Writing the Other

by Nisi Shawl

  Of course, diversity of any sort—especially of ROAARS traits—will increase your readers’ ability to contribute helpful feedback to you. It will not, however, prevent you from making mistakes that see print.

  Learning boils down to making mistakes, seeing what you’ve done wrong, and making corrections. If you’re going to be a good writer, if you’re going to improve, you mustn’t flinch from this process.

  Do your best. Eventually, you’ll figure out how to make your best better.

  Intended Resonances: Not Always a Good Idea

  Consciously creating a resonance doesn’t guarantee the resonance will be a good idea.

  A few years ago, Cynthia read Julie Smith’s mystery novel 82 Desire. In this novel, an important character was christened, through the trickery of a nasty white doctor, with the name Urethra.

  The white author made this black character the most interesting and likeable person in the novel. The author also recognized that she had to make this astonishing christening the defining moment of the unfortunate woman’s life.

  While the word urethra is in and of itself a perfectly legitimate anatomical term, in this context (as the name of an African American female) it carries the following associations: ignorance of the word’s primary usage; mispronunciation of the name of the well-known singer Aretha Franklin; and through the urethra’s connection to urine and other excreta, the misconception that African Americans are dirtier than whites (as exampled by the reluctance of Ivory Soap to sponsor the appearances of another well-known singer, Billy Holliday).

  Given all this, how many readers are going to keep reading after the revelation of the character’s wildly offensive first name?

  The novel is a better-than-average mystery, but Cynthia has never recommended it to anyone on the assumption that most readers will have a bad reaction to the intended resonance of Urethra’s name. Too, Nisi has never expressed an interest in reading 82 Desire: quite the opposite.

  Lincoln Child’s suspense thriller Utopia offers another example of an intended, yet unfortunate, resonance.

  In the novel, Utopia is a gigantic theme park with thousands of employees and 65,000 visitors a day. Yet everyone in the novel has a last name that’s Anglo-Saxon, Irish, or German. Would you believe that ­nobody with a Spanish, Italian, Japanese, or Nigerian surname visits Disneyland? Of course you wouldn’t.

  But we exaggerate—slightly. There are some characters not of WASP, Irish, or German descent. These characters are an Asian love interest; an “almond-eyed” terrorist (race unspecified, but obviously he’s “foreign”); and a coke addict with tight-curled hair whose drug habit is used to blackmail him into betraying the theme park’s security measures.

  The resonances invoked by the last character’s traits are intentional. We’re clearly supposed to recognize him as a coke-snorting, spineless black man.

  But being coy about race or other ROAARS categories doesn’t make a negative resonance positive, especially when the character is the only member of his/her group—or the only member of any minority ROAARS classification—in the novel.

  An easy way to disarm this kind of resonance is to have more than one or two members of a particular ROAARS classification in your novel or novella, and to have several different minorities represented. If Child’s novel had reflected in microcosm the normal diversity of a theme park, he’d have had African-American and “foreign” characters who behaved well, and not just the African-American and “foreign” characters who behaved badly. You don’t want to reproduce Child’s error.

  Some stories, novels, and movies have small casts and/or homogeneous settings that will preclude your being able to introduce much diversity. That’s fine. There’s no point in introducing diversity when it’s unlikely or impossible. When Cynthia watched the movie Mooseport, she quickly and accurately deduced the small-town-Maine-set movie was not filmed in Maine because it had too many black characters. When researching her nonfiction book Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich investigated minimum-wage existence in Maine because no one there would notice a poor white woman ­scrubbing ­toilets. (51) Much of Maine is poor, and 96.9% of Maine is white (http://factfinder.census.gov/).

  And yet, Maine has diversity, even in its smallest villages. Not all homosexual small-town Mainers leave their small towns. Some Mainers need wheelchairs. There are Mainers taller, shorter, fatter, skinnier, richer, poorer, healthier, and less healthy than the perceived American “average.” By the standards of her father’s WASPy Maine hometown (pop. 300), Cynthia is the product of a mixed marriage: her mother is of French descent. And in Maine’s isolated, ethnically homogeneous Washington County, a Mexican grocery recently opened. Even a brief story set in Maine can include diversity—just not the same kinds of diversity as those kinds likely to be found in Miami, Detroit, San Jose, Santa Fe, or Billings.

  When you write a novel or script which, like Utopia, features a large cast in a multi-cultural American setting, reflect that diversity of heritage, nationality, and sexual orientation. Even particularly unobservant members of the unmarked state may notice if 99.9% of your characters are straight whites.

  Exercise 6

  You can use an excerpt from your own writing as the basis for this exercise, or you can select something from the work of another author.

  Find a scene in which the story’s main character encounters someone else. Rewrite that scene so that the secondary character encountered differs in one ROAARS characteristic from the original version. Take five minutes for this exercise if you’re typing it; eight if you’re writing longhand.

  When you’re done, re-read what you’ve come up with. How does it differ from the original scene? Is it stronger? Weaker? More or less plausible?

  Exercise 7

  Now, from this same manuscript, story, or novel, pick another scene in which the main character appears and rewrite it, making a change in this main character’s ROAARS characteristics identical to the change you made for the secondary character in Exercise 6. Give yourself four minutes; six if you’re writing longhand.

  As you consider the new scene you’ve come up with, ask yourself the same questions you asked after Exercise 6. You may also want to think about which of these two exercises was easier or whether doing one made it easier to do the other.

  8

  Don’t Do This!

  In this section we examine just a few of the many, many mistakes it’s possible to make as we write about characters of different ROAARS characteristics from our own. When it comes to writing the other, we’ve all got a lot to learn. Fortunately, the errors of writers who have attempted to portray those of other ROAARS characteristics are available as examples that we strongly advise you NOT to follow. As the Yoruba saying has it, “If we stand tall, it’s because we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors.” Don’t be afraid to get a boost up from your literary forebears and profit from the lessons to be learned from what they’ve done; the worlds you create and the one we actually live in will all benefit greatly.

  “The Dark Hordes Attacked”

  And they usually attacked pseudo-Celts and ­pseudo-­Vikings.

  This is such a hoary fantasy cliché it doesn’t need much discussion. If you find yourself casting heroes and villains (whether as individuals or groups) exclusively along lines of color, religion, sexual orientation, or the like, it’s time to re-think your approach.

  Example: S.M. Stirling’s novella “Shikari in Galveston” (Worlds that Weren’t, edited by Harry Turtledove) has a large cast with a tough, believable warrior woman. But all the blacks are cannibals, safari bearers, or corpses. And the cannibals are the hapless tools of a white man!

  Here Stirling is deliberately working in the tradition of Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H. Rider Haggard, old-fashioned colonialist adventure-fiction authors. Yet for all their problems, these decades-dead white fellows managed to create black characters far more diverse, differentiated, and believable than those of
the modern-day author.

  Glory Syndrome

  Common in Hollywood, but not unknown to print fiction. In this scenario, the movie/story pivots around the concerns central to those far removed from the unmarked state (say, slavery for example), but the plot is all about how the issue affects those in the unmarked state (say, American whites.)

  This isn’t strictly an error, but it’s getting old. If you’re writing about American slavery, why not focus on the people it affects most? It’s not like you can’t show the ways it affects whites, too.

  Example: Glory (which is a good movie—it’s just about the wrong people).

  Counter-Examples: Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing and Steven Barnes’s alternate-history novels Lion’s Blood and Zulu Heart.

  Sidekicks-R-Us

  The straight, white, usually male main character has a best friend of a significantly different ROAARS categorization, and that friend exists primarily to validate the hipness of the main character.

  Cynthia didn’t see the TV series, but the novels she read in Robert B. Parker’s Spenser detective series clearly used the character of the calm, collected, criminal black man Hawk to function as a “coolness” indicator for the white hero, Spenser.

  Using marked-state characters to lend cachet to un-marked heroes, thus bringing them closer to the marked state, is such a cliché that the TV comedy show In Living Color parodied it (and specifically the Lethal Weapon movies) with a joke TV show called “Sidekick.”

  A particularly weak variation on Sidekickism is to have just one to three black characters in the novel/movie, who exist only as bit-players: cops or bodyguards or the like. Alternatively, a minority character may have a better role (like that of a fellow soldier or fighter pilot in a war movie), but he (it’s usually a he) is soon killed off, apparently because the author can’t think of anything else to do with the poor guy. “There!” you can hear the writer thinking. “I promoted diversity. Now, on with the real story!”

  The sidekick’s fatal marked state isn’t always related to ROAARS traits. A happy relationship or family life leads to sidekick death frequently enough to be parodied in the 1991 move Hot Shots: white fighter pilot Pete Thompson is so happy about his wife and kids that all the other pilots call him “Dead Meat”—and he’s barely introduced before he’s killed.

  Laurell K. Hamilton’s Cerulean Sins displays a couple of variations of Sidekickism.

  Hamilton does create sympathetic, complex gay, bisexual, and polyamorous characters, and she has also come up with an interesting and effective way to examine ROAARS classifications, category, and the unmarked state. Her alternate Earth is partly populated by vampires, werewolves, and other were-beasts—­intelligent beings who have recently won legal rights in the US but still face prejudice and hatred.

  There is, however, a major problem with Cerulean Sins. The book is set in St. Louis, a midwestern US city known for its proportionately large black population, and despite its sizeable cast, only three black characters appear in the whole novel. Any reader who knows anything about race in the US will ask, “So where did all the dark-skinned people go?” One of the three black characters is a werewolf bodyguard for the main character’s ex-lover. The other two are foreign vampires who speak an unknown language. They are bodyguards for the antagonists, and they exist only to be killed—repeatedly. Since they’re vampires, it takes at least two attempts to make them truly, permanently dead.

  Talk about “Dead Meat”!

  Counter-Example: The Hap & Leonard mystery/suspense novels of Joe R. Lansdale. In this series, the relationship between marked- and unmarked-state characters is one of equals; neither exists to prove anything about the other.

  Subtle Victimization

  You know you’re in the presence of this error when everyone’s beautifully and insightfully characterized; but the black characters are all victims and/or minor criminals, and power remains in the hands of the power elite (almost exclusively straight and white though not all-male anymore).

  James Lee Burke is an excellent author, but his Dave Robichaux detective novel Purple Cane Road, which is intelligently sympathetic to the effects of racism in Louisiana, shows signs of this problem. When you get right down to brass tacks, in Burke’s novel the whites (some of them; not nearly all) have a monopoly on power and the blacks are victims.

  The only black cop is a dispatcher—he’s in no position to right wrongs or even to do any “policing.”

  This book does not commit the “Great White Father” error of having a straight white guy fix the blacks’ or other minority-ROAARS status characters’ problems. No one is able to right the terrible wrong done to an unjustly imprisoned black woman.

  That is realistic.

  But it is not particularly realistic that every black character in a novel is powerless and that almost every one is a victim. No marked-status member of any ROAARS classification is always powerless. And blacks/gays/etc. aren’t always victims.

  Counter-Example: The Easy Rawlins mystery/detective novels by Walter Mosley.

  In this series we have black heroes and villains, white good guys and bad guys. There are enormous problems. But the blacks solve their own problems, and sometimes white folks’ problems as well.

  Patronizing Romanticizations

  Another category of error encompasses the Noble Savage and other imaginary figures. This sort of character arises when the author fetishizes difference to such an extent that nothing is allowed to detract from it or diffuse it. The traits ascribed to the marked state may be seen as admirable or reprehensible, but they’re presented to readers in the simplest form possible.

  Examples: James P. Hogan’s “Madam Butterfly” beautifully illustrates the so-called “Butterfly Effect,” the part of Chaos Theory that explains how small changes in initial conditions can cause big consequences down the road. But he makes his first viewpoint character, an elderly Japanese woman, unbelievably naïve about the world around her. In Chifumi Shimoto’s eyes, her country is just “…a province in some vaster scheme that she [doesn’t] understand…” (687) The struggle between Earth’s government and the Libertarian-leaning miners in the outer system where her son lives is beyond her: “She had never understood it…” (688)

  Because the story is set in a fairly near future—sometime in the next 100 years— Chifumi’s childhood in a remote mountain valley would have to have taken place in the first decade of the twenty-first century, at the earliest—which means this valley, while remote, couldn’t have been completely isolated. Almost no place can be these days, and certainly no place in Japan. Also, she has been living in a sophisticated urban center, Tokyo, for most of her life—decades, presumably. So why does this woman know nothing of world ­affairs?

  Perhaps Hogan cast her as ignorant because she reveres a mountain spirit called Kyo. Chifumi’s Kyo-­reverence is intrinsic to the plot, but as a real life ­nature-spirit worshipper, Nisi can testify that ignorance and naiveté are not prerequisites for this particular variety of the religious experience.

  Far more blatant romanticization occurs in “Belief,” by P.D. Cacek. Samuel, an elderly black man dressed in rags, apparently an ex-slave (he mentions his former “massa”), guides a newly-killed soldier through Heaven. The soldier realizes that each dead soul creates its own version of the place when Samuel gives him a piece of fresh sugar cane. Holding Samuel’s hand, he sees the black man’s Heaven: a massive field of sugar cane and a small cabin by a fishpond. The author, in other words, portrays the height of Samuel’s ambition as that of owning a better grade of shack than the slave quarters he occupied during life—located conveniently close to a loving reproduction of the site where he labored dawn till dusk. New clothes free of holes and tatters aren’t actually desired, let alone required. These simple people have such simple needs…

  But Maybe Someone Really Did Say That…

  Sometimes an offensive or erroneous representation of a person of a different ROAARS classification springs from
the author’s own experience.

  As we all know, there’s a difference between recounting the facts and telling the truth. Objectivity is problematic in journalism; and when it comes to fiction, it’s a moot point. Though someone may have said or done something that accords with your view of those of a different ROAARS classification, the act of selecting this event for representation in your work moves it from the realm of the objective to that of the subjective.

  You noticed it. You decided it was important. You placed it in a certain context. You scripted your other characters’ reactions to it. You’re trying to imbue it with meaning, and there’s no escaping your responsibility for that, whether or not the attempt is successful.

  Just because you’ve based what you’ve written on something that truly did occur doesn’t mean that what you’ve written is the truth. Your story will benefit from your examination of the implications of what you’ve written, from the feedback you receive on its impact, from your consideration of how typical it may be, and from your questioning of what other parts of the picture you may have missed.

  Example: Midway through Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, the author paints a picture of Reconstruction as an irresponsible free-for-all in which childlike “darkies” are lured from the countryside to urban dens of vice, then abandoned. From their seats on the curbs of city streets, these rustic innocents cry out to passing white women to “…write my old Marster down in Fayette County dat Ah’s up hyah….’Fo’ Gawd, Ah done got nuff of dis freedom!” (646)

  When Nisi complained to another African American woman about this scene, the woman responded that it was at least theoretically possible that a freed slave could have had this reaction. That doesn’t make Mitchell’s artistic choice to spotlight a plea to be re-­enslaved less reprehensible or more plausible.