Authorship and Responsibility

Several students during section agreed with the critics that stated "Saturday Night..." and other works by author Lois-Ann Yamanka were racist against Filipinos. Based on what we have read in her poems, that is a fair criticism. I feel that authorship is a tricky issue. If an author creates a character that spouts controversial words, they have to take responsibility for what that character says. It's not as if the character has a life of its own, and determines what is written. Though it can be argued that a character should be real to life and uncensored in his or her use of language, the effect of the words written should not be overlooked. Yamanka should have (and probably did) expect some sort of criticism from any number of Filipinos, especially after producing various works that contained seemingly racist content in regards to Filipinos. Even though I agree that her critics have the right to call her a racist, I do not believe it to be true. Yamanka must be responsible for the work she produces, but at the same time anyone who reads it must determine their own reaction based on the work as a whole. This means that taking a few lines of a collection out of context and basing a reaction solely on the most controversial parts is not the best way to read Yamanaka's work. If her goal was to slander the Filipino people, the book most likely would have contained far more racist content, and possibly wouldn't have been widely circulated, let alone published. In the end, everyone has a right to his or her own opinion, and in this case I feel that Yamanaka's work was not intentionally meant to offend the Filipino community.