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ricardienne) wrote2009-05-13 11:22 pm
ricardienne) wrote2009-05-13 11:22 pm
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So I have been thinking a lot about MammothFail (short version: Patricia Wrede writes a fantasy YA about settlers in the magical American West -- having eliminated the Native Americans altogether. People, naturally, find this problematic. Lois McMaster Bujold says some very stupid things on the internet...)
Anyway, having read lots of analysis and quotes from the link above, these are my two (quasi-original, or at least I haven't seen them completely put out this way) thoughts:
(1) Wrede's decision to write about a magical America sans indigenous people has nothing to do with how "hard" it would be to write Native Americans in a non-offensive way. It has everything to do with how impossible it would be to write the whites in a non-completely-unsympathetic way. We don't think about it, and our (or at least my) history books are all about the heroic and intrepid pioneers, (and I grew up on the Little House books too) but settling the West (or any of the Americas, really) was imperialism. It was moving onto land already occupied by a civilization, and is not separable from the displacement and extermination of that civilization.
I hadn't really thought about that until this internetsplosion. I think that it is generally recognized that one cannot talk about e.g. the antebellum South unproblematically. The hoopskirts and rolling hills and peach orchards may be very nice, but it is not possible to write a novel about the planter class and their lives with their slaves in the background and not have it be read either as racist or as a indictment of the society with a dark and ironic undercurrent or something.
The same should be true of the pioneer novel, really. And in this respect, Wrede's choice to eliminate the "problem" is trying to have your cake and eat it, too. Or more bluntly: to avoid white guilt while still having her settlers-in-the-west story.
(2) One of the things that has come up in many of the posts and discussions I've read the last few days is the prevalence of the pioneer narrative in, esp. science fiction. That may be the expression of the human desire for the frontier or whatever, but it's also the ideal, unmessy colonization narrative: wide-open spaces with no strings attached in the form of people already living there. (Ironic that LMB's first Vorkosigan novel is set on exactly such a planet: unpeopled and ready to be contested by "advanced" galactic civilizations?) It's certainly much more squicky when done an alternate-earth, where the peoples who are getting eliminated to make it easier for the Europeans are precisely those whom the Europeans really did try to eliminate in order to make it easier for themselves. But how much of this more general fantasy/sci-fi plot is essentially doing the same thing in a less obviously bad way?
Also, I really hate to bring this up, because LMB is one of my favorite authors, in spite of her rather unadvised comments recently, and because I particularly like her Chalion books, but her fantasy is a pretty obvious earth-analogue that also functions by removing the inconvenient and guilt-inducing parts of history: a transparently Reconquest Spain where the fake!Moors are conveniently barbarous and imperialist and the *fake!Jews are conveniently not there? There is something a little bit weird about fantasizing Isabella and Ferdinand and then removing the problematic aspects of their careers.
Anyway, having read lots of analysis and quotes from the link above, these are my two (quasi-original, or at least I haven't seen them completely put out this way) thoughts:
(1) Wrede's decision to write about a magical America sans indigenous people has nothing to do with how "hard" it would be to write Native Americans in a non-offensive way. It has everything to do with how impossible it would be to write the whites in a non-completely-unsympathetic way. We don't think about it, and our (or at least my) history books are all about the heroic and intrepid pioneers, (and I grew up on the Little House books too) but settling the West (or any of the Americas, really) was imperialism. It was moving onto land already occupied by a civilization, and is not separable from the displacement and extermination of that civilization.
I hadn't really thought about that until this internetsplosion. I think that it is generally recognized that one cannot talk about e.g. the antebellum South unproblematically. The hoopskirts and rolling hills and peach orchards may be very nice, but it is not possible to write a novel about the planter class and their lives with their slaves in the background and not have it be read either as racist or as a indictment of the society with a dark and ironic undercurrent or something.
The same should be true of the pioneer novel, really. And in this respect, Wrede's choice to eliminate the "problem" is trying to have your cake and eat it, too. Or more bluntly: to avoid white guilt while still having her settlers-in-the-west story.
(2) One of the things that has come up in many of the posts and discussions I've read the last few days is the prevalence of the pioneer narrative in, esp. science fiction. That may be the expression of the human desire for the frontier or whatever, but it's also the ideal, unmessy colonization narrative: wide-open spaces with no strings attached in the form of people already living there. (Ironic that LMB's first Vorkosigan novel is set on exactly such a planet: unpeopled and ready to be contested by "advanced" galactic civilizations?) It's certainly much more squicky when done an alternate-earth, where the peoples who are getting eliminated to make it easier for the Europeans are precisely those whom the Europeans really did try to eliminate in order to make it easier for themselves. But how much of this more general fantasy/sci-fi plot is essentially doing the same thing in a less obviously bad way?
Also, I really hate to bring this up, because LMB is one of my favorite authors, in spite of her rather unadvised comments recently, and because I particularly like her Chalion books, but her fantasy is a pretty obvious earth-analogue that also functions by removing the inconvenient and guilt-inducing parts of history: a transparently Reconquest Spain where the fake!Moors are conveniently barbarous and imperialist and the *fake!Jews are conveniently not there? There is something a little bit weird about fantasizing Isabella and Ferdinand and then removing the problematic aspects of their careers.
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Patricia Wrede has been a favourite of mine for so long that I think my love for the Enchanted Forest Chronicles even predates my stint at Sheroes.
Why couldn't they have been authors like Bear or Bull? I wasn't AS emotionally invested in them. /petulant whining
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Although I'm not as surprised as I wish I were that LMB put her foot in it. There is something about her books that I am having a hard time describing (and it isn't just that her future is populated almost exclusively by the descendants of white Europeans): a pro-status quo, family and individual-oriented sort of thing.
I think it's actually part of what I like about her books: the focus is on people just trying to be happy and fulfilled, not people trying to effect social justice. This makes them more like "realistic" novels about people rather than "defeating evil" type fantasy, but when the set-up is a fantasy/sci-fi that isn't so socially just, there's a kind of dissonance.
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And I think part of the dissonance with Bujold is that she at once has a monarchy with bad people, and points out the evil of reactionary, militaristic viewpoints. But at the same time, is saying that the system is fundamentally sound. It's like she's saying "Once we replace the reactionary elements, a system based on nobles ruling will be fine".
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This is half the fantasy of Fantasy, isn't it? That's what I've always suspected, anyway. We fictionalize what's too far away because from a distance it's exotic and exciting and it could work, but only if we did it right. It's not racism on purpose so much as an overactive but impractical imagination. Also, perhaps, a compulsive need to romanticize. What's sad is that it can come out so problematically despite good intentions (or at least a lack of maliciousness).
*jumping in a random; sorry. This is fascinating*
(and I'd say, in a non-absolute kind of statement so if there's a counter-example, please correct me, that this is true for fantasy or SF because SF looks a lot like fantasy from a distance. Look at Dune or Dan Simmons)
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But at the same time, insofar as these patterns do exist in fantasy, I wonder about them and about what they say about (my) (the cultural) patterns of thought and assumptions behind them. I think it's true that most fantasy is not trying to be "relevant" at all, and much fantasy can be read without thinking about "relevancy" or the wider implications of setting something up the way the author sets it up.
BUT all of these set-ups do have certain (often problematic) assumptions behind them, and I think they need to be considered, at least so we can describe how we are reading and to what extent fantasy "matters".
(I realize that this sounds kind of accusatory, and I don't mean it that way at all: I'm just continuing the point you were making.)
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And since I would hope that fantasy does matter, a lot, thinking is important.
Gah. This is like realizing that Robin McKinley is endorsing colonialism. Normally I like these authors because they think (hmm, actually, Wrede not so much; I read her for the sugar hit). It's always a little icky when you realize what the thinking implies.
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Wrede's decision to write about a magical America sans indigenous people has nothing to do with how "hard" it would be to write Native Americans in a non-offensive way. It has everything to do with how impossible it would be to write the whites in a non-completely-unsympathetic way.
You've hit the nail on the head, I really think you have. Well said.
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mammothfail
this is a really good point, and i agree that it's quite probably the source for the original idea to erase the indians (aside from just going for the "shiny", which is fairly evident in the discussion of the book in rasfc before she wrote it). this is mainly why i boggled at her notion that she could write a "not too divergent" AU with the "right feel" -- i couldn't see how she could get from A to B. and indeed, she can't (i've read the book, and found it unsatisfactory from a world-building PoV).
though i'd say "difficult" instead of "impossible", because i can see the migration of people happen for other reasons than their own imperialism -- climate change, for example, or violence on the part of others squeezing them out of their original land.
ETA: woops, forgot to say: here via
Re: mammothfail
That's true -- and actually, on more reflection, I think that, with or without magic, narratives of settlers in the/a new world can be written about settlers as individual, good or bad or middling people within this inherently unacceptable settlement project. And it is certainly possible to write Native Americans/indigenous peoples in a way that preserves them as people first in the same story. (Oh wait: this would be a good historical fiction novel about the American pioneers...)
But you can't eliminate the injustice of the situation (either by ignoring it or "eliminating the problem" à la Wrede.