by Kate Elliott
They listened attentively, perhaps drawn by the fact that I got a bit of a tear in my voice, but by this time it was clear we had reached the limit of our visit to the exhibit, so I steered them toward the exit door.
As I herded them forward, a woman, also exiting, had paused at the door and turned back to look at me. She was an African-American woman about my age, maybe a bit older.
She caught my gaze, and she said, “I want to thank you for what you said to your children.”
My first reaction was surprise, succeeded almost immediately by embarrassment. I said something in reply; I have no recollection what. She went on her way; we went on ours, and my embarrassment subsided to be replaced by a sudden and very sweeping sense of shame.
Not at myself. I try to live a decent life (as do most people, I truly believe).
It is difficult for me to express how deep the chasm is, this exposure of the pervasive racism that afflicts the USA.
My father taught American history. He taught his children that “if you grow up in a racist society, you are a racist” by which he meant not that you burn crosses on lawns but that you have absorbed unexamined assumptions about the way things are and that it is therefore incumbent upon you (I am using the generic “you” here, as he was) to honestly reflect and examine where you stand and what is going on around you as often as you can.
The presence of racism is not news to me, therefore. But I am white, and while I have intersectionally dealt with forms of prejudice directed at me personally or family members or friends or as part of the body politic, for someone like me it can still take a moment like this one to really expose that particular chasm, however briefly, in its full and terrible darkness.
She thanked me.
I have no idea what prejudice that woman had faced in her life, what moments of anger, hatred, denial, insult, grief, rudeness, and perhaps outright physical danger she might have experienced because she was black. That made her—the one afflicted by racism—take notice of a solitary woman and her three children, and thank me for such a small act. I felt shame, among so many other reasons, that what I said to my children was even worthy of comment. Because in a better world it shouldn’t be. It should be ordinary. It should be unremarkable.
Never think this story is about me, because even though I naturally tell it from my perspective, it is a story about the way in which racism and prejudice harm our country in the most deep-seated ways imaginable.
Think instead that it might be the story of Pharaoh hardening his heart each time Moses asks him to “let my people go.” He hardens his heart (or God hardens it for him, but that’s another layer to a story that has many layers of meaning) in order to bring himself to say “NO.”
To harden our heart means to turn away from our connection to others, to deny compassion, to refuse to change. Psychologist Erich Fromm says that “every evil act tends to harden man’s heart, to deaden it. Every good act tends to soften it, to make it more alive.”
Every time Pharaoh hardens his heart, he makes it easier to harden his heart again, the next time. Surely this is true for all of us. Every time we turn away from our connection to others, we imprison ourselves a little more. In the end we can so accustom ourselves to this condition that we cease to notice it is going on.
The question of the systemic racism threaded through American history, as well as the question of the extermination of so many of the original indigenous inhabitants of this continent as the destiny and dream of a mighty empire (for that is what we are, speaking in the context of history) was being established, cannot be dealt with in a brief piece of writing like this one. So I won’t try.
This is what I will say:
Prejudice is a form of hardening the heart. Prejudice, as we unfortunately know, comes in many forms. Just as human beings show a propensity to be tolerant and inclusive, so also, often at the same time, and sometimes in the same person, they show a propensity to be intolerant and exclusive. Human beings are such forces for good, and yet such forces for bad, and sometimes in the same person. The contradiction makes one dizzy. I am not immune.
Prejudice harms and hardens each of us as individuals. It also harms and hardens that thing which those of us who are Americans like to call “America,” which is a dream and an ideal and, in some ways and at some times, a reality.
For those of you who are not Americans (USAians, to be precise), if you are still reading (and frankly, were I not American, I am sure I would get sick and tired of all the maundering Americans do about the Dream of America), I do not apologize but simply explain that this is specifically written from the perspective of an American speaking of America.
The USA has always had a contentious love affair with immigration, which may be inevitable in a country founded on the three-legged stool of genocide, slavery, and liberty.
In the nineteenth century Jewish immigrants were considered, as a group, ineducable; in the twentieth century, some universities (more than I care to think about) maintained quotas for how many persons of Jewish background they would admit, because so many (i.e.“too many”) qualified. Similarly, plantation workers brought in from different countries and regions of Asia in the nineteenth century to settle in Hawaii were considered not smart enough to succeed in Western-style schools. Of course this makes me laugh now—in a sardonic way, I suppose, the joke being on those self-righteous missionaries—given that perhaps three-quarters of the students in my sons’ high school honors classes were, of course, girls who were Americans of Japanese ancestry.
In World War II, as I need not remind you, citizens of Japanese ancestry were forced into internment camps on the Mainland because they were considered threats, people who would “by nature” feel more loyalty to the place of their parents’ or grandparents’ birth than the place those same forebears had chosen to immigrate to, to make a new life, presumably because they sought greater opportunity here than what was available to them there. They were considered threats even though this was the country most of them had been born in and identified with.
My father’s grandparents came to this country because it offered them more than the old country did. My mother, an immigrant, did the same, I believe. Why should I not assume that others came likewise when I see the evidence all around me that it is so?
Now, of course, Americans of Japanese ancestry are seen as a “model minority.” These days if a child goes after school to, say, “Mandarin school” (as my father, back in the day, went to “Dane school” or my children attended “Hebrew school”) to learn the language of his/her grandparents and the culture of her/his heritage or the religion of their ancestors, then we call that a fine thing. Or many of us do anyway. Or some of us, at any rate.
For the whole point of the USA is not that it is homogenous but that it is a greater whole woven from diverse strands. It has never been truly homogenous; the social fabric has always been influenced and altered by each latest wave of incoming immigrants. For me it is a truism that immigration is what makes this country strong, and that specifically the diversity of immigration does so.
When I grew up, we were taught that the USA was built from those who had the courage to leave the safety of the known to build a better life elsewhere. This story, of course, rarely took into account those who had no choice but to come, shackled by the slave trade, and the indigenous peoples who were already here. Part of the mythology of America is that the brave and the bold and the desperate and the ambitious come here to make a better life because America is the land of opportunity.
Yet a cycle repeats itself. Every generation seems to fixate on some “new” immigrant group as a threat that can’t or won’t assimilate itself properly, that is stubborn or ineducable or secretly under the thrall of the Pope or or or. You can fill in the blanks. It happens over and over again as, meanwhile, people who want to build a good life for themselves and their children, and their children who can conceive of nothing other than being Americans because that is what they are—they are Amer
icans just as I am, or you over there, or you, or you—get on with living a decent life . . . if they can, if they aren’t locked into internment camps or having their places of worship burned because they are this decade’s or this generation’s Threat to Our Way of Life.
But that’s the thing. Our way of life is predicated on change. Change is embedded in the Constitution, in that codicil called the Bill of Rights. Change is embedded in life itself. Judaism survived as a religion because it changed from a religion based around a single temple to one based on community centers, although we call them synagogues. Societies that do not change will ossify and die. I guarantee it.
So is that not the beauty of the USA? That our institution, our mode of citizenship, creates the constant possibility of change? That change is not just a possibility but a necessity? Not often radical change but usually incremental change driven in part by reversals and resurgences?
Somewhere out there in the USA today a citizen of Indonesian-American descent who happens to also be Muslim is going about the ordinary business of life. So are you. So am I.
This should be unremarkable.
We do not become stronger through prejudice. We become weaker. Those against whom the prejudice is directed are hurt most, of course, but in the end, we all lose.
THE STATUS QUO DOES NOT
NEED WORLD BUILDING
THE IMAGINATION IS NOT contextless.
The words and conceptual markers a writer puts on the page arise from thoughts and perceptions and interpretations rooted in our experiences and knowledge and assumptions. Writers write what they know, what they think is important, what they think is entertaining, what they are aware or take notice of. They structure stories in patterns that make sense to them. A writer’s way of thinking, and the forms and content of what and how they imagine story, will be rooted in their existing cultural and social world.
Now consider the genre of science fiction and fantasy. Creators place a story within a setting. In the literature of the fantastic, this landscape must be explained to some degree so readers can situate themselves.
Some writers describe this landscape in extensive detail while others use a minimalist approach. To quote fantasy writer Saladin Ahmed1: “Some readers/writers want scrupulous mimesis of an otherworld. Some want impressionistic wonder. No inherent right/wrong/better/ worse there.”
Complaints now and again arise about obsessive world-building and how such dorkery has ruined modern fantasy. Recently on Twitter, Damien Walter (writer and critic who, among other things, writes about the SFF genre for The Guardian), stated, “Obsessive world-building is [a] common cause of crap books. . . . Like some other acts pleasurable to the individual, it shouldn’t be done in public. Or in a book.”2
Too much detail, too clumsily employed, is an issue of bad writing and should be addressed as such.
But complaints about depicting a detailed world in fantasy have potential sexist, colonialist, and racist implications. These implications are more damaging and pernicious than the alleged disadvantages imposed on literature by detailed world-building.
Why?
Let me explain.
The status quo does not need world building.
It is implied in every detail that is left out as “understood by everyone,” in every action or reaction considered unimportant for whatever reason, in every activity or description ignored because it is seen as not worthy of the doughty thews of real literature.
There are many ways to discuss elaborated world-building. This post will focus on material culture and social space.
Material culture can be defined narrowly as any assemblage of artifacts in the archaeological record, but here I am thinking of it more as the relationship between people and the physical objects used in life by those people and their culture(s).
Social space refers to the ways in which people interact in social spaces and how these interactions enforce and reinforce custom, authority, and social patterns and kinship.
What follows is an obvious statement that I am going to make anyway: Different cultures have different material cultures and different understandings of social space, just as they have different languages and language variants, different religious beliefs, different kinship patterns and household formations, different aesthetic preferences, and so on.
As well, every culture tells stories about itself and its past. These stories work their way into that culture’s understanding of the cosmos and its place in it.
Just to complicate matters further, cultures are not themselves purely discrete things. There can be cultures that live between and woven into or half outside of other larger and more dominant cultures so that they partake of elements of both (or more). I know this in part because I am the child of an immigrant and grew up in a household that was both part of and in some ways separate from the dominant culture.
The more minimal the world building, the more the status quo is highlighted without anything needed to be said. This doesn’t mean that minimal world building can’t work in narrative: of course it can.
But minimal world-building championed as a stance against “obsessive world-building” veers dangerously into the territory of perpetuating sexist, racist, and colonialist attitudes. It does so by ignoring the very details and concerns that would make a narrative less status quo in terms of how it deals with social space and material culture as well as other aspects of the human experience.
When people write without considering the implications of material culture and social space in the story they are writing, they often unwittingly default to an expression of how they believe the past worked. This is especially true if they are not thinking about how the material and the social differ from culture to culture, across both space and time, or how it might change in the future.
Which details a writer considers too unimportant to include may often default to the status quo of the writer’s own setting and situation, the writer’s lived experience of social space, because the status quo does not need to be described by those who live at the center of a dominant culture.
For example, consider how many a near or far future SF story uses social space that is modern, Western, and in some cases very suburban American—and how this element of the world building is rarely interrogated by writer or critic or readers when, meanwhile, other elements of a story may be praised for being bold, edgy, ground-breaking, or brilliant. Compare how deliberately Aliette de Bodard uses social space in On a Red Station, Drifting3, an example of far future SF not focused on a Western paradigm and which needs—and relishes—the elaborated detail as part of the story’s unfolding.
The implied status quo becomes a mirror reflecting itself back on itself while it ignores the narrative patterns and interests of most non-Western literatures, which often tell their story in a way different from much Western narrative (as Aliette de Bodard4, Rochita LoenenRuiz5, Joyce Chng6, and Sabrina Vourvoulias7, among others have pointed out).
The implied status quo in denigrating descriptions of daily living and material culture denigrates the lived experience of so many people. It judges these details as unworthy of narrative in the same way colonialism, racism, and sexism dismiss other cultures and life-ways and life-experiences as inferior or exotic window-dressing. It does so by implying that a self-defined and often abstracted “universal” (of subject matter or of mostly invisible setting) trumps all else and can thereby be accomplished with none of this obsessive world-building, none of these extraneous details. This imagination is not contextless.
In the US/UK genre market, for example, it is exactly the marginalized landscapes that need description in order to be understood and revealed as just as expressive of the scope of human experience as that of the dominant culture whose lineaments are most often taken for granted.
Of course there is plenty of detailed world-building that emphasizes the status quo and expands on it, not always in a deliberate or thoughtful way.
Regardless, a well-described setting is
good writing. There is nothing wrong with using (say) medieval Europe for your inspiration if you have a story to tell there. Judith Tarr’s8deeply imagined medieval landscapes attest to that. The point of this essay is not to suggest what any person is required to write or how much or how little world building they should deploy. A story needs to be the story that it is.
Meanwhile, as I don’t have to tell most of you, there is an entire world literature of the fantastic, works of imagination set in the past, the present, and the future, most of which are embedded in the status quo of their particular culture and era. The examples are legion, such as the magnificent Sundiata cycle, the Shah-Nama, the Journey to the West, the numerous syncretic versions of the Ramayana that spread from India throughout Southeast Asia and the Indonesian archipelago, the Popol Vuh, and so many others including all those I have never heard of and the many works being written today. However, speaking as I must from an American perspective, few of these works have penetrated into the Western consciousness to the degree that, say, Harry Potter has become a worldwide phenomenon.
So who chooses what amount of world building is acceptable in fantasy literature? More importantly, from what place can such a demand be made?
The world can and will speak for itself, in a multiplicity of voices, not just in one.
Thanks to Daniel José Older, Liz Bourke, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and Joyce Chng for reading and commenting on early and late versions of this post. Special shout-out to this recent Strange Horizons roundtable arranged by Daniel José Older: Set Truth on Stun: Reimagining an Anti-Oppressive SF/F9 . And a final link to N. K. Jemisin’s excellent and important Guest of Honor speech at Continuum earlier this year: “SFF has always been the literature of the human imagination, not just the imagination of a single demographic.”10