I was amazed at your answer to the last question. I knew that Solitaire is a multicultural book from the moment I read that it took place in Asia and that the protagonist’s surname was Segura , but I missed most of the racial inferences. Most writers use epithets when they have minority characters (which I dislike), and I’m glad that you don’t. Now – after reading all the details of the characters’ ethnicities – I think I’m going to go back through Solitaire and try to find the clues I must have missed. I knew that Jackal was Spanish, but I missed the Italian part (but now I realize Donatella is an Italian name). I knew Tiger was Asian from the way you described him and from his last name, although I thought he was Japanese or Southeast Asian. I must say, you’re open-minded for portraying an Asian male so sexually (and attractively). And I knew Snow was Scandinavian, also from the description.
I do have a few questions. How did you become so open-minded about things? Were you raised that way, or did you become more accepting over time?
Anyway, I hope your week is going well. Thanks again.
Sirene
I find it challenging to write multiculturally, and am not overly impressed by my own skills in this regard. I believe that most white writers can and should do better. When writers of a dominant culture start patting themselves on the back for getting a few non-dominant characters in the mix, it’s just a bit too close to straight married men who want the world to call them heroes because they routinely do 50% of the housework. No one would ever praise a woman for doing her 50% of the housework, or tell her husband that he must feel “so lucky that your wife helps out so much!” Same theory applies here. I should recognize in my work, as in all other parts of my life, that not everyone looks, feels, thinks, believes, behaves, dreams, fears, loves, or experiences their everyday world like me. Not because I’m a hero, just because it’s my 50% of this work. I appreciate your approval, and I’m not trying to imply that you shouldn’t like this aspect of my work (or me, grin)–quite the contrary! But I don’t want to start falling in love with myself about it either.
Part of the challenge of writing multiculturally is my own hang-up as a writer: I dislike reading character descriptions that are so obviously only there to satisfy the “rule” that the reader has to know what everyone looks like. (“Oh, no,” she said, brushing her golden hair back from her forehead…) Ick. And we’ve talked before about white writers describing white characters in particular terms without any reference to skin color, while characters who are not white are described first and foremost as whatever sort of not-white they are. I don’t have enough experience with a spectrum of literature by African-American writers, or writers from other countries, to make the same generalization, although I’ve understood from my African-American friends and teachers that skin color is an important (although not always openly-discussed) differentiation in African-American culture. Maybe someone here knows more about this than I do?
Sometimes the kind of obvious description I mention above is necessary: sometimes the most important thing about a character is skin color (for example, in the movie Beverly Hills Cop, when Eddie Murphy walks into the redneck bar, the point is that it’s full of white people). But that’s context. If hanging a race/culture/ethnicity tag on someone isn’t right for the context, then it’s just a lazy choice.
But since physical character description is necessary sometimes, that’s where skill comes in. I wanted to make the point in Solitaire that not everyone was white, but I also didn’t want it to be a big deal (from Jackal’s perspective) that she lived in a diverse society. I thought some of my choices were pretty clumsy, and some were okay. And you caught one of my mistakes. Tiger is indeed supposed to be Chinese, but I couldn’t find a family name for him that I liked (character names are important to me, and I sometimes really struggle with them). So I plugged in “Amomato” and promised myself I’d come back and fix it…and never did. Oops (laughing). Maybe he was an orphan adopted by a forward-thinking Filipino family, or something.
Anyway, you probably didn’t miss that many clues, because there aren’t that many, because I was trying hard not to make too many lame choices (grin). And I’m still trying in the new book.
I don’t know how open-minded I am: like everything else, it depends. I’ve done a fair amount of work to overcome the effects of being raised in a racist culture, and I was blessed with parents who fought against racism in all kinds of ways during my childhood. They were civil rights activists in the 60’s, and were part of an “underground railroad” of sorts that helped Black activists get out of town (sometimes the country) when things were getting too hot. There were still race riots in the streets of Tampa in 1968 and 1969, the police force was actively and aggressively racist, and things were terribly hard for people who weren’t white.
In 1970, one of the leaders of a Black youth movement in Tampa was arrested on a marijuana charge. He and his wife, who was white, lived with us for a few months during their trial (five people in a 700-square foot house, with the two of them sleeping on the living room floor, so as you might imagine we all got to know each other better). He spoke several languages, and taught me to play chess, and let me figure out for myself whether what was happening to them was right or not.
I went with my parents to court during the trial, and watched the police officer at the courtroom door “search” my mother’s purse by dumping it out on the table, or the floor, every time she went in or out; all the Black women were searched this way, and no other white woman was. Our phone was tapped. Uniformed officers showed up at our house for no particular reason. We were followed by patrol cars and unmarked cars (I was even followed as I walked to school one day, dangerous 10-year-old that I was). It was a little taste of what Black and Hispanic folks in Tampa lived through every day in a thousand different ways. It sucks that it happened, and is still happening to people everywhere, everyday; and it also taught me that racism is real, which was a very good thing for me to learn. I remember going to boarding school and describing some of this to my peers, many of whom flatly asserted that I was lying, that those kinds of things couldn’t happen in America. Go figure.
Because I was an only child, I spent a lot of time in adult company. My parents rarely excluded me from adult events as long as I was respectful and didn’t act up. Our parties were full of people of all colors, all ages, poor and wealthy, people who drank and those who used drugs, gay and lesbian people as well as straight people. I met bikers, Viet Nam veterans, low-level Mafia soldiers, lawyers, priests, artists, people with illness or disability. There was a lot of difference in the room when I was growing up. Along with loving me unconditionally and making sure I got an education way above my class expectations, it is the most powerful thing my parents did for me. Those three things built my foundations in ways that I’m still only just figuring out.
And does this make me Wonder White Woman? Absolutely not. I still struggle with racist assumptions and fears. I find it frustrating and shaming, but there you go, this is where we live and this is what it does to all of us.
I am learning these lessons again, in different context, in my study of American Sign Language and Deaf culture: much of our learning centers on the assumptions that hearing people make about deaf people, and the ways that deaf people can be oppressed by those assumptions. As part of that study, last year we read a book called Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice, by Paul Kivel; I highly recommend it. It’s not a book that beats up white folks about individual racism; rather, it looks at how racism manifests in America’s legal, educational, social, economic and cultural systems, and how any of us can take individual steps to push back against the various ways that this oppression has been institutionalized. It’s about ways in which white people can become allies to people of color. Some of the students in my class wondered why we were reading a book on racism to learn more about the experience of deaf people in America; by the end, it was pretty clear.
Uprooting Racism put me strongly in mind of another excellent book that explores systemic oppression from a different perspective: How To Suppress Women’s Writing, by Joanna Russ. Both great books.
And I’m sorry as hell that there’s any need for them. Sometimes I wonder why we’re all so damn hard on each other all the time. Socialization, enculturation, the slow accretion of assumption that congeals into Truth About The World and Everyone In It…. and whether we embrace it or fight against it, it still happens. Creating a worldview is a human thing, it’s what we do and I wouldn’t change it. I just wonder why so many people feel that there can be only one?
Yeeks, if we were drinking real beer instead of virtual pints, no doubt people would be propping me up and making go-home noises about now. And so I will. Cheers.
Bwahahahaha no one would congratulate a man that his wife did 50% of the housework!!!
Oh, wait, I should read the whole article….but I love that bit…
It amuses me greatly that names are being used for racial tagging.
Of all lingual concepts, I trust names least of all.
However, I forgive that sort of thing. What’s a writer to do? In most cases, it makes sense anyways. Regardless, it weirds me out.
Well, as I said in the post, I’m not overly impressed with myself and certainly don’t think I exactly deserve a cookie. I was and am still learning.
I’m not sure what to say… One of the things that keep bugging me about many stories that try to portray multicultural characters under a positive light is how race and culture are apparently not an issue, not even enough to need addressing. That, too me, reads so artificial. Politically-correct situations make my skin crawl, they make me tense and weary.
Hm, this is complex and I’m not sure I know how to explain it. I’m also not sure if what we do is just something particular to our group of friends, and to most Mexicans, or if it’s something that can be extended to multicultural scenarios in general. The first thing me and my multicultural friends do—and the second and the third and the constant thing we do—is point out how different we are from each other. We joke about it a lot, about the good and bad—we tease more about the bad stuff, I have to say. The aboriginal people I’ve hung out with in Canada also share a self-deprecating and all-around-bashing sense of humour. We laugh because it’s more comfortable than being quietly afraid of each other; the hints we throw around helps us understand where our differences come from instead of having to pretend we are the same when we are not, pretend all the edges are smooth when they are so clearly sharp. It feels more honest than being politically correct…. But then we may just be totally messed up by our coping mechanisms, and condemning ourselves to a lower level of hell by perpetrating stereotypes. I don’t know.
I typed up a whole scene to illustrate how our multicultural dinner table sounds like, but decided not to post it. I’ll do the cowardly thing and let Sarah Silverman take the fall while still offering you a sample of the kind of talk you could have heard when a group of Mexicans, Guatemalans, Iranians, Chinese, and Africans got together for pozole and beer. We teased the hell out of each other, to the horror of the two white—and very silent—Canadians who just couldn’t believe what we were saying, or how we laughed about our differences, or how we kept squeezing lemon over the wounds and airing out the things we can barely stand about the other’s cultural and/or racial traits.
I’m still trying to decide which is more helpful: to tell it like it is and try to take it from there, or to tell it like it should be and hope the wish alone will be powerful enough to help us breach the gap.
I’m still thinking about this. It must be especially difficult for a white author to pull off the right blend of realism and optimism, and, even when she does get it right, she can still be blamed of being too patronizing or not sensitive enough… Ack.
Last year, one of my peers wrote a story set in Japan. The interaction between a group of western English teachers and the small-town locals was not very cordial. People in the workshop freaked out on the author, who was white and Canadian. They argued that she’d written a very racist story, and that portraying the Japanese as having all black hair and styled in the same fashion, etc. was not accurate, that in fact the Japanese have really cool and colourful and distinct and experimental hairdos… and so on. And they love westerners! Hadn’t she ever been to Tokyo? The author replied, “Yes, in fact I have visited, but my story is not set in Tokyo. It takes place in a little town called so and so, and I lived there for four years. I know what it’s like and how people look and act in that place, and how they interact with us foreigners.” The only person who didn’t read her story as racist but hilariously accurate—if transported to small-town Mexico—was me. So strange…
Then, we had Caleb, who took to writing about the US-Mexico border in a very crude way. His Mexicans were basically thugs and evil and stuff. No one freaked out on him, because he’s brown and then there was me in the workshop. People would look my way and ask, “Is that how it is?” And I’d say, “Sure, we have all kinds of people, and some are pretty nasty because they’ve had a very hard life.” And to the question, “Why would a Mexican be so mean to his fellow countrymen?” I had to reply, “There are times when a Mexican’s worst enemy is another Mexican. So, yeah, Caleb’s characters are realistic.” So the author was left off the hook and the discussion shifted to elements of plot and setting and so on. I suspect that, had Caleb been white and karina absent, our peers would have flogged the author with accusations of racism.
Multiculturalism is such a thorny issue… It makes my head hurt sometimes, and my heart. I’m glad you are sensitive and brave enough to tackle it in your writing.