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intertribalApparently it was International Blog Against Racism Week last week, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
genrereviews had this thing about white-washing characters. So this brings us into RaceFail territory, which is basically a bunch of spec fic writers yelling at each other for their views on race and how they use it in their books, and dare I say it, white liberals worrying about how to Write the Other without offending other white liberals. I'm sorry, but there it is.
I have a very tumultuous relationship with race dialogues in fiction. I'm not even going to get into the whole "right what you know/right what is worldly" debate now. But I am going to say that I have very little respect for "multicultural books," regardless of whether they're written by a white person or a non-white person. This is not to say books that are about a non-white culture. This is to say books that make a fetish out of culture, race, ethnicity, whatever. These are books that are written as pseudo-cultural-travelogues for white people to read so they feel cultured. It is, to put it mildly, "pimping out your culture for middle-aged white women who want to read about something exotic." Or in Elizabeth Gilbert's case, pimping out other people's cultures. Either way, bad. The plot is always something along the lines of "oh, how will I, a [insert non-Western country]-American/Brit, ever reconcile my modern Western culture of MTV and cellphones with my traditional [other country] culture of [insert an exotic spice] and arranged marriages? woe is me! i, forever torn between two worlds!" "India" books are really big right now. A while back, it was "China." I have a lot of gripes about these books:
- they are excruciatingly shallow
- they almost never involve countries with any significant political history (i.e., it's much rarer to find a "Korea" book, and even if there was a "Korea" book, I'd bet my bottom dollar there would be no commentary on the increasingly strained, uncomfortably close Korean-American diplomatic relationship, seeming to presume that politics and history don't have any manifestation on people's daily lives and self-conceptions, which while perhaps true for some people, is total BULLSHIT in general), automatically reducing any complexities to the tension, and allowing the author to...
- reduce every single goddamn character to their racial background (which is more often than not a big exercise in self-orientalizing), which is the worst thing these books do.
That said, almost all of my favorite books deal, in some way, with cross-cultural exchanges. A Passage to India (E.M. Forster), Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad), Season of Migration to the North (Tayeb Salih), Macho Camacho's Beat (Luis Rafael Sanchez). They just do it way differently - and the main difference is that they have respect for all their characters as human beings, and no character is defined by their race. They all have complete personalities and fucked-up psychologies and their relationship with their culture and other cultures is way more realistic and complicated than the ones offered by the motherfucking multicultural books. They don't sugarcoat the unpleasantness here - and yes, Amy Tan's books sugarcoat. Season of Migration to the North, which I really consider one of the best postcolonial books out there, is about a Sudanese economist sent to the London School of Economics to "make good." Now, if this was a "multicultural" book, he would have a lot of teenaged-level angst issues in his head that he ultimately keeps to himself, probably bring with him a Sudanese wife, and later have arguments with his kids about whether they can abandon Sudanese culture or not. It is not a "multicultural" book - he engages in a dramatic, insane affair with a British woman (also an intellectual) who regularly trashes all the stuff he brought from home, until during one of their fights she basically dares him to stab her and repay the insult the British paid to Sudan, basically "rape Britain back." Which he does. And goes to prison for years. He gets out, goes back to Sudan, marries a Sudanese woman, and then drowns himself in a river. The narrator, who also went to Britain to study (but kept a much lower profile), ultimately finds himself in that same river, wondering whether or not to let himself die. It's very dark but also very point-blank honest about exactly what these issues are all about. It's not about race. It's about humiliation, control, power, masculinity, etc. It's not about the motherfucking saffron. If you watch, these books barely ever go into such bullshit, harmless descriptions of culture.
Colonialism - say it with me - was a fucking cancer upon the world. Cross-cultural exchanges have a very long and oftentimes very violent, horrible history. Reducing your characters to shallow teenagers wondering about whether to order curry or hamburgers is: a) ultimately dishonest, b) skirting the issues instead of tackling them, such that when people do try to tackle them they're dismissed as "whiners" who "can't let go" of things like colonialism, and c) piss poor literature to top it off. And I think that's why a lot of people hate multicultural literature (of course, some people can't read about people from non-Western countries, but that's a different problem) - it's bad, and it's contrived. And at its worst, it actually reinforces the old ~cult of the exotic~. Ouch.
p.s. A funny story about cross-cultural exchanges in fiction. When my parents were dating, my mother had to have surgery on a tumor in her thyroid. Both my parents had read Pramoedya Ananta Toer's "Bumi Manusia" series (we own the whole series in both English and Indonesian), about an Indonesian "kampung boy" who goes off to the West to study. Apparently at some point the main character's white love interest dies of some illness. And obviously my dad was also a "kampung boy" who went off to the West to study and met my mom. So my dad before the surgery was all like, "OMG you remember in Bumi Manusia..." and my mom was like, "why the fuck are you bringing that up now?!" Anyway. I should also note that because of all this, A Season of Migration to the North emotionally bludgeoned me. It bears mention that there is always a way out of the cancer, though it may be rare.
genrereviews had this thing about white-washing characters. So this brings us into RaceFail territory, which is basically a bunch of spec fic writers yelling at each other for their views on race and how they use it in their books, and dare I say it, white liberals worrying about how to Write the Other without offending other white liberals. I'm sorry, but there it is. I have a very tumultuous relationship with race dialogues in fiction. I'm not even going to get into the whole "right what you know/right what is worldly" debate now. But I am going to say that I have very little respect for "multicultural books," regardless of whether they're written by a white person or a non-white person. This is not to say books that are about a non-white culture. This is to say books that make a fetish out of culture, race, ethnicity, whatever. These are books that are written as pseudo-cultural-travelogues for white people to read so they feel cultured. It is, to put it mildly, "pimping out your culture for middle-aged white women who want to read about something exotic." Or in Elizabeth Gilbert's case, pimping out other people's cultures. Either way, bad. The plot is always something along the lines of "oh, how will I, a [insert non-Western country]-American/Brit, ever reconcile my modern Western culture of MTV and cellphones with my traditional [other country] culture of [insert an exotic spice] and arranged marriages? woe is me! i, forever torn between two worlds!" "India" books are really big right now. A while back, it was "China." I have a lot of gripes about these books:
- they are excruciatingly shallow
- they almost never involve countries with any significant political history (i.e., it's much rarer to find a "Korea" book, and even if there was a "Korea" book, I'd bet my bottom dollar there would be no commentary on the increasingly strained, uncomfortably close Korean-American diplomatic relationship, seeming to presume that politics and history don't have any manifestation on people's daily lives and self-conceptions, which while perhaps true for some people, is total BULLSHIT in general), automatically reducing any complexities to the tension, and allowing the author to...
- reduce every single goddamn character to their racial background (which is more often than not a big exercise in self-orientalizing), which is the worst thing these books do.
That said, almost all of my favorite books deal, in some way, with cross-cultural exchanges. A Passage to India (E.M. Forster), Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad), Season of Migration to the North (Tayeb Salih), Macho Camacho's Beat (Luis Rafael Sanchez). They just do it way differently - and the main difference is that they have respect for all their characters as human beings, and no character is defined by their race. They all have complete personalities and fucked-up psychologies and their relationship with their culture and other cultures is way more realistic and complicated than the ones offered by the motherfucking multicultural books. They don't sugarcoat the unpleasantness here - and yes, Amy Tan's books sugarcoat. Season of Migration to the North, which I really consider one of the best postcolonial books out there, is about a Sudanese economist sent to the London School of Economics to "make good." Now, if this was a "multicultural" book, he would have a lot of teenaged-level angst issues in his head that he ultimately keeps to himself, probably bring with him a Sudanese wife, and later have arguments with his kids about whether they can abandon Sudanese culture or not. It is not a "multicultural" book - he engages in a dramatic, insane affair with a British woman (also an intellectual) who regularly trashes all the stuff he brought from home, until during one of their fights she basically dares him to stab her and repay the insult the British paid to Sudan, basically "rape Britain back." Which he does. And goes to prison for years. He gets out, goes back to Sudan, marries a Sudanese woman, and then drowns himself in a river. The narrator, who also went to Britain to study (but kept a much lower profile), ultimately finds himself in that same river, wondering whether or not to let himself die. It's very dark but also very point-blank honest about exactly what these issues are all about. It's not about race. It's about humiliation, control, power, masculinity, etc. It's not about the motherfucking saffron. If you watch, these books barely ever go into such bullshit, harmless descriptions of culture.
Colonialism - say it with me - was a fucking cancer upon the world. Cross-cultural exchanges have a very long and oftentimes very violent, horrible history. Reducing your characters to shallow teenagers wondering about whether to order curry or hamburgers is: a) ultimately dishonest, b) skirting the issues instead of tackling them, such that when people do try to tackle them they're dismissed as "whiners" who "can't let go" of things like colonialism, and c) piss poor literature to top it off. And I think that's why a lot of people hate multicultural literature (of course, some people can't read about people from non-Western countries, but that's a different problem) - it's bad, and it's contrived. And at its worst, it actually reinforces the old ~cult of the exotic~. Ouch.
p.s. A funny story about cross-cultural exchanges in fiction. When my parents were dating, my mother had to have surgery on a tumor in her thyroid. Both my parents had read Pramoedya Ananta Toer's "Bumi Manusia" series (we own the whole series in both English and Indonesian), about an Indonesian "kampung boy" who goes off to the West to study. Apparently at some point the main character's white love interest dies of some illness. And obviously my dad was also a "kampung boy" who went off to the West to study and met my mom. So my dad before the surgery was all like, "OMG you remember in Bumi Manusia..." and my mom was like, "why the fuck are you bringing that up now?!" Anyway. I should also note that because of all this, A Season of Migration to the North emotionally bludgeoned me. It bears mention that there is always a way out of the cancer, though it may be rare.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 03:08 am (UTC)Wow, great post. Again.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-03 03:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 01:59 am (UTC)