Report from Planet Midnight (6 page)

More positive change that came out of RaceFail: fans of colour began daring to blog their experiences and their feelings about systemic racism in fantasy and science fiction (both in the literature and in the community) because they realised there was some backup. Fans of all stripes—and by that I mean “white people, too”—began challenging one another to read books by people of colour and review and discuss them, and they are by heaven doing it. Can I just say that I love me some fandom? Fandom is not exempt from the kind of wrongheadedness that humans display every day. But when fans conspire to do a good thing, it is most well done indeed, with verve and enthusiasm.

The white fantasy and SF community has a culture of arrogance and entitlement that is infuriating. It became clear last year just how patronizing some of you could be, just how little you trusted us to have any insight into our own experience, an experience about which many of you are proud to say that you’re blind. If I’d ask one thing of you, it’d be to demonstrate your own impulses to equity and fairness—I know they’re there—by beginning from the assumption that people of colour probably know whereof we speak on issues of race and racism.

It also became clear that many of the white people who are able to make that collegial leap of equality and respect are so mired in guilt and trying to take the fall for the rest of you that they are somewhat paralysed. That doesn’t help either, and I’m not sure what the solution is. I think you could stand to talk amongst yourselves about that one.

One of the things I really wanted to say from this podium: people of colour in this community, I love allyou. I love allyou can’t done. I love how you stepped up to the plate in this past year; I kept feeling that love even when rage led to regrettable actions from some of you. I love how you looked out for each other; I love how you got energised. It’s bloody terrifying to be up on this podium right now, but you give me the courage to keep going, and for that, I thank you. When RaceFail first began to happen, I was dismayed. I didn’t think the Internet with its trolls and incendiaries was the place to have the discussion. I was wrong. Tempest Bradford, I was wrong, and I love you for holding strong, for keeping your sense of humour, and for speaking hard truths while being honest with and
generous to pretty much everyone (by “everyone” I mean, “white folks, too”).

There are so many names to be named of people who did the right thing through all this. I cannot name them all. Because I’ll tell you, people, I tired. Oonuh, I tired to rass. I get seen as one of the go-to people when it comes to race in this community. I spent most of the last two years homeless and couch-surfing with my partner, recovering from illness and fighting a still ongoing struggle to get enough to eat from day to day. I simply didn’t have the energy to take RaceFail on the way I wanted to. And when I began to hear from some of the more arrogantly obstructive white people in the community who were all of a sudden being friendly to me without acknowledging their actions and the reasons for their overtures, I saw red. Allyou think I just come off the banana boat or what? That is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and my mother didn’t raise no stupid children. I am not your tame negress. I mean, I know I’m published by a mainstream house and have achieved some recognition. I know I’m in the house, people. But house negroes get a bad rap for being inherently complicit with Massa. There were and are freedom fighters among them, too. I know that a large part of the reason I’m up here has to do with the brave actions of people on the inside, of all colours, at the IAFA. And I thank you all profusely for it.

By the way, to the people in the community who have coined and are using the term “failfandom” to mock people of colour who dare to call you on your racism, that’s using derision, minimizing, and discrediting as tactics of
suppressing dissent. And we see you coming a mile away.

Sure I’m angry. I also love this community and this genre to pieces. This literature and some of the people in this community have kept me alive; in these past four years, sometimes literally so. That’s why, as much as I can, I keep fighting for and with the community to be the best it can be, to live up to its own visions of worlds in which no one is shut out. I’m very, very happy to be here, and happy to have been offered a podium from which to talk to this group of people on this topic. Any space created in this community for people of colour, and any space we can make for ourselves makes it possible for more of us to find it easier to be ourselves, to speak up; makes it easier to write, or possible to write at all. That is true when we do it for any disenfranchised group of people within the larger fantasy and science fiction community: women, disabled people, queer people, poor and working class people, chronically ill people, old people. I’d lay odds that everyone in this room experiences at least one of those disen-franchisements. Making room makes room for all of us. It makes the possibility for even more great writing in a field where we are already blessed with so much of it. How wonderful would that be? And come right down to it, the writing is why we are all here, nah true?

AFTERWORD

A postscript, if I may; a few minutes after I gave this address, an audience member approached me privately and asked whether I was a Marxist. Surprised, I asked him why he thought
I might be. He said it was because I had “reduced” the lofty subject of art to a mere question of labour. (Paraphrasing mine.)

To him I’d like to say, Mister, I am an artist who supports herself on the strength of her art and her ability to keep producing it. You’d be hard put to convince any artist that art isn’t work. And you can’t convince me that there’s no art to labour. You can’t convince me that art and the labour that creates it can be easily teased apart and considered as separate objects, and you sure as hell can’t convince me that the latter is somehow base and impoverished in comparison to the former.

And how sad is it that you apparently managed to ignore the main gist of my speech so profoundly that all you got from it were the few paragraphs I used to contextualise a much larger discussion of how fantasy and science fiction approach race?

1
. By “(active) science fiction community” I mean the people who attend and organize science fiction and fantasy conventions, who identify as science fiction/fantasy fans, and who are conversant and current with much of the body of science fiction/fantasy literature, a genre of storytelling that can be found in text-based, time-based (films, television, etc.) and visual media.

2
. You’ll notice that my “we” shifts according to context. In other words, when I say “we,” I don’t always mean the same group of people. Think Venn diagram.

3
. I’m not asking people to do anything I haven’t done. I’ve wronged and probably will wrong enough people in my time that I’ve had ample opportunity to put myself through the process of apology, addressing/redressing and hopefully reconciliation. I know in my bones how badly it grates. But I also know that it works, and that the subsequent healing soothes away the grating feeling.

4
. See Rydra Wong’s LiveJournal blog at
http://rydra-wong.live-journal.com/l46697.html
.

5
. Papa Legba, ouvre baye pou mwen, Ago eh! In African-derived religions of the Caribbean, the “horse” is a believer who, during a ceremony of worship, voluntarily consents to being temporarily inhabited by one of the deities. The worshipper then exhibits characteristics specific to that deity (sometimes in defiance of their own physical capabilities when not in trance state), and is said to have the deity riding on their head.

6
. A video recording of the 2009 speech is available at the following address, courtesy of artist/writer David Findlay:
http://nalohopkinson.com/2010/05/30/reluctant_ambassador_planet_midnight.html.

7
. Tip o’ the nib to Sally Klages.

8
. Tip o’ the nib to Winnie the Pooh and to A.A. Milne.

Down,

Down,

Down,

To the deep and shady,

Pretty mermaidy,

Take me down.

—African-American folk song

“D
ID
YOU SLEEP WELL?”
she asks, and you make sure that your face is fixed in a dreamy smile as you open your eyes into the morning after. It had been an awkward third date; a clumsy fumbling in her bed, both of you apologizing and then fleeing gratefully into sleep.

“I dreamt that you kissed me,” you say. That line’s worked before. She’s as lovely as she was the first time you met her, particularly seen through eyes with colour vision. “You said you wanted me to be your frog.”
Say it, say it,
you think.

She laughs. “Isn’t that kind of backwards?”

“Well, it’d be a way to start over, right?”

Her eyes narrow at that. You ignore it. “You could kiss me,” you tell her, as playfully as you can manage, “and make me your prince again.”

She looks thoughtful at that. You reach for her, pull her close. She comes willingly, a fall of little blonde plaits brushing your face like fingers. Her hair’s too straight to hold the plaits; they’re already feathered all along their lengths. “Will you be my slimy little frog?” she whispers, a gleam of amusement in her eyes, and your heart double-times, but she kisses you on the forehead instead of the mouth. You could scream with frustration.

“I’ve got morning breath,” she says apologetically. She means that you do.

“I’ll go and brush my teeth,” you tell her. You try not to sound grumpy. You linger in the bathroom, staring at the whimsical shells she keeps in the little woven basket on the counter, flouting their salty pink cores. You wait for anger and pique to subside.

“You hungry?” she calls from the kitchen. “I thought I’d make some oatmeal porridge.”

So much for kissing games. She’s decided it’s time for breakfast instead. “Yes,” you say. “Porridge is fine.”

Ban … Ban … ca-ca-Caliban …

You know who the real tempest is, don’t you? The real storm? Is our mother Sycorax; his and mine. If you ever see her hair flying around her head when she dash at you in anger; like a whirlwind, like lightning, like a deadly whirlpool. Wheeling and turning round her scalp like if it ever catch you, it going to drag you in, pull you down, swallow you in pieces. If you ever hear
how she gnash her teeth in her head like tiger shark; if you ever hear the crack of her voice or feel the crack of her hand on your backside like a bolt out of thunder, then you would know is where the real storm there.

She tell me say I must call her Scylla, or Charybdis.

Say it don’t make no matter which, for she could never remember one different from the other, but she know one of them is her real name. She say never mind the name most people know her by; is a name some Englishman give her by scraping a feather quill on paper.

White people magic.

Her
people magic, for all that she will box you if you ever remind her of that, and flash her blue, blue y’eye-them at you. Lightning
braps
from out of blue sky. But me and Brother, when she not there, is that Englishman name we call her by.

When she hold you on her breast, you must take care never to relax, never to close your y’eye, for you might wake up with your nose hole-them filling up with the salt sea. Salt sea rushing into your lungs to drown you with her mother love.

Imagine what is like to be the son of that mother.

Now imagine what is like to be the sister of that son, to be sister to that there brother.

There was a time they called porridge “gruel.” A time when you lived in castle moats and fetched beautiful golden balls for beautiful golden girls. When the fetching was a game, and you knew yourself to be lord of the land and of the veins of water that ran through it, and you could graciously allow petty kings to build
their palaces on the land, in which to raise up their avid young daughters.

Ban … ban … ca-ca-Caliban …

When I was small, I hear that blasted name so plenty that I thought it was me own.

In her bathroom, you find a new toothbrush, still in its plastic package. She was thinking of you, then, of you staying overnight. You smile, mollified. You crack the plastic open, brush your teeth, looking around at the friendly messiness of her bathroom. Cotton, silk and polyester panties hanging on the shower curtain rod to dry, their crotches permanently honey-stained. Three different types of deodorant on the counter, two of them lidless, dried out. A small bottle of perfume oil, open, so that it weeps its sweetness into the air. A fine dusting of baby powder covers everything, its innocent odour making you sneeze. Someone
lives
here. Your own apartment—the one you found when you came on land—is as crisp and dull as a hotel room, a stop along the way. Everything is tidy there, except for the waste paper basket in your bedroom, which is crammed with empty pill bottles: marine algae capsules, iodine pills. You remind yourself that you need to buy more, to keep the cravings at bay.

Caliban have a sickness. Is a sickness any of you could get. In him it manifest as a weakness; a weakness for cream. He fancy himself a prince of Africa, a mannish Cleopatra, bathing in mother’s milk. Him believe say it would make him pretty. Him never had mirrors to look in, and with the mother we had, the surface
of the sea never calm enough that him could see him face in it. Him would never believe me say that him pretty already. Him fancy if cream would only touch him, if him could only submerge himself entirely in it, it would redeem him.

Me woulda try it too, you know, but me have that feature you find amongst so many brown-skin people; cream make me belly gripe.

Truth to tell, Brother have the same problem, but him would gladly suffer the stomach pangs and the belly-running for the chance to drink in cream, to bathe in cream, to have it dripping off him and running into him mouth. Such a different taste from the bitter salt sea milk of Sycorax.