la_marquise (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
la_marquise) wrote2012-04-30 12:01 pm
la_marquise) wrote2012-04-30 12:01 pm
Entry tags:
Euro-Fantastic
So, I'm seeing a lot of posts and items lately celebrating the appearance of fantasies that are not 'European'. Which is fair enough. Writers will and have written books inspired by all sorts of things and places, it's what writers do. It's important that books reflect a world that is wider than just Europe or 'the West'; that it reflects the experiences of all peoples, not just a privileged (pale-skinned, all too often) subset. It's important that we recognise and respect the experiences of others, although we must *not* pre-empt their right to speak for themselves, arrogate that right to ourselves, silence their voices, misrepresent or warp their experiences and cultures for our own self-seeking ends. It's important that we recognise that, even if we are related or descended from that people or culture or both, the culture and people are not identical to us, will have changed, will have different interpretations and usages that we should not 'correct' or represent as debased or damaged or wrong; and that in many ways their interpretations, experiences, and usages are the primary ones and their claims on their myths, stories, traditions, beliefs, history and culture take precedence over ours. (And yes, this applies to me as a person neither Welsh nor English. Being of mostly Welsh descent doesn't make me Welsh, and I don't own that culture.)
But here's the thing. I'm European. Most of the European fantasies I have read and loved and delighted in -- and the ones I've read and found dull, and the ones that I hated -- were not written by Europeans. And that's fine. I believe writers should explore and expand and think outside their place of origin, and examine the stories of their ancestors and so forth. I am deeply unhappy with a model that says that a writer can only write about their very own backyard (a position which, amongst other things, restricts writers like Meera Syal, say, to only writing about being British-Indian and the 'British-Indian Experience', which is, frankly, a form of ghettoising). Some of my favourite books were written by outsiders or descendants. But -- you knew there would be a big but in here, didn't you? -- there's a knot of annoyance somewhere inside me at all this jubilating over the new wave of non-Euro fantasy.
Because, you see, many -- most, indeed -- of those books do not read European to me. They are based on our cultures but they are not rooted in them. They represent us, but they do not, all, speak for us or even about us. Mel Gibson can never be William Wallace, not with that script and that set of beliefs and assumptions about who I am, who the Scots are, what our history is. (Braveheart is an easy target, because it's so historically fake and so marked with Gibson's own prejudices. But it's also a well-known one, so...)
This does not mean that these aren't good books -- some of them are. It does not mean that I think they shouldn't have been written. All it means is that they feel like outside narratives to me.
None of which matters, of course. It's easy to argue that Europe has had its day, that we are a bunch of ex-Imperialists still whinging because we lost our Empires. That we have been culturally significant for far too long and we should shut up and let others shine. There is probably a lot of merit in this view. We spent hundreds of years plundering and silencing others. That's an inescapable part of the histories of at least some of us. We are not, of course, a monolith, and there are many parts of Europe which did not have that experience of Empire, or had it in a distant past, or were on the conquered, not the conquering side. (For the interested, Ireland did, in fact, have its colonialist, dominant phase, in the period from the 2nd down to the mid-9th centuries. Scotland, culturally, is an Irish colony, whose indigenous practices and leaders were supplanted and overridden by an invasive culture which remains the major one to this day, although in a distinctive regional form.)
But part of me still watches the currently dominant culture metaphorically shaking the dust of my stories, my histories, off their feet and moving on to something fresh, while declaring my past, my myths worn-out and useless.
They're still useful to me, thank you, in my home context. I still see the footprints of that past outside my windows, travel in its traces, speak and think and explain through the lens of its stories and experiences. And I will deny to my last breath the changes that the outsider narratives have tried to impose, the re-readings that simply feel wrong. I will not relearn my past to include liberated 'Celtic' warrior princesses and tree-cuddling druids. They are not there, they did not exist, they are a fantasy and they belong in fantasy. And they are not my fantasy. When I see an outsider reading European books and complaining that those writers don't have a right to say what they said, or that they got the -- European -- stories wrong -- I see red. Because the outside narrative does not trump that of the inside. It is not 'more right'. It can't be. It can only be different, and much of the time it will remain outside. (This includes anyone telling me that their coven leader/spirit guide/avatar of the gods told them that Mists of Avalon, say, is 100% true and I have no right to question is, or am 'too English' possibly to be right. Without even getting into the large amount of French influence on the Arthur stories, and the ways in which the Welsh stories borrow from the latter, and the ways in which the early traces of the stories are nothing like the story everyone knows, the bottom line is that that book is not history and, as a Briton, I get to say that as loudly as I want. My country, my story. And, y'know, my academic specialty.)
I really, really love the Cardinal's Blades series of books by Pierre Pevel. Part of that is, of course, because Pevel is drawing on Alexandre Dumas, who, as we know, I adore. But an equally big part of it is that, when I read them, I heard the voice of the Europe I know. They are rooted in our experiences, our interpretations. There are no high school heroes (and I am so over high school football team hero d'Artagnans) or kick-ass Buffy clones. The series reads French, not French-flavoured.
I am, of course, not French and I am myself guilty of French-flavouring and I get it wrong and I try to do better. I am not in anyway innocent of going outside my own culture and being careless, though I do try not to do it on purpose. I'm not better than anyone else, and I'm a lot worse than most. As I said at the top, I don't believe in putting writers in boxes of their own culture and not letting them out. There are reasons why I write what I do -- there's the whole write-what-you-love thing, and I love Dumas and Balzac and Sagan and Moliere and Hugo. I read academic French history for pleasure and have done so since my late teens. And then, I am, by training, a historian of early mediaeaval Britain and Ireland. The histories of the English, Gaelic and Celtic speaking peoples in the British Isles are work, to me, and I don't like to mix work of that kind with fiction writing. And -- and this is the one I rarely say -- there isn't much space for me to write fiction in my own histories and myths any more. It's pretty full, mostly with outside voices, and the Big Audience has declared it dull, over, cliched. As I write, I'm trying to think of a British writer currently writing British-set, British-inspired fantasy and I'm not coming up with many names. Stories based in the myths of the British Celts written by British Celtic writers or even mixed up mongrel writers like me is even rarer. I'm coming up with Mike Shevdon, whose books are partly rooted in English folklore, and, umnmmm... someone help me out. It's getting hard, going into bookshops, to find fantasy by British writers altogether (though they are not as rare as British sf by British women published here). We are there, but we are writing other things, or we are only published overseas. But the last major sff series inspired (partly) by British Celtic materials by a British writer I can think of is Gwyneth Jones' Bold As Love sequence, which was finished in 2006 (and is, as I said, only partially and obliquely inspired by Celtic or English myths, though it is very rooted in our recent histories).
And so, and so... I suppose what I'm saying is this: fashions change, cultures rise and fall in terms of their influence and importance, and this is how the world seems to work. It's good for old Empires to decay and face their own evils. But to people inside a culture, that culture will not feel 'over', those myths and histories are still part of them. They still need them, even if it is only within their own small space. Those stories may not be what outsiders think they are, too. (Personally, I am baffled by the 'hanging on to Empire' thing, as that has never been part of my experience as a British woman. Worried by and distressed by and guilty over, yes. And there may well be politicians who long for that kind of power, and scions of some upper class families who want to behave as though they still had their grandfathers' privileges, but they are not part of my normal experience, nor are their narratives the dominant ones I hear in our media. The problems caused by that Empire, yes: those are everywhere and we continue to struggle with them and -- I hope -- try to do much better, now.) But the bulk of may experience of the myths of my country have come to me in foreign accents, since 1980 certainly, and in some cases as long as I can recall. And now those outside voices are bored, feel -- in my head -- that they have wrung us dry and are ready to move on -- and -- and here's the kicker -- in some cases are saying that they are the ones who can say it best, far better than the peoples whose histories, stories those are first.
And that latter is not on, frankly. Certainly, step outside your home box, but do so with respect, please, and don't claim to speak for or trump the native voices. And remember that what bores you is still a living culture to someone else. And they get to go on valuing it, and telling stories within it.
Skirt of the day: heavy black cotton.
But here's the thing. I'm European. Most of the European fantasies I have read and loved and delighted in -- and the ones I've read and found dull, and the ones that I hated -- were not written by Europeans. And that's fine. I believe writers should explore and expand and think outside their place of origin, and examine the stories of their ancestors and so forth. I am deeply unhappy with a model that says that a writer can only write about their very own backyard (a position which, amongst other things, restricts writers like Meera Syal, say, to only writing about being British-Indian and the 'British-Indian Experience', which is, frankly, a form of ghettoising). Some of my favourite books were written by outsiders or descendants. But -- you knew there would be a big but in here, didn't you? -- there's a knot of annoyance somewhere inside me at all this jubilating over the new wave of non-Euro fantasy.
Because, you see, many -- most, indeed -- of those books do not read European to me. They are based on our cultures but they are not rooted in them. They represent us, but they do not, all, speak for us or even about us. Mel Gibson can never be William Wallace, not with that script and that set of beliefs and assumptions about who I am, who the Scots are, what our history is. (Braveheart is an easy target, because it's so historically fake and so marked with Gibson's own prejudices. But it's also a well-known one, so...)
This does not mean that these aren't good books -- some of them are. It does not mean that I think they shouldn't have been written. All it means is that they feel like outside narratives to me.
None of which matters, of course. It's easy to argue that Europe has had its day, that we are a bunch of ex-Imperialists still whinging because we lost our Empires. That we have been culturally significant for far too long and we should shut up and let others shine. There is probably a lot of merit in this view. We spent hundreds of years plundering and silencing others. That's an inescapable part of the histories of at least some of us. We are not, of course, a monolith, and there are many parts of Europe which did not have that experience of Empire, or had it in a distant past, or were on the conquered, not the conquering side. (For the interested, Ireland did, in fact, have its colonialist, dominant phase, in the period from the 2nd down to the mid-9th centuries. Scotland, culturally, is an Irish colony, whose indigenous practices and leaders were supplanted and overridden by an invasive culture which remains the major one to this day, although in a distinctive regional form.)
But part of me still watches the currently dominant culture metaphorically shaking the dust of my stories, my histories, off their feet and moving on to something fresh, while declaring my past, my myths worn-out and useless.
They're still useful to me, thank you, in my home context. I still see the footprints of that past outside my windows, travel in its traces, speak and think and explain through the lens of its stories and experiences. And I will deny to my last breath the changes that the outsider narratives have tried to impose, the re-readings that simply feel wrong. I will not relearn my past to include liberated 'Celtic' warrior princesses and tree-cuddling druids. They are not there, they did not exist, they are a fantasy and they belong in fantasy. And they are not my fantasy. When I see an outsider reading European books and complaining that those writers don't have a right to say what they said, or that they got the -- European -- stories wrong -- I see red. Because the outside narrative does not trump that of the inside. It is not 'more right'. It can't be. It can only be different, and much of the time it will remain outside. (This includes anyone telling me that their coven leader/spirit guide/avatar of the gods told them that Mists of Avalon, say, is 100% true and I have no right to question is, or am 'too English' possibly to be right. Without even getting into the large amount of French influence on the Arthur stories, and the ways in which the Welsh stories borrow from the latter, and the ways in which the early traces of the stories are nothing like the story everyone knows, the bottom line is that that book is not history and, as a Briton, I get to say that as loudly as I want. My country, my story. And, y'know, my academic specialty.)
I really, really love the Cardinal's Blades series of books by Pierre Pevel. Part of that is, of course, because Pevel is drawing on Alexandre Dumas, who, as we know, I adore. But an equally big part of it is that, when I read them, I heard the voice of the Europe I know. They are rooted in our experiences, our interpretations. There are no high school heroes (and I am so over high school football team hero d'Artagnans) or kick-ass Buffy clones. The series reads French, not French-flavoured.
I am, of course, not French and I am myself guilty of French-flavouring and I get it wrong and I try to do better. I am not in anyway innocent of going outside my own culture and being careless, though I do try not to do it on purpose. I'm not better than anyone else, and I'm a lot worse than most. As I said at the top, I don't believe in putting writers in boxes of their own culture and not letting them out. There are reasons why I write what I do -- there's the whole write-what-you-love thing, and I love Dumas and Balzac and Sagan and Moliere and Hugo. I read academic French history for pleasure and have done so since my late teens. And then, I am, by training, a historian of early mediaeaval Britain and Ireland. The histories of the English, Gaelic and Celtic speaking peoples in the British Isles are work, to me, and I don't like to mix work of that kind with fiction writing. And -- and this is the one I rarely say -- there isn't much space for me to write fiction in my own histories and myths any more. It's pretty full, mostly with outside voices, and the Big Audience has declared it dull, over, cliched. As I write, I'm trying to think of a British writer currently writing British-set, British-inspired fantasy and I'm not coming up with many names. Stories based in the myths of the British Celts written by British Celtic writers or even mixed up mongrel writers like me is even rarer. I'm coming up with Mike Shevdon, whose books are partly rooted in English folklore, and, umnmmm... someone help me out. It's getting hard, going into bookshops, to find fantasy by British writers altogether (though they are not as rare as British sf by British women published here). We are there, but we are writing other things, or we are only published overseas. But the last major sff series inspired (partly) by British Celtic materials by a British writer I can think of is Gwyneth Jones' Bold As Love sequence, which was finished in 2006 (and is, as I said, only partially and obliquely inspired by Celtic or English myths, though it is very rooted in our recent histories).
And so, and so... I suppose what I'm saying is this: fashions change, cultures rise and fall in terms of their influence and importance, and this is how the world seems to work. It's good for old Empires to decay and face their own evils. But to people inside a culture, that culture will not feel 'over', those myths and histories are still part of them. They still need them, even if it is only within their own small space. Those stories may not be what outsiders think they are, too. (Personally, I am baffled by the 'hanging on to Empire' thing, as that has never been part of my experience as a British woman. Worried by and distressed by and guilty over, yes. And there may well be politicians who long for that kind of power, and scions of some upper class families who want to behave as though they still had their grandfathers' privileges, but they are not part of my normal experience, nor are their narratives the dominant ones I hear in our media. The problems caused by that Empire, yes: those are everywhere and we continue to struggle with them and -- I hope -- try to do much better, now.) But the bulk of may experience of the myths of my country have come to me in foreign accents, since 1980 certainly, and in some cases as long as I can recall. And now those outside voices are bored, feel -- in my head -- that they have wrung us dry and are ready to move on -- and -- and here's the kicker -- in some cases are saying that they are the ones who can say it best, far better than the peoples whose histories, stories those are first.
And that latter is not on, frankly. Certainly, step outside your home box, but do so with respect, please, and don't claim to speak for or trump the native voices. And remember that what bores you is still a living culture to someone else. And they get to go on valuing it, and telling stories within it.
Skirt of the day: heavy black cotton.
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I came to history with an anti-English bias (I'm from South Wales), but the more I learned about the consequences of the Conquest, first when studying law and then when studying archaeology, the more sympathy I felt for the English and the less regard I had for my own Norman ancestors.
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Love, C.
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I don't think freedom of expression and the right to a history are the same thing.
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As I said, there are many European fantasies written by non-Europeans that I love, that are well-written, that are great books, that feel strong and powerful. I have no problem with people writing outside their own culture. But, like
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I forgot to consider the case of wilful ignorance or malicious writing, and I'm certainly all too ready to correct them myself, so yes.
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I do tend to believe, though, that good writing can arise from any and every background.
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Wow.
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-->NOT TRUE.
If you want that statement to be true, you need to change "millennia" to "centuries."
Europe was pretty much a global backwater--yes, even under Rome--until they did one better than the Chinese with gunpowder. The reason so many of us think otherwise is precisely because many European nations spent the last 300 years trying to rewrite history.
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European =/ = UK/Germany/France/Etc. It's considerably larger than that, both Eastern and Western. So the phrase loses meaning without drilling-down context.
[I agree with Kari's points; I'm just clarifying who/what we're discussing]
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And labelling one groups as imperialist for all time is rather short-sighted, too, and suggests that there can be neither growth nor change.
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Is it Europe's fault that our myths, legends and outright fairy tales got more widely published than those of other countries? Schools in the UK used the well known ones, until they went all PC in the mid 70's and you got "reality" stories of children in high rise blocks of flats in school reading books. The kids I taught hated them, and when we finished out text books early, I raided the stock cupboard and got out the old readers with water color plate illustrations, full of folk tales about the boy going to market for butter and everyone he met telling him how best to carry it back home to prevent it melting. They loved those stories - they were fresh to them.
Ultimately it is down to the reader - the stories are out there, have been for a long time, you just have to have the desire to look beyond the known fiction.
And I'm a Scot living in the USA, not European - one of the reasons I left the UK to avoid being stamped with the EU symbol. I barely admit at times to being British.. but that's me, and yes, I can and will complain when someone takes one of our best loved myths and invents stuff just to sell their story. I vote on it by not reading it, or like the Wallace film and the Rob Roy one, not ever watching them.