During the American occupation, the passing on of the oral tradition was suppressed as the native priests and their rituals were demonized not only by the white colonizer but also by the white missionaries who followed in their wake. This meant that the true traditions and the original culture were slowly overlaid with the glaze of white culture and white belief.

Add all this up and it is no wonder that the psyche and the culture of the Filipino is so scarred and wounded to the point where we see the white and the west as being superior to us in all things.

Reading the history of conquest and colonization is a traumatic experience for the colonized. The Philippines went through not one, but two colonizers. I wonder how many colonizers other countries had to endure.

From reading these histories, it becomes clear to me that the erasure and subjugation of existing indigenous narratives were prioritized as these were viewed as being rival to the colonizing power.

Well worth reading, discussing and sharing.

Accordingly and for your reading pleasure, a series of disjointed observations on the use of aliens and supernatural creatures in SFF:

-When you portray a group of funky-looking people with odd customs who either live on different planets, or try to integrate in a modern human society–whether you consciously want it or not, you’re bringing to mind real-life parallels. Namely, respectively non-Western countries (during the colonial era or during the globalisation era, depending on your portrayal), and immigrant communities.
If you don’t believe me, put side-by-side the following: someone travels to a foreign planet and describes the sights; and someone else (of the somewhat clueless variety) travels to, say, Vietnam or China, and describes what they’ve seen, and what odd customs those people follow, or what odd things they eat. Or try this one: a group living on the margins of society (or within society but still not integrated), hiding their extent of their difference from a fearful and prejudiced mainstream; and say, the situation of Muslisms in modern-day US. See how broadly similar they are?

-This is then reinforced by choosing to depict, say, specism/racism against your aliens/vampires and basing it (because you have to) on real-life examples.

-This then poses some serious problems, because as a parallel, this suffers from a very deep flaw. Vampires are rightly discriminated against because they feed on blood and kill human people; the fae have wild and dangerous magic and toy with human lives; and aliens really are different species.
Foreigners and immigrants are none of these. They’re human; they have no special magical powers; and above all, they don’t make a habit of hunting down human people or drinking their blood. All of these have been used against POCs/minorities at some point: the different species to justify racial classification; the magical powers in what I call the “mystical East” clichés (but also in tropes like the Magical Negro or The Native American In Tune With Nature); and the drinking of blood in stuff like blood libel.
Making those features literally true for otherworldly creatures, and drawing explicit parallels between treatment of those creatures and the treatment of existing people is hugely problematic. Because the main reason all those treatments are utterly wrong-headed is… they’re not true. Foreigners aren’t magically different species.

-Assuming you’re depicting racial prejudice against said creatures–the other reason it’s problematic is that it’s very often accompanied by a total lack of actual prejudice against actual foreigners. Aka the “we have solved this stuff already” fallacy. I find it disturbing to assume that in an alternate New York City that reads like today’s New York City with added magic, people can be so outspoken against vampires/werewolves/etc., and not have prejudice against Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, LGBT people… Bonus point for UFs in which the vampires/fae/werewolves remain a secret community, and people who don’t know about the existence of such communities are still not racist… Yeah, like that’s a realistic depiction of the world.
Equally puzzling is that in the far future, humanity will magically have become this homogeneous mass that has let go of cultural conflicts. Honestly, so far we’ve shown remarkable capacity to pick new sets of prejudices as our immediate spheres became larger and larger (first communities and villages, then countries; and now the world, to an extent and with problems [1]): I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t continue doing this as mankind spreads to other planets!

-The specific comparison of UF supernatural creatures to immigrants and minorities is also problematic because in many books, it ends up putting such a high value on “normal” society (by which read heterosexual, White and American)–even more so than if it was just immigrants trying to fit in. It’s… something like this: when even immortal vampires, fairies, etc. feel so good about US high schools or US cities that all they really want to do is join in the fun, you basically have a narrative that reinforces the superiority of the “normative” society over all other expressions (sure, sometimes this is depicted as something enforced through lack of choice [2], but by and large the Fae/vampires do a surprisingly good job of fitting into human society). The pinnacle of achievement becomes joining a biology class in high school (I’m looking at you, Twilight): the centre of the world is humans and their values, and not the other way around. Now replace “humans” with “White male” (or dominant paradigm), and “fae” with POC/LGBT/etc. See how problematic it all becomes?

-Bonus points: the handling of “mixed-race” people. Those include alien/human crossbreeds (though these are rare); supernatural creatures/human crossbreeds, and the odd ones out like changelings, humans raised by aliens. I have yet to find a book that doesn’t make a huge splattering mess of things.
A couple of things not to do (and that I’ve seen in books!): mixed-race people aren’t suicidal or depressive because they hover on the cusp of two cultures. They’re also seldom in a position to actually draw little boxes and list their habits and physical traits, and separate them into mother’s stuff/father’s stuff. Except in very specific cases, sentences like “he had the beautiful exotic features of his father, but his true beauty came from his German mother” are not only racist as heck, but also quite unrealistic. And uh, not every mixed-race child will end up making an explicit choice of their father’s side or their mother’s side at the expense of everything else (I’m somewhat wondering, though, how much that is true in the US, which seems to have an odd elusion of mixed-race identity. If you’re mixed Chinese and White, you seem to magically become Chinese or White, but you can’t be both. Can someone from the US confirm or infirm that?).

Also. Wow. Now that I’m looking at the whole list I’m becoming quite depressed about some aspects of genre. I think I need a stiff tea…

Feel free to comment/discuss/disagree below, I’m off to write some novel chapters…

1. Can you introduce yourselves?
*Djibril al-Ayad*: Sure. I’m Djibril, and I edit The Future Fire, a magazine of social-political speculative fiction that has been publishing free online issues for about seven years now. We’ve focused in the past on feminist and queer issues, as well as environmental and colonial concerns. I have a soft spot for cyberpunk and dystopian settings, which are ripe for deep political storylines, but also like to experiment with surreal, magical realist and slipstream work.

*Fábio Fernandes:* I’m a science fiction author living in Brazil. I’m a professor of Creative Writing for Games and of Digital Culture scholar and translator for an university in São Paulo, and in my spare time I work as a translator (I did the Brazilian Portuguese versions of Neuromancer, Boneshaker and The Steampunk Bible, among many others). I’m edited a bilingual journal in Brazil a few years ago, and won two Argos Awards for Best Fiction (Brazil). I’m still doing some writing and editing in Portuguese, but since 2009 I’ve been doing most of my work in English.

2. Can you talk a bit about the project and its inception?
This project arises indirectly from the fact that TFF took a one-year hiatus last year, in part due to editor fatigue, and when we came back we felt we needed a bit of fresh blood to bring us back to form. Fábio was one of several people who responded to our call for proposals for themed and co-edited special issues, and his suggestion caught our eye right away: an anthology of colonialism-themed stories celebrating the viewpoints of people from developing countries or backgrounds. (We selected only two of the many proposals, the other being the Outlaw Bodies, currently reading submissions.)

We plan for the We See a Different Frontier anthology to be a professional rate-paying venue, which is why we’re asking people to help fund this through the Peerbackers venture. If we reach our target of $3000 we’ll probably be able to offer at least $0.05 per word and have a good spread of stories. (Obviously we hope we’ll exceed that and be able to pay an even more realistic “professional” rate for these stories.)

This anthology will publish colonialism-themed stories in any of the subgenres of speculative fiction: scif, fantasy, horror, surreal, weird, slipstream etc. We’re looking for stories from perspectives outside of the usual white, anglophone, Western, middle-class, straight/cis/male literature than dominates the genres. Although we’re not planning to place any restriction on who can submit stories, we are determined to avoid stories that contain cultural appropriation, orientalism and the like, so make sure your voices are authentic and come from a place of knowledge rather than wishful thinking.

3. The anthology is strongly focused on the experience of people from developing countries–a perspective that I find fascinating because it’s one that we don’t much see in the field (which has a plethora of stories written from what I’d call an “outsider” point of view, from people in developed countries writing about developing countries). What do you think are the main differences between this perspective and SF from developed countries?
*Fabio*: The outsider has always been the “industry standard”, so to speak. This, in itself, is not necessarily a problem – science fiction is a genre that serves pretty well to self-examination and criticism, hence the New Wave and the Cyberpunk Movement, for example. But whenever I want to see what’s lurking around the corner, it’s easier to find stories that take place in the other side of the galaxy than in a country of the Third World written by a citizen of said country. Take the case of Brazil: when I was growing up, all I could read in terms of SF was Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein (later, Frank Herbert, William Gibson) and a handful of Brazilian authors published by small presses. I became a member of an SF club which exchanged information with other countries (Argentina, China, Japan, UK, USA), but we mostly relied on Locus Magazine and Ansible for information; they served as information hubs mostly. We got more info from them than from Argentina; that still remains the case, sadly – but we must stress out that Brazil is the only Portuguese language country in the subcontinent, entirely surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries (11 only in South America – I’m not counting Central America or Mexico).

Still about Brazil, or should I say “Brasyl”? Ian McDonald’s novel about my country is pretty good and very well-written (one couldn’t expect less from McDonald), but I couldn’t shrug off the impression that he somehow failed to capture the essence of Brazil, the cultural and subcultural undercurrents that permeate our daily life. For instance, in a scene early in the novel, he describes a capoeira fight between a blonde woman and an African Brazilian man, and he describes all the racial tension between them – but he does it with an Anglo’s eyes! To a Brazilian, the tension is spread thinner and subtler than it was described there. It was something many of my Brazilian friends who read the novel didn’t even care about, but I’m sure that a Brazilian writer would have done it differently. This sort of thing, however, is apparently unsolvable: McDonald did his very best and the novel is good. I wrote a couple of stories about India and I think they were well researched, but I’m sure I will never write them as an Indian author. So, it is just a difference in perspective. It’s not necessarily good or bad, just different. And I want to see more of this different perspectives.

4. One of the things that I find fascinating about SF is its strong roots in a colonial paradigm (it’s not for nothing that we talk about space colonisation, or that stories about the settlement of other planets bear strong parallels to the Conquest of the West). Obviously this is a subject that you mean to tackle in this anthology! However, if I may take it further… How do you think those original tropes affect SF today–and how do you think we should go about producing genre that doesn’t unthinkingly perpetuate those problematic tropes?
*Fabio:* I had a paper to present in this year’s ICFA, and sadly I could not attend it – but it was just about that: how Firefly dealt with the conquest of space drawing a simple parallel with the Conquest of the USA Wild West. This paper wasn’t accepted for a book on Joss Whedon’s works, and I wonder why – I am a fan of Firefly, but I happen to disagree with a few things I wanted to see and I didn’t. I just thought there wasn’t enough diversity in Firefly! Is that evil? Not at all, it’s just a tiresome thing – and I believe it is one of the reasons why the show unfortunately didn’t last.

I loved Tobias Buckell’s Xenowealth series, and I think he shifted slowly the colonial paradigm by changing the ethnicity of the colonists in the first place. This is a nice first step, and Buckell’s Caribbean upbringing helped him a lot to see things differently from the original SFnal tropes. Your own Obsidian and Blood trilogy deal with a culture that shifts from the old fantasy stories about pre-columbian peoples and treat the Aztecs as an extremely intelligent people, that is, as every people on the world should be treated historically, socially, and narratively. I think the best we can do is not underestimate the Other.

*Djibril:* I think the best and maybe only way for a writer to avoid unthinkingly perpetuating problematic tropes is to think–think hard about everything you say and write. That sounds like a platitute, but I seriously believe that we can learn a lot by being self-conscious. We can learn from analysing our own mistakes (and yes, being criticised for them, for all it can hurt). Of course the best way to avoid Western colonial attitudes in science fiction is to read and publish SF written by someone with a different perspective, with a different attitude, but even then there’s the danger that we internalize prejudice and the Western tropes have permeated pretty much the whole world, so thinking about what you’re writing and why helps even there.

But the most important thing, and what we’re trying to achieve with this anthology (and what collections like So Long Been Dreaming, Dark Matter, World SF, Walking the Clouds etc. have done before us) is actively to pay attention to speculative fiction being written from outside the dominant paradigm, to “give voice to the voiceless” as Salman Rushdie puts it (although I don’t want to suggest that such writers are voiceless, certainly not on this blog!). There’s a lot of great spec-fic out there, and as Fábio said in his response to our call, only reading the stuff by western white anglo straight cis male authors just isn’t good enough.

Thank you, Djibril and Fabio, for dropping by! And, if you feel like donating money to make this possible, go over to the Peerbackers website over here. I’m very much looking forward to this anthology.

The above is something that I’ve often heard quoted when speaking of “writing the Other” [1]. And I’ve been struggling with it ever since I heard it; because it rings fishy to me. And yet there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it; and indeed, much that is right. Of course we’re all human beings. We’re born and we live and we age and we die. We love and we care and we hate and we fear. We have parents and grandparents and some sort of family; and a non-insignificant bunch of us will have friends and children and partners. There’s a whole spectrum of experiences and emotions that we share on what, for want of a better word, I think of as the human continuum. And, given that a few centuries ago people of a different colour or gender or creed were thought of as no better than beasts, I’m certainly not going to complain at the impulse to declare us all part of the same species.

At the same time… I think the main problem I have with the above sentences is that they’re too reductive: they go straight to what they see as “the essential”, and forget that our lives are often made up of many large and small details, of a mosaic of beliefs and cultural mores which comes from the environment we’ve been raised in, the society we’ve moving in, the subcultures we’re members of, the people we frequent… Yeah, we’re all the same deep down, but, broadly speaking, life in Hồ Chí Minh City follows very different rhythms from life in Paris; and the social structure and attitudes can also be very different [2]. Similarly, of course French politics are like US politics, but for a matter of degree; but that doesn’t get across the way that those two are fundamentally un-alike, and the myriad differences that make French politics characteristics of France.

Of course there’s nothing like “French-ness”, or “Black-ness”, or “Asian-ness”–and of course you don’t want characters who are walking stereotypes (personally, if I see one more Eastern mystical master, or one more Asian family obsessed with school grades and arranged marriages, I’ll hit someone). But the reverse approach, the one that advocates that “we’re all the same deep down”, is a bit like globalisation to me: instead of being a vibrant celebration of what makes us different, globalisation tends to smooth everything into an over-arching culture (which is a mix of European/US cultural mores, to oversimplify). Or like “universal stories”, which so often tend to be the Hollywood variety (rather than, say, the Bollywood or Nollywood one, to take just two examples).

This approach assumes that everyone in every country wants the same things: which might the case if you go deep enough, but is intensely problematic if you stop, say, at tastes in food, or beauty standards, or cultural values. And, like globalisation, the “we’re all the same” approach tends to lead to characters who might feel powerfully individual, but who basically remain 21st-Century US/European people in costume with a few “exotic” [3] words thrown in: it makes a mockery of all that makes us different.

In other words, saying “everyone is the same deep down” carries the risk of being boiled down to “everyone is like me”, and that in turn can lead to thinking everyone has the same beliefs and culture as you do, aka imposing your own thought processes on others at the expense of their own.

So, yeah. We’re all the same deep down. Except for a matter of degree. But degree is a huge thing.

This isn’t my most articulate post. I’m fully aware that I’m struggling to pinpoint why I disagree with the above assumptions; and I’m not entirely sure I succeeded in putting my thoughts down on, er, blog electrons. I guess it broadly boils to a matter of balance between two ends of the same problem: characters as walking stereotypes, and characters as entirely similar to the writer or the assumed majority audience (both stemming from an incomprehension of difference, and to some extent for me, a tolerance fail). Am I making sense to you? What do you think?

-The evolution of Vietnamese clothing, via lilsuika and Jhameia (amazing to see all the different styles together like this).

-China Miéville on racism and the Belgian decision to publish Tintin in Congo without acknowledging its racist clichés. For the record, Tintin was also a part of my childhood. I have very fond memories of some of the BDs in the series (mainly the later ones), but I don’t think they’re books I could enjoy today, and I’m not really sure they’re books I’d hand to my children. Every single nationality around the globe basically got skewered in a racist fashion (including but not limited to Africans, Arabs, Asians, Gypsies–you name it, he skewered it), and it’s very much boys’ adventures–wimmen need not apply. There are other BDs from my childhood that are far, far better than those.
Also, this quote?

there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say

Smartest quote about freedom of speech, ever.

-The New York Times on Explaining Londoners. Definitely worth a laugh. I would like to point out that although the French do greet each other by kissing cheeks, we only do the one-on-each-cheek in Paris (every area of France basically has its own idea of how many kisses you should give)

-Fellow VDer Stephen Gaskell has started a new blog, Creepy Treehouse, aimed at educating the young-ish crowd better than dry school lectures. He’s running a series of posts on how to survive the apocalypse that are rather fab.

1. Food: oh my God, the food. I might be a tourist and more than a little lost in Vietnam, but the food is always like coming home (and it’s no coincidence that the one place I’m never lost in is restaurants). Plus, you always eat well at Grandma’s house (thanks to the combined efforts of Grandma, my maternal aunt, and my cousin). We also tested and patented the food crawl as we were travelling: this is a technique by which you get up at 6:00, have a cup of tea, eat a breakfast soup at 9:00, have lunch at 11:00, then have a boat ride on the Mekong and have a copious snack at 15:00, and proceed to dinner at 17:00 (all the while being pointed to food in various peremptory ways, and being told to eat in either French or Vietnamese). That’s discounting special events where you are well and properly stuffed, banquet-style (our stay intersected my great-grandmother’s death anniversary, and a two-year death anniversary for my great-uncle, which is basically when the period of mourning ends for the descendants); and it explains why we came back from Vietnam sated, but determined to undergo a diet of salads. [1]

2. Orientation: Grandma very sensibly wrote the address of the house on a bit of paper (well, OK. First she told me to repeat it out loud, then she grimaced and said she was going to give me a bit of paper… Remember what I said about my pronunciation sucking?), and that was what we gave taxis as we zoomed around Saigon. It puzzled them no end that two very obvious tourists (one White guy, and one vaguely Vietnamese-looking gal who obviously couldn’t speak very well) would ask to be dropped in what seemed to them the back end of nowhere. Mostly it was fine, but we did have one taxi driver who kept circling the house, looking for a hotel where we could be staying… (when this was explained to Grandma, she laughed very hard and said she was the cheap variety of hotel). In the end, I gave up the pronunciation game–it’s just too frustrating to argue with a cab while the meter is running–and copied down street names on a bit of paper. (I think the only two places that I said out loud that didn’t suffer from a pronunciation problem were the Bến Thành market, which is a touristy destination, and the word “crossroads”, but it was accompanied by a list of two street names, and a rather graphic gesture of a cross made with my hands).

3. Tourists vs. locals: the H and I spent a most profitable afternoon in Hội An [2] observing an ever-increasing flow of local tourists vs Westerners, and we’ve come to the conclusion that the one difference between the “locals” and the Westerners is–guess who’s wearing the T-shirts and shorts and getting sunburnt? (getting dark skin is considered a bad thing in Vietnam, so a lot of people dress with long-sleeved shirts, trousers, and sometimes even gloves and facemasks. And I shudder for the poor kids decked out in thick winter clothes, because it’s colder in the Centre, but most certainly not *that* cold).

ETA: I stand corrected. Patrick Samphire and K.S. Augustin pointed out to me that this was also a UK and Aus usage. I’d not seen it in UK/Aus blog posts, and I leapt to conclusions regarding its use a tad too fast.

-Somehow ended up on deepad’s DW, where I found an old-ish post about emigrants vs. sourcelanders (to over-simplify, the diaspora versus those who remained in the “home” country). Interesting discussion especially as regards authenticity (though I’m not sure I agree with everything. Some of the arguments about who “owns/gets to write about” the cultural heritage of a particular country, for instance, make me more than a little uneasy, though a. I’m hardly neutral on the issue, obviously, and b. I can see where the frustration comes from–an all-too-familiar case of minorities/majorities in Western countries getting more attention than their “sourcelander” counterparts). ETA: sorry, this is the blog post in question. As a bonus and because, on second thought, the post, its comments and some of the attendant assumptions make me deeply uneasy, here’s a set of links to Asian people blogging about their various hyphenate experiences and how it’s affected them. Especially love this one by ciderpress.

-Two Dudes in an Attic reviews Servant of the Underworld (particularly like the description of Acatl as an emo wanker who would be moping and writing bad love poetry, were he alive today).

-Amy Sanderson reviews Servant of the Underworld.

Meanwhile, we’re running out of boxes, and will be packing the eletronics next…

Resolutely failed to buy the Lymond chronicles in ebook format (I have the paper editions but wanted to have them handy for, say, holidays). However, my purse balked at paying ten freaking pounds per book for something I essentially already own in another format. (it occurred to me that for the price of three ebooks, I can buy a 16GB card, too. No comments necessary).

And if I see one more American remake of a successful other-language movie, under the pretext that Americans are too bemused to handle dubs or (Heaven forbid) subtitles, I’ll hit something. Hard, and with a spiked iron gauntlet. (this brought to you courtesy of Let Me In and The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo).