Report from Planet Midnight (10 page)

It took me some hard thinking to figure out the flaw in the logic that leads people to think that antiracist diversity and literary quality are mutually exclusive. This is what I came up with: there are many steps to editing an anthology, and they have different priorities. Efforts to broaden the representation have to happen at the beginning of the process, not at the stage where you’re selecting for literary quality. If I wanted black writers to send me their stories, I’d have to specifically invite them. And in an effort to right the systemic imbalance in numbers, I’d have to invite more of them than of anyone else. If I wanted the participation of non-black writers (and I did), I’d need to invite the ones that I felt were creatively up to the task.

I knew that statistically speaking, if you invite people to something, one-fifth of them will attend. I knew
that I had room for roughly twenty stories in the anthology. I multiplied that number by five, and so decided I would solicit stories from more than a hundred writers. “More than” because I knew I would reject some of the stories as unsuitable.

Then I made two lists of writers to invite who I thought could handle the material well: one of writers I knew to be black, and one of writers I knew to be non-black, or whose race I didn’t know for sure; after all, some writers don’t place a focus on their racial identities, and that is their right. I listed twice as many black writers as those in the second group. In a way, you could say that I deliberately did the opposite of what would have happened in our current context of institutionalised racism if I hadn’t thought about who I was inviting. Some might call that reverse racism. I think it was more in the way of reversing racism (grammar’s so important, don’t you think?), if only for a small space of time in a temporarily and very conditionally autonomous zone.

I sent out the invitations, crossed my fingers, and waited nervously until the submission deadline. There was a chance it wouldn’t work. The law of averages means that efforts to even out that kind of imbalance work in the aggregate, not necessarily in every single instance. I had to take that chance, and to also take the chance that if it didn’t work out, I’d face disapproval from some of the black readers in the field. Part of the job. At least I could say that I’d tried.

Once the stories were in, I read them and picked the ones I thought were strong, no matter who the writer was. Much of the time I wilfully disremembered the writer’s name until I’d read their story; my natural forgetfulness
comes in handy that way. I tried to read cover letters only after I’d read the attached stories. I didn’t pay much attention to who was going to be in the anthology until I’d assembled the stories I wanted in the order I wanted. I believe that in fact I didn’t assess it until I’d submitted the anthology to my editor and she’d accepted it. I’d have to recheck in order to verify this, but I think that about 50 percent of the contributors to
Mojo: Conjure Stories
are black.

I’m glad it worked. It was probably my first lesson that demarginalisation has to start at the organisational/ systemic level. Trying to do it person by person is starting too late in the process. Individuals are going to have a hard time making change if they’re not receiving organisational support. You start as early on in the process as you can.

To certain white male writers I’d like to say, when those around you try to wrestle with issues of entitlement and marginalisation, please don’t give us the tired trumpeting of “Censorship! No one can tell me what to write!” True, people
shouldn’t
tell you what to write, but people will try to, for bad reasons and better ones. Your mother will try to tell you what to write or not write. Your husband will. Your editor, your government, your church, your readers, your nosy neighbour. Humans are an argumentative lot. Dealing with that as a writer comes with the territory.

Those books by my bedside? They include a book written by a white man about a white woman, one by a white man about South Asian people, one by a white woman about a black woman, one by an American about a Londoner, one by a black woman and a white woman
about, oh, everybody; I could go on. Write whatever the blast you want, and if you live in an environment where doing so doesn’t endanger your life or career, count yourself blessed.

When I hear a (usually white and usually male) writer trying to shut down a discussion about representation by bellowing that no one should tell him what to write, it sounds very much as though he’s trying to change the topic, to make it all about him. To him I’d say, why not try to further the discussion, rather than trying to, um, censor it? What do you think needs to be done in order to make publishing more representative? Nothing, you say? The doors are already open but we just won’t come in? Women, black people (and purple polka-dotted meercats) actually “just don’t write much science fiction”? Or their books are “only relevant to their communities” (which is often code for “those people are incapable of producing anything of real literary merit”)?

Funny, how every one of those statements boils down to not being willing to change the status quo. You do realise that you’re even drowning out the white voices amongst you that are trying to make some changes along with the rest of us? You do realise that a more representative literary field would be representative of
all
of us, yourself included?

Sure, there are people on both sides of that discussion who are full of crap. But as a smart white man once said, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” The crap doesn’t invalidate the discussion.

Oy, I’m ranting again! This is what happens when you ask me to be an “outspoken author.”

In
Midnight Robber
the naming (and renaming) of things seems to be an important part of the story. (Granny Nanny instead of “electronic overlord” or some such.) What exactly are you “subverting” here?

In my novel, Granny Nanny is a supercomputer that loves us. That’s not new. She’s like a planet-sized Tardis. The difference may be that the way in which I describe her is culturally specific. Granny Nanny is named after Nanny of the Maroons, a seventeenth-century African freedom fighter from Jamaica. She is one of our national heroes. In a West African diasporic linguistic context, Granny/Nana/ Nanny don’t necessarily designate a sweet, harmless old lady who bakes you cookies. It’s a term of respect for a female elder, for a woman who has more years and more life experience than you do. Granny Nanny—the woman, not the A.I.—led an insurgency that fought off British soldiers and eventually gained freedom for a Maroon community in the hills of Jamaica. The soldiers were convinced that she could catch their bullets between her ass cheeks and fart them back like a machine gun. She was an Afro-Jamaican woman guerrilla strategist on horseback, and I enjoyed invoking her memory in a science fiction novel. A lot of the time, all I’m trying to do is put some of my specific ethnocultural touchstones into science fiction and fantasy. When white writers do that, it’s barely remarked-upon. And sometimes it should be, because it’s often wonderful.

Your literary background runs both wide and deep, from Russian lit to Shakespeare to classic SF to Caribbean folklore. How do the artist and the scholar get along in Nalo’s head? Heart?

I’m not a scholar. That implies in-depth, perhaps guided study. I skim. I’m more along the lines of a knowledge geek who’s been exposed to a lot of different cultures. They all get along well in both my head and my heart, but it often means that people don’t pick up on all the references I’m making. I try to be aware of that when I’m writing. Sometimes I try to make sure that it doesn’t matter if a reader doesn’t get all the references. Sometimes I try to make it a bit of a game for the readers who don’t know a particular reference, as well as a kind of in-joke for those who do.

Do you read comics—excuse me, graphic novels?

I do, whatever one calls them. My partner and I are verrrry slooooowly working on creating one. Some of my favourites are Love and Rockets, Bayou, Finder, Le Chat du Rabbin, The Invisibles, Dykes to Watch Out For,
Fun Home,
and Calvin and Hobbes. The superhero comics from the Big Two mostly make me twitchy and cranky, though I’ll usually go to the spin-off movies. The films make me equally twitchy and cranky, but there’s my fannish pleasure in watching impossible science and impossibly beautiful people blow impossible shit up real good. And they give me lots of food for thought and ranting about everything from bad physics (when I can pick up on the incorrect science in a film, it’s
really
fucking incorrect) to messed-up gender politics. Comics thrill me. They make me wish I were a comic artist.

You are often called a magical realist. Is that just a euphemism for fantasy, like speculative fiction for SF? Or does it actually get at something?

I haven’t read tons of magical realism. I don’t have as informed a feel for what magical realist writing does as I do for fantasy and SF. I sometimes feel that in magical realism (in literature, not in art), the supernatural elements are conceits that don’t have to be followed through as rigorously as we demand from fantasy. It seems to me that in magical realism, the story as a whole takes precedence. The supernatural elements are only one of its parts. In fantasy, the fantastical elements are as central as plot and character. I think.

I love your description of geeks as people who “know too much about too many things that other people don’t care about.” What then are literary snobs?

I think the main difference is that all geeks aren’t snobs, whereas all snobs are snobs.

Do you read V.S. Naipaul? Do you like Naipaul?

I read his earlier short story collection
Miguel Street
over and over when I was a kid. I really liked it. I think it still holds up fairly well, but I haven’t read his newer work. He is, of course, notorious amongst his fellow Caribbean writers and everyone else for his outrageously racist and sexist statements. I don’t like those. But I find him easy to ignore.

What kind of car do you drive? (I ask every author this.)

I don’t have a car. You don’t need one in Toronto. I believe the last time I owned a car was twenty-three years ago. I don’t remember what kind it was. It was red. I hated it. I don’t like cars. I don’t like the expense, the maintenance, the danger of driving them, what they’ve done to the planet. Now that I spend part of the year in Southern California, I may have to get a car. This part of the world is built around the assumption of people having cars. It’s difficult to get around without one and I have fibromyalgia. I get tired.

James Joyce never went back to Ireland. Do you see yourself growing old in Canada, or in the Caribbean? (Or growing old at all?)

I don’t know where I’ll grow old. Perhaps moving back and forth between a couple of places. The Caribbean is the home of my heart, but no one place has everything I’d want as a permanent home. Wherever it is, it’ll probably be a big, socially progressive city with lots of cultural, linguistic, ethnic and racial variety, lots of black people, a mild climate, and a large body of water nearby. I haven’t yet found a city that has all those things. I do plan on growing old, and I’m simultaneously terrified of it. I’m fifty-one years old, and the past few years as I entered what may be the latter half of my life were hellish. I experienced escalating illness, which led to destitution, homelessness, and near loss of my career as a writer. Things seem to be stabilizing now. I’m addressing the health concerns that can be addressed, I’m writing again, and I now have
a professorship that is going a long way toward stabilizing my income. My primary (life) partner and I not only stayed together during those horrible years, but I think our relationship came out of it stronger. That in itself is a miracle, and unutterably precious. And yet I’m constantly aware that it’s all temporary, that getting older will probably bring more and perhaps worse physical affliction to me and to my loved ones. Certainly, the longer I stay alive, it’ll mean losing more and more of the people I love. I think of those afflictions and losses to come, and it makes me frantic with terror. I’m trying to remember that there will also be lots to gain in those years: new friends, new experiences, new competencies, new joys.

When you teach writing, what do you teach? What do you un-teach?

Nowadays, I’m all about architecture and integrity. A story has to be given a deliberate shape that hopefully has some structural integrity and architectural wonder, and it has to be in dynamic movement along a trajectory. Is “dynamic movement” a tautology? I mean there should be pacing. I’m also all about allowing the reader to inhabit the body of a point-of-view character and experience the physicality of her or his world. I try to un-teach the notion that a story is something told to a passive listener. I try to get my students out of the point-of-view character’s head and more into that character’s physical sensations. I try to model my love of words and meaning. I try to show them that editing is the fun part. It’s the part where your word baby develops fingers and toes and eyes and starts looking back at you and reaching for things.

And being me, I’m now thinking about just how ableist a metaphor that is.

Did you initially see SF and Fantasy as a gateway, or as a castle to be stormed? How has that perception changed?

That’s a fascinating question. As neither. I think. You can breach gateways and storm castles, or enter gateways and inhabit castles. Maybe this is trite, but science fiction is a universe.

You totally work magic with titles: “Greedy Choke Puppy,”
“Ours Is the Prettiest,“ etc. At what point in the creative process does the title come to you?

Thank you! Often before the rest of the story. The title’s sort of the distilled version of what the story wants to be. Before I quite know what the story is, the title whispers hints to me.

I like that. Now here’s my Jeopardy item. I provide the answer, and you provide the question. The answer is: Because they can.