i keep saying i'll have more cogent things to say about this, but till then...

[fictional]

Check out deepad's post, I Didn't Dream of Dragons, a thoughtful, lucid, poignant essay on race and reading fantasy.

Excerpt from my comment:

But here is my problem, and that problem is love. Brought up on a steady diet of white fantasy and British boarding school novels, now, even when I can identify the alienation imposed by them -- these are stories by people who think of me as sub-human -- I still love them. They are still the fabric of my childhood, the patterns of my inner landscape. It's like Stockholm Syndrome.

And I still don't know what to do with that? How does one cope with the politics of desire?

Comments

[oddnari.livejournal.com]

... I've not read the post you mention but from your excerpt, I just thought - desire? and rational? Wot?

Perhaps I am obtuse - in fact, I probably am, and I beg you to explain to me the reasoning behind the need to reason out this desire for I am unable to see the need for, well, politicising (rationalising?) "desire" - you either give in to it, or you don't.

I love the St Clare, the Malory Towers, Whyteleafe, Chalet School, William, and the PG Wodehouse school stories. True, there are no people of colour, the only times a colony is mentioned are in the St Clare's series - Hillary's family goes to India, the girls watch a film called Clive of India, Pat and Isabel study Africa for geography exam, so would it be considered alienation of people of colour? And how are these stories by those who think of people of colour as sub-human? I am quite ignorant of this, so if you have the time and inclination, I beg you to enlighten me.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

I love all those stories too. Except William, haven't read him. Which is what I was trying to say.

But I was in Calcutta last winter, and stocking up on the Enid Blyton, which I hadn't read in years, and flipping through the ___ of Adventure series? And the one where they meet the savage little black boy, and he might as well be called Sambo? (Actually he probably was, and there was a lot of discussion about how they steal, they don't have our "good british ethics" etc etc) I used to love those books for the descriptions of sausages and tinned peaches and cakes and ginger beer. How do I respond to another book I loved, Kipling's Kim, and his depiction of the oily, verbose, shabby Bengali Babu -- that's my people there, specifically. How do I enjoy Hillary's family going to India, or the novels of Emily Eden, how am I such an anglophile, when I don't support the Raj?

These novels were written from a perspective of racism. Part of that is time-specific; they are of their time. But loving them so much sometimes feels like self-loathing. I feel like they wouldn't love me if they could know me. I feel like they weren't written for me.

Which is what I meant by alienation.

Does that make sense?

But then I also love the villains, right? Lucius Malfoy wouldn't love me either. Or Draco. So what to do with that?

*throws up hands*

...

[keith418.livejournal.com]

Some of the best Italian food is made by Ethiopians and some of the best sushi, I think, is made by Koreans. Colonization and conquest, while never pretty, often have complex features and exchanges that can't be reduced simply or easily.

My wife is Chinese, but she is the biggest Anglophile on the planet. The fact that the British empire fought the opium wars and colonized parts of China never really bothers her. Should it? Or does a new era mean that we can look at other things and move beyond the kinds of resentments that stem from a past we never participated in ourselves?

[rm.livejournal.com]

How does one cope with the politics of desire?

Well that's always the problem, isn't it?

Let's take gender, since I am far more qualified to talk about that within this perspective. For simplification purposes, I'm a woman with a strong preference for the stories of men. But so much of gendered dialogue completely sucks. I recognize this, even as I engage in it as a writer, consumer and queer person. How often do I talk about manning up or being angry at myself because I'm being such a _girl_ about something. That's pretty toxic shit, especially when you consider not just that I'm a woman, but that my partner is also a woman who loves women.

But! If I remove the ugly politics and privileges of gender, those stories that interest me? Not as interesting. The fun/power/pleasure of cross-dressing or being butch or being a girl who does boy things or establishing my gendered identity as belonging to some grouping of other (which are four different categories of action in my mind): all completely uninteresting in a world where "having a cunt doesn't make me less of a man" is an irrelevant sentence.

So what does this mean?

Bleakly, I think it underscores that humans like hierarchy, even when they are not in an advantageous position in the hierarchy. It's the swaddling to our identities and we do badly without it.

But, perhaps more disturbing to me, is that it suggests that desire is rooted, somehow, in shock value and/or contrariness, and I would like to think that our species is somehow more complex than merely being Tina the Troubled Teen en masse, but, the fact is, I suspect we're not.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

I also think of this in regard to the fact that we like to think of ourselves as good people, with a predilection towards the stories of villains.

Somehow it seems part of the same problem. Is it a love of transgression for its own sake, as you suggest?

Maybe it's not even a problem. I don't know.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I hope it's not love of transgression for its own sake. It doesn't _feel_ like it, but I suspect that it may be, not because ooo, trangression, fun to be shocking, but because desire is in part a function of discomfort.

The most powerful line in the essay you originally cited was "I grew up with half a tongue" and it's there to make a very specific cultural point, that I really don't want to take away from with my digression, but when it comes to the language of desire -- isn't it that we all have half a tongue, at least in a society that is all about punishing desire both cultural and sexual? Certainly, that's where this discussion meanders ("what desire is acceptable") further down-thread.

Another Question

[keith418.livejournal.com]

I think that in addition to looking at why people are drawn to what might be called "colonialist genre fiction" instead of fiction deriving from experiences in the Third World or from immigrants. For example, why Harry Potter and NOT Zadie Smith? Why Dr. Who and NOT Rushdie? If you wanted to, you could spend your life fully immersed in more PC fare, and what is generally seen by critics and academics as more "literary" than genre oriented, but you don't.

I find this question curious myself because both you and rm seem like amazingly intelligent and well-educated women to me - and women who betray little to no interest in the kind of literature that I might expect really cultured and well-educated women to be invested in. Why not Ahmed Alaidy, Isabel Allende, Ruth Prawar Jhabvala? Why so little interest in the stuff that actually address the other side of the equation?

I also want to say that no one has to do "literature" or genre all the time. You can have a little of both. I've noticed that the people who read more literary stuff tend to take breaks with genre novels, but the people who read genre seldom read other kinds of lit.

Re: Another Question

[demotu.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was kind of an asshole post with more assumptions than you can throw an asshole at.

?

[keith418.livejournal.com]

Let me try to put it another way:

If one kind of books produces "It's like Stockholm Syndrome" - then why not books and art that are not going to induce "Stockholm Syndrome"?

Re: Another Question

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

You seem to have a number of erroneous assumptions here.
1. I am not interested in/familiar with "more literary fare" i.e. the authors that you mention and "fiction derived from experience."
2. The authors that you mention don't write "genre fiction."
3. That critics and academics agree with you about what is "literary".
4. That the authors you mention sufficiently address "the other side of the equation."

Some of them might be predicated on the fact that you don't actually know me or my background. I am, in fact, an academic. And a critic. I do have little interest in "fiction deriving from experience," though your assumption that I have not read the authors you mention is wrong. I am quite fond of Allende, for instance (who often writes magical realism, which is sort of like genre fiction that can sometimes win the Nobel Prize), and I greatly dislike Jhabvala and all her works (but I have read them), both for stylistic reasons, as well as political ones (not actually addressing the "other side of the equation"). Rushdie is another author I am fond of; Zadie Smith does not speak to me.

I also have extensive training in the early modern period, as well as 19th century literature. I've chosen however, to also examine genre fiction, children's literature, popular culture with these same critical lenses. I find the distinction between high culture and low culture to be mostly fictional, and this attitude is reflected both in my leisure-time activities as well as my work - & the distinctions between these two aspects of my life grow less pronounced by the day.

It is curious to me how much literary weight you seem to place on the aforesaid "fiction derived from experience." I am almost entirely uninterested in it. I have experience. I have spent a good portion of my life in the "third world." I am the daughter of immigrants. Those stories do not tell me anything new; they are not the exotic transports to other worlds that they may be to some. I enjoy the literature of fantasy because stories are doorways, and I don't want to walk in rooms I could get to on foot. I find it rather boring, to be frank. Literary style can be found anywhere (though rarely) and for something I'll enjoy aesthetically, I'll go pretty far. But that kind of perfection is just as often found in the parts of the canon which I prefer. Jane Austen, incomparable stylist. That's fine though - she counts as literary, right? Though still denigrated by many as "frilly dresses & romance." But for the turn of a sentence -- there are few to match. And I'd stack Georgette Heyer (genre) up there too. Films too. Do I not see the limited releases? Of course. Do I think a lot of mass market stuff is tripe? Certainly. But the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie? BRILLIANT. Perfect timing, perfect chemistry, perfect pace, perfect dialogue, beautiful performances. Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal A Million? Ditto.

Many of my students enjoy reality tv & "fiction derived from experience" in the same way; they look, in fiction, for things that could, they think, happen to them, for recognizability, for "facts." I find this attitude immensely depressing. How sad to be so tied down to this world? In one of my favorite works by Rushdie -- perhaps you've not read it; it's called Haroun and the Sea of Stories -- his villain asks, "what is the point of stories that aren't even true?" The heroes think differently, of course. In my opinion, (with apologies to Boswell & Johnson) a person who is tired of fantasy, is tired of fiction, for there is in fantasy all that fiction can afford.

But Rushdie could never, would never have written that novel without The Wizard of Oz, without The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Which is the point being brought up in the essay I'm citing in the post.

women who betray little to no interest in the kind of literature that I might expect really cultured and well-educated women to be invested in.

Incidentally, a question: Are women meant to be particularly interested in "fiction deriving from experiences"? Why? What does being a woman have to do with anything you've brought up here? Why not just people?

Re: Another Question

[demotu.livejournal.com]

Oh, win. Everything I was thinking (not the personal parts, obviously, although I knew much of it about you) but I couldn't get far enough beyond omg, asshole to say it.

Re: Another Question

[rm.livejournal.com]

(posted in two parts because of LJ comment character limit)

You know, we keep having this conversation in one fashion or another. You seem preoccupied by what I/we read, thinking that, that is somehow the relevant question, when I suspect very strongly that the more relevant question, at least to me, is a matter of how we read/experience media.

I have mixed feelings about the works you cite (as well as tone with which you do so), and unlike Kali, don't particularly have the patience to list my various reactions to the authors in question, which is why she's a critic and I merely play one occassionally on subjects of interest.

Litary fiction, by and large, focuses on two things: questions of personal power and the emotional logistics of the domestic. These stories hold remarkably little interest for me, because they are not the stories of my questions, problems or processes or those of anyone around me. As disconnected from reality as genre literature may seem to you, these stories seem to me, but instead of being about the stars, they are to me about the mud.

Because I am not struggling against the expectations on me as wife. Nor trying desperately to find enough personal power to pursue my creative dreams. I'm not trying to raise a kid that hates me, overcome writer's block, deal with a spouse's alcoholism, come to terms with a sibling's dark secret or know joy in the face of my parent's loveless marriage or any one of 100 other struggles rife in literary fiction.

But back to the how.

Let's take Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint. I suppose if you read it you'd be like "oh, okay, some book about a professional assasin with some random social and class politics thrown in." To me it's about "what the world look like if my sexual orientation was in the majority instead of the minority." The author merely uses the setting to illustrate facets of the point.

Let's take Doctor Who, which, if I'm not mistaken, you watch too. I don't know what you see in that if you do, but I imagine for lots of people it's "woah, adventures -- wouldn't that be COOL?" For me it's about "how do you love when you're sure you're too heartbroken to love anymore?" "how do you find the grit to be extraordinary when you're really perfectly ordinary and scared out of your goddamn mind?" "how do you engage with beauty when you know it will always end in loss?"

Harry Potter. Typical story, right? "Lonley boy, discovers he's special, fights evil, not even that well written." All true. But I, and I think it's safe to say, Kali, read for the cracks. Why is this world stratified this way? What is adulthood? Is the loss of positive social constructs enough to justify negative and essentially racist acts in an attempt to preserve them? What is the proper response to beauty built on the labor of slaves? What is family? (hey, that them'es in Doctor Who too!) And, on a meta level, how does a writer construct a story? What happens when the plot deviates from the plan and what's the proper response from an editorial standpoint?

Where you seem to see "oooooh, shiny! escapism" I see the questions that define my life in a way that makes that explicable to other people.

and continued

[rm.livejournal.com]

When I was in college the film Metropolitan came out, and I saw it with a bunch of friends. It's a extremely vivid rendering of my teen years: that is, being an outsider amongst NY private school kids and the folks that go to the International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf Astoria. Coming out of the theater, one of my friends said she had been amused, but it was all so fake -- no one really lives like that. Well, actually they do.

Metropolitan, despite being a well-made, funny and engaging film about essentially true things, did nothing to provide her insight into that experience. Yet, I've been able to simply explain that class experience in a way that was personally resonant for others through, for example, Harry Potter.

Just because something isn't real, doesn't mean it's not full of truth. Or allegory. Or mere usefulness.

I don't define myself by my gender. Or by what I read or watch. But I do partially define myself by how those things fit on me and how I engage them in turn. Literary fiction and its disection of modern work/life conflicts, heteronormative neuroses, the burdens of family legacies and quests for personal identity in the face of strip-mall culture, aren't things I need or want to wear, hich doesn't make many of those books less artfully rendered, it just makes them not terribly useful to me.

At the end of the day, I think it's ridiculous that this discussion always comes down to you asking me or Kali or whomever is engaging this dialogue with you to justify our tastes, to justify -- to link this back to Kali's original point -- our desires.

Desire is interesting as a subject for its variances and discomforts; it's not an experience of neatness. I don't know why you keep asking it to be.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

That was the textual equivalent of taking a crap in someone's living room. I hope it made you feel big and powerful.
Also, the statement that people who read literature also read genre fiction, but people who read genre fiction don't read literature actually makes no logical sense in any universe.
Concern troll for the lose.

[electro-club.livejournal.com]

I think I understand what you mean, though I might not be able to translate my thoughts into exact words. Not in English, that is. And I suppose that is somehow also part of the problematic.

I read the post, and there is no way to disagree with what deepad said. My reality might be just slightly different, but it stills fits in that same scenario. And when you question how does one copes with the politics of desire - well, I keep asking myself the exact same thing.

I've taken a course about the portrayal of the Other, mostly in the movie industry. It basically covered the Latin Americans, black and homosexual groups. It's the kind of thing that makes you angry. I can't even watch, say, Aladdin the same way I used to, and I used to love it when I was a kid. I grew up watching those things, being part of it, dreaming of going to countries where they shut my fellow countrymen inside small airports' rooms for weeks like they're criminals before kicking them back to my country with no further explanation for the mere fact they are South Americans. And the scariest part of it all is that it's really easy for one to watch or hear or read about that and not find it disturbing in the slightest. Because that's what they're told, isn't it? That Brazilians are all dealers who want to steal their jobs.

Anyway….

The lack of respect for the culture of others (mainly for the culture of former colonies) is so impregnate on societies that it kind of becomes a comforting zone or something. Like you don't have to understand the other, even if you are to speak or write about them, you just have to be aware of stereotypes and that is enough. It's like thinking Americans are all burger eaters with two neurons called Chip and Dale, or that the French are all poofs with berets. Brazilians equals soccer, samba and lack of clothing? Really? I don't think you have to understand everything and everyone, because really, you can't. No one can. If things were that easy we wouldn't be discussing this right now. But if you are going to write about a different kind of person, with different kinds of vision and beliefs, you really shouldn't assume that you understand that person based on a vision that is constructed by your own universe. It doesn't work like that. Shouldn't the fact that it will get people pissed somewhere represent a problem? It can be really toxic.

What deepad says goes further than that, I know. And I do find a lot of similarities in what deepad said and my own life and society, but there are differences, important differences, that I guess I'm thankful for, on some ways. However, in the end, one way or another, it's still all the same thing. I grew up with Zé Carioca's comics (I don't know if that's his name in English, but I suppose it is. He's the green bird, Donald Duck's friend). He's a crook. He does bad things, he's bad mannered, he doesn't work, spends his entire days on bars, dancing and drinking. But he's a nice guy, sympathetic, and that makes you generally like him (of course he uses his likeability to take advantage of people). But what defines him essentially is that he's a carioca. And that is the image everyone has of cariocas. A carioca is a person who is born in Rio de Janeiro. Well, basically, the rest of the country hates us, because of our accent, and because of the damn Zé Carioca's imagery. Argentineans hates Brazilians, because they think we are all Zé Cariocas, except there is a very large part of Brazil that actually resembles Argentina in everything. It doesn't make any sense. But that's what media and its poor and reckless representation does.

[electro-club.livejournal.com]

And then there's the part where I, or we, feel guilty about it. Because I can’t help loving things and universes and characters and writers and movies that are not really made for me, but I can’t get away from it. Because it's there. I grow up with that, I learn from that, I am used to that. And then there are the times when I even feel like I’m part of something that is, in reality, alien to me. Makes me feel like I know it, when I don't. I underestimate, on some ways, realities and people as though they’re so familiar to me, I’m free to judge or argue over it reasonably. That’s what flares this whole thing. It’s an endless cycle. Know the thing about a lie being told several times until it becomes the truth? Works the same way, I guess. My situation here is a bit different, but walks the same road. It’s a matter of how natural things become, of how easily familiarized you are, and, most of all, of how intense and disrupting an intervention of that type can be, regardless of the intent.

It's not completely bad to have stereotypes, because stereotypes, one way or another, create a mutual feeling of belonging. It's by generalizing that you are made part of something, right? Part of a group, part of a people, part of a country – and people might disagree here, but I have absolutely nothing against being me, with my thoughts and opinions and individualities, and being a Brazilian, sharing certain marks of expression that identify me as part of the syncretism that has formed my birthplace’s traditions. But there are limits to generalizing and the creation of stereotypes and that is the line, or distorting factor, that keeps being transcended all the time. Like deepad said,

how difficult it is to growing up reading books (and watching movies) about a culture alien to you, and how pernicious the influences thereof can be.




(I'm sorry for such a gigantic comment that might have, and probably did, wander so far away from your original comment and purpose of discussion. And I'm also deeply sorry for raping your language.)

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

My language (which isn't mine, or didn't start out that way - as Deepa says, I suppose I too was born with half a tongue) loves you. ;-) Seriously.

And then there's the part where I, or we, feel guilty about it. Because I can’t help loving things and universes and characters and writers and movies that are not really made for me, but I can’t get away from it. Because it's there. I grow up with that, I learn from that, I am used to that. And then there are the times when I even feel like I’m part of something that is, in reality, alien to me. Makes me feel like I know it, when I don't. I underestimate, on some ways, realities and people as though they’re so familiar to me, I’m free to judge or argue over it reasonably.

YES. THIS. That is exactly what I was trying to say. What to do about the guilt???

[thaddeusfavour.livejournal.com]

You've given me so much to think about. And, wow. You communicated so well, in English. You not only got your point across, you verbalized a complex set of feelings so that I "got" it. Wow.

Honestly, as I said to Kali, I need to think these things through. Thank you for expressing it so well.

[demotu.livejournal.com]

Hun, I think if I see you apologize for your English one more time I've going to jump through the internets and hit you on the head with a banana. Because if you didn't say it was your second language I'd never have guessed. (Content of the comment aside.)

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

I come back to this question a lot but in really awkward ways. Sometimes it's blindingly clear that I'm coming from a position of White Liberal Guilt. So, uh, yeah. Poke me with a stick if I do something stupid.

As someone white who writes, I know I struggle with including characters who aren't. I'm afraid of writing token characters who are distinct only because of their skin, or their national origin, or their accent. OTOH, I want to live in a world where there are enough characters with enough different skin tones, origins, and accents that the problem of tokenism is less overt. (I'm not sure if it's something we can eradicate or not.)

As someone who reads, I run into things The Spirit -- not the film, but the original comic -- has a lot going for it, but then there's Ebony White and my guts go, "Oh no. No no no no." There are tons of old films and cartoons that I grew up with, but when I see them as an adult I go, "Whoa! Not okay!"

I think everyone has to find their own point of acceptance/comfort. Art is uncomfortable because it reflects life, and artists are dirty mirrors whose flaws show in their work. Some are dirtier than others, I'll grant, but if the light you get is pleasing, even for a little while, maybe it's useful? I don't know. I really don't have an answer.

[rm.livejournal.com]

You know, one of the weird things for me as a writer is that a lot of my original work has non-Western settings, but hey, white chick. A lot of that comes from living a culturally adjacent life -- a man I lived with in my 20s grew up in Okinawa, for example. There are a lot of cultural habits or awarenesses I have of other places not because they are fashionable or because I'm trying to be a cool white chick, but because they are natural and familiar to me in a lot of ways. But when people read my stuff, they have no way of knowing I'm not just appropriating at random. It's sooooo complicated. Patty goes through this too. She wants to ask the men who work at the bodega downstairs from us where they are from, because their Arabic sounds different from the Arabic she's learned, but she knows what is a natural question for her, won't sound like one coming from her to them, without a lot of backstory they probably don't give a crap about.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

I doubt stick poking will be necessary, and no one died and left me Grand High Arbiter of Political Correctness, but yeah. Most (all? sheesh) of my closest friends, my partner -- they're all white. So sometimes I go, "uh! wait!"

As someone white who writes, I know I struggle with including characters who aren't. I'm afraid of writing token characters who are distinct only because of their skin, or their national origin, or their accent

Right, right! Actually I was just thinking about this -- in my last post, in this play I went to see, they had NO BLACK ACTORS (though one black character.) And if that was "color blindness" at work - I was incredibly disturbed by it. Would I have been if it'd been the other way? But it's not all right for the race of privilege to read as neutral, like you can just paint anything else on top of it. white (or pink-beige-cream whatever) is a color too. I think of this in cosplay all the time. Somehow, on top of whiteness, one seems to be able to paint anything... it's a blank canvas of possibility. And that is perhaps what I feel most envious of.

Did you ever see the original Fantasia? Which has a black maid unicorn/pegasus thing waiting on all the white pegasi? Disney cartoons are really alarming at times. And I too was okay with lots of stuff when I was young, but not later. Does it work as a historical artifact though? Is it okay to love those things if the authors are dead?

I dunno. These are all the questions I wrestle with, all the time.

Art is uncomfortable because it reflects life, and artists are dirty mirrors whose flaws show in their work. Some are dirtier than others, I'll grant, but if the light you get is pleasing, even for a little while, maybe it's useful?

Maybe it's just the unexamined that that's unuseful. I don't think one ought to be ashamed of pleasure or desire in any form (though it might not be my personal cup of tea) and art and life are both messy, messy things. But talking about it, thinking about it -- maybe that's what makes it possible to move forward.

Clearly I have no answers either.

[dirty-diana.livejournal.com]

I understand that. So much. My mother raised me on the English kids' books that her mother raised her on. So I loved Enid Blyton. But I still remember, one of those weirdly clear kids memories, the day I had to ask my mother what on Earth a golliwog was. And her, trying to explain it to me, and this weird uncomfortable sensation that never really went away when I read the Amelia books, after that.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

*chuckles* I feel actually somewhat relieved that my mother had no familiarity with most of these books, and so I didn't read them at any time.

I first discovered what a golliwog was when reading, of all things, Alan Moore's "The Black Dossier" last year! I closed the book and said, "what the hell is that doll?" and then looked it up.

I had never heard the term before that. Odd how so many people had, and I was 28 when I first encountered it. :x

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I still kind of love Enid Blyton, frankly. But there's all this hidden stuff which we miss as kids, and then come back to as adults, and go, "whoa!" I prefer the books set entirely in Cornwall, or other parts of Britain than the ones where they actually go other places and meet little black sambo, or whatever.