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I have two longish things I really want to put together for International Blog Against Racism Week -- one trying to Own My Skanky Race Issues around the whole thing about exoticization, and one that says all the things I was too lazy and conflict-avoidant to say about Stargate-centric racism back when it was fandom's issue du jour (and yes, there will be cats! I'll be talking about the fucking cats again -- live with it!)
However, in a profoundly rare instance of real life actually taking precedence over fannishness, I stayed out late after work, eating sushi and drinking martinis with My Puerto Rican Friend and talking about why people cover beautiful hardwood floors with crappy avocado-green carpeting, the neuroses generated by publishing your fiction on teh internets, and why women's studies classes change your life, but clueless, privileged white feminists make you want to choke a bitch. Ironically, then, I am probably in a particularly good frame of mind to post about racism...except that I'm pretty drunk. Just sober enough, in fact, to be aware that posting deep shit about race after three martinis is not a very bright idea.
Instead, I pimp! Not really fannish pimping, but two things you may not have seen and may be of interest to you, if you are interested in the intersections of race, queerness, and speculative fiction, which I tend to assume a very high proportion of people who read this journal are.
The stereotype about LGBT culture, of course, is that it's white, urban, professional, and blue-state. Like all stereotypes, there's a piece of truth hidden inside this one: it's easier, practically and psychologically, to be out when you're white and a professional in an urban, blue-state environment. At the same time, apply all the usual problems with stereotyping. As someone who grew up and came out in a mid-sized town in a red Midwestern state, I've always been pretty conscious of the false assumptions hidden in the latter part of that stereotype -- and a little bit touchy about it, frankly. It took longer for me to notice how unrealistic and unjust the first part was, too, and now I keep a weather eye out at all times for images and voices of queer folk of color, in the same way I'm always watching for images and voices of working-class and rural queer people.
That's part of why I feel in love with Deadlee's video for Good Soldier II (head down the list -- it's the fifth one) -- just general happiness at seeing a queer-themed hip-hop ballad from a very out artist of color -- Deadlee's website, where you can download the "Good Soldier II" video to your iPod for free, calls him "Cholo. Roughneck. Explicit. Fearless. Blaxican. Gayngsta. Homo thug. Grimy. Confrontational. Groundbreaking. Aggressive. Fiery. Vigilante. Sexy. Sensitive. "Queer Bastard Child of DMX & Lil Kim"."
All of which would be nice enough on the surface of it, but incidentally, it's a STONE FUCKING AWESOME video -- I guess those of you who are deeply angst-avoidant or otherwise allergic to the Tragic Homosexual motif might have some wariness, but I think it's basically a flawless piece of work -- it's raw and sad without being in the slightest self-pitying or sucking up for anyone else's pity; Deadlee is a gorgeous man with a gorgeous voice, and he's backed up by vocals on the chorus from -- I don't even know who, but another guy with a fantastic singing voice; and I think anyone with a taste for the slash aesthetic will melt into a little puddle of goo over the visuals, which are just explicitly sexual enough to avoid coyness or a retreat into metaphor, and also just amazingly acted -- the density of emotional stuff that the two young actors compress into a couple minutes of screentime is incredible, covering flirtation, romance, intimacy (physical and emotional), and grief. It's good music, it's good politics, it's complete eye-candy, it's angsty, it's unapologetic, and it's sexy as hell. Seriously, if it doesn't turn you on, I'm'a show up at your door and take your slasher's ID card away.
Pimp the Second is, perhaps weirdly, for a book I haven't read yet. But David Anthony Durham's Acacia: Book One: The War With the Mein has got to be worth noticing the existence of, whatever I think of it when I ultimately read it. It's the first book of a high-fantasy trilogy that's gotten incredibly good reviews in the genre and mainstream press (God bless Entertainment Weekly for increasingly treating fantasy and science fiction as legitimate genres to be reviewed right alongside the book-books), with comparisons to C.S. Lewis, Guy Gavriel Kay, and particularly George R.R. Martin -- so, no bad there, in my book.
What makes me care, though, is that the more I hear from Durham himself (this is his fourth novel, but his first in the genre), the more I ADORE this guy. So I'm gonna shut up and let him speak.
Why fantasy? Part of it had to do with paying homage to a genre that was important to me as a young reader. Nothing drove me to read like fantasy did. I ate up CS Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, Fred Saberhagen and Stephen R Donaldson. Ursula K LeGuin was challenging and exciting for reasons I didn't completely understand at the time. I read The Lord of the Rings in middle school, at a time when my reading level still hadn't risen from the slow start I got in elementary school. My teacher cautioned me against my reading Tolkein. It was above my reading level, she said, and I'd probably find it too difficult. If I hadn't wanted so badly to fall into this imagined world I would probably have accepted that. But I had to read that book. It wasn't easy, but pushing through such novels improved my reading by bounds, improved my self-image, stimulated my imagination and set me on the path to being a writer. Fantasy was a gateway for me, one that opened up a world of all sorts of literature and connected me with the wonders of storytelling as a way to meaningfully explore life's great questions.
In college and graduate school, I settled in to an academic study of literary fiction, but I never forgot the pure excitement I'd felt as a young reader. I found that - on the side and somewhat secretly - I was still drawn toward imaginative tales that were also novels of ideas: Octavia Butler, Orson Scott Card, Susanna Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Frank Herbert, Neal Stephenson, just to name a few. And I realized how much fantasy was becoming a part of my children's life, both in the classics and in new works by Cornelia Funke, MI McAllister, Kai Meyer, Phillip Pullman, JK Rowling, Jonathon Stroud, just to name a few. All this got me thinking...
Geek bonafides? Check.
I think women get short shrift in many genres. Trying to correct that, though, isn’t easy. Pride of Carthage, for example, could be called an ancient war novel. A bit of a guy’s genre, although I didn’t approach it that way. I featured a number of female characters – wives, sisters, mothers, and at least one stand alone. I got the feeling this attempt at some gender equality annoyed some of the guys. Like it softened the novel to include females and their issues and imagined experiences. Like it softened Hannibal to show him having any emotion about things in his private life…
But that’s not the way I see the world. In the same way I feel an obligation to people my world with diverse races, I also feel it’s only natural to give as equal a treatment as I can to female characters. (Expect even more strong female characters in future volumes, by the way.) I’d like to think that my approach to writing is always “a deliberate subversion of the unfortunate norm”. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been driven to write in the genre if I didn’t love it on one hand and feel disappointed with it on the other hand.
Subversively feminist? Check.
What I’d fear would be expected of me would be that I’d produce some sort of “black” fantasy, something that takes our world’s racial issues and transport them to another universe and gives the “black perspective”. One online reviewer said she opened the book expecting it to be primarily about black characters. Well, it’s not. I have no interest in correcting past imbalances with new imbalances, and I don’t feel limited in any way to writing from a particular perspective. My family may be African American and Caribbean, but it’s also from Scotland and New Zealand. The blood of all these peoples is in my children’s veins, and I’ve spent enough time abroad to be proud of recognizing the ties they bind.
Still, I’m proud to be a writer of color. I do think people of color have to see other people – of all colors – more readily than white people have to. Our lives and stories have always been affected by people of other races in ways that we’re tangibly aware of. In my early work, for example, even my “African-American” novels are only half about black characters: Gabriel’s Story is also about an array of white and Hispanic characters and Walk Through Darkness is a shared narrative in which the other main character is a Scottish immigrant. And Pride of Carthage is by default the story of Romans, Iberians, Gauls, Greeks and a variety North African and Semitic peoples.
Only white writers have the luxury of imaging worlds filled exclusively with variations of whiteness. I find that a bit silly, really, and also racist in ways that the writers – good people that they invariably are – don’t even notice. Having said that, I give all due respect to writers like Erikson and Bakker and Martin – and to pioneers like Ursula K LeGuin and Octavia Butler – who acknowledged diversity in our past, our future, and in our imaginations. Let’s have more from them and more like them – and a bit more diversity in the writers themselves wouldn’t hurt either.
OH, A WHOLE WORLD OF CHECK.
So you should read the book! (And tell me how it is, if you get finished with it before I do....) I'll leave off with what Durham promises we'll get if we spend twenty bucks on his novel, and I have to say that if he comes through on all of it, Acacia will be a bargain at twice the price.
No flawless good guys. No unreasoning evil. No stable boy-princes who discover their true identity and learn that the fate of the world rests on their shoulders. No easy, unearned last minute rescues. No magic rings. No traditional magical creatures. No elves, dwarves, trolls, hobbits, etc. No good = white and black = evil nonsense. That said, I didn’t set out to reinvent the genre either. I just wanted to add my bits to it. But there are still coming of age stories here, still beasts to be slain, invaders to be repelled, magic and mystery.
However, in a profoundly rare instance of real life actually taking precedence over fannishness, I stayed out late after work, eating sushi and drinking martinis with My Puerto Rican Friend and talking about why people cover beautiful hardwood floors with crappy avocado-green carpeting, the neuroses generated by publishing your fiction on teh internets, and why women's studies classes change your life, but clueless, privileged white feminists make you want to choke a bitch. Ironically, then, I am probably in a particularly good frame of mind to post about racism...except that I'm pretty drunk. Just sober enough, in fact, to be aware that posting deep shit about race after three martinis is not a very bright idea.
Instead, I pimp! Not really fannish pimping, but two things you may not have seen and may be of interest to you, if you are interested in the intersections of race, queerness, and speculative fiction, which I tend to assume a very high proportion of people who read this journal are.
The stereotype about LGBT culture, of course, is that it's white, urban, professional, and blue-state. Like all stereotypes, there's a piece of truth hidden inside this one: it's easier, practically and psychologically, to be out when you're white and a professional in an urban, blue-state environment. At the same time, apply all the usual problems with stereotyping. As someone who grew up and came out in a mid-sized town in a red Midwestern state, I've always been pretty conscious of the false assumptions hidden in the latter part of that stereotype -- and a little bit touchy about it, frankly. It took longer for me to notice how unrealistic and unjust the first part was, too, and now I keep a weather eye out at all times for images and voices of queer folk of color, in the same way I'm always watching for images and voices of working-class and rural queer people.
That's part of why I feel in love with Deadlee's video for Good Soldier II (head down the list -- it's the fifth one) -- just general happiness at seeing a queer-themed hip-hop ballad from a very out artist of color -- Deadlee's website, where you can download the "Good Soldier II" video to your iPod for free, calls him "Cholo. Roughneck. Explicit. Fearless. Blaxican. Gayngsta. Homo thug. Grimy. Confrontational. Groundbreaking. Aggressive. Fiery. Vigilante. Sexy. Sensitive. "Queer Bastard Child of DMX & Lil Kim"."
All of which would be nice enough on the surface of it, but incidentally, it's a STONE FUCKING AWESOME video -- I guess those of you who are deeply angst-avoidant or otherwise allergic to the Tragic Homosexual motif might have some wariness, but I think it's basically a flawless piece of work -- it's raw and sad without being in the slightest self-pitying or sucking up for anyone else's pity; Deadlee is a gorgeous man with a gorgeous voice, and he's backed up by vocals on the chorus from -- I don't even know who, but another guy with a fantastic singing voice; and I think anyone with a taste for the slash aesthetic will melt into a little puddle of goo over the visuals, which are just explicitly sexual enough to avoid coyness or a retreat into metaphor, and also just amazingly acted -- the density of emotional stuff that the two young actors compress into a couple minutes of screentime is incredible, covering flirtation, romance, intimacy (physical and emotional), and grief. It's good music, it's good politics, it's complete eye-candy, it's angsty, it's unapologetic, and it's sexy as hell. Seriously, if it doesn't turn you on, I'm'a show up at your door and take your slasher's ID card away.
Pimp the Second is, perhaps weirdly, for a book I haven't read yet. But David Anthony Durham's Acacia: Book One: The War With the Mein has got to be worth noticing the existence of, whatever I think of it when I ultimately read it. It's the first book of a high-fantasy trilogy that's gotten incredibly good reviews in the genre and mainstream press (God bless Entertainment Weekly for increasingly treating fantasy and science fiction as legitimate genres to be reviewed right alongside the book-books), with comparisons to C.S. Lewis, Guy Gavriel Kay, and particularly George R.R. Martin -- so, no bad there, in my book.
What makes me care, though, is that the more I hear from Durham himself (this is his fourth novel, but his first in the genre), the more I ADORE this guy. So I'm gonna shut up and let him speak.
Why fantasy? Part of it had to do with paying homage to a genre that was important to me as a young reader. Nothing drove me to read like fantasy did. I ate up CS Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, Fred Saberhagen and Stephen R Donaldson. Ursula K LeGuin was challenging and exciting for reasons I didn't completely understand at the time. I read The Lord of the Rings in middle school, at a time when my reading level still hadn't risen from the slow start I got in elementary school. My teacher cautioned me against my reading Tolkein. It was above my reading level, she said, and I'd probably find it too difficult. If I hadn't wanted so badly to fall into this imagined world I would probably have accepted that. But I had to read that book. It wasn't easy, but pushing through such novels improved my reading by bounds, improved my self-image, stimulated my imagination and set me on the path to being a writer. Fantasy was a gateway for me, one that opened up a world of all sorts of literature and connected me with the wonders of storytelling as a way to meaningfully explore life's great questions.
In college and graduate school, I settled in to an academic study of literary fiction, but I never forgot the pure excitement I'd felt as a young reader. I found that - on the side and somewhat secretly - I was still drawn toward imaginative tales that were also novels of ideas: Octavia Butler, Orson Scott Card, Susanna Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Frank Herbert, Neal Stephenson, just to name a few. And I realized how much fantasy was becoming a part of my children's life, both in the classics and in new works by Cornelia Funke, MI McAllister, Kai Meyer, Phillip Pullman, JK Rowling, Jonathon Stroud, just to name a few. All this got me thinking...
Geek bonafides? Check.
I think women get short shrift in many genres. Trying to correct that, though, isn’t easy. Pride of Carthage, for example, could be called an ancient war novel. A bit of a guy’s genre, although I didn’t approach it that way. I featured a number of female characters – wives, sisters, mothers, and at least one stand alone. I got the feeling this attempt at some gender equality annoyed some of the guys. Like it softened the novel to include females and their issues and imagined experiences. Like it softened Hannibal to show him having any emotion about things in his private life…
But that’s not the way I see the world. In the same way I feel an obligation to people my world with diverse races, I also feel it’s only natural to give as equal a treatment as I can to female characters. (Expect even more strong female characters in future volumes, by the way.) I’d like to think that my approach to writing is always “a deliberate subversion of the unfortunate norm”. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been driven to write in the genre if I didn’t love it on one hand and feel disappointed with it on the other hand.
Subversively feminist? Check.
What I’d fear would be expected of me would be that I’d produce some sort of “black” fantasy, something that takes our world’s racial issues and transport them to another universe and gives the “black perspective”. One online reviewer said she opened the book expecting it to be primarily about black characters. Well, it’s not. I have no interest in correcting past imbalances with new imbalances, and I don’t feel limited in any way to writing from a particular perspective. My family may be African American and Caribbean, but it’s also from Scotland and New Zealand. The blood of all these peoples is in my children’s veins, and I’ve spent enough time abroad to be proud of recognizing the ties they bind.
Still, I’m proud to be a writer of color. I do think people of color have to see other people – of all colors – more readily than white people have to. Our lives and stories have always been affected by people of other races in ways that we’re tangibly aware of. In my early work, for example, even my “African-American” novels are only half about black characters: Gabriel’s Story is also about an array of white and Hispanic characters and Walk Through Darkness is a shared narrative in which the other main character is a Scottish immigrant. And Pride of Carthage is by default the story of Romans, Iberians, Gauls, Greeks and a variety North African and Semitic peoples.
Only white writers have the luxury of imaging worlds filled exclusively with variations of whiteness. I find that a bit silly, really, and also racist in ways that the writers – good people that they invariably are – don’t even notice. Having said that, I give all due respect to writers like Erikson and Bakker and Martin – and to pioneers like Ursula K LeGuin and Octavia Butler – who acknowledged diversity in our past, our future, and in our imaginations. Let’s have more from them and more like them – and a bit more diversity in the writers themselves wouldn’t hurt either.
OH, A WHOLE WORLD OF CHECK.
So you should read the book! (And tell me how it is, if you get finished with it before I do....) I'll leave off with what Durham promises we'll get if we spend twenty bucks on his novel, and I have to say that if he comes through on all of it, Acacia will be a bargain at twice the price.
No flawless good guys. No unreasoning evil. No stable boy-princes who discover their true identity and learn that the fate of the world rests on their shoulders. No easy, unearned last minute rescues. No magic rings. No traditional magical creatures. No elves, dwarves, trolls, hobbits, etc. No good = white and black = evil nonsense. That said, I didn’t set out to reinvent the genre either. I just wanted to add my bits to it. But there are still coming of age stories here, still beasts to be slain, invaders to be repelled, magic and mystery.
no subject
Date: 2007-08-08 07:39 pm (UTC)From: