Why is your writing not for "cis-white men"?
a response to a reader
“Hi, may I ask you a question about your book? (I didn't read it yet but am about to): Why do you think it is not for cis-men?”
“Death of General Wolfe” by Benjamin West
Let me reiterate. The book is not written to deliberately alienate and exclude the group of people predetermined by their gender assignment or race. But instead, it is a book that is highly likely to be ignored or even repulsive by a category of people in society by coincidence, ”cis-white men”. Why is that, you ask of me. Perhaps the “cis-white man” would have a better propensity to inform me of this. My writing has been vacillating between uninteresting and unethical. This is the precise gap that my writing aims to address. Within this gap, the useless, the boring, I find most alluring, curious and subversive. It is within this gap of dismissal that my existence and personal lay because it escapes the attention of the oppressive structures that pushed me around from the day I was born. One may even label it Oppositional Defiant Disorder, schizophrenic or illogical, but how should an alien sound? There is no space for me to assimilate; there is no possibility for me to compete because I will permanently lose in such a game. But I sense a certain spark, knowing precisely that you may find these thoughts disturbing.
Quoting from Wikipedia:
The term "alien" is derived from the Latin alienus, which in turn is derived from the Oscan mancupatis (a proto-Etruscan tribe), meaning a slave. The Latin later came to mean a stranger, a foreigner, or someone not related by blood. Similar terms to "alien" in this context include foreigner and lander.
My writing is a response to the hegemony, which under its own view, sees outsiders as aliens or slaves. Naturally, how else could you interpret it, when the violence of language is your operating system?