{"id":5063,"date":"2011-09-02T13:33:47","date_gmt":"2011-09-02T18:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=5063"},"modified":"2018-02-19T01:46:08","modified_gmt":"2018-02-19T06:46:08","slug":"safe-exoticism-part-2-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=5063","title":{"rendered":"Safe Exoticism, Part 2: Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note:<\/strong> This 2-part article is an expanded version of the talk I gave at Readercon 2011.<\/p>\n

Part 1: Science<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Recently, I read a round table discussion<\/a> at the World SF blog whose participants were international women SF\/F writers.\u00a0 The focus was, shall we say, intersectional invisibility.\u00a0 One item that came up was the persistence of normalizing to Anglo standards.<\/p>\n

Also recently I started Patrick Leigh Fermor\u2019s Mani travelogue.\u00a0 In the prologue I ran into the following sentence: \u201cThere is not much here about his wartime service in Crete, where for two years in the mountains he organized the resistance to the Nazi occupation.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, for those who read this introduction (or Anthony Lane\u2019s and David Mason\u2019s swooning accounts of Fermor), the Cretans became sidekicks in their own country, in their own struggle \u2013 like the Arabs in T. E. Lawrence\u2019s memoirs.<\/p>\n

There are two asides to this.\u00a0 Fermor’s best known doing, the Kreipe kidnapping, conferred no strategic or tactical advantage, although the German reprisals were very real: they slaughtered and burned the village of An\u00f3ghia, the home of bard N\u00edkos Ksilo\u00faris.\u00a0 Like most of its kind, the action served to maintain Allied control over the “unruly” native resistance.\u00a0 Additionally, Fermor was frequently airlifted to Cairo, to decompress and receive his wages.\u00a0 The Cretans were not invited along.\u00a0 They remained in Crete, subject to said reprisals.\u00a0 But Fermor was British gentry.\u00a0 It was his version of reality that got heard, became canon history and granted him fame and fortune.<\/p>\n

In Part 1, I said that if I wrote about New Orleans, readers and critics would be on me like a brick avalanche.\u00a0 I followed the recent conniptions of the British SF contigent over Connie Willis\u2019 depiction of WWII London.\u00a0 She got terms wrong, she got details wrong, blah blah blah.\u00a0\u00a0 Care to know how many things Greg Benford got wrong about Bronze Age and contemporary Mycenae in Artifact<\/em>?\u00a0 Care to know what I think of Neil Gaiman’s \u201cThere is nothing uniquely Greek about the Odyssey?\u201d\u00a0 For that matter, you hear endless hymns about Ian McDonald\u2019s books \u2013 until you discuss Brasyl<\/em> with a Brazilian or Hyberabad Days<\/em> with an Indian.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Myths and history that recedes into legend reach us already as palimpsests.\u00a0 When The Iliad<\/em> became standardized, the events it recited were already half a millennium old.\u00a0 Such stories bear all kinds of revisionist tellings, and the more resonant they are the more ways they can be re\/told.\u00a0 If you want to see a really outstanding retelling of Oed\u00edpus Rex from Ioc\u00e1ste\u2019s point of view, watch Denis Villeneuve\u2019s film Incendies<\/em> based on Wajdi Mouawad\u2019s play Scorched<\/em>.\u00a0 However, whenever people embed stories in a culture they haven\u2019t lived in and know intimately, I\u2019m wary.\u00a0 This, incidentally, is true across genres.\u00a0 For example, I can’t quite trust Martin Cruz Smith\u2019s Russia, although Arkady Renko is a truly stellar creation.\u00a0 If you read John Fowles\u2019 The Magus<\/em> side by side with his French Lieutenant\u2019s Woman<\/em>, the disparity in authenticity is palpable.\u00a0 Marguerite Yourcenar knew Hell\u00e1s; Mary Renault, not so much.<\/p>\n

There is nothing wrong with writers using other cultures than their own, especially if they\u2019re good storytellers with sensitive antennae.\u00a0 But when such works are taken for the real thing, the real thing often gets devalued or rejected outright, just as real science gets rejected in SF in favor of notions that are false or obsolete and often duller than the real thing.\u00a0 It\u2019s like people used to canned orange juice disdaining the freshly squeezed stuff because it contains pulp.\u00a0 Or like James Ruskin forming his opinion of women\u2019s bodies from classical statues and then struck impotent when he discovered that real women possess pubic hair.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another equivalence between science and non-Anglo cultures in speculative fiction.\u00a0 Namely, the devil\u2019s in the details.\u00a0 You need to have absorbed enough of your subject\u2019s essence to know what counts, what needs to be included for verisimilitude.\u00a0 You may get the large picture right by conscientious research; you may get by with bluffing \u2013 but small things give away the game even when the bigger items pass cursory inspection.\u00a0 The diminutive of Konstantin in Russian is not Kostyn, it\u2019s Kostya.\u00a0 Hellenic names have vocative endings that differ from the nominative.\u00a0 The real thing is both more familiar and more alien than it appears in stories written by cultural tourists.\u00a0 And often it\u2019s the small touches that transport you inside another culture.<\/p>\n

When outsiders get things right, they get saluted as honorary members of the culture they chose to depict and deserve the accolade.\u00a0 Outsiders can sometimes discern things in a culture that embedded insiders cannot see.\u00a0 Mark Mazower wrote riveting histories of Salonica and my people\u2019s resistance during WWII that I recommend to everyone, including Hellenes.\u00a0 Roderick Beaton and Paul Preuss wrote absorbing novels set in Crete that are inseparable from their setting (Ariadne\u2019s Children<\/em> and Secret Passages)<\/em>.\u00a0 And Ellen Frye\u2019s The Other Sappho<\/em> may have dated considerably in terms of its outlook \u2013 but you can tell that Frye lived in Hell\u00e1s for a long time and spoke idiomatic Hellenic, whereas Rachel Swirsky\u2019s A Memory of Wind<\/em> suffers from a generic setting despite its considerable other merits.<\/p>\n

Then we have the interesting transpositions, like Jack McDevitt\u2019s A Talent for War<\/em>.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t know he\u2019s loosely retelling the wars of the Hellenic city-states against the Persians, you enjoy the story just fine.\u00a0 But if you do know, the underdrone adds emotional resonance. By knowing Hellenic history past the surface, McDevitt got something else right almost inadvertently: Christopher Sim is a parallel-universe portrait of \u00c1ris Velouchi\u00f3tis, the most famous WWII resistance leader in Hell\u00e1s.\u00a0 On the other hand, Ian Sales turned Eurypides\u2019 careful psychological setup into wet cement in Thicker than Water<\/em>, his SF retelling of Ifigh\u00e9nia in Tavr\u00eds<\/em> (to say nothing of the name changes, with Orris and Pyle for Or\u00e9stis and Pyl\u00e1dhis winning the tin ear award<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Previously, the costs and intrinsic distortions of translation stood between stories of other cultures told by their own members and Anglophone readership.\u00a0 With SF\/F writers of other nations increasingly writing in more-than-fluent English, this is no longer the case.\u00a0 The double-visioned exiles that camp outside the gates of SF\/F might be just what the genre needs to shake it out of its self-satisfied monoculture stupor.\u00a0 The best-known examplar of this is Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) whose bewitching stories have never gone out of print, though her Kenyan memoirs have their share of noble savage\/colonial glamor problems.\u00a0 Of course, one swallow does not bring the spring: reading one author per culture won\u2019t result in major shifts; singletons cannot serve as blanket representatives of their culture — they remain individuals with unique context-colored viewpoints.<\/p>\n

I think we should encourage cross-fertilization or, to use a biological term, back-breeding to the original stock.\u00a0 We need to listen to the voices from outside the dominant culture, if we don\u2019t want speculative fiction to harden into drab parochial moulds.\u00a0 We need to taste the real thing, even if it burns our tongues.\u00a0 Burt Lancaster (but for the accent) was a memorable Don Fabrizio in the film version of Giuseppe di Lampedusa\u2019s Il Gattopardo<\/em>; but Ghassan Massoud swept the floor with his Anglo co-stars as Salahu\u2019d-Din in The Kingdom of Heaven.<\/em>\u00a0 Although, to be thorough, Salahu\u2019d-Din was a Kurd.\u00a0 So he might have had blue or gray eyes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Images:<\/strong> 1st, Peter O’ Toole in another quintessence of palatable exoticism, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia<\/em>;\u00a0 2nd, Memoirs of Hadrian<\/em> by Marguerite Yourcenar; 3rd, Lubna Azabal as Nawal Marwan in Villeneuve’s Incendies<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Related entries:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Iskander, Khan Tengri<\/a><\/p>\n

Being Part of Everyone\u2019s Furniture; Or: Appropriate Away!<\/a>
\n
\nA (Mail)coat of Many Colors: The Songs of the Byzantine Border Guards<\/a><\/p>\n

Evgen\u00eda Fak\u00ednou: The Unknown Archmage of Magic Realism<\/a><\/p>\n

Added note:<\/strong>\u00a0 Almost concurrently, Aliette de Bodard<\/a> and Cora Buhlert<\/a> discuss aspects of the same issue.\u00a0 The synchronicity suggests that the time may be ripe for a change!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note: This 2-part article is an expanded version of the talk I gave at Readercon 2011. Part 1: Science Recently, I read a round table discussion at the World SF blog whose participants were international women SF\/F writers.\u00a0 The focus was, shall we say, intersectional invisibility.\u00a0 One item that came up was the persistence of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology-and-culture","category-history","category-science-fiction","category-writing-and-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}