Writing Authentically About Cultural Heritage

There is a particular kind of fear that comes before writing your own culture into fiction. It is not the ordinary writer's fear of being bad at your craft — it is something more specific, more loaded. What if you flatten it? What if you get a detail wrong that your grandmother would have known instinctively? What if the people whose lives and traditions you are drawing from feel reduced rather than seen? I spent years sitting with that fear, convincing myself it meant I was not ready. What it actually meant was that I cared. And caring, I eventually decided, was exactly the qualification. The Eucalyptus Tree — my debut novel rooted in Madagascan culture, family, and resilience — exists because I finally accepted that no one else was going to write the story I needed to write. This post is about how I navigated the responsibility of doing it honestly.

Why Cultural Authenticity Matters More Than Ever

We are living through a moment in publishing where diverse narratives are genuinely sought after — commissioning editors talk about them, prize committees award them, readers demand them. But that visibility comes with a corresponding scrutiny, and rightly so. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story, remains one of the most important pieces of thinking any writer working across cultures can encounter. Her argument is precise: the problem with a single story is not that it is untrue, but that it is incomplete. When one narrative dominates — poverty, conflict, exoticism — it crowds out everything else.

The distinction that matters here is between cultural appropriation and cultural contribution. Appropriation takes from a culture without accountability, without intimacy, without consequence for the writer if they get it wrong. Contribution is something different: it is writing from within, or in rigorous, respectful proximity to, a culture you have a genuine relationship with. Readers who belong to that culture know the difference immediately. They feel the inauthenticity in their bodies before they can articulate it. Authenticity, by contrast, produces recognition — and recognition is one of the most powerful things literature can offer.

Start With Deep Research — Even Into Your Own Culture

One of the traps I nearly fell into was assuming that because I grew up in Madagascar, I simply knew it. Memory is partial. Memory is selective. Memory is filtered through the specific household, the specific region, the specific social position you occupied as a child. When I began writing The Eucalyptus Tree, I quickly realised that my personal memory was a starting point, not an archive.

I went back to primary sources. I spoke to family elders — the ones who hold the genealogies, who remember things that were never written down, who tell you a story and then tell you what the story is actually about. I read Malagasy historians and sought out African and diaspora writers who had thought hard about how to hold a culture on the page. I looked at what had been documented and compared it against what I had been told, noting where they diverged and asking why.

This kind of research is humbling, even when you are researching your own heritage. Especially when you are researching your own heritage, in fact, because you cannot hide behind ignorance. You have to confront the ways in which your knowledge has gaps, and fill them with curiosity rather than assumption.

Avoid the Three Traps of Cultural Writing

Trap 1: The "Exotic Other" Gaze

This is perhaps the most pervasive trap, and the most insidious because it can infiltrate your writing even when you are the insider. The exotic gaze describes a culture primarily through its difference from a Western baseline — as if the Western reader's frame of reference is the unmarked default and everything else is colourful deviation from it. You see it in sentences that over-explain customs that would require no explanation within the culture, or that linger on surface detail — clothing, food, landscape — without penetrating to interior life.

The corrective is to write from inside the experience rather than at it. Your characters are not ambassadors for their culture; they are people who happen to live within it. They take most of it for granted, just as you take your own culture for granted.

Trap 2: Flattening to a Single Experience

Madagascar is not a monolith. It is home to eighteen officially recognised ethnic groups — Merina, Betsimisaraka, Sakalava, Tsimihety, Antaisaka, and many more — each with distinct histories, languages, customs, and relationships to the land. Writing "Malagasy culture" as a single, unified experience is the same error Adichie identifies at the continental level when people speak of "African culture."

This does not mean you must represent every group in a single novel. But it does mean being specific about which community your characters belong to, and not allowing one community's experience to silently stand in for all.

Trap 3: Trauma as the Only Story

Difficulty and hardship are real and worth writing about. But when trauma becomes the only available register for writing about a community, something has gone wrong. Joy is equally real. Humour is equally real. The ordinary textures of daily life — a joke between siblings, the specific pleasure of a particular food, the particular rhythm of a Sunday — are equally real and equally worth documenting. Joy, in fact, can be a form of resistance. Writing it is an act of insistence that the full spectrum of human experience exists within a culture that is too often reduced to its struggles.

Use Specific Detail, Not General Colour

There is an enormous difference between "she prepared a traditional meal" and "she made romazava, pushing the beef through the broth with the back of her spoon until the brèdes mafana leaves had softened into the stock." The first sentence gestures at culture. The second one is inside it.

Specific, accurate detail is the mechanism by which fiction generates trust. When a reader from Madagascar encounters the name of an actual dish, an actual proverb, an actual place rendered without error, something relaxes in them. They know the writer has been paying attention. And for readers outside the culture, specificity is the doorway — it makes the world vivid and navigable in a way that generalisation never can.

I drew on Malagasy ohabolana — traditional proverbs — throughout The Eucalyptus Tree. But I was careful to provide context within the narrative, so that the proverb functions as itself rather than as an exotic ornament. When a character invokes a proverb, it should carry the weight that proverbs carry in actual Malagasy conversation: not decoration, but wisdom that has earned its economy of words.

Sensitivity Readers Are Collaborators, Not Censors

The phrase "sensitivity reader" makes some writers defensive, as though it implies that their imagination requires supervision. I think of it differently. A sensitivity reader is someone with expertise — lived or professional — in an area of your text that you cannot fully verify from your own position. They are not there to approve your politics or sand down your edges. They are there to catch errors you could not see because of your vantage point.

For cultural writing specifically, I would recommend seeking readers from within the specific community you are depicting — ideally people with some reading experience, so their feedback is calibrated to literary fiction rather than to a checklist. We Need Diverse Books is a useful starting point for finding readers and understanding current conversations in this space.

Your Story Is a Document

Here is the frame that helped me most when the responsibility felt overwhelming. Every story you write about your culture is, among other things, a document. Future readers — including future readers from your own community, including children who are not born yet — will encounter your world through this text. That is not a reason to write with paralysing caution. It is a reason to write with care, with specificity, and with the full complexity that your culture deserves.

The absence of documented stories is itself a harm. When I was growing up, I did not see Madagascar reflected in the books available to me. That gap shaped what I thought was possible, what I thought was worth writing. Every authentic story you add to the record narrows that gap for someone who comes after you.

The Work Is Worth It

Writing authentically about cultural heritage is demanding — more demanding, in some ways, than inventing from scratch, because you carry a responsibility to people and places beyond the page. But it is also a privilege, and a form of service. The stories that stay with us — the ones that change what we think is possible in fiction — are almost always the ones where a writer has gone somewhere true and brought us back something real.

If you are at the beginning of this process, trust the caring. It is not fear — it is conscience. Let it make your research more thorough, your detail more specific, your representation more honest.

You can read about The Eucalyptus Tree and order your copy at the store on my website. I would love to know what it brings up for you.