David Treuer's "Native American Fiction: A User's Manual"

Carrie Devall has sent AatA a review of David Treuer's controversial Native American Fiction: A User's Manual, a book she mentioned in a comment a few weeks back. She also sends a link to Shannon Gibney's fascinating interview with David Treuer for Gibbon's "Thinking Souls" Literary Series, that I think many readers of this blog might find interesting.

Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, by David Treuer, Graywolf Press, 2006.
Review by Carrie Devall, April 2009

I stumbled on David Treuer’s book of essays, Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual on a library shelf while rooting around the Minnesota poetry and fiction collections to learn more about local writers. Treuer’s novels are The Translation of Dr. Appelles, Little, and The Hiawatha. He lives on the Leech Lake reservation in northern Minnesota, and also in Minneapolis where he teaches at the University of MN.

I mentioned NAFiction in a comment here before I got to the part where Treuer makes comparisons between Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony and Luke Skywalker’s 1977 movie adventures, as “products of their time and the story that surrounds them.” That should give you some idea of the wide-ranging and anti-beatifying approach he takes to analyzing his genre. While its focus is very different, I think the book could be a useful resource for speculative writers trying to develop their own style and voice who have to contend with all the issues surrounding being a writer from a particular community, like endlessly being pigeonholed as “the ____ writer,” or as “not ___ enough,” etc., as well as for speculative writers working on projects of ‘writing the Other,’ beyond the beginner’s issues.

In this book (and in more depth in online interviews about the book), Treuer discusses the responsibility of writers from his P.O.V. as a fiction writer (and avid reader). He starts with the idea that all writers appropriate, but balances that with discussions of the writer’s awareness of how and what they appropriate, and how a reader will interpret the text. He also discusses his own conception of his responsibility as a writer to the community made up of individuals whose culture and language are being used to create a fiction, or a novel (a particular form of fiction that works in certain ways and does a certain kind of work). He develops ideas about what constitutes “good faith” on the part of a writer in “appropriating culture,” as opposed to what kinds of representations effect violations of self and the other.

Treuer lays out an analysis of ‘culture’ as something real people enact in their real lives, in contrast to a novel, which uses literary techniques to put together words on paper in a specific language (here, English) to depict people and their lives, culture, and forms of community. Fiction writing relies on the use of symbols, metaphor, all the abstractions that lead to ‘representation’ of people as certain kinds of objects, symbols, or ‘ghosts’—the analogy he uses to talk about how images and ideas about Native Americans are constructed by other people. Alongside the ‘ghost’ analogy, he also places the questions about non-Indians writing about American Indians in the context of a history of Indians being “written about as if [they] were silent for decades and decades and decades,” always the subject of ‘expert’ study but never the ‘experts.’ (partly quoting from an online interview)

His analysis is centered around the importance of style, of being aware of the assumptions that readers will likely bring to a text, for the writer to be able to avoid unintended ‘readings’ of the text, but more to be able to use awareness of those assumptions in crafting the text to best achieve the writer’s intended effect. He also takes on the political issues surrounding his favoring analysis of ‘style’ over analysis of the ‘origin’ or ‘authenticity’ of the author, style, and/or content of the text. I read his approach as steeped in an awareness of exactly how he is seeking to intervene in a debate over those issues that has gone on for decades. He is open about his particular agenda as a writer of novels that do not follow all of the conventions that many people have identified as “the way to write Native American fiction,” and as a man who grew up and lives on the Leech Lake reservation, speaks Ojibwe, but is not always perceived as someone who “looks Indian” or lives a stereotypical “Indian life.”

Treuer holds his cards close to the chest in interviews as well as the book, but to me this book read like a performance—the performance of a shrewd and skilled fiction writer and reader with a subtle sense of humor, masquerading for provocative effect as a more bristly and brash critic than his thoughtful and detailed analyses of books and literary theories reflects.

The book could be read for titillation, because he does a lot of nitpicking about the writing of big names in the genre and how specific writers talk about their novels and their body of work, and how they market their persona. However, he nitpicks to make larger points, and mentions that many of these people he knows well or considers friends. He also displays much respect for their craft, with the exception of Sherman Alexie, with whom he seems to have a personal beef aside from the fact that Alexie is one of the icons to whom every other (male) Indian writer has to put up with being compared to. I found that Treuer’s analysis of the performance aspect of Alexie’s public persona is constructed to support Treuer’s own project of performing a different, (ideally more expansive and freeing) idea of who a Native American writer and critic and what “Native American fiction” as a genre could be (as well as simply doing it by writing his own novels).

The book has a fractured focus, which seems to stem from Treuer switching positions, back and forth. The first is his position as a writer, serious about his craft and contribution to literature, caught between personal annoyance at the limits placed on him by the conventions that have grown up around the books labeled as a genre of ‘Native American fiction,’ resistant to being forced into the roles of token, spokesperson, and by nature of writing a fictional text becoming an ‘expert’ on anything and everything Indian that the text touches upon. The second is his position as a critic, reader, and writer who seeks to contribute in a concrete, constructive way toward pushing writers, readers, and critics to rethink those conventions and the limits they place on writers, to ask new and different questions. Negotiating the tensions between these two positions and covering all that theoretical ground is a big project; the essays tend to throw out a bunch of provocative questions and brief samples of how one could go about trying to come up with answers to those questions to address the specific problems he raises, rather than provide detailed, thorough analysis. (This made the book very readable, not overly long or dense.)

The essays I found particularly interesting examined specific novels closely in terms of the literary techniques the author used to create the effects that lead readers and critics to say they “represented” Native life or culture in an “authentic” manner. The essay “Smartberries,” Treuer’s analysis of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and The Antelope Wife, focuses on her use of languages, Ojibwe, English, and German, and her varying use for literary effect of translation by context, by explaining the meaning of words or phrases, or by lack of explanation. The position he takes as a critic in this essay is as a native speaker of Ojibwe, unlike Erdrich, so the analysis is partly one Native writer’s analysis of how he feels another Native writer succeeds and fails at writing his particular language and culture (and related ones) as ‘the Other.’

In the process, Treuer asks a lot of interesting questions about why Erdrich might have used the particular literary techniques she used, suggesting particular interpretations that may or may not be fair, but the cumulative effect is to point out many places where future critics could do fruitful study and analysis of Erdrich’s work and the work of other writers. He points out, for example, that Love Medicine primarily used Ojibwe nouns, as solitary words, where the language relies heavily on verbs. He questions what effect that has on the novel’s representation of Ojibwe language and culture. He also asks about the responsibility of a writer in crafting representations of a ‘dying’ language that people are working hard to keep alive in their very real lives.

Because I had this sense of the book as a performance of ‘the provocative critic,’ I found some of the negative reviews of the book amusing. The way Treuer structured that essay around an Ojibwe story involving the eating of ‘smartberries’ (rabbit turds) allowed him to succeed in luring critics into the trap of taking him to task for telling them they’re full of rabbit turds for taking issue with his analysis. In a way, this is a silly distraction, but his careful use of style in his critical writing brings home his point that focusing on questions of authenticity of the writer or the novel are a distraction from these other issues that he raises. Form, style, and content are closely linked in the essays, which gave me particular pleasure as a reader. And the traps Treuer lays seemed to me to make the statement “you’re purposely missing my point, stop evading the issues and look again,” not “I’m right and you’re wrong.”

One of the throughlines of the book is an insistence on specificity and thoroughness in literary criticism, on analyzing particular novels by Native American authors in terms of their literary craft and methods instead of the personalities and public personas and/or ‘political’ projects of the authors. He takes issue with the idea that any writer’s novels simply appear out of the ether or out of tribal history and culture as ‘products of culture,’ emphasizing the importance of the writer’s own time, effort, thought, and work to master craft and figure out how to ‘enact culture’ in a written form that has its own culture—literary tradition. He questions the ways writers (particularly Silko) claim they use ‘traditional’ myths and storytelling techniques, and analyzes how these are actually used in their novels. He also analyzes specific literary techniques that James Welch and other writers used to create a heightened sense of historicity about their fictional characters and the characters’ dialogue. These parts of the book might be particularly useful for speculative writers.

Some critics take his arguments, as Treuer says he anticipated critics would, as a call for a return to earlier methods of criticism that insisted that only the text matters and there should be no consideration of the larger context in which texts are produced and read. He specifically acknowledges fears that his project is an attempt to ‘turn back the clock’ and roll back the gains of thirty years of identity politics. (That by saying “style is what matters,” instead of the writer’s identity, means ‘white people can write Indian.’) But Treuer spends a good portion of the book criticizing white readers and critics and the effects of publishing industry marketing practices for the reductionism, colonization of the styles and content of the novels written by Native American writers, all the issues of white people trying to ‘be Indian,’ ‘have Indian spirit,’ and all that stuff that ‘identity politics’ is particularly useful in analyzing and countering. He also uses the example of (a former Klan leader using the pseudonym) Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree to examine how imitating certain literary styles allows ‘imposters’ to write hoax texts that are received as ‘Native American novels’ or biographies until the identity of the writers is unmasked.

I thought he managed to make a solid case for reading Erdrich, Silko, and Welch as amazing literary stylists, period (in fiction/literature as the unmarked state), whose skill as fiction writers should be appreciated and examined thoroughly, and he does this without recoding the writers as ‘not Indian.’ Some critics of this book disagree, because he tries at the same time to take issue with ‘what is Indian’ in a novel, and his lines of analyses get convoluted at times, but I think it’s pretty clear Treuer is not arguing that any of these writers are ‘not Indian.’

He goes to some pains to make it clear he is calling for something different than a return to old (white, Western) styles of criticism. And that his focus is on opening up opportunity and space for Native writers, and on the way in which standard ways of configuring identity politics limit or constrain the development of individual writers and Native American literature as a whole, having a cumulative negative effect on how people feel they are required to write their novels, as well as whether people can get published and how their work is received and marketed.

I ended up wanting to re-read the novels he analyzes in order to study them more closely, both out of curiosity about whether I agree with him and in the hopes of learning more about literary craft and techniques to improve my own writing in a very different genre. In particular, I became curious about his criticism of Leslie Marmon Silko’s use of the feminine figure who heals the male hero through being sexually receptive to him in Ceremony, as being sexist and also questionable in terms of the psychological healing process enacted in the story. My head is already filled with conflict over this issue, with the writings of Jungian analysts of myth and fairytales who decry the historical Western suppression of the feminine and ‘the goddess’ clashing with feminist criticisms of tired old tropes. Treuer’s analysis made me want to reread Ceremony to examine the use of that trope in that novel.

Also, halfway through Treuer’s essay about Sherman Alexie, I began to want to reread Alexie’s novels to see whether Treuer might be missing something about the way Alexie’s use of the “angry young man” as protagonist works in his novels, and whether that affects some of the flaws Treuer identifies in those novels. When a book of literary criticism sparks my mind in this way, generating new theory kernels to examine and giving me the urge to reread books, I have no problem calling it “thought-provoking.”

* * * * * * * * *

To illuminate Carrie's review, here's a taste from Shannon Gibney's interview of Treuer:

DT: But I guess I do feel like there’s a depressing lack of ambition among many writers, not just Native writers. Writers in general, who just want to write a book. They sit down and say, “I just want to write a good story.” You know, it’s a bit disingenuous. They want more than that – I’d like to think they did. You know, “Oh, a good story, that’s so sweet!” Especially writers of color – don’t they have more to do? Shouldn’t we think? But there’s this anti-intellectual strain in America, where intellectualism is somehow bad.

One of the writers who I cover in Native American Fiction, who shall remain nameless, was mad about one of the essays. I showed it to him/her, and they said, “Oh, so you wanted to be an academic.” And I said, “No, I wanted to be a thinker.” But I believe, I feel that we need to put a lot more thought into what we do. Especially when we know that people read our stuff as culture. Even we don’t intend it that way, we know it’s being received that way, so don’t we have a responsibility to keep that in mind when we’re creating?

. . . . .

[...] What passes as a “smart” book, the inheritors of Eliot’s and Nabokov’s and Thomas Mann’s efforts. To write books with really simple characters, who have very simple emotions, with language that replaces complexity with quirkiness. So we don’t have any complex language or complex characters, or complicated cross-purposed agendas. Instead of this, we have books that are quirky and extravagant. “Oh my God! His dog’s name is Sammy Davis Jr., Jr.!” (the dog’s name in Everything Is Illuminated). “Isn’t that hilarious!” So this quirk has replaced intelligence.

I’ll tell why people like these books. Because most readers, they don’t trust their own taste. They don’t trust they’re going to understand a” smart” book. But they will, if they get into the mode of reading them.

Reading takes practice, like anything else. Any reader can sit down with The Magic Mountain [Thomas Mann], and enjoy it. But, since readers don’t trust their own tastes, since the market doesn’t trust readers, since editors don’t trust writers, what we have now in these so-called “smart” novels are young adult novels dressed up as literary fiction. Simple plot, simple character, extreme emotions, extreme situations. Like The Life of Pi [Yann Martel], another great example. It looks deep, but it’s really very wide and shallow. “You put a tiger in a boat – isn’t that crazy!” And it’s selling readers short, I think.

That is authors then abdicating any responsibility, with a few exceptions – Richard Powers being one of them. I think he’s just incredible. The Time of Our Singing is just outstanding. It’s about race in America in the last 50 years, and it’s the most amazing book. It’s far more complex than [Toni Morrison’s] Beloved.

There are very few books that are about much anymore. But I’m trying to bring that back, in ways that are enjoyable. Because I think you’re right: people associate that kind of thought with whiteness, or that anything that makes you think is somehow suspect. Especially books about culture – they’re not supposed to make you think. They’re supposed to make you feel. Which is why Ishmael Reed is not a best seller. He should be, but he’s not. Because he makes you think.

SG: So what do you think the critic’s role is in all of this?

DT: Well, I think it’s like T. S. Elliot said, that you really can’t have healthy, vibrant literature without healthy, vibrant criticism. And there’s an awful lot of criticism out there about a great many things, but not a lot of it is about Native American literature.

I was putting it to a friend this way last night: “You are now allowed to be a non-Native critic of Native literature, so long as you take the writer’s word for it.” And this is an honest and heartfelt response to a pretty sticky situation. You know how it is, how often we’re spoken for. Everyone else is the experts about us, we’re never experts about ourselves. We were written about as if we were silent for decades and decades and decades.

Native American criticism, growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, alongside multiculturalism, began to address that, and suggest that these books have value. But the main argument is somehow faulty: That these have value not despite the fact that they’re different, but because they are. So they were read for difference where, in some ways, difference didn’t exist.

Most Native critics are in the same situation as many Native writers, where criticism is a kind of wish-fulfillment. Books are a portal into cultural connection for the writer and the critic. People feel, “I really want to believe that these books perform culture.” Because for Native critics and writers, it’s a way to have a connection with their culture.

I had my own identity issues so long ago, and that’s my private business. I know who I am, and where I belong, and who my people are. I don’t need anyone else to approve it. I don’t need anyone else to give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I don’t need my books to make me feel better about myself, or my place. I skipped all that. I speak Ojibwe, and that’s a great thing. And I don’t need books to do that for me.

Books are for thought and pleasure, and the thrill and magic that literature can bring. And for their inventiveness, not for their truth – except for maybe their emotional truth. That’s what books do for me. I mean, I love that. I can’t live without that. But it’s not about who I am. A lot of people like stories of cultural re-connection. And I’m not interested in that at all.

* * * * * *

A lot to think about, yes?

The Race Fail Challenge

Micole asked:

What would it take to change our community from a primarily English-speaking, English-writing community to a genuinely multicultural one? What might that change look like, and what might it bring us?

A significant, telling catch here is "primarily English-speaking, English-writing": I suspect that most members of our community are monolingual. (This being a shameful consequence of educational priorities and values in the US.) To make our community multilingual would require either that most of the people in it be removed and replaced by multilingual writers and readers, or else that a massive educational program teaching monolingual people to read several other languages be carried out.

Since the latter solution would take at least a generation to accomplish and I'm middle-aged and the publisher of a small press, what I'd like to see would be a massive project of translation. The problem with that? It takes money. I have for some time been thinking of all the feminist sf texts in other languages I'd like to make available-- and sighing wistfully without any sense of how to make that happen. There are governments in the world that pay to have texts translated into English, but the US Government has no interest in funding translations of texts from other cultures into English. Small presses like Aqueduct are unlikely to be able to afford to pay for translations, while corporate publishers are required to make profits for their owners, so it is unlikely they can be prevailed upon to undertake a large-scale initiative to do this. There might be a collective solution to this, but it would take a massive amount of effort and organizing to bring off.

And of course there are more general problems. One of the ironies of the Internet is that communities continue to be isolated from one another by both lack of contact and incomprehension. Lanugage is only one important barrier among several. It is worth noting that although the US and British f/sf communities flow into one another, communication is often sketchy. (I myself am often baffled by the frames of reference and priorities of many Brits who are active in f/sf; I know I don't get what they're saying and why. But I sometimes feel that I don't know how I could even begin to remedy that.) And there's even less flow between the US and the Australian f/sf communities. The fact is, for the US f/sf community, chief among the cultural barriers that go beyond language-differences is the assumption that not only is the center of the community in the US, but also that he center is inhabited by a certain set of persons, institutions, assumptions, and texts, and that the rest of the f/sf community must accommodate itself to and privilege that definition of the center. (As we continually see when those assumptions are challenged.)

A multicultural f/sf community would find it necessary to be in touch with other f/sf cultures around the world as intrinsic to its own health and identity. It would see the presence of heterogeneous elements as vitalizing-- and, moreover, as expanding the size and scope of the field. This is such a no-brainer, given the longstanding plaint of people in the field that the readership of f/sf has been shrinking, that one can read the lack of general rejoicing at the increasing presence of people of color writing and reading sf, attending cons, and blogging about sf, as indicative of something akin to the hatred of immigrants (who have contributed so much for so long to the US economy and culture).

A final word: in case you haven't noticed, the idea behind this challenge is that utopian visions can be useful for illuminating the paths of change. Once again, we need to remind ourselves that this is not the way it has to be. 2008 was a watershed year in the US for seeing beyond what is: but given how quickly we humans compartmentalize, we can never have too many reminders that it doesn't have to be this way.

RaceFail '09: This hurts us all

Micole (a poster here) was outed by W*ll Sh*tt*rly and (eta: name removed per request³). Although they have now removed her legal name, neither of them have prevented others from outing her in their comments, and WS has deleted his LJ¹ and (eta: name removed per request) has taken down the entries (be warned, the one outing Mely leads to a malware site). WS has noted he will not out anyone, but quite frankly, given that he had apologized to Mely, Willow, Deepa D, and Vom Marlowe only a month before, I do not trust anything he says (the apology was on his LJ, which has been deleted). In interest of full disclosure, I note that Mely is a good friend of mine, as well as an ally I value a great deal.

I am disturbed and frightened by WS and (eta: name removed per request)'s actions, not in the least because they tie directly back in to issues of gender, race, class, and other social injustices.

Here's a timeline of RaceFail '09, so people can decide what they think themselves.

SF media and book fandoms and power

RaceFail has, from the very beginning, had authors and editors on one side and readers and consumers on another. Although authors and editors and readers and consumers are not and never will be mutually exclusive categories, it is fair to say that those who have more power in the SF/F publishing world (Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, the Nielsen Haydens, Emma Bull, W*ll Sh*tt*rly, (eta: name removed per request)) were arguing against people who did not have power in that world (Willow, Deepa, Mely²), with the exception of some SF/F authors and editors such as Nora Jemisin, K. Tempest Bradford, and Liz Henry (eta: Nora and Tempest and Liz are also arguing against that power, as they are not as firmly established and are therefore risking more).

Veejane has posted about SF book fandom versus SF media fandom. I generally do not agree with posts that hold up media fandom (eta: this circle of media fandom, not all media fandoms) as something to be learned from, as it is not a haven to fans of color or a hotbed of diversity. However, the divide between SF book fandom, particularly the segment that is directly involved in the publishing industry, and SF media fandom exists, and as a whole, SF book fandom has had more professional power in terms of the publishing industry, more men, and probably more white people. It's not some accident or random twist of fate that created this divide. The unofficial nature of media fandom is indirectly responsible for its relatively larger diversity—and I never thought I would say this, because being more diverse than media fandom is not that high of a bar—institutional power makes it that much easier for white people, abled people, male people, middle-aged people, middle-class people to get in and to stay in. There are, of course, disadvantaged people in SF book fandom and in SF publishing, and I personally benefit a great deal from people like Nalo Hopkinson and Tobias Buckell and organizations like the Carl Brandon Society and Wiscon. But the face of SF book fandom is very limited.

This is why WS and (eta: name removed per request)'s attempts to reframe the argument in their own terms is so harmful. They are attempting to force a conversation which started in LJ and make it follow their own rules. WS is doing so after having had an LJ for many years, and both WS and (eta: name removed per request) are doing so after many people have told them repeatedly about pseudonyms and about the dangers of outing. It is widely agreed upon by nearly everyone in media fandom that outing someone is unacceptable; furthermore, this is not LJ specific. Political and personal bloggers around the internet have lost jobs by being outed, and that's only one consequence. The important thing is not that they are reframing the conversation around pseudonymity and outing, it is that they are reframing the conversation so that it once again leaves that of race and racism in SF fandom. This reframing of the argument is not dangerous simply because of this one incidence of race fail; it is dangerous because it is representative of what happens when a group with more power and a group with less power argue.

This reframing is a cousin to the tone argument (search for "tone"). Both are ways of asserting power, of staking metaphorical ground; they are rhetorical forms of control that deliberately uphold current power structures. Mely writes, "This conviction, in the face of public conversation and well-documented timelines, that a discussion about race in science fiction is about the personal grudges of white people -- this inability to recognize, hear, or speak to the people of color involved in the discussion -- this in itself contributes to the institution of racism and the continuing whiteness of science fiction." Note how frequently WS and (eta: name removed per request) refer to race and racism in their posts. There has been an amazing moving bar of who has the "right" to speak; first, Deepa and Willow didn't critique Bear's book properly because they were too "emotional;" now we are too educated, not oppressed enough. Furthermore, WS in particular has had a long history of changing the subject. The arguments happening don't start with WS talking about classism; they start with someone else talking about racism. This is power at work, trying to keep itself in power.

SF book fandom, where are you?

Although a few authors and editors have come out against what WS and (eta: name removed per request) have done, where is the rest of the fandom? Like Jane says earlier, "Where are the con-comms, going apeshit to distance themselves from these serial fails of race and culture? Where are the guests-of-honor, specifically inviting underserved communities to visit at an upcoming con? (Where are the "discount if this is your first con evar" programs?) Why aren't the SF organizations like SFWA (okay, bad example) having a cow and putting out official position statements on outreach? Where are press-releases from the publishing houses, explaining their diversity efforts (in their lists and in their workplaces)?"

Why the resounding silence? Editors, authors, fans—all the people who were not talking about RaceFail and what people in their field were doing: where are they?

If the prior months of RaceFail were "both sides behaving badly" (which I disagree with), what is this, and why has no one said anything?

Mely previously wrote, "Is group protest always right or good? No, it's not. It's a way to establish and enforce community norms, and it's only as right and good as the community norms are. It can be profoundly oppressive and profoundly abusive. But silence in the face of injury is also a way to establish and enforce community norms. You don't opt out of a community by remaining in it and never commenting on its big controversies; you just opt to abide by whatever party wins."

What SF book fandom is telling me—a woman, a person of color, and a long-time fan of SF books and a con-goer—what you are telling me is that you don't care. That these are, in fact, your community norms, that you are all right with people who have more power in your community (by virtue of profession, race, and gender) using that power to harm other, less powerful, members of your community. That you are fine with the erasure of women, of people of color, of those without the same professional privileges you enjoy, and that you are willing to stand by silently and let people be hurt. This is how it affects us. This. And this.

Your silence speaks volumes.

The intersectionality of threats

Even though this started as RaceFail, it does not affect "just" race. For one, that assumes that people of color only suffer from a single oppression. Secondly, as many, many people have noted, outing can be threatening on many levels, and I would like to highlight that it can seriously harm women who are being sexually harrassed, GLBT people who are not out, POC who have been threatened, and etc. Media fandom is a safe space for some people. Again, this is something I never thought I would say, as it has proved time and again that it is not a safe space for all people. But in this particular case, it is more of a safe space than SF book fandom because of media fandom's lack of business deals and money-related matters, because of the general lack of ways to retaliate in the offline world. The act of outing comes out of the attempt to control conversation and thereby acts as an attempt to control the people having the conversation, and it comes from not just from two individuals trying to silence an anti-racist ally, but also from a community with more power in terms of gender and race.

WS and (eta: name removed per request) did not do this in a vacuum; they did it in an environment in which they could reasonably not fear many consequences (and as far as I can tell, they will not suffer consequences at all, save being banned from some blogs they probably never visited). They may not have knowingly taken advantage of this power, but they did regardless. And right now, that same environment's reaction is saying that it's ok.

This is why I think a threat to one of us is a threat to all of us. It is upholding a social norm that makes it ok to make threats against people talking about issues of social justice, and even more, it is upholding a norm that says these issues of social justice do not exist at all. I do not think feminists or GLBT activists or anti-classists or anti-ablists will be attacked right this second. But I do think the reduction of social justice is something that affects us all. If nothing else, these few years in my communities have taught me that yesterday's classism is today's anti-Semitism and becomes tomorrow's misogyny. And quite frequently, these attacks hurt the same people, because oppressions do not come singly.

What I want

I want to know if this is the norm for SF fandom. I want to know what SF fandom is doing to welcome oppressed groups—actively welcome, because simply saying "Come in" to someone who has just been assaulted in your house is not the same as showing them the precautions you have taken against further assault. I want to know if I and my allies will be safe.

But mostly, I want to know what you who have been silent are going to do.

I say this because it is all too easy for me to stay on the periphery. So don't tell me. Show me. Not via links or comments, but by making changes—in yourself, in one aspect of your life, online or offline, public or private, large or small. Help us all change.

What I'm going to do

I'd like to spend this week focusing on POC; in particular, I will try to catch up on all my backlog of book write ups by and about POC. I am going to read the 12th POC in SF Carnival. I will continue working on making my blog a safe space for oppressed people and issues of social justice. I will work on my pieces for the Asian Women Blog Carnival and the Remyth Project. I am going to continue to deal with these same issues of safety and trust and social justice offline.

eta: Also, any pointers about bringing up these things and dealing with them offline are incredibly appreciated.

Rules of discourse

I will be on- and offline periodically tomorrow, but I will still be moderating comments. I will also attempt to coordinate any ETAs on this post and the one in my LJ, although there may be a time lag depending on my internet access.

Notes:
¹ It was deleted when I wrote this, and he restored it while I was editing this prior to posting. (eta: deleted again as of 3/5)
² No, I don't think having worked nine months for an SF/F publishing house thirteen years ago is the same as being an editor or an author right now.
³ I removed the poster's name to prevent Aqueduct from having to suffer any consequences for my own statements, which are not associated with those of Aqueduct Press.

x-posted here

YACAP (Yet Another Cultural Appropriation Post) aka Get over It

The cultural appropriation debate recently raging on LJ and elsewhere is actually two debates: one about cultural appropriation and the other about racism. Racism is pretty big and pretty psychologically and individually fraught for people, and it informs the first debate, shades and distorts it. Without clearing away the racism debate -- if that is ever possible -- it is difficult to have an undistorted version of the first debate -- again, if that is ever possible.

We will be seeing this debate over and over through the next few years. Obama's presence in the White House keeps bringing it up, a grain of sand in the American psyche that itches many towards contemplating the fact that the experience of the world may be different for someone else due to their race or gender or economic class or sexual orientation or physical abilities or a thousand other categories.

For many of us, we no longer outnumber the Other in quite the same way psychologically. Our relationship to it has changed. For others, we have always been conscious of being an Other: through race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth.

Many of us who have spent time thinking about this have seen extended discussions of race, the Other, oppression, and cultural appropriation come up in various arenas (often those academic disciplines so often stifled or decried -- women's studies, queer studies, black studies) and be dismissed out of hand in a variety of ways. We may have ventured opinions and seen them cried down with arguments that are echoes of the approaches currently being used in the spec-fic community.

For example:

• "This debate is just too big/scary/energy-draining for me! I'll be over here hiding from it!"
• "This is just more PC craziness. Ignore it and it'll go away."
• "You're stifling my writing ability by attacking me/making me think about my writing/saying I can't write about certain things/distracting me/etc."

Kynn talks about a lot more of them eloquently and well here: http://kynn.livejournal.com/948395.html I think this is a tremendous post to look at as well: http://vito-excalibur.livejournal.com/208031.html

Is anyone saying that works that do not confront race (or class or sex or gender or Otherness) are categorically wrong or dishonest or Bad? No.

But many people, including myself, are saying that works that factor in such things are a valid way of writing, and perhaps should be the norm rather than the exception.

And many of us, including myself, are suggesting that the benefits to factoring them in far outweigh the many straw men erected around the idea of ignoring them. If you deliberately choose to avoid race and other categories in your fiction, I think that's fine as long as you're doing it from a position where you know what your options are, rather than just falling into the normal stereotypes. The latter is lazy writing.

I personally believe that if you're not thinking about race and class and gender as factors that affect your personal existence on a daily basis, that if you see things as invariably binary, always black/white, up/down, Good/Evil, you are deliberately blinding yourself, depriving yourself of another way of perceiving the world. Such perceptions end up changing things, moving you out of painful binaries to a more joyful, creative, mindful existence. And I think as a writer, such modes of antiquated thinking turn your back on many of the possibilities of your craft.

Where do I stand in this debate? Am I saying I'm not racist, either as an individual or writer? Goddess, no. Like every other being on this planet, and probably this universe, I have a difficult relationship with the other. We are all primates at heart, and when a different looking creature walks into our camp, we want to throw feces and bare our fangs at them first. But the lovely thing is that we are all self-aware, and we can look at that reaction and (often) move past it in a way rewarding to both sides.

For (hopefully) a few of you, this is something you have never thought about or that you've dismissed out of hand. I'm sorry to say, but I think this is no longer a debate you can ignore.

Some reactions to the debate seem to originate first and foremost in defensiveness. I know it is painful to have your worldview challenged -- believe me, I feel for you.

At the same time, I think it's necessary surgery and that once folks start adjusting to the idea that it's no longer black and white but rather a rainbow of possibilities, we can put aside some of the energy-wasting bullshit and move ahead together to a better world. Yes, I'm well aware that I sound like an idealistic idiot, because I also believe that we make things possible through idealistic idiots such as the Abolitionists, the Suffragists, and a thousand other varieties of philosopher and activist being willing to express and live their beliefs.

I firmly believe that we can become better people by contemplating our actions, by seeing where they are shaped by outside circumstances, and trying to make an informed decision based on what we learn from that contemplation. Race -- as well as other factors -- are an odd combination of our outside circumstances as well as our internal state. To know a character's circumstances is to have more profound knowledge of the character. As a writer, I believe this sort of examination results in finer, deeper, truer writing.

If you are feeling hurt or attacked or shamed or embarrassed by this debate, that is sad and too bad, but honestly -- get over yourself. No one is interested in making you feel bad. What people would like to do is move along down to where the debate is productive, where it begins to change outmoded/racist/sexist/ablist/

agist/elistist/whateverist ways of doing things and moves us towards a more enlightened era. I would think that science fiction writers would be intently eager to find out what could result from changing ways of thinking on this scale, that fantasy writers would explore the worlds such changes might produce. It startles me when this is not the case.

Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM 2009: Update

A few people (Liz Henry, I know, but also others independently) observed that this is more like Round III than Round II of the Cultural Appropriation Debate, if not actually Round 300. So I'm re-titling this Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM 2009 to avoid sticky numbering issues. There have been many, many updates and participants; once again I am indebted to Rydra Wong for her comprehensive link dumps. This is simply a selection of the posts I found most relevant, thought-provoking, or moving.

I am grateful to the women of color who gave me permission to link to their posts, despite previous bad experiences with influxes of hostile commenters, and I hope that anyone going through these links will consider their words carefully when commenting.

Avalon's Willow has posted several updates on the (disappointing and infuriating) responses to her Open Letter to Elizabeth Bear:

• Ahem, Ms. Bear?
  
• My Close on This Chapter
  
• Why It's Never Over
  
• Is It Wrong to Point and Laugh? Twice?
  
• Why It's Never Over - Part 2
  

Sparkymonster sums up the exchanges in a question posed in Bear's blog:

I have some questions for you. Why haven't you actually called out any of your defenders who were being racist? You name checked nojojojo in the context of her post, and kenscholes as someone who can handle direct criticism. Why not say "hey, medievalist it was awkward how racist you've been in defending me from a criticism I agreed with" or "Hey truepenny and coffeem it sucked how you didn't notice the racism that was happening while discussing reading texts closely." Or how about cdguyhall began comments on this post of yours by saying racist things, and went pretty much unchecked despite you ending that post by saing "And make damned sure you are being both polite and respectful of others when you do. Or I will close comments."

Or your lack of response to the next comment by rolanni which says "So, all storytellers should shut up because they can never tell everyone's story for them, correctly and exactly as that person would tell it, if they could? And we shouldn't even try, because we'll only Get It Wrong?

*is depressed*

Going back to bed, now. I shouldn't read LJ when I'm sick."

By not freezing those threads, or clearly saying "cut it out", you are implicitly telling people reading the post that you think those are acceptable types of arguments to make. And that people making them are somehow being polite and respectful.

Basically, you set off a bomb which resulted in a lot of PoC being hurt and wounded. I understand you may not have realized you were setting off a bomb, but after it happened I didn't see you doing much to protect or help PoC that were injured by the shrapnel.

Yes when I burrow into comment threads I can see you having discussions and going "oops I didn't realize my privilege goggles were still on" but at that point there has already been a ton of people saying and doing hurtful things who believed they were helpful, and doing things you were OK with.

What I'm seeing a lot of in comments to this post are white people praising your insight and strength in apologizing. What about the strength of PoC who have been engaging in this discussion while having their intelligence insulted and their humanity belittled? What about the time and energy PoC and white allies have put into this discussion only to receive complaints that things weren't phrased nicely enough? What about mentioning that this imbroglio has resulted in the comments and posts by PoC being referred to as "Orcing" (apparently a racist step above trolling). Orcing, as in a reference to dark skinned, mindless savages who live to destroy things. Nothing racist there. Nope.

Apologizing for making a mistake is good. Acknowledging the fullness of what happened is better.

Delux Vivens dissects the idea that

Text is always an innocuous beam of pure starlight which personal experience *never* has any sort of bearing on; it merely enters through your ajna chakra and slips down slowly into your throat, from which elegant and suitably academic explications de texte flow like the finest lavender honey made by lissome elven beekeepers.

Oyceter explains why IBARW will not be participating in the Diversity 2009 project proposed by participants in the debate.

And several women explore the implications of decolonizing the mind:

Bravecows:

It hasn't been uncommon for people who meet me on the Internet to tell me that they thought I was British.... I don't find this especially pleasing, but there is a kind of satisfaction in it, and it's the satisfaction of having pulled something off. That 'something' being -- talking right, writing right. IRL it is impossible for me to pass as white; I look pretty definitively East Asian and my accent is obviously Malaysian (though more on that later), but in writing ... I'm not saying that anyone who writes in grammatical English of a certain flavour will sound white, but there are Englishes and there are Englishes, and I've become aware that the English I adopt in writing is basically the equivalent of the Queen's.

Deepa D.:

I do not want to be blind to race.

I want to see the glossy dark brown skin of the new President of the United States, as his beautiful smile dazzles the world.
I want to see the epicanthic folds that crease as Lucy Lui laughs.
I want to see the nose that Jon Stewart points to as he calls himself Jewy McJewson.
I want to see the blue eyes in a a close up of Cameron Diaz.

Oh, I do want to see race. Dreadlocks and thin straight hair and thick springy hair and silky straight hair and wavy hair, and nappy hair and oily hair and black and brown and reddish-golden and white and gray hair. Hirsute and hairless chests, brown and pink nipples. Noses straight and curved and tilted and flattened and lips broad and narrow and everything in between.

Shewhohashope:

I don't remember the first time that I was walking down the street and someone yelled at me to go home, but I remember not understanding. At first because I usually was going home, and then because I didn't see how they couldn't understand how much I wanted to. I do remember my mother holding my hand and pulling me after her, crossing the street, keeping her head down and moving faster while people shouted abuse after us. Safety is an illusion. I may not wake up to the sounds of gunshots anymore, but there is always someone willing to remind me that I'm not safe, that being who I am makes me unwelcome. A man shouting a racial epithet at me as he walks by. A woman pulling at my headscarf. A drunk man stopping from walking by him while his friends stand by and laugh. You soon learn that no matter how crowded the street is, no one will help you if someone decides to become violent.

Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM, Part II

There have been a number of recent posts, mostly on LiveJournal, revisiting topics raised in the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM (see also Cultural Appropriation Revisited). If I had to single out one post as most critical, it would be Deepa D.'s I Didn't Dream of Dragons:

When I was around thirteen years old, I tried to write a fantasy novel. It was going to be an epic adventure with a cross-dressing princess on the run, a snarky hero, and dragons. I got stuck when I had to figure out what they would do after they left the city. Logically, there would be a tavern.

But there were no taverns in India. Write what you know is a rule that didn’t really need to be told to me; after having spent my entire life reading books in English about people named Peter and Sally, I wanted to write about the place I lived in, even if I didn’t have a whole bookcase of Indian fantasy world-building to steal from. And I couldn’t get past the lack of taverns. Even now, I have spent a number of years trying to figure out how cross-dressing disguise would work in a pre-Islamic India where the women went bare-breasted. When I considered including a dragon at the end of a story, I had to map out their route to the Himalayas, because dragons can be a part of a Tibetan Buddhist tradition—they do not figure in Hindu mythology.

There are far more eloquent writers who have pointed out how difficult it is to growing up reading books (and watching movies) about a culture alien to you, and how pernicious the influences thereof can be. I am lucky in that Indian culture is more widely represented in Western media than other colonised regions—when I talk about Bollywood in the yuletide chat room, there are people who have an idea about what I might be referring to, bastardised ideas of ‘pundit’ and ‘caste system’ and ‘karma’ and ‘reincarnation’ are present in the English vocabulary. Yet still, my ability to connect fannishly with people from different parts of the world is mediated through the coloniser’s language and representation. Enid Blyton, with her hideous caricatures of African tribal boys helping the intrepid British children is read from Johannesburg to Jaipur—Iktomi stories are not.

These imbalances of power are what frustrate me in several discussions regarding issues of representation and diversity in writing that I’ve seen recently. I am summarising some positions that I have heard, and my responses to them.

One of the most frustrating arguments I’ve encountered is—If you hate it so much, stop bitching and write your own.

This naive position stems from the utopian capitalist belief that all markets are equal, and individuals are free to be what they can driven only by their inner divine spark.

Other posts, roughly in chronological order (with much reference to helpful index posts by Rydra Wong):

Jay Lake, Another shot at thinking about the Other
Elizabeth Bear, Whatever you're doing, you're probably wrong
Micole, I blame Tempest
Avalon's Willow, Open Letter: To Elizabeth Bear
yeloson, The Remyth Project
Elizabeth Bear, Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else's liver
Micole, Resistance and Individuality
She Who Has Hope, Cultural Appropriation and SF/F
Deborah Kaplan, Race and reviewing
Cryptoxin, Cultural appropriation
Sarah Monette, race-(class-sex)
She Who Has Hope, Cultural Appropriation and SF/F (Once More, with Feeling)
Friendshipper, Cruel little lies
Yeloson, Othered, Only Because You Say So
Betsy, Getting called on your white privilege
Deepa D., White people, it's not all about you, but for this post it is
Vassilissa, About the Current Racism and Othering Discussion
The Angry Black Woman, What Is Cultural Appropriation?

Cultural Appropriation in Fantasy Writing: Learning to Laugh with Each Other

Within western fiction written by whites, there is always the problem of writing about other cultures. I don't mean writing about people not of one's own race, although that sort of diversity poses its own problems.

I mean, writing about other people's cultures and not falling into the many, many traps that await the unwary writer. These problems are especially acute in science fiction and fantasy, where most writers trade in describing places distant in time and space. Some of the goals of the informed writer should include:

• Not sucking


• Not including incorrect information


• Not reducing incredibly complex cultural formations to bite-sized, simplified versions that have no resemblance to the original except that they include whatever Westerners find sensationalistic


• Not sucking


• Not being racist


• Not exacerbating colonial power structures any more than is inherently unavoidable in the process of a privileged person making money off of a non-dominant culture


• Not making your characters into marionettes that wander around reciting a westernized understanding of their cultural values (e.g. a Chinese character who enjoys proclaiming, "I care a lot about family and duty, more than I do about my own individual identity!")


• Not lazily playing into historically damaging stereotypes, such as portraying African women as not caring about their children


• Generally not reducing the other culture (or its people) to a westernized caricature


• Not sucking

That's not a complete list.

My own preference as a reader often leans toward the slow and imagistic. I like things with careful, precise language, things that feel beautiful. However, I've recently begun editing for a podcast (see adendum). This has shifted the way that I'm reading stories. I've found myself yearning for things that are more fun -- things that grab me and make me laugh.

I also hope to find and publish a good number of stories that are set in times and places other than the generic European setting filled with generic European characters that The Angry Black Woman aptly titles Blandy McWhite.

My slush pile has thus far included a few fun medieval stories, in which Whitey McBread characters duke it out with swords, while Whitey McPeasants and Whitey McMilkmaids go for a tumble in the totally-not-English pastures. These stories are great. I've put a few of them on hold, and we inherited a few from Escape Pod's stock.

My slush pile has also so far included several beautiful, carefully detailed stories that take place in non-western settings, stories that are written with a respectful, perhaps even reverent gravity.

But so far, I've seen very litte funny work that takes place outside of the default fantasy setting.

Now, I don't want to criticize the stories in my slush pile. I have lovely slush. I'm mostly looking at reprints, so the stories I get have already been deemed excellent by more experienced editors than I. I'm also getting subs from some of my favorite writers, from established masters like Peter Beagle to newer writers whose fiction is funny, moving, and startling in turns. My slush is less like dirty snow than it is like a bed of pearls. In any case, the problem is with no one individual story, but with the overall pattern. The problem isn't the excellent stories that are present; it's the stories that are missing.

The near absence of comedic non-western stories is not a unique feature of my slush pile. It's also a pattern that I've observed in many different kinds of media. Fantasy novels, especially, but also television shows and mainstream books.

When I went to the Book Expo in San Jose last weekend, I heard a variety of writers whose books were set "against the tapestry of war-strewn foreign lands." I am sure these books contain moments of humor, but the framing is about the seriousness of life outside the west. This emphasis on understanding the social and economic problems of third world nations is a first step toward anti-racism. However, it's also a variety of orientalism, exoticism, and/or romanticism.

Binyavanga Wainaina describes this effect in an essay that was published in Granta, "How to Write About Africa."

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

...

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

I've often framed the debate about cultural appropriation in terms of respect and knowledge. A writer must have respect and knowledge of the culture sie's writing about. These things are not sufficient, but they are certainly necessary.

I think many white, western writers have learned how to write respectful, knowledgeable pieces. Not all writers. Not all their work. But I think this is a step that the science fiction community, and the community of writers in general, is aware needs to be taken. The definitions of "knowledge" and "respect" vary from writer to writer, of course, and even stories that are respectful and knowledgeable have their problems. But I think we acknowledge the necessity for these two traits. (Or damn, at least I hope we do.)

But most westerners seem to be so nervous when they treat other cultures that they put on kid gloves before entering them. We render other cultures grave, and somber, and beautiful.

The mood of these stories is so similar that they often seem to blend into each other, one into the next, even though the characters, plots, and settings differ. The tone with which they are told has the same cast. A lovely cast, frequently, but the same cast. Individually, the stories are respectful and knowledgeable and frequently excellent. Taken together, though, the trend of them feels orientalist and appropriationist -- because, as a mass, they present such a one-dimensional and skewed version of an amalgam of non-western cultures.

Exoticism is not just fetishizing and commodifying cultures. Its treating them as sacred, incomprehensible objects. Its handling them as if they might break.

It's easy to see why western writers frequently handle stories of non-western cultures in this way. We're afraid. As Nisi Shawl writes in Writing the Other, the most penetrating fear of many white liberals is to be called racist. Similarly, most westerners, white or non-white, don't want to be called appropriationist. In our fear*, we become overcautious. And most Americans, white and non-white, have been exposed to a steady stream of exoticism throughout our lives, which we internalize, and which ends up in our writing unless we are very careful (and likely, to some degree, even then).**

In contrast, one may look at Nalo Hopkinson's adaptations of Carribean legends. They are fun and playful. The people are real and loud and messy. There's no sense that the author is treating them delicately, or that she fears her characters may break. The author trusts herself to be fun and funny.

Of course, Nalo's working within a culture with which she is intimately familiar. But still, I think authors who don't have that luxury have to turst ourselves to be funny and playful.

Certainly, there are stories in western settings that are grave and reverent. Grave and reverent stories are necessary. I favor them, personally. As a writer, I will write many grave and reverent stories; as an editor, I will certainly buy many grave and reverent stories, about both western and non-western cultures.***

But grave and reverent stories, wonderful as they are, represent only a fraction of the range of possible stories. When worrying about representation, it's not enough just to get other cultures on the page. The other cultures have to breathe. They have to be not just sad, but happy; not just rendered beautifully, but full of chaos and motion; not just careful and lovely, but messy and playful. We don't just need to see non-westerners on the page. We need to see non-westerners having fun.

--


*The appropriateness, or inappropriateness, of this fear is a topic for another post.

**Western writers of color may be less likely to exoticize non-western cultures, but it certainly seems to happen.

***Rephrased: Please keep sending me grave, reverent stories!

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Addendum:

The Podcast I'm editing is called PodCastle. We're the fantasy imprint of Escape Pod. We publish mostly reprints, but we'l look at original fiction. Our pay rate is $100 for fiction from 2-6,000 words, and $20 for fiction under 2k. We're not yet officially open for business, so we don't have a website, but you can read some extremely basic information at our Podcastle livejournal.