I have never before been trailed, but that has now changed. University Radio York are doing an adaptation of The New World Order, to be broadcast to a waiting campus in November. Today York, tomorrow … well, Stamford Bridge at least.
What’s really touching is one of the comments on the YouTube site: “I loved this book when I was younger!” Younger? For crying out loud, it was only 2004 … which, okay, if you’re an 18-year-old first year probably seems longer ago than it was.
Recently I’ve had the pleasure, from afar, of watching a couple of Internet storms on the topic of cultural appropriation. In this context, that’s when a writer decides to set a character or society in an historical culture different to their own, and then gets it egregiously wrong in a manner that is compounded by their own wilful ignorance and implicit claim of the superiority of their own culture.
I can see why it hurts and offends. I’m a public school educated science fiction writing Christian believing scion of the military – that’s four quite key components of my persona that people who don’t get just Do Not Get, and I’m invariably irritated when people get them wrong. (I suppose you can add other categories to that list: English, male, quite tall.) It’s mild stuff compared to the compounded grievances of entire cultures that have been mis-represented or persecuted for centuries. Yes, I can see why cultural appropriation – or maybe that should be mis-appropriation – upsets.
I utterly fail to live in fear of fatwas by Mayan fundamentalists who are offended by my heinous and quite upfront misrepresentation of their culture in The Vampire Plagues. I did however stop and think about what I was doing/had done in Phoenicia’s Worlds …
Phoenicia’s Worlds begins on a colony world settled by a multitude of ethnic and societal groups from Earth, all of whom arrived on the starship Phoenicia before the story begins. The most dominant are a group calling themselves Los Hijos de Castilla, the Sons of Castille, a group who were dedicated to reviving the mores and culture of old Spain 1000 years hence. They woke up first from hibernation, they took over and named the planet (La Nueva Temporada), and they’re in charge despite being, by the time the story starts, very much in the minority.
How is this not cultural mis-appropriation? Their Spanish extends to their names and a few words or phrases that I gleaned from Spanish-speaking friends and Google Translate. They are nothing like the real Spanish.
Well, first, this is the future 1000 years hence, and any similarities between the present Spanish and my lot will already be pretty thin. Events of a 1000 years ago can still have an effect in the present day, but the societies at either end of that millennium are probably going to be quite different. (Queen Elizabeth II can trace her descent to William the Conqueror: the similarities between the two individuals are quite minimal.)
Second, even if the Hijos were present-day Spanish, the book isn’t about them. It’s about the society of their children and grandchildren on their new world. Any immigrant society in a new place immediately becomes its own thing. My people aren’t Spanish, they aren’t Castilian, they’re Nuevan – a society I created and can do what I like with.
And third, even the Hijos (at least the more honest ones) accept that they’re completely faux. At least, faux as genuine Earth-based Castilian Spaniards go. Completely bona for Nuevans, of course. Maybe a few founders of the movement could legitimately claim Spanish descent, but it’s all a bit silly and, deep down, they know it. I would give the same treatment to, say, any political group trying to revive the values and culture of Saxon England. The more they admitted that they were giving it their best shot but weren’t actually, you know, Saxon, the more I would respect them for it. I will generally accept anyone’s self-identification at face value because who am I to say otherwise about what is going on in their hearts? But the more serious and po-faced they were about it, the harder I would find it to take them seriously.
I chose the Spanish because part of the plot revolves around the fact that La Nueva Temporada is stuck in the grip of a fierce Ice Age and badly needs terraforming to be habitable. Okay, maybe there was a bit of good old English xenophobia at work here. Who would it be funny to stick on a freezing cold ice world? Why not the Spanish? Ho ho, hee hee.
In a future post, how the plot of Phoenicia’s Worlds was also affected by the shenanigans of the British Intelligence services during World War 2.
Sunday’s episode of Inspector George Gently – I watch period police dramas, I can handle it, I could give up any time – said nothing new but still much that was worth saying about race relations in Britain in the 1960s. The most telling point for me was that the BBC news, immediately after, was read by a black man.
I don’t believe this country is yet an interracial paradise. I do think it’s doing much better than it was in 1960-whatnot.
I had a sheltered upbringing and I know it. I spent 10 years in private, boarding school education, where the skin colour was not 100% white but the exceptions tended to be people like the future King of Swaziland – not really representative of the streets of Brixton. I found Constable Savage funny for its absurdity more than its satire. I suppose my personal wake-up call to the tensions out there, that I had so far either blithely ignored or been happily sheltered from, was the riots of the early 1980s. I have to admit that when I read some of the aired grievances of the rioters, unlike my mostly Tory colleagues, I didn’t find them that unreasonable. I’d riot if the police could, and did, stop and question me every ten paces for being suspiciously white.
I freely admit to using a particular word to describe black people, quite routinely. It was in my everyday vocabulary. And yet. I can honestly say there was no intended malice, and when I learnt how offensive the word was, I stopped. And even then I could tell the difference between casually saying of a man of African ancestry that “he’s a $WORD_THAT_ONLY_SAMUEL_L_JACKSON_IS_ALLOWED_TO_USE”, purely for descriptive purposes, and sneering that “he’s a …” with the clear implication that the one word was all you needed to know about the individual. I could tell the difference between unintentional and deliberate offence, and I was offended by those who chose the latter.
I even remember being branded as a “$THAT_WORD-lover”, believe it or not. We lived in Bangladesh when I was aged 12-14. It was a pretty comfortable, privileged existence and it did not make me an authority on the problems of the Third World or give me any searing insights into race relations – but it gave me marginally more than many of my contemporaries had. And so, in one quite heated discussion – can’t remember what, or why, or when – that was the soubriquet I acquired. One boy even went to far as to write on my homework – shortly before it was due to be handed in – “Jeapes for $LA_LA_LA_CAN’T_HEAR-YOUs”. I tipp-exed it out. The teacher scraped the tipp-ex off to expose the message, and wrote in the margin, “don’t be childish, or, choose your friends with more care.”
The irony is that the boy in question was probably the most liberal of us all in other regards. He was proud that his barrister father only ever defended, never prosecuted, and was vehemently opposed to the death penalty.
I was never quite sure what to make of the historical rebranding of, say, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little $DUM_DE_DUMs or the name of Guy Gibson’s dog in The Dambusters, but China Miéville at a convention a few years ago put it well enough for me to come off the fence. Roughly, paraphrased: which is better, to preserve the historical purity of the original text, or to do what we can to remove that word from the ammunition of race hate? If one less kid gets called that word in the playground then by all means call the dog Trigger or Digger or whatever. If you really have to, mention the fact of the original usage in a footnote, and leave it there.
I’ve no idea where I’m going with this, so here’s Constable Savage again, to finish with.