I was taught that women who ask questions are women who are patted on the head and used as examples of an “exception to be made.” My own name, Hannah, comes from the mother of a man who talked quite a lot, but was rebuked and called, “drunk,” for speaking for herself.

When I was in 7th grade, a sharp-tongued English teacher taught me something new. She taught me to write and read my work aloud. Each new day was a day to quickly finish our classwork and share our writing aloud among the only three people in the room. I still remember the way her eyes glistened when we read her our terrible poetry, the way she smiled when we wrote something particularly imaginative. She was one of the few Native Americans in West Virginia and, I admit, I worshipped her for her silver hair that hung past her waist and the stories of her cursing at students in the other class. As I spoke in her basement classroom with yellow-painted walls, I felt my voice take shape through writing. It was that same year that I finally began sharing the things I thought no one would believe, the things that had eaten at me so much that, by the age of twelve, I was already diagnosed and medicated for life-threatening depression.

I learned in quick succession the power a voice can have in the next few years. I learned that a single voice, amplified by mental health professionals, social workers, and concerned teachers, could tear a family apart. That, in such moments, it matters what words you use because it could change the course of your life forever. I learned that, after such amplification, almost everything else that follows can feel like a whisper.

My story is no exception. And it took me a long time to discover that the events of my past did not define who I was in the present. My old scars tested me, isolated me, and caused me to question whether or not living my truth was worth living at all, but I survived because I had the option of moving on to bigger, better things. I could imagine a better future for myself. When I wrote my novel, I wrote a story of a girl who needed to find herself and a boy who needed to discover that his self-hate was only holding him back from his true potential. And, just as in 7th grade, writing my story let me find my own voice.

Whether or not a voice is heard is often out of our control. We can be confident and have all the right presence of mind, but it all relies on who is willing to amplify that voice. That can be a hard truth to take in the writing world, but it is also why things are changing so dramatically so quickly in publishing. Because agents and publishers are willing to amplify people who have been quieted, who have been told that they are the exception and nothing more.

I am currently working on a diverse panel of librarians who are looking at the canon of children’s literature and identifying all the negative stereotypes that can be problematic in our modern world. These books are the voices of white and predominantly male authors who have been lauded through history for their quality of writing. But there are some things in their books that are plainly inaccurate. These are things that have been told through a filter of propaganda and racism, but because of the accolades the books have received, they can seem true. It is harmful for a Native American child to see in a picture book that the only things that represents him or her is a wax sculpture in a museum. It is harmful for a Chinese American boy to find that books in the library have illustrations that color him yellow, with dashes for eyes. Yet these are the voices that have been historically amplified, that have been preserved with time and care by well-meaning librarians with small budgets. It is long time for that to change.

Diverse voices represent more than an exception. They represent identities that have been discarded as "entertaining," or "overreacting," for far too long. We all deserve to find our voices and live our truth. There are better places; we just have to work to reach them. And, even though my voice is small in the scheme of things, I will help amplify these voices as best I can.