Writing the Other

by Nisi Shawl

  When it comes to finding more contemporary material, magazines help. I also strongly recommend shopping trips, night-clubbing, and restaurant hopping. Take a walk on the wild side. Do you feel like a tourist? Uncomfortable? Well, you are one, and you need to know what it’s like to be conspicuous. If your character’s a minority, she or he will be quite familiar with the sensation. Bruce Sterling once told me that alienation is an essential part of any science fiction writer’s education, and I agree.

  Perhaps you have friends of other cultural backgrounds. Talk to them. Explain what you’re trying to do. Even though no one is a certified representative of their own ethnic group, they can let you know when something you propose is totally out of whack. And they can point you to sources of specific info.

  If you’re thinking of approaching someone who’s more an acquaintance than a friend, offer to buy them lunch or dinner, and make the interaction a formal interview. This is what you’d do with anyone else you wanted to pump for valuable data. Cultural background is data. If you want it, and you don’t have it, it’s valuable; treat it that way.

  Above all, don’t rely on representations of minorities gleaned from popular culture. They’re as true to life as Donna Reed’s pearl-laden floor-waxing outfits.

  So now that you’ve got some background on these Beautiful Strangers, how best to use it?

  A lot depends on your piece’s point of view and the size of a given character’s role within it. Let’s start with Charnas’ short story “The Ancient Mind At Work,” in which the protagonist, a white immigrant from South Africa, views an African American man:

  Katje never called him by his name because she didn’t know whether he was Jackson Somebody or Somebody Jackson, and she had learned to be careful in everything to do with blacks in this country. (16)

  He was slender as a Kikuyu youth—she could see his ribs arch under his shirt…. By rights he belonged in a red blanket, skin gleaming with oil, hair plaited. Instead he wore the tan shirt, pants, and zip-up jacket of an ”engineer” from Buildings and Grounds, and his hair was a modest Afro, as they called it, around his narrow face. (19)

  Here we see the minority through the eyes of another minority, but one sharing many assumptions with this society’s rulers. Katje’s opinions about what this man “should” be wearing and doing throw our own preconceptions in relief by their extremity. Her caution in dealing with Jackson underscores that of most American whites.

  On a few occasions, Charnas has Jackson speak for himself:

  “Try and don’t put nobody in that number-six bedroom till I get to it the end of the week,” he said. (19)

  “I got accepted to Computer school in Rochester next semester…they don’t do blacks with guns….” (50)

  Jackson’s speech reflects patterns familiar to anyone who’s ever listened to or talked with blacks of a certain upbringing. But it doesn’t lapse into incomprehensible “Buckwheatisms”; it marks difference, not inferiority. The combination of honest, foreign prejudice, familiar tension, and Jackson’s voicing of his own concerns produces a picture in slightly more than two dimensions, all that’s necessary for a supporting character.

  Sterling’s “Green Days In Brunei” features a multi-transracial cast; main and most supporting roles are filled by people of very different races than the author’s own. On assignment for a Japanese corporation, Turner Choi, a twenty-six-year-old Chinese Canadian CAD CAM engineer, becomes slowly accustomed to the ways of a tiny, somnolent country near Borneo, and its mix of Malaysian, Chinese, Iban, Dayak, and European citizenry. Novella length gives Sterling room to flesh Choi out, using comparisons to his stay-at-home, lawyer brother and his domineering, bad-cop, drug tycoon of a grandfather. A non-Asian girlfriend calls him “about as Chinese as maple syrup…” (122) A Malaysian princess sees his status as a Western techie as exotic.

  Choi’s observations of his surroundings reveal as much about himself as they do about Brunei. The gossipy, village-like kampongs, which run the city’s retro-greened high-rises, inhibit his bachelor lifestyle. The Dayaks are his exotics, the “dark, beautiful descendants of headhunting pirates, dressed in hand-dyed sarongs and ancient plastic baseball caps,” (129) their language “utterly incomprehensible.” (129)

  Otherness is not a uniform state. Non-whites are not identical, interchangeable units. Choi’s sense of himself as a foreigner, as a Westerner, a Northerner, and a child of privilege, complicates all his interactions. Age, more than race, distances him from the white exile Brooke, with whom he might otherwise form an alliance.

  It’s mostly Choi’s gear-headedness that defines him for himself. He learns the obsolete programming language required for his assignment so well he dreams in it. And he sees his love for Princess Seria as defined by tech: “The painfully simple local Net filtered human relations down to a single channel of printed words, leaving only a high-flown, Platonic essence. Their relationship had grown into a classic, bloodless, spiritual romance…” (126)

  Being a gear-head in low-and-appropriate tech Brunei causes Choi’s most alienated moments and allows Sterling his closest identification with the character.

  Katmer Al Shei, a heroine of the novel Fool’s War, shares several characteristics with her creator Sarah Zettel. They’re both women of low stature and high determination. Both rely on discipline and humor to help them deal with trying situations.

  For Al Shei, this includes an encounter with a “gerbil,” i.e., space-station worker, who assaults her near the book’s beginning:

  “Oh, sorry,” said a man’s bland voice. “I didn’t see a person there. I thought it was just a pile of rags and shit.”

  Al Shei pulled herself upright and turned around slowly to face the chestnut- skinned, auburn-haired, totally unshaven can-gerbil.

  She drew herself up to her full height. “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah.” Reciting the first pillar of Islam loudly was her standard tactic. Bigots seldom know how to reply to a declaration of faith… (18)

  Long before this early and explicit confrontation, Zettel establishes Al Shei’s otherness, with descriptions of the veils she and her cousin wear and their integration of prayer into starship routine.

  She also gives us a good idea of the context of this otherness. Coloring is noted: Master Fool Evelyn Dobbs’ skin is “a clear brown, two or three shades lighter than Al Shei’s earth tones. That and the angles in her eyes and her face said a good chunk of her ancestry was European.” (5) And “shockingly blue eyes” shine out of Al Shei’s brother-in-law Tully’s “medium brown face.” (16) But the roots of this society’s major prejudices lie in a dislike of certain strongly held beliefs. And right down there with the Muslims in terms of popularity is a group called “Freers.”

  Freers have revolutionary ideas concerning A.I.s and their occasional emergence into self-awareness. Since these chaotic births usually result in the loss of human life, most people think Freers are insane to encourage them.

  Fool’s War’s narrative viewpoint switches between Al Shei, a target of religious persecution, Freer Jemina Yerusha, and Evelyn Dobbs, who has her own reasons for fearing irrational hatred. Though they all ­experience prejudice, the heroines’ goals aren’t quite congruent. Again, varying view points and sources of otherness give the story verisimilitude.

  One more note on Fool’s War: Zettel makes a conscious effort to avoid equating non-European skin tones with food. In fact, she does the opposite, writing of Com Engineer Lipinski’s “pale, exotic good looks” in terms of milk and lobsters, which she contrasts with the more customary copper, bark brown, chestnut, etc. A friend pointed out to her the annoying frequency of references to coffee and chocolate as racial color analogies. Humans have been treated as commodities in this hemisphere’s recent past. The connection to slavery was subtle, but disturbing, and Zettel has done what she can to reverse the trend.

  So let’s review how you, too, can make your universe an equal opportunity employer.

&nb
sp; First, get to know your subjects. Primary sources are best.

  When telling your story from any character’s viewpoint, be true to their take on the situation. Don’t give them your own anachronistic beliefs or inauthentic, “p.c.” motivations.

  Allow minority characters to speak with their own voices, even if only in a brief comment. Contrasts between multiple viewpoints produce both diversity and depth.

  Show how race and prejudice figure in your setting and what, if any, their connections.

  Remember that difference is in the eye of the beholder. Black people don’t spend their whole lives thinking of themselves as black. We’re Ghanaians and editors and diabetics, and lots of other -ians and -ors and -ics. Use these self-categorizations to add points of audience identification to your characters.

  Finally, offer your work to members of other ethnic groups for critique. You don’t have to follow their suggestions, but it won’t hurt to hear them.

  Tom Wolfe spoke at a National Press Club lunch on the subject of “writing what you know.” (November 16, 1998, National Press Club, Washington, DC). His point was that this is great advice, but that as writers it’s our job to continually know more.

  This is true for sf writers in spades cubed. If we can’t create a reasonable facsimile of the local cigar shop’s owner, how much of a chance do we have of convincing readers they understand the Ganymedian group mind’s ambassador?

  So welcome the Beautiful Strangers. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes with them. Do your best, and you’ll avoid the biggest mistake of all: exclusion.

  Works Cited

  Charnas, Suzie McKee . “The Ancient Mind At Work.” The Vampire Tapestry. Albuquerque, NM, Living Batch Press, 1980.

  Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2001.

  Sterling, Bruce. “Green Days in Brunei.” Crystal Express. Sauk City, WI, Arkham House, 1989.

  Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York, NY, Bantam Classics, 1983.

  Zettel, Sarah. Fool’s War. New York, NY, Warner Books, 1997.

  Appropriate Cultural Appropriation

  by Nisi Shawl

  For some of us, the attractions of another’s culture can hardly be overrated. Within the context of speculative fiction’s reputation as “escapist” literature, getting away from one’s own traditions and background may seem like a good idea. Surely to find that much-prized “sensawunda” sought by genre aficionados we must leave behind what British fantasist Lord Dunsany called “the fields we know?”

  But what if the realms beyond these fields are populated? One person’s terra incognita is another’s home. What are we to make of the denizens of these exotic lands? And what will they make of us, tramping through their yam patches in search of the ineffable, and frightening their flocks with our exclamations over their chimeric beauty?

  To collapse the metaphor, readers looking for something “different” in fantastic fiction, and authors who attempt to supply them with it, often turn to mythologies, religions, and philosophies outside the dominant Western paradigm. Then, not too surprisingly, people who practice these religions or espouse these philosophies or descend from those who constructed these mythologies object. Their culture, they complain, is being misrepresented, defaced, devalued, messed with. Stolen. Often said culture is the only resource remaining after colonialization has removed all precious ­metals from the ground, or the ground from under its former inhabitants feet, or, as in the case of the African slave trade, when it has assumed ownership of those feet themselves.

  Hiromi Goto’s poem “Notes for an Appropriation Panel” (written during WisCon 27) voices her uneasiness in the face of another author’s culture-mining:

  #1

  my subject positioning does not reflect

  your object placement your anthropological

  imperative soothed by your liberal heart

  we will agree to disagree is your buddhist mantra

  as you keep stuffing geisha

  into my house

  #2

  I’m frightened

  your imagination is not my reality

  I do not trust you

  I have read from your imagination for five centuries

  I am still starving

  you want to think you’re doing me a favour

  I will bite the hand that feeds me

  #3

  you are so interested

  your eyes are glowing

  it’s simply fascinating

  a tightening in your groin

  you want to share it

  you’ve done your research and you got permission

  from your native informant

  you want me to thank you

  you think we will be friends

  #4

  your inscription has maimed me

  a small cut you choose not to see

  scars criss cross my body

  you turn away from my disfigurement

  my critique falls upon your mantra

  you would rather gaze upon

  your own creation

  #5

  she is a work of art

  almost everyone loves her

  you love her

  you tug the kimono off her dainty shoulders

  her perfectly formed arms

  you burrow into her body

  the small noises you make are disturbing

  in her silence her eyes are open

  but she cannot see

  #6

  I did not want to watch you do this

  a lot of people are clapping

  you stand up to take a bow

  as I leave the auditorium

  your creation falls to dust

  you do not care you will make another

  the only limits are your imagination

  Yet if they ignore non-dominant cosmologies and traditions and exclude them from their work and their libraries, writers and readers could be said to have contributed to their erasure. How to resolve this conflict?

  Thoughtfully.

  To begin with, we can reframe it. Rather than looking at a binary choice between (mis)appropriating a culture and avoiding its mention, we can consider a spectrum of roles its possible for transcultural writers and readers to play.

  We can examine works in which authors have attempted to write about or extrapolate from another’s culture for ways in which they succeed or fail.

  We can question and reground our desire to write about other cultures.

  In this essay, I’ll do all of the above, to varying and (I hope) entertaining degrees.

  During the same panel that inspired Goto’s poem, audience member Diantha Day Sprouse categorized those who borrow others’ cultural tropes as “Invaders,” “Tourists,” and “Guests.” Invaders arrive without warning, take whatever they want for use in whatever way they see fit. They destroy without thinking anything that appears to them to be valueless. They stay as long as they like, leave at their own convenience. Theirs is a position of entitlement without allegiance.

  Tourists are expected. They’re generally a nuisance, but at least they pay their way. They can be accommodated. Tourists may be ignorant, but they can be intelligent as well, and are therefore educable.

  Guests are invited. Their relationships with their hosts can become long-term commitments and are often reciprocal. (Sprouse, personal communication.)

  A good deal of transcultural writing’s bad reputation is owing to authors and audiences who act like Invaders. In one unpublished story I’ve seen, the writer took a sacred song here, a tattoo there, snapped up a feast featuring roasted pig and manioc root from somewhere else and presto! South Pacific Island culture at our fingertips! That this Island’s analogue was inhabited by blond, blue-eyed people may have been meant to soften the act of appropriation by distancing readers from its victims. Or the point may have been to allow the blond, blue-eyed author or reader easier identi
fication and access. The effect, unfortunately, was one of cultural theft squared. Not only were the ­appurtenances of the culture removed from their native settings, they were placed in the hands of people deliberately marked as racially distinct from their originators.

  Further controversy is generated when certain authors reject the equivalent of Tourist status, under whatever name that status is presented to them. They prefer to see themselves as Guests: welcome everywhere they go, almost indistinguishable from those born to the cultural territory they’re visiting. A territory where they’re enjoying themselves so much they keep putting off their scheduled departure.

  A Tourist can become a Guest, if the locals like what they see and ask her to return. But before taking on the Tourist role, a writer or reader will have no contact with said locals. When first learning about and incorporating aspects of another’s culture, then, we ought to act like the best of all possible Tourists: to stay alert and observant, to watch for the ways our own background influences how we interpret our surroundings. We ought to remember that we have baggage. We ought to be prepared to pay for what we receive (but more about that below). We ought to be honest about the fact that we’re outsiders. And since we’re in an unfamiliar setting we shouldn’t be ashamed of occasionally feeling lost. We ought to swallow our pride at such times and ask for help, ask for directions.

  Whom should we ask?

  When it comes to non-dominant cultures, there are no officially elected gatekeepers. Particular organizations have heads, councils, spokespersons, and so on, but there’s no over-arching authority, no one clearing-house to vet and approve all a writer’s transcultural efforts or a reader’s interpretation of those efforts.

  So while it’s best to ask for help, it’s unrealistic for an author to expect to be awarded an embossed, beribboned certificate proclaiming the authenticity of her work. All transcultural writers can hope for is understanding and acceptance by readers in general and by individual members of the culture they’re attempting to represent in particular.