On reading and race
I wrote the below last year after finishing Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, then starting Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Tl;dr: Having my usual fictive environment shifted from the typical white perspective for a while lowered my tolerance for the usual white perspective, and nudged my privilege-blinders just a little further back.
So I just finished reading Midnight Robber, the second book by Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-Canadian writer of speculative fiction. (I was assigned this book in one of Uppinder Mehan’s classes back in Emerson’s MFA program — I think his summer science fiction class — but didn’t get to it then.) I don’t know about her other work, but this one combines a sci-fi/fantasy landscape with Caribbean speech patterns, cultural touchstones, and storytelling techniques.
Her facility with language is amazing, and it only took a page or so before I was so ensconced in the rhythm of the patois she created from various Caribbean referents that I ceased to notice it. I loved this book, overall, but two things stood out for me in terms of my experience of reading it:
1. I was forced to confront the little institutionalized-racist voice in my head, which occasionally says things like, But how could people who speak this way develop space travel and nanotechnology? Like wow, brain, wtf. As one reviewer said, the book “raises questions about the highly conventionalized way that SF has always treated language, [and] mak[es] us question the hegemony of American culture in SF worlds” (Gary K. Wolfe, taken from the Wikipedia article on the book).
2. Once my douchebag brain got properly chastised, I found myself deeply enjoying inhabiting this world where everyone is a person of color (the primary setting, Toussaint, is a planet colonized by Caribbeans), and where slavery is a distant race-memory, told again and again in stories to remind the citizenry of how they came to Toussaint in freedom, but not personally known by anyone alive (until later in the book). Reading a book in which people of color are just the people in the book, as opposed to people whose position must always be considered in relationship to the white people in the book, was refreshing and oddly relaxing. (What that might say about my white privilege is also interesting: how relieving of white guilt to enter a world where white people don’t even exist, and to watch mixed people of many shades and cultures treat each other well or poorly based on completely different factors than race.)
So that was fascinating, besides being a fantastic book.
So next, I turned around and started Cloud Atlas, which had been on my shelf for ages and which I figured I’d pick up and continue my sci-fi tear. I didn’t know a lot about the book aside from that it got made into a movie not too long ago, and I got the sense that it’s somewhat post-modern and travels through lots of times and places. It was also written recently, by a white guy.
Thing is, the time and place where Mitchell starts is with a section titled “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” which, while not clearly dated, appears to be written sometime in the mid-1800s by an American traveling among colonial Brits in the South Pacific. This narrator starts out charming, with an overly florid, steampunk-worthy writing style. But it takes about five seconds for him to start casually saying the most horrendously racist things seemingly every chance he gets. Like literally, every paragraph affords an opportunity for him to say something about the various natives of the place they’ve landed. Now, I know that 1. this is highly reflective of how people generally thought in this time and place, and is therefore accurate as character development, and 2. I’m fairly sure Mitchell is exaggerating this point for effect, as I sense the book will further treat issues of race in complex ways. [Ed. note: it does, mostly.]
However! Reading this one, especially right after Midnight Robber, made me feel maybe an iota of the frustration people of color must feel living in this world. To wit: having to deal with racism on a constant, low level, casual basis, just as part of the background noise. I can’t imagine what reading the so-called “Western canon” must be like for people of color, given not just the historical racism that pervades it, but the persistence of the solely-white perspective of those books. Having had a few moments to get the perspective of a woman writer of color, writing in a world without white people, coming to this opening narrative of Cloud Atlas was like being slapped rudely back into reality. I had the strong sense that Mitchell was doing what he was doing for good reasons, but the onslaught of it was especially dizzying and sickening after seeing an alternative. And this, in many ways, feels like it’s good for my privilege-blinders, too.
It makes me understand, just a little, the kind of idiots who want to cut every instance of the n-word from Huckleberry Finn, for example. It’s vitally important to talk and read about race in a way that is critical and accurate to history. But man, I can imagine that it just gets exhausting, hearing it and feeling it all the time.
