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kaigoucontinued from first part
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matociquala writes:
So you start second-guessing yourself.
That need -- which I would posit is crucial for a writer or artist of any ilk, really -- to be constantly aware of the situations in one's life of Otherness and Thisness, creates a dichotomy where it can get harder and harder to see people in your stories because you're too busy being crushed under the weight of a bazillion tokens. I mean, there's worrying about an issue, and making the issue such a driving force that your story becomes just as bad as the average baby-food commercial: one white kid, one black kid, one asian kid, one indian kid, half boys, half girls, okay, everyone, smile!
Since I've never written anyone else's stories, I don't have anyone else's stories to use as examples of how they organized their approaches. Therefore I ask forgiveness in advance for boring you with mine, and I'll skip the obligatory nod to Thoreau at this time.
Okay, main character. Male. Does that make him Other, because he's not like me? Or am I, as author, the Other? Uhm. Here's where I stall for a moment, pondering that. Well, let's say he's not Other, because he's also raised to hold authority and position. Except he's also a hundred-and-sixty-three. That probably makes him Other, especially if I know already the intended audience is going to be more like me than like the main character -- doubly so when I consider that the main guy is also not even American, but Danish-Faroese.
Alright. Second main character, the Sámi boy in his twenties. Partially Other, I suppose, but still, not American, so Other in the eyes of most Americans, probably. And a street thug, at that, so he's not even middle-class. Probably mostly Other, and throw in the fact that he was multilingual from a young age (Sapmi, Norwegian, Swedish, some Finnish) and he's not really fitting into what Americans would find, uhm, normal. I guess.
But still, so far, both guys, and both pale-skinned. So maybe mostly not-Other?
Three major supporting characters: a young Welsh man, a young woman from Mozambique, a young woman from Korea. Is the Welsh guy not-Other because he's got pale skin? Is the woman from Mozambique not-Other because she was raised in an urban environment? Is the woman from Korea not-Other because she's grown up travelling all over the world with her mother's work? Or are they all Other because they're not American? Are they tokens individually -- the miner's son, the farmer's daughter, the fisherman's daughter? Are they tokens by dint of their skin color, or lack thereof? Do they look too much like a Hollywood babyfood commercial?
The antagonists: almost all Swedish-born and bred, all pale-skinned in comparison, hair medium to dark, eyes of varying shades. None of them are stand-ins for the readers to relate to, so are they Other even though they look like many Anglo-Americans? They're also not Americans, and range in age from a hundred-and-ten to three-hundred-and-five. Does that make them Other? If the generic, genetic, background for the average Swede is pale-skinned and light hair/eyes, does that mean I'm whitewashing to not put any immigrants into positions of long-standing inherited power as mafia dons? (Or whatever the Swedish version of mafia, that is.)
Other supporting characters, hailing from Denmark, Norway, Amsterdam, Belgium, both male and female: does the fact that culturally (and somewhat linguistically) they're very different mean they're diverse enough, or are they still monolithic by virtue of being relatively paler in skin tone than the girl from Mozambique? What about the cabbie, from Lebanon, a recent immigrant? Is he a token, or does he have to get a lot more effort put into him even if he only shows up in one scene? Is it okay to have the doctor, another one-scener, have a Danish surname but be implied as Hispanic, without having to make her scene into something big enough to warrant that much information?
Or maybe I should do more to emphasize that the protagonist isn't entirely white-man's-burden kind of guy. After all, he has to speak to the Lebanese cabbie in French, because his Arabic is only mediocre and the cabbie is still struggling with Swedish. Maybe I should play up more that the Sámi-boy is, well, indigenous and therefore not mainstream-white-boy, even though he spent his first eighteen years doing everything he could to deny being Sámi because it was nothing but an embarrassment and a cause of misery?
Wait, the main character's younger sister immigrated to Los Angeles, and she's only a hundred-and-twenty, but then, she only shows up in one scene, too, and that's over the phone. Besides, being a sibling, it'll be assumed she looks something like the main character.
And there's the main character's cousin, who comes to visit from America, and is possibly the most Americanized in the bunch -- except his childhood was in India during WWI and a decade or so after, before moving to China only to leave when tensions started in the 30's, when he went to Brazil with his grandmother... No, not really American. Not really anything, really. He's the global child in the picture; he's everyone's Other. Nobody's going to relate to him. (Except maybe CP.)
But still, if I were to paint a picture of the skin colors, I'd have to say: really pale, medium-pale, a whole lot of ruddy-pale, two or three dark faces that get named, and the background a range but dominated by the Swedish pale-skin majority. Except when I think of the characters, I don't think of pale-dark-pale, I think: Faroese, Danish, Swedish, Swedish, Belgian, Sámi, Korean, Bantu, Swedish, Faroese... And I think in languages, and accents: the lilting style of southern Sweden, the slightly flatter and choppier style of Stockholm, the slow uplifting accent of the Faroes, the musical hints in Welsh-accented Swedish, the hesitancy in the Lebanese-inflected Swedish.
Or maybe I'm going about it all wrong and should make more people tanned! Oh, no! Maybe they're all tokens and I'm whitewashing and I need to remember the weight of things! Or maybe I need to juggle faster before I drop any of these baskets and break all the eggs! Or maybe I can say that because the audience is intended to be American and not a single character is truly American that the entire cast is Other? Wait, no, then maybe no one can relate to any of the characters, truly, and is that bad, or good?
There is a contrived element, I think, that is bound to start rearing its head when an author begins obsessing about such things. It starts to crush me. I feel like I'm not looking at a story anymore, but a separate and diverse and even divisive set of pieces that aren't people anymore, they're representations of certain boxes getting checked off. That girl from Belgium stops being a girl whose father left Stockholm for warmer climes, who then inherited her grandfather's tree on the grounds of a church in Soder; she becomes girl from Belgium. The young law clerk from Mozambique isn't someone raised on French Vogue and bootleg copies of American R&B vinyl; she becomes obligatory black token girl.
I don't know how to write Obligatory Black Token Girl, though. I've never met any. I don't know what I'd do if I did. I know how to write someone who's five thousand miles from her nearest family and feels terribly out of place with unfamiliar language and no family structures like she's known all her life, that I can do, but this token-thing, maybe I shouldn't try. I mean, it seems awfully important that I get it right, and if I don't, I'm gonna be breaking a lot of eggs.
(Which circles back totruepenny's comment about similarities and differences: at what point does seeing a related experience become "seeing only the same and dismissing the different"? At what point does it become "using the same as the starting-point for then trying to comprehend the not-same"? Or does it begin that way but only become imperialism if the differences are unexplored?)
Maybe I should add in several more Obligatory Token Black Girls, instead, then, but I have no idea where -- and besides, this cast is already big, and seems to be getting bigger by the worry, err, contemplation. Even so, I'm dubious about adding a handful of tokens to be friends for the girl from Mozambique, though. I don't like doing that to characters. I feel like I'm suddenly becoming one of those morons who says to their one gay coworker, "there's a guy in my apartment building who's gay, I should introduce you!" Like all gay guys are bound to get along simply because they're, y'know, gay.
Like any other Token Black Girls I introduce should get along automatically with this one law clerk who likes hiking boots and really short skirts, excuse me, this Obligatory Token Black Girl, because they've got the same skin color. I think the law clerk would kick my ass if I assumed she was that shallow, so I'd definitely at least have to write her friends as very intelligent and fashionable Token Black Girls. Wow, that's a lot of work, and I don't even know where I'd fit them in. Maybe I can just mention that they exist, or is that a cop-out?
The story stops being a story about people and starts becoming a collection of Important Messages. I don't want to write a story of Important Messages; I want to write a story about people who do, and don't, get along, and sometimes shag and sometimes kick each other's asses. Or is that complaint in and of itself a sign that I'm somehow privileged because I'm even whining about this in the first place? Is this whining? Or is this just really obsessive worrying? Where does whining stop and start, anyway? If I don't talk through my nose, can it still be considered whining?
What exactly is the Other, anyway? Is it one who is not like me, as the author? Then the entire story is pretty much Other, because I'm none of those characters, as much as I'd love to be multilingual and knowledgeable about international law and able to make rotting leaves look like hundred-kronor bills. (Hell, I'd be happy with the last, thanks.) Or is the Other defined as being those characters not like the audience? Man, that's even harder. That's damn near impossible. How am I supposed to know, other than in the most general of terms (likely age group and gender, at most) who might find/read/enjoy the story?
Or is the Other based on being in contrast to the main POV character? Wait, doesn't that mean the Brits in Rudyard Kipling's Kim are actually the Other? What about the white love interest in Ellison's Invisible Man? Because she sure seemed Other to me; it was the Black male protagonist with whom I sympathized because hey, it was his story. And then there's Lord of the Flies -- I didn't sympathize nor even 'get' any of them, so were they Other because they were boys, or were they Other because I just didn't click with them? Or is that something else?
Now, when
matociquala writes:...the difference between Ben Kenobi and a magical Negro is that Ben is not Other to everybody else in the film. And that's also the solution, right there. Because if you only have one of something, it automatically becomes a poster child.I find myself thinking of the analogy of this post's title (from Albert Camus' statement, "We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity"), and to badly mix metaphors -- when you put all your Other-eggs into a single Other-type basket, it gets really freaking heavy, and you only need to drop it once to smash everything.
So you start second-guessing yourself.
That need -- which I would posit is crucial for a writer or artist of any ilk, really -- to be constantly aware of the situations in one's life of Otherness and Thisness, creates a dichotomy where it can get harder and harder to see people in your stories because you're too busy being crushed under the weight of a bazillion tokens. I mean, there's worrying about an issue, and making the issue such a driving force that your story becomes just as bad as the average baby-food commercial: one white kid, one black kid, one asian kid, one indian kid, half boys, half girls, okay, everyone, smile!
Since I've never written anyone else's stories, I don't have anyone else's stories to use as examples of how they organized their approaches. Therefore I ask forgiveness in advance for boring you with mine, and I'll skip the obligatory nod to Thoreau at this time.
Okay, main character. Male. Does that make him Other, because he's not like me? Or am I, as author, the Other? Uhm. Here's where I stall for a moment, pondering that. Well, let's say he's not Other, because he's also raised to hold authority and position. Except he's also a hundred-and-sixty-three. That probably makes him Other, especially if I know already the intended audience is going to be more like me than like the main character -- doubly so when I consider that the main guy is also not even American, but Danish-Faroese.
Alright. Second main character, the Sámi boy in his twenties. Partially Other, I suppose, but still, not American, so Other in the eyes of most Americans, probably. And a street thug, at that, so he's not even middle-class. Probably mostly Other, and throw in the fact that he was multilingual from a young age (Sapmi, Norwegian, Swedish, some Finnish) and he's not really fitting into what Americans would find, uhm, normal. I guess.
But still, so far, both guys, and both pale-skinned. So maybe mostly not-Other?
Three major supporting characters: a young Welsh man, a young woman from Mozambique, a young woman from Korea. Is the Welsh guy not-Other because he's got pale skin? Is the woman from Mozambique not-Other because she was raised in an urban environment? Is the woman from Korea not-Other because she's grown up travelling all over the world with her mother's work? Or are they all Other because they're not American? Are they tokens individually -- the miner's son, the farmer's daughter, the fisherman's daughter? Are they tokens by dint of their skin color, or lack thereof? Do they look too much like a Hollywood babyfood commercial?
The antagonists: almost all Swedish-born and bred, all pale-skinned in comparison, hair medium to dark, eyes of varying shades. None of them are stand-ins for the readers to relate to, so are they Other even though they look like many Anglo-Americans? They're also not Americans, and range in age from a hundred-and-ten to three-hundred-and-five. Does that make them Other? If the generic, genetic, background for the average Swede is pale-skinned and light hair/eyes, does that mean I'm whitewashing to not put any immigrants into positions of long-standing inherited power as mafia dons? (Or whatever the Swedish version of mafia, that is.)
Other supporting characters, hailing from Denmark, Norway, Amsterdam, Belgium, both male and female: does the fact that culturally (and somewhat linguistically) they're very different mean they're diverse enough, or are they still monolithic by virtue of being relatively paler in skin tone than the girl from Mozambique? What about the cabbie, from Lebanon, a recent immigrant? Is he a token, or does he have to get a lot more effort put into him even if he only shows up in one scene? Is it okay to have the doctor, another one-scener, have a Danish surname but be implied as Hispanic, without having to make her scene into something big enough to warrant that much information?
Or maybe I should do more to emphasize that the protagonist isn't entirely white-man's-burden kind of guy. After all, he has to speak to the Lebanese cabbie in French, because his Arabic is only mediocre and the cabbie is still struggling with Swedish. Maybe I should play up more that the Sámi-boy is, well, indigenous and therefore not mainstream-white-boy, even though he spent his first eighteen years doing everything he could to deny being Sámi because it was nothing but an embarrassment and a cause of misery?
Wait, the main character's younger sister immigrated to Los Angeles, and she's only a hundred-and-twenty, but then, she only shows up in one scene, too, and that's over the phone. Besides, being a sibling, it'll be assumed she looks something like the main character.
And there's the main character's cousin, who comes to visit from America, and is possibly the most Americanized in the bunch -- except his childhood was in India during WWI and a decade or so after, before moving to China only to leave when tensions started in the 30's, when he went to Brazil with his grandmother... No, not really American. Not really anything, really. He's the global child in the picture; he's everyone's Other. Nobody's going to relate to him. (Except maybe CP.)
But still, if I were to paint a picture of the skin colors, I'd have to say: really pale, medium-pale, a whole lot of ruddy-pale, two or three dark faces that get named, and the background a range but dominated by the Swedish pale-skin majority. Except when I think of the characters, I don't think of pale-dark-pale, I think: Faroese, Danish, Swedish, Swedish, Belgian, Sámi, Korean, Bantu, Swedish, Faroese... And I think in languages, and accents: the lilting style of southern Sweden, the slightly flatter and choppier style of Stockholm, the slow uplifting accent of the Faroes, the musical hints in Welsh-accented Swedish, the hesitancy in the Lebanese-inflected Swedish.
Or maybe I'm going about it all wrong and should make more people tanned! Oh, no! Maybe they're all tokens and I'm whitewashing and I need to remember the weight of things! Or maybe I need to juggle faster before I drop any of these baskets and break all the eggs! Or maybe I can say that because the audience is intended to be American and not a single character is truly American that the entire cast is Other? Wait, no, then maybe no one can relate to any of the characters, truly, and is that bad, or good?
There is a contrived element, I think, that is bound to start rearing its head when an author begins obsessing about such things. It starts to crush me. I feel like I'm not looking at a story anymore, but a separate and diverse and even divisive set of pieces that aren't people anymore, they're representations of certain boxes getting checked off. That girl from Belgium stops being a girl whose father left Stockholm for warmer climes, who then inherited her grandfather's tree on the grounds of a church in Soder; she becomes girl from Belgium. The young law clerk from Mozambique isn't someone raised on French Vogue and bootleg copies of American R&B vinyl; she becomes obligatory black token girl.
I don't know how to write Obligatory Black Token Girl, though. I've never met any. I don't know what I'd do if I did. I know how to write someone who's five thousand miles from her nearest family and feels terribly out of place with unfamiliar language and no family structures like she's known all her life, that I can do, but this token-thing, maybe I shouldn't try. I mean, it seems awfully important that I get it right, and if I don't, I'm gonna be breaking a lot of eggs.
(Which circles back to
truepenny's comment about similarities and differences: at what point does seeing a related experience become "seeing only the same and dismissing the different"? At what point does it become "using the same as the starting-point for then trying to comprehend the not-same"? Or does it begin that way but only become imperialism if the differences are unexplored?)Maybe I should add in several more Obligatory Token Black Girls, instead, then, but I have no idea where -- and besides, this cast is already big, and seems to be getting bigger by the worry, err, contemplation. Even so, I'm dubious about adding a handful of tokens to be friends for the girl from Mozambique, though. I don't like doing that to characters. I feel like I'm suddenly becoming one of those morons who says to their one gay coworker, "there's a guy in my apartment building who's gay, I should introduce you!" Like all gay guys are bound to get along simply because they're, y'know, gay.
Like any other Token Black Girls I introduce should get along automatically with this one law clerk who likes hiking boots and really short skirts, excuse me, this Obligatory Token Black Girl, because they've got the same skin color. I think the law clerk would kick my ass if I assumed she was that shallow, so I'd definitely at least have to write her friends as very intelligent and fashionable Token Black Girls. Wow, that's a lot of work, and I don't even know where I'd fit them in. Maybe I can just mention that they exist, or is that a cop-out?
The story stops being a story about people and starts becoming a collection of Important Messages. I don't want to write a story of Important Messages; I want to write a story about people who do, and don't, get along, and sometimes shag and sometimes kick each other's asses. Or is that complaint in and of itself a sign that I'm somehow privileged because I'm even whining about this in the first place? Is this whining? Or is this just really obsessive worrying? Where does whining stop and start, anyway? If I don't talk through my nose, can it still be considered whining?
What exactly is the Other, anyway? Is it one who is not like me, as the author? Then the entire story is pretty much Other, because I'm none of those characters, as much as I'd love to be multilingual and knowledgeable about international law and able to make rotting leaves look like hundred-kronor bills. (Hell, I'd be happy with the last, thanks.) Or is the Other defined as being those characters not like the audience? Man, that's even harder. That's damn near impossible. How am I supposed to know, other than in the most general of terms (likely age group and gender, at most) who might find/read/enjoy the story?
Or is the Other based on being in contrast to the main POV character? Wait, doesn't that mean the Brits in Rudyard Kipling's Kim are actually the Other? What about the white love interest in Ellison's Invisible Man? Because she sure seemed Other to me; it was the Black male protagonist with whom I sympathized because hey, it was his story. And then there's Lord of the Flies -- I didn't sympathize nor even 'get' any of them, so were they Other because they were boys, or were they Other because I just didn't click with them? Or is that something else?
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Date: 19 Jan 2009 10:57 pm (UTC)Greek and Latin? Oh, that's totally privileged. Not to mention indication of very high class. Unless of course some nun washed your mouth out with soap any time you tried to speak in your native English. Then you might be able to argue oppression, but the rest of us might look at you like you're crazy. Heh.
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Date: 20 Jan 2009 02:02 am (UTC)ONLY UPPER MIDDLE CLASS, I SWEAR. Which is bad enough, I know. D: