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

[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.