(no subject)
Jun. 13th, 2008 07:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusIt's been a quiet, though brutally hot week. I've worked six of the last seven days, and spent most of what remained working on my novel and reading.
I finished Anansi Boys last week. It wasn't his best work -- it was poorly plotted, and character development was sudden and followed the logic of the plot only, not the logic of the characters. There was a lot of excess detail, and nothing new. It was frequently too safe, and the ending was cheesy.
One particular vector of the failure, though, is something I've been interested in -- it's his presentation of his black characters.
When an author portrays a character they don't belong to, they have several choices. Some just default to silly stereotypes, and these are worse than evil -- they're bland. You get a lot of that in Mordecai Richler's later work, and in Gaiman, too, who keeps writing the same shallow, empty gay man over and over again.
If you're trying to be sympathetic, though, things get complicated. Most writers -- scared of getting it horribly wrong -- retreat to the "just-like-everybody-else scenario." In this, you write gay characters like straight people, and members of visual minorities with just the minimum number of changes.
The problem is, there really is no such thing as "just like everybody else." As a member of an often-marginalized minority myself, I can't help but be focused on this. Generally, any marginalized group in a society has its own culture and cultural experiences -- its own mores, its own argot, its own leaders and heroes and assumptions and writers and artists and perspective.
And anyone who has membership in the community can accept these cultural differences wholesale, refuse them completely, or (most often) pick and choose what they like and what they dislike. Most people take a buffet approach, accepting and refusing elements of their culture depending on their own temperment.
But no one can deny a cultural experience wholezsale. Even the loudest denials that one is part of X community set you apart from the majority just as easily as everything else -- the majority doesn't need to say "it's just like everybody else," so you're different the moment you say this.
(I'm thinking of the gay men in Ward Cleaver drag you often see in movies now, living in Technicolour suburbs. This is apparently meant to symbolize that they're just like straight people, but I don't know any straight people who live like that. Gay men who attempt that in real life are even more obviously out of place.)
Then there's prejudice. When you're a part of a minority, you catch subtle, institutionalized prejudices and assumptions that others miss -- and chances are pretty good you've lost jobs and other opportunities, or heard some pretty nasty comments from some very idiotic people throughout your years. Sometimes, too, you jump at shadows -- so certain that prejudice will be a factor that you see it where it probably isn't. Either way, it affects who you are, and what your assumptions are about the world -- it subtly warps your interactions with people.
I understand these things mostly from a gay perspective, but from what I've heard from black people and read in the works of black writers, it's a fairly similar situation -- both when it comes to prejudice and to culture.
I bring this up, because Gaiman has written a 330-page novel about black people in two predominantly-white cultures (the US and England) without race ever becoming a factor or being mentioned except as physical description. Problem is, I've never read a black writer in any sustained narrative avoid the topic so thoroughly.
Hell, even the milk-white villain who thinks purely in movie-clichés never has a racist thought in all of his internal narratives. It's not mentioned when he's living like a colonial lord with black servants on a Caribbean Island. Race isn't mentioned as a factor -- in either his or his prisoners' internal narratives -- when he has two black women imprisoned in a meat locker beneath his home.
I realize it's the safe choice for a white writer to go this route with black characters, but after awhile it strikes an odd chord, and it leaves me yearning for a bit more realism.
I finished Anansi Boys last week. It wasn't his best work -- it was poorly plotted, and character development was sudden and followed the logic of the plot only, not the logic of the characters. There was a lot of excess detail, and nothing new. It was frequently too safe, and the ending was cheesy.
One particular vector of the failure, though, is something I've been interested in -- it's his presentation of his black characters.
When an author portrays a character they don't belong to, they have several choices. Some just default to silly stereotypes, and these are worse than evil -- they're bland. You get a lot of that in Mordecai Richler's later work, and in Gaiman, too, who keeps writing the same shallow, empty gay man over and over again.
If you're trying to be sympathetic, though, things get complicated. Most writers -- scared of getting it horribly wrong -- retreat to the "just-like-everybody-else scenario." In this, you write gay characters like straight people, and members of visual minorities with just the minimum number of changes.
The problem is, there really is no such thing as "just like everybody else." As a member of an often-marginalized minority myself, I can't help but be focused on this. Generally, any marginalized group in a society has its own culture and cultural experiences -- its own mores, its own argot, its own leaders and heroes and assumptions and writers and artists and perspective.
And anyone who has membership in the community can accept these cultural differences wholesale, refuse them completely, or (most often) pick and choose what they like and what they dislike. Most people take a buffet approach, accepting and refusing elements of their culture depending on their own temperment.
But no one can deny a cultural experience wholezsale. Even the loudest denials that one is part of X community set you apart from the majority just as easily as everything else -- the majority doesn't need to say "it's just like everybody else," so you're different the moment you say this.
(I'm thinking of the gay men in Ward Cleaver drag you often see in movies now, living in Technicolour suburbs. This is apparently meant to symbolize that they're just like straight people, but I don't know any straight people who live like that. Gay men who attempt that in real life are even more obviously out of place.)
Then there's prejudice. When you're a part of a minority, you catch subtle, institutionalized prejudices and assumptions that others miss -- and chances are pretty good you've lost jobs and other opportunities, or heard some pretty nasty comments from some very idiotic people throughout your years. Sometimes, too, you jump at shadows -- so certain that prejudice will be a factor that you see it where it probably isn't. Either way, it affects who you are, and what your assumptions are about the world -- it subtly warps your interactions with people.
I understand these things mostly from a gay perspective, but from what I've heard from black people and read in the works of black writers, it's a fairly similar situation -- both when it comes to prejudice and to culture.
I bring this up, because Gaiman has written a 330-page novel about black people in two predominantly-white cultures (the US and England) without race ever becoming a factor or being mentioned except as physical description. Problem is, I've never read a black writer in any sustained narrative avoid the topic so thoroughly.
Hell, even the milk-white villain who thinks purely in movie-clichés never has a racist thought in all of his internal narratives. It's not mentioned when he's living like a colonial lord with black servants on a Caribbean Island. Race isn't mentioned as a factor -- in either his or his prisoners' internal narratives -- when he has two black women imprisoned in a meat locker beneath his home.
I realize it's the safe choice for a white writer to go this route with black characters, but after awhile it strikes an odd chord, and it leaves me yearning for a bit more realism.