Junot Díaz condemns creative writing courses for 'unbearable too-whiteness'

Pulitzer prize winner Junot Díaz's blistering attack on the "unbearable too-whiteness" of creative writing courses in the US has been echoed by experts in the UK, with author and professor Aminatta Forna pointing to a "backlash" as the "centre in literature begins to shift away from the Anglo-American writer towards writers with different backgrounds".

The award-winning poet Daljit Nagra, meanwhile, has issued a similarly damning indictment of British poetry, saying that "too often editors use a euphemism such as 'taste' as an excuse for rejecting black authors because they actually mean 'I am not interested in minority writing'", and that "when 'race' is written about by black or Asian poets it is too often dismissed as something that has been 'done before', a criticism which is not generally targeted at those writing about 'love' or 'snow'".

"I believe this to be the case because unoriginal and cliched white poetry finds publishers with dreadful ease whilst unconventional black writing does not," Nagra told the Guardian.

In an introduction to a new anthology, Dismantle, Díaz writes of how, when undertaking his MFA (master of fine arts) in creative writing at Cornell University, New York, his experiences as a "person of colour" – Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey – were almost entirely overlooked. "That shit was too white," writes Díaz in the introduction, which was published by the New Yorker. "Too white as in Cornell had almost no POC – no people of colour – in it. Too white as in the MFA had no faculty of colour in the fiction programme – like none – and neither the faculty nor the administration saw that lack of colour as a big problem. (At least the students are diverse, they told us.) Too white as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture's blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and heteronormativity, etc)."

Díaz said his workshop never explored racial identities or how they impacted on writing, that students never talked about race at all, other than to argue that "race discussions" were inappropriate for "a serious writer". "In my workshop the default subject position of reading and writing – of Literature with a capital L – was white, straight and male," writes the author of the Pulitzer-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. "In my workshop what was defended was not the writing of people of colour but the right of the white writer to write about people of colour without considering the critiques of people of colour. Oh, yes: too white indeed. I could write pages on the unbearable too-whiteness of my workshop – I could write folio, octavo and duodecimo on its terrible whiteness – but you get the idea."

He stuck it out – others didn't. And Díaz says things haven't changed today, 20 years on. "I can't tell you how often students of colour seek me out during my visits or approach me after readings in order to share with me the racist nonsense they're facing in their programmes, from both their peers and their professors. In the last 17 years I must have had at least 300 of these conversations, minimum," he writes.

Forna, who is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University, said that what Díaz had "put his finger on isn't so much a blind spot, it's worse, it's actually protectionism", and that "as the centre in literature begins to shift away from the Anglo-American writer towards writers with different backgrounds we are witnessing a backlash".

"The response on the part of those writers and critics who can no longer take the centre ground for granted is to deny the validity of other, alternative voices," said Forna. "By saying race doesn't matter and cultural perspective is irrelevant, you're asserting that those writers have nothing to say and nothing to add. The attacks on the so-called 'global' novel are part of the same protectionism. It means the jobs stay with those who already have them."

Nagra said he felt that Britain "lacks language for talking about issues to do with race", and that "whereas Americans confidently articulate a language involving terms such as POC, we have BME [black and minority ethnic], which seems to hover between catch-all and don't-know-who-you-are-but-I-know-you-are-there".

The writer, who is a course director on Faber Academy's Becoming A Poet course, said that he had "always been in the company of racially inappropriate comments either about my work or those of other black and Asian poets".

"We are often described as performance poets and our work is 'lively' or 'vibrant'," said Nagra. "I feel frustrated that we are rarely appreciated beyond the content of our poetry, which is viewed as an exotic curiosity. It is rare for our work to be viewed in the context of a serious engagement with forms and traditions of the British canon as we are not fully accepted as part of it."

Nagra felt that "certain black and Asian poets" were "partially responsible for perpetuating the situation by happily imitating the dominant white style without finding a way to challenge it; we sometimes bleach ourselves to fit in".

Forna, meanwhile, said that her own university includes a "pretty diverse group" of teachers, including Naomi Alderman, Nicholas Jose and Kate Pullinger, and headed by Bambo Soyinka. "My international teaching experience (from west Africa to Western Massachusetts) was evidently of interest to those who appointed me," said Forna, adding that as a teacher, she makes space for those kind of discussions.

"Do we talk about race? Hell, yes. Sexuality, gender? Hell, yes. And everything else too," she said. "It would seem to me to be a dereliction of moral and creative duty not to do so, not to mention the implicit cowardliness in avoiding those subjects. Because this is, of course, what writers do."

Soyinka, who is planning a centre for transnational literature at Bath Spa, agreed that "we need to think more imaginatively about issues such as race and diversity". The new centre would address this need "by providing a forum for writers and students who want to cross borders", she said. "We are forming a network of international universities leading in the field of transnational writing. The centre will give emerging writers the opportunity to develop their voice through contact with a global audience and transnational community."

While Soyinka agreed "with much of what Diaz is saying", she felt "the context in the UK is very different from that in America. Yes, there is a lack of diversity on UK creative writing courses, but the problem is not simply black versus white."

Maureen Freely, who teaches on the English and creative writing programme at Warwick University – where visiting fellows have including Monica Ali, Wole Soyinka and Mario Vargas Llosa – also felt it was "such a different situation" in the UK. "For me, education is a form of conversation – we provide the structure, but we very much want what we teach to be around conversations with our students. If they're from backgrounds which are not ours, then it is our job to listen and build that in," she said.

Instead, Freely felt that in the UK "the main problem is always the cost. In the US you can get a fellowship at a place like Cornell – we don't have any provisions for MAs here," she said. "Anybody short of money isn't going to be able to go beyond a first degree."

In the US, as soon as he was published, Diaz went on to help set up a workshop for writers of colour, the Voices of Our Nation workshop. The anthology for which he has provided his introduction is drawn from the workshop's writers, and the organisation is, he writes, "something right out of my wildest MFA dreams, where writers of colour could gather to develop our art in a safe, supportive environment. Where our ideas, critiques, concerns, our craft and, above all, our experiences would be privileged rather than marginalised; encouraged rather than ignored; discussed intelligently rather than trivialised."

And "where our contributions were not an adjunct to Literature but its core".