Internalizing the Differences

Ever since I read this post over at Fantasy Bookspot a couple of weeks ago, I have been pondering and rethinking my own take on the gender issue when it comes to story telling. I was going to post something about this a few days ago, when my attention was diverted by the arrival of a story collection that Nalo Hopkinson co-edited called So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy. Reading that collection and the comments that Hopkinson and fellow editor Uppinder Mehan made about the hows and whys of these stories taking place was thought-provoking.

Although there are very few photos of me available online, I would probably be presumed by most readers to be a Caucasian male. While my religious background (Catholic) and sexual orientation (heterosexual) may or may not be easily determined by reading electronic black words on an electronic white backdrop, there is much in what I have chosen to read that reveals (perhaps) an ambivalence towards my own US Southern upbringing.

A great many readers will claim that gender and race do not matter when it comes to reading a tale. I say to that, "Bullshit!" It does matter, even if it might only take subconscious forms. From the types of tales that people are trained by their sociocultural backgrounds to prefer to how one views the world and its relationships with the fictional stories written within in, people cannot help but to view things through their own prism.

I used to have bookmarked (before my old computer blew up and I lost all of those countless links) an article written by an African-American woman (sadly, I'm forgetting her name now, as it's been about two years since I read this) who talked about how important it was to her to read of brown-skinned people in stories such as Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series. I recall that article sparking a lot of discussion on the various blogs and websites...then fading into the backdrop.

So when I read the stories contained within So Long Been Dreaming, I could not help but think of that article and how the stories presented in this collection come at the issues of Exploration and First Contact (among other SF/F tropes) not from that of the Explorers, but of those being Explored. Stories that dealt with issues such as forced assimilation or of self-denigration due to pressures from a somewhat alien and yet overarching "other" culture. Stories that are not just based on our various pasts but also on our presents and possible futures.

When I read novels by a Nalo Hopkinson or an Octavia Butler or a Laura Restrepo (to name just three of the many women authors that I've read in recent years), I cannot help but to detect a "difference" in their writings, a je ne sais quoi that is eluding me now but which I want to understand better, to internalize it into my own understandings of the world around. Speculative fiction, or fiction of any sort for that matter, deals at its core with how we view the world and its peoples. As much as we might wish to "escape" from the oft-sad realities of how groups of people have treated other groups of people, there are still many elements of "the White Man's Burden" visible and active under the surface of a great many tales. Some extol those elements, while others struggle to deal with it, but yet there it is...that 800 lb. gorilla looming over us.

Perhaps that is why that when I read a Hopkinson or a tale by a Latina such as Isabel Allende, I cannot but help notice the different texture and paralanguage behind the written words printed on the pages of their novels. That does not mean that I value them more or less than those of WASPs or men of other cultures, only that there is a "difference" in there...and I am often drawn toward that, trying to process it, understand it, and relate it to my own understanding of the world around me, which is perhaps one of the few ways that cultural diffusion can truly triumph over cultural imposition.