Reconciliation: A Response To Theodore Beale

Trigger warning: appalling racism.

There are many kinds of anger.

There is anger at inanimate objects – sleeves getting caught on doorknobs, iPod headphones yanked from ears when the cord snagged unexpectedly. There is anger at circumstance – the ugly day full of mundane evils, the barked shin, the forgotten bill. There is anger at people – the friend who lies, the partner who cheats, the executive who cancels your favourite show. There is anger at power abused – the endless parade of politicians so corrupt that it makes you lose faith in society, the faceless voice from the bank that smugly ups your mortgage. There is anger at personal affront – the stranger who gropes you on the bus, the condescending boss who treats you like dirt.

And there is white-hot anger, so fierce you become the eye within the maelstrom of your own rage, calm as your pulse exceeds the beats of a marathon runner, calm as your fingers grasp and clench, calm as you grip your aggressor’s throat and squeeze.

This last I feel for Theodore Beale.

***

Recently, I blogged about sexism in the SFWA Bulletin. I wrote that piece as a self-declared comic rant, the tone inspired by anger at men who ultimately meant well, however offensive and outdated their efforts at showing it. I received a lot of support for having done so; but of course, there was a flipside. My anger, said some, was unseemly and unprofessional. My arguments were poorly reasoned. I was preaching to the choir. I was the gendered pejorative of choice. But the thing is, I can shrug that off. I deal out enough criticism that I expect to receive my share in return, and whatever form that pushback takes, it very rarely shocks me. By the standards of women on the internet, in fact, I’m pretty lucky. I’ve received a minimum of rape threats, I rarely get called a cunt, and if some of my detractors are uncivil, then I can usually dish it out in return. I was bullied, harassed, attacked and assaulted enough at school for being forthright, female and unfeminine that written threats just don’t chill me the way they used to. (They still chill me, of course. And I didn’t suffer nearly as much as others. Nonetheless, the comparison stands – and no, this isn’t an invitation to try harder.)

The point being, I have privilege, and that privilege protects me. I’m a middle-class, well-educated, straight white ciswoman with a functional, middle-class white family, and however much the misogyny gets to me at times, I can draw on that privilege – on that firmly entrenched sense of self-worth and the emotional, social and financial safety net which supports it – and fight back. I belong to the second most privileged group of people on the planet, and whatever abuse I still suffer regardless of that, I have the cultural status to counter it and be heard. As an individual, therefore, I’m hard to oppress. I have privilege. I have resilience. I have opinions.

And I have anger.

***

Don’t feed the trolls.

Don’t read the comments.

Don’t engage. You’ll only encourage them.

Don’t retaliate. It gives them publicity.

Just ignore them. They’ll go away.

Why bother? This argument never ends.

These comments enrage me as threats against my person don’t and can’t. These comments are apathy. They are exhaustion. They are a concession to the idea that some fights are too big to win, some problems too entrenched to fix, some evils too petty to countermand. I understand them, yes. Some days, I even feel them. But I do not believe them. However drained this interminable process of arguing for my rights and the rights of others leaves me feeling, I am yet to cede the ground. One day, perhaps, though I hope not.

But not yet.

***

Last week, author N. K. Jemisin delivered her Guest of Honour speech at Continuum in Melbourne. It’s a powerful, painful, brilliant piece about racism in SFF, and racism elsewhere; about the barbaric treatment suffered by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, my home, at the hands of white invaders, politicians, and most of the rest of the populace for the past two hundred-odd years. It’s also a call for Reconciliation within the SFF community: capital R, much like the Reconciliation our government has so belatedly and underwhelmingly – yet so significantly – attempted to make itself. She wrote in response to not only the recent strife within SFWA, but all the endless scandals of racefail and sexism and appropriation which have preceded it within reach of our collective memory; a memory she rightly names as short.

And as a result, Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day – a man whose man affronts to humanity, equality and just about every person on Earth who isn’t a straight white American cismale are so well documented as to defy the utility of cataloguing them here, when all you need do is Google him – has responded to Jemisin with a racist screed so vile and unconscionable that the only surprise is that even he, a man with no apparent shame, felt comfortable putting his name to it.

“Let me be perfectly clear,” he says (my emphasis):

“Jemisin has it wrong; it is not that I, and others, do not view her as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious reason that she is not.

She is lying about the laws in Texas and Florida too. The laws are not there to let whites “just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self defence laws have been put in place to let whites defend themselves by shooting people, like her, who are savages in attacking white people.

Jemisin’s disregard for the truth is no different than the average Chicago gangbanger’s disregard for the law…

Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support. Considering that it took my English and German ancestors more than one thousand years to become fully civilised  after their first contact with an advanced civilisation, it is illogical to imagine, let alone insist, that Africans have somehow managed to do so in less than half the time with even less direct contact. These things take time.

Being an educated, but ignorant savage, with no more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine, Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for “reconciliation” and even more diversity with SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into irrelevance…

Reconciliation is not possible between the realistic and the delusional.

I feel poisoned even typing that. Sickened. Trembling. I cannot even imagine how Jemisin feels. Nor am I attempting to speak for her. She is, without a doubt, one of the most brilliant women – one of the most brilliant people and writers, period – active in SFF today, and my voice in this matter is not a replacement for hers.

I am speaking because it would be a crime against conscience not to.

I am speaking because a world where men like Theodore Beale are left to speak unchallenged by the weariness of their opponents is not a world I want to live  in.

I am speaking because my privilege affords me a chance to be heard.

And I am speaking because of the bodily disgust, the rage and hatred and putrescence I feel for members of my own race, both now and throughout history, who speak of savages and lesser beings, of civilisation and the right to kill those outside or perceived to be incapable of it; who speak, as Beale does, as though people of colour are a genetically different, inferior species of human when compared to his Aryan ancestors.

This is my Reconciliation.

***

Theodore Beale is the bodily personification of everything that is wrong and rotten in SFF; everything that is hateful in society. He talks both of and to an accomplished, amazing, award-winning writer as though she were a child too ignorant and uncivilised to merit a response to her argument that makes no reference to her race; because, in fact, her race is the thing he really wants to rebuke. Too stupid. Too savage. Too black. Too African. His argument is repulsive, vile and violently racist on every possible level. He talks of laws that have legitimised the shooting of an escort who refused to engage in illegal prostitution with a client, laws that actively enforce one rule for whites and another for people of colour, as though the sexist and racist implications of both are not only morally justified, but intended by their creators – which, of course, they overwhelmingly are. It’s just that, more often than not, their proponents try to keep a lid on this fact, the better to fool the rest of us into thinking that racism no longer holds sway. (It does.)

If Theodore Beale isn’t cast out of the SFWA immediately, then that organisation is worth nothing.

If Black Gate continues to give Theodore Beale a platform, then that publication is worth nothing.

This isn’t just about Jemisin. It’s not even wholly about the fact that Beale has gone on record making excruciatingly racist comments; comments which are just the latest in a long and execrable history, and which he has publicly attached to the SFWA as an organisation by promoting them through its official Twitter feed.

It’s that Beale’s remarks aren’t just racist; they’re imperialist tracts straight out of the same 19th century playbook as phrenological proof of African inferiority and the White Man’s Burden, spiced up with the 20th century logic of the Ubermensch and bigotry couched as genetics. In a year when the fascist, neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party in Greece has literally been rounding up “undesireables” like sex workers, trans* individuals, immigrants and the homeless and putting them into camps, any aggression that draws its strength from the none-too-tacit endorsement of colonial racism and racial purity is not only horrifically bigoted, but actively dangerous.  This is racism pulled from the very root of what racism means, unfiltered by any pretence at equitable discourse. Theodore Beale has gone straight to the arguments originally made in support of black slavery, and he has found them good.

As members of the SFF community, there is only one acceptable response to Beale, and that is to shun him utterly; to excise him from our genre like the cancer that he is, from convention to blog to column, and to enforce that ban as thoroughly and determinedly as we are able.

Because if we don’t, our Reconciliation will mean nothing.

We will mean nothing.

 

Defining Epic Fantasy

There’s an interesting post by Matthew David Surridge over at Black Gate about defining epic fantasy, and an equally interesting response by author N.K. Jemisin. Being as how this is a subject near and dear to my heart, I can’t help but contribute some thoughts of my own. Surridge concludes his article with the following definition:

“An epic fantasy is a very long and fundamentally serious story set mostly or entirely in a fantastic secondary world, typically defined by the existence of magic and often fleshed out with maps, appendices, and other paratextual devices; it’s usually an encylopedic, stylistically direct, structurally uncomplicated story in which characters notable for their active agency combat a defined evil, often by forming an alliance, and generally are involved with a world-transformative event.”

It’s a comprehensive definition, and the article itself makes some very good points – and yet, I can’t quite bring myself to agree, because the more I think about it, the more it feels like a definition of one particular type of epic fantasy, and not the genre as a whole. To begin with, I’d like to consider Surridge’s suggestion that epic fantasy is fundamentally serious: that the world and story cannot be comedic. At first glance, this struck me as a reasonable requirement – until I remembered Redwall, a lengthy series of books created by the recently deceased Brian Jacques. Given that Surridge is willing to include William Horwood’s Duncton Wood in his epic canon – which, insofar as animal protagonists are concerned, falls within the same thematic territory as Redwall – Jacques’s work becomes a very interesting test case. For starters, and perhaps most importantly, it is indisputably aimed at young adults. One thing never discussed as part of Surridge’s definition was whether a series should be excluded on the basis of being YA, presumably because most people consider the answer, whatever they think it is, to go without saying, and perhaps also because, if we accept his requirement (I don’t) that epics be not only written in trilogies at a minimum, but trilogies with a combined minimum wordage of 250,000, then most YA books are automatically disqualified.

But Redwall, which runs to more than 20 stories set in the same world, is a definite contender. The vast majority of novels feature overlapping characters – that is to say, characters who appear in more than one book – and at least four whole volumes are dedicated to the lives of historical characters whose exploits underpin the mythology of all later adventures. Paratextual elements abound in the form of poetry, songs and maps. The crisis and conflict of each book is always a world-transformative event, the evil is always well-defined, quests are quested and alliances are most definitely made. And yet the series is also defined by its humour. The hares of Salamandastron, who count among the fiercest warriors in Jacques’s world, are innately comical creatures, affecting the mannerisms and speech patterns of the British aristocracy to such a degree that many of them, sans the fact of their species, wouldn’t be out of place in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. Though the lead villains are always dastardly, their vermin armies of rats, ferrets, stoats and foxes are equally as prone to slapstick and fearful blubbering as they are to ruthless brutality. Comedy is built in to the bones of Redwall, not only as a means of softening characters and concepts that might otherwise be too frightening for younger readers, but because Jacques actively chose to write stories that were equally as capable of eliciting laughter as they were tears.

Beyond the comedy question, and with an eye to further unpicking the Black Gate article, Maria V. Snyder’s excellent Poison Study series stands as strong contender for the notion of YA epic fantasy – as, quite arguably, do the works of Tamora Pierce. But rather than build my definition only in accordance with existing titles, I’ll stop here and consider the question in abstract. The one aspect of Surridge’s definition with which I wholeheartedly agreed was the requirement that epic stories be set either mainly or entirely in a secondary world, one which is frequently (but not necessarily) typified by the presence of magic. In fact, I would go so far as to make it the starting point for my own definition, minus his clarifying remark that most such worlds are similar to medieval Europe. But in order to do that, I must first ask a different question: what are the other fantasy genres, and how are they different from epic? Surridge makes passing mention of heroic fantasy and gritty fantasy, and high fantasy is certainly a known term, but all of these share the secondary world qualification, and having chosen that single factor as a building block, I’ve brought myself to a place where any novel can constitute epic fantasy, regardless of scope, focus or direction, provided it belongs to a secondary world.

This makes for a helpful starting point: nothing more. Because, as tempting as it might sometimes be to have done with the whole question of fantastic subgenres by autocratically declaring everything set in a magical, non-earth world to be epic fantasy, with any other label like heroic or gritty relegated to the nomenclature of individual taste, doing so would be both an oversimplification of epic (hah!) proportions and a gross unfairness to writers who want to find their own, distinct use for secondary worlds. Were I to stop now, for instance, Catherynne M. Valente’s breathtaking Palimpsest would end up categorised as epic fantasy, which it isn’t. And here we encounter the real crux of the matter: a dilemma I’m tempted to refer to as the shelving problem. As things stand, even specialty SFF bookshops will have very few sections, despite the large number of admissible genres. Fantasy, SF and Horror will be honoured with their very own shelves, as, increasingly, will Paranormal Romance – though since coming to the UK, I’ve seen more than one bookstore boasting a Dark Fantasy section, which seems to be a rough equivalent. But the thing about shelving books is that, regardless of content, you cannot put them in two places at once*. Obviously, this is a stricture that applies only in the physical world, and not to definitional debates. And yet, when we think about genre, there is a tendency to behave as if the former principle – the shelving problem – is still the most important consideration; as though, in shaping our notions of genre, we must establish our definition after the fashion of international borders, trying to control not only what goes in, but what can be taken out.

This is not an entirely illogical endeavour, as shown by the above flirtation with an exclusively secondary world definition of epic fantasy. Cast the net too wide, and you end up trying to argue that black is white just because homogeneity is easier to describe. But by the same token, the borders of genre cannot be rigid things. Enforce them too stringently in accordance with too specific a set of principles, and last week’s debate is the inevitable result. Because ultimately, the most common conventions of genre should not be mistaken for the genre itself. The fact that many epic fantasies run to multiple volumes and hundreds of thousands of words, for instance, does not mean that length must be a defining characteristic of epic fantasy. To steal from scientific parlance, that is an instance of confusing correlation with causation. Definitions should not hinge on establishing what is most common; rather, they should ask what is most indispensable.

And so – tentatively, as I am not a perfect, all-seeing, all-tapdancing omniscient – I would suggest that epic fantasy can be defined by the following conditions:

1. Any story which is set, either mostly or totally, in a secondary world; and

2. Which is concerned, either mostly or totally, with the politics and/or history of that world; and

3. Whose arc and resolution, either mostly or totally, involves the use of either magic or technology specific to that world; and

4. Whose characters, either mostly or totally, are instrumental in bringing about the conclusion.

Of all those points, the one I’m least confident in is 3. To my knowledge, I’ve never read a fantasy novel that lacked for magic of some description, or whose fantastic elements weren’t justified by some type of mythic, unobtanium-fueled or genius-dreamed technology. However, that is not to say that such a novel is a thematic impossibility, and if one was written that still met the criteria for 1, 2 and 4, I would be hard-pressed not to term it epic fantasy. For me, the question of whether magic is a necessary component of genre lies right on the borderland between a common characteristic and an indispensable characteristic. For now, I’m working with the assumption that it’s slightly more the latter than the former, but in the end, given that the act of creating a secondary world is automatically an engagement with the fantastic, regardless of whether that world functions exclusively according to the laws of Earth science, I could be persuaded otherwise.

So, that’s my two cents. What’s yours?

*Unless you’ve got multiple copies, but that’s not really the point.