In which her ad hoc comment policy remains in place

[zeborah]

[Possibly it will seem less strange this time since I'm saying from the start that I'm not saying "You should" and therefore "Why should I?" is not appropriate. Instead I'm saying "I want to, and how can I and minimise the hurt it causes?"

So, again, any "I don't want to" or "Why should I?" or "How woeful is the life of a white writer?" will be summarily deleted. This will prevent me getting embroiled in a conversation I don't want to have and will thus save me time. As a bonus, anyone who gets accused of trying to censor someone simply because they didn't censor themself, can point to me as an example of what *real* censorship means.]

So, anyway, in the other thread I said I've got a story idea that wants to be in Africa. (The western part comes to mind. I don't know why. One of the reasons I want to do this is because I'm so ignorant about Africa that I don't even know what countries go where.) I pondered this on the way to the fish and chip shop and realised that, while technically true, it's also misleading. My story idea wants to be *in* Africa; but it doesn't want to be *of* Africa.

It's not at all unlikely (though nor is it certain) that there's somewhere where a story about a quest to the Underworld to rescue one's kin is not culturally inappropriate. It's less likely that there's somewhere that has a system where gods are 'assigned' to different roles so that there is, for example, a God of Children, a God of Storytellers, etc. And I highly doubt that there's somewhere which not only has m/patronymics but also has them take - not the form "X's son/daughter" - but "X's first/second/third/...".

So really what the story wants is to appropriate the setting of Africa for local flavour. Which I consider problematic. (Note that "problematic" doesn't mean "evil". It means "If I try this, there will be problems which I will want to consider.")

[Interlude: "It's your story, you can write it however you want!" is not helpful. Of course I *can*. But I don't *want* to write it however I want. I want to write it in a way that will satisfy me without unnecessarily hurting people.]

So while I was at the fish and chip shop I pondered how to respond to this realisation. I could, for example, throw out those parts of the story that aren't congruent with whatever setting I end up choosing. But I think if I did that I'd end up having nothing left that really inspired me. And then I wouldn't write it. And that fails my "Something is better than nothing" test.

Or I could write it but set it in a pseudo-European setting. But that also fails my "Something is better than nothing" test.

So I concluded that I should write it anyway but quit fooling myself that it's set anywhere in Africa. I think I should:

a) set it in a (part of) a pseudo-Africa;
b) research as much as possible about that part of the real Africa so I've got some authenticness available;
c) acknowledge the sources I use;
d) acknowledge that what I'm writing is nevertheless totally not authentic;
e) hopefully learn enough along the way that I'll be inspired by an idea that will be a little less appropriating;
f) iterate on the understanding that I'll never "win" and won't get any cookies.

[Which is a shame, because cookies are yummy. OTOH, they're also quite cheap at the supermarket, so I'll cope. As for winning, who wants to win? People only win when the race is over and you all stop running; I intend to keep writing until I die.]

On the way back from the fish and chip shop, I pondered the fact that I feel almost comfortable writing somewhere in a continent I know nothing about, but the idea of writing anything set in New Zealand just freezes me. Part of it might be that I grew up reading books set in the US, Britain, Europe, Japan, Ceylon... pretty much everywhere but New Zealand. Part of it is fear... whether abstractly of "getting it wrong", or altruistically of "offending someone", or selfishly of "being called out for getting it wrong", it's moot. Whatever it is, I'm afraid in a part of me that I don't know how to reach into and fix yet.

But maybe if I get more comfortable writing about places that aren't Europe, I might be able to ease my way towards places that are New Zealand. Dunno. It's kind of a plan, anyway.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

the idea of writing anything set in New Zealand just freezes me

That's interesting. I understand the bit about reading books set in the US and UK. When I was young all books seemed to be set in this (to me) almost mythical middle-class, southern England that bore almost as little relation to my life as the stories we had in Sunday School about children in villages in Africa. My early stories were set in a sort of pale copy of that mythical southern England.

Thankfully Alan Garner came to my rescue with Elidor. Whatever its flaws, that book showed me that it was possible to write an exciting and magical story set in the slum clearance area of a grimy northern city that was where I lived at the time. Since then I've written quite a lot of stories set in places I know and a sense of place is something I feel is very important to a story.

Are there many books set in New Zealand? I could see that if there aren't you might end up with a milder version of the problem that Monica Ali (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Ali) had with her debut novel Brick Lane, but are New Zealanders really as sensitive as an immigrant community who saw themselves betrayed by one of their own?

[Edited to correct glitch in the link.]

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

the idea of writing anything set in New Zealand just freezes me.

In other words, you have the same 'generic Europe/America' problem everyone else in the English-speaking world appears to have.

The books of my childhood were set in Germany, England, America, Sweden (lots of wonderful pony stories, and Astrid Lindgren). On television, we got German/English/American/Swedish/East German (a different world) and Czech. (They used to make the nicest children/YA television series, and the East German channel carried them. When you only have four channels, you watch all of them.)

So, while I might have been short on Asian/African/South American experiences, I had plenty of 'other.'

[slrose.livejournal.com]

I always enjoyed the exotic New Zealand settings in Essie Summers' Harlequin romances.

[poetrychook.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I brought you home lots of library books by New Zealand authors - New Zealand settings may be another matter, Margaret Mahy for instance didn't always use New Zealand settings although they weren't exactly Europe either. Come to think of it, aren't Margaret Mahy's books for older readers more clearly set in New Zealand? Hairy McLary is quite clearly New Zealand. But of course once you were choosing your own books (pretty young), and given the whole of English language literature to choose from, it was inevitable that the balance would be weighted towards Europe/ the US. And among fantasy books, it does seem to be Europe and not the US (maybe because there's no medieval tradition in the US).

Elizabeth Knox's Dreamhunter stories are set in a New Zealand that isn't New Zealand in I think the same way as you are talking about writing about an Africa that isn't Africa. (Not that I've read them yet, but I did hear her talking extensively about them at the Book Festival)

[zeborah]

Come to think of it, when I was a kid and a teenager I wrote set in New Zealand. Dunno what changed.

Partly it's that I left fantasy for a long time and while there's a certain amount of NZ fantasy there's not a whole lot of NZ sf. Some, yes, but not a lot. And even then, it's very Pakeha fantasy and sf. Still more dragons than taniwha and more elves than patupaiarehe.

And if it's Maori fantasy/sf it gets shelved as New Zealand fiction. See Witi Ihimaera - "Sky Dancer" is totally fantasy/sf, but it's never shelved there. It's done in a way that makes me feel guilty for thinking of it as fantasy/sf, as if that's disrespectful of the culture in some way, and that makes me feel as if I have no right to try such a thing myself.

So, yeah, various hangups I need to get over.

[zeborah]

There are, as Mum (poetrychook) says, a decent number of books by NZ authors and set in New Zealand. It's just that the books that really caught my imagination when I was a kid and a teenager, in ways that inspired me to write pastiches, were: the Secret Seven; Swallows and Amazons; Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator; various Nesbit and Edward Eager; Star Trek.

There's a novel I mean to write some day (argh, getting too many of those) where the protag is a New Zealander in a time when NZ is much more blended culturally - more Maori/Pacific, less rigidly European - she's in space but she's still got that background to her. But of course things which NZers would understand (Maori words, references to the Treaty, customs) would have to be explained to foreign readers. The same as you'd inclue alien words, history and customs. Except Maori isn't just some other invented alien culture, so... nnh. I'll figure it out when I get to it. Hopefully not by minimising her background.

[zeborah]

You had four channels? We had two. TV Three was a great excitement.

I forgot about Pippi. Oh, and Emil and the Detectives. The Great Steppe. Asterix. Certainly I read novels from all four corners of Europe. None of that feels like 'other' to me, perhaps because I read them in my formative years, perhaps because... well, it's all still Europe.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

It would be a challenge to make the book work for both foreigners and NZers, but it ought to be doable. The different readers wouldn't get quite the same reading experience, but as long as each reader gets an interesting and enjoyable reading experience, I don't think that matters.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

We used to get those lovely Czech children's animations too.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I could sort-of-relate to the English ones, although the whole boarding school experience was weird, but Sweden with its months of summer holidays and families packing up and living in a summer house for months and dark winters and Lucia crowns - no, that was very Other to me.

I also read Karl May which are set all over the planet - Arabia, Out West, South America - although the PoV is, ahem, somewhat biased. And in a way that worked, too, because May is *so obviously* colonial and skewed that even at ten or twelve I recognised his white/German supremacy for what it was. And... he's one hell of a writer.

[zeborah]

Oh yes, I don't count the Willard Price novels. I devoured them as a kid -- and still love them for those fond memories, but omg the colonialism just fairly drips out...