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

[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.