historical narratives and fail at home

[rm]

This week's writerinadrawer reveals are up, and if you follow the community, you'll see that I had some fail this week, of yes, the big bad R-word kind. To be clear, I did something racist. And I got called on it, and then I shut the fuck up and thought about it and went "yup, bad choice that hurt people, because of ways in which I was not aware of my own privilege." If you want the details on that, you can find them here; for reasons that I hope are obvious I'll not be reposting the story here, but I've left it up with a note about the situation on AO3 in order to not interfere in discussion.

Failing sucks, but as this whole thing was happening this weekend (in a whole lot of gracious emails with some very gracious people), one thing I tried to keep in mind was my friend bodlon's admonition that the most important things we can do when we fuck up in these ways isn't just to apologize and listen, but to be willing to view the situation as a bit of a continuum. I failed. Hopefully I won't fail again. Odds are, because there are areas of my life in which I have a lot of privilege, eventually I will fail again. But having a goal of failing less and failing better is really important.

For me, one mine field is always going to be the fact that I write in a lot of historical periods and often write narratives that require looking at the racism, sexism and other uglinesses of these periods. Sometimes my forays into history have worked and sometimes they haven't. And sometimes, this time, they failed. For me, one of the big lessons of this experience has been learning the degree to which "is it kind, necessary and true?" is applicable as much to fiction as to life.

The language I used in my WIAD story this week may have been accurate, but it was neither kind nor necessary. I made a choice that hurt people out of laziness. Hopefully this experience will help me make better choices next time.

Please feel free to discuss my fail here or at the WIAD post about the story in question. If people would like to range about on the topic of avoiding fail when writing historical stuff in this thread, that is also a conversation that I think might be potentially useful to many of us.

Thanks for listening, and I'm absolutely sorry for whatever hurt this has caused.

Comments

[teleens-journal.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

I didn't see the story, because I basically don't have time to read, but everyone makes mistakes, :(.

[labellerose.livejournal.com]

You are a class act to respond with such humilty and grace. Just thought I'd share.

[dsmoen.livejournal.com]

That's what I was going to say. Then I realized I'm white and privileged, but I suspect if I were not that I'd feel the same way.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

I like this post.

In relation to the subject: a friend of mine complained about the historical "inaccuracy" in "Who" the other day, i.e. the Venetian people who happen to be black (hopefully not a spoiler for you...) and I explained that we don't actually live in 14th century Venice either... he was irritated that they were more interested in being PC than anything else.

It really irritates me to hear this sort of thing, because it is so clearly racist, but I really don't know how to counter it other than sounding all "PC" myself and saying that it's wrong to discriminate simply because black people back then were slaves... I mean, it's a real wtf thing to say regardless, no?

[sister-bluebird.livejournal.com]

Nitpicky on.

Vampires of Venice is a 16th century piece (1580) and while the Atlantic slave trade did exist at that point, it was primarily Portuguese and Spanish, to their colonies in the Americas. There were definitely lots of stereotypes and some slavery of Africans in Europe during the 16th century, but it's more complicated than black people simply being slaves. I do wish there'd been some discussion of it, but Doctor Who rarely does good histories - often entertaining, but rarely historical.

http://books.google.com/books?id=d2dN5vh2200C&printsec=frontcover&dq=africans+in+renaissance+europe&source=bl&ots=R4PZwnz-j6&sig=eXepjl9Nb-c45Bglrw13Or5Mt5E&hl=en&ei=pu0nTKCHCo7anAf7mJTiBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CFEQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q&f=false is an interesting book on the subject (of which I have skimmed only portions, and not read all).

Nitpicky off. :)

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

The black people in Venice in 1580 were certainly not slaves; Venice was at cross-roads of one of the major world trading routes, and the African kingdoms were at the apex of their power as trading and cultural centres. The title character of Shakespeare's Othello (The Moor of Venice) is a General from a distinguished (Royal?) family and I suspect Guido was riffing off Othello, since he's also a senior military advisor to the Venetian court.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

It is natural to fail at things we are not encouraged to do well.
Or at all.
We will do better. It is too painful to do otherwise.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

I liked your apology. I'm writing a piece set in 1940s NYC right now, and I've been wrestling a lot with how to write about race, ethnicity, and sexuality. I think part of me feels tempted to use setting-appropriate slurs for "authenticity," but that's a really ugly reason. I don't want to fall into the trap of trying to portray oppression critically but actually just reproducing it.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I will say I find the 40s particularly difficult in terms of fail issues, because it's an iconic period where we have a sense of what the language is not just from the period but from other people writing about the period. It's also a period within living memory, which means the potential impacts are different.

[azn-jack-fiend.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting about this. I'm also glad that you're writing historical stuff and will continue to write it, minefields and all, because I LOVE it. Your story about the west amazed me.

When it comes to avoiding problems I can speak for my own experience as a reader... I have a pretty high tolerance when it comes to stuff written in the past. I'm a huge Lovecraft fan, for example, and Lovecraft is racist to a pathological degree. But his stuff is really about racial panic and racial contamination, so it all sort of blends in to the general creepiness, even when he's describing people who look like me as essentially animalistic and demonic. Umm, I guess that was a sidetrack (I love Lovecraft too much).

But when people are writing in the modern day and bringing a modern sensibility to the past, I expect that as they update their lens in some areas, they will update it in all areas, and that would mean using less slurs or using them more conscientiously, and not writing in stereotypes.

On the other hand, I think sometimes modern writers can and should use more slurs to reflect historical accuracy as long as they do it responsibly... for example, when Chester Himes wrote his Harlem crime novels he was censored heavily to the point where his books are filled with words like "motherraper". But when Walter Mosley wrote back about the same era in the same genre he was a lot more free to use words that reflected actual speech.

[rm.livejournal.com]

And thank you to being so gracious about this whole and also talking about how it's not "don't use this word" but "use words with intention" because that's not just good human advice, it's good writing advice.

Also, that story about the west caused me ridiculous amounts of stress (hence it's never ending disclaimer) -- it means a lot to me that we can a) have this conversation and b) you think I did well there, because it felt like it had a lot of potential points of fail when I was writing it.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

A related point is that no time is a monolith. I've been reading mysteries from the first quarter of the 20th century lately for instance, and I notice that the Raffles stories are a lot more anti-Semitic than the Dr. Thorndyke mysteries (the latter have lots of Jews, both sympathetic and not) and that the Father Brown mysteries are far more racist than either. (And even more racist than I'd noticed on previous readings; apparently I find it harder to give older books a pass these days.

[azn-jack-fiend.livejournal.com]

I totally agree... on a related note a few years ago I went through the Library of the Americas collections of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I found Chandler's short stories almost impossible to read because of the level of casual racism. There were a lot of African-American and Asian-American characters scattered throughout and they were all disposable and objects of loathing and nothing more. Hammett, on the other hand, was a lot more readable even when he used slurs and stereotypes, because the characters of color were practically as three-dimensional (or one-dimensional, depending on context) as the white characters. He even has a story called "Dead Yellow Women" set in Chinatown that was hard to read but basically not as horrible as it sounds.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

Thank you -- I didn't notice the racism myself when I read your story (and yours was on my shortlist of the ones I consider voting for), as that language is what I associate with that time period, but as you point out here, that is no excuse in this case. So, you've alerted me to my own complicity in this sort of racism here -- thank you, again.

[austengirl.livejournal.com]

Yes, this. Thank you rm and azn_jack_fiend for sharing the conversation publicly, I appreciate having the chance to learn from the fail, about acknowledging privilege and how to do better.

[dr-is-in.livejournal.com]

I think, for those that know you or are familiar with you, that most know that you are the last person who would have done or said something racist with the intent to be hurtful. You strove to be as authentic as possible in your writing of the time period, and it had unfortunate consequences. You are to be applauded for so graciously stepping up and saying "I made a mistake using the term, I am sorry and never meant to cause harm" (although much more eloquently that how I just put it).

[weirdquark]

I am not at all surprised that you were the one who wrote the WWII story.

I have to say that on the first read-through, I didn't really notice that the language might be problematic, because as you say, it's the sort of language that would be used during that time. But going back, I think it's problematic because it's Jack who is using it, and he's not a product of that time. I can see him using period appropriate racist language if he thought he had to (but if the story was from his perspective I'd expect him to have some sort of internal comment about it) but it's clear from the rest of the letter that he doesn't expect anyone to ever read the letter, so I'm left wondering who the period appropriate language is for. (I could be convinced that Jack's been pretending to be from "now" for so long he even does so here without thinking too much about it -- where he'd had to buy into his own con in order to be convincing. Which would be kind of interesting, but hard to get across in the length of the story that you have.)

[rm.livejournal.com]

I actually don't think the language is necessarily problematic because it's Jack (canon gives us plenty of time to see that Jack was a complete asshole pre-1999), although the characterization issue is, of course, worth discussing.

I ultimately decided it was problematic because that element, regardless of accuracy, was unnecessary in the story I was trying to tell, and its use -- by me the writer -- was therefore casual and hurtful. As others have noted there are some WWII stories that absolutely do require that sort of language, but this wasn't one of them.

[weirdquark]

I don't think Jack wouldn't use racist language because he's not an asshole; I think he wouldn't use it because it wouldn't occur to him unless he's gotten really used to the language from hearing other people use it all the time. Or maybe because of how Time Agent training works -- I don't know.

But I'd agree that the language isn't necessary for that particular story. Possibly it would be in a longer story about how surviving WWI and WWII messes with your head and changes what you think about what appropriate behavior is. (I love how in Foyle's War you keep running into people who are totally fucked up and you find out that they were at Ypres. Yes, that is correct. And now I'm thinking about Jack at Ypres, because not only could he have been one of the few who survived the battles there, he could have died during them too.)