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

[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.)