Essay: Dark Ink

This is a piece I wrote in 1998, when my website was first being launched and I was first having a novel published:

A question I hear a lot is "Why don't people of colour write speculative fiction?" We do, but it's unlikely that you'll find it on the sf shelves in your bookstores. Novels such as Gloria Naylor's Mama Day or Devorah Major's An Open Weave end up on the shelves for black authors, not in the sf section.

Although magic realist writing contains fantastical elements, many do not think of it when they think of speculative fiction, and it's easier to find magic realism by authors of colour than it is to find "hard" science fiction or genre fantasy. For ideas on why that may be so, read Uppinder Mehan's essay "The Domestication of Technology in Indian Science Fiction Short Stories" in Foundation, Fall 1998.

Mehan's essay is specifically about science fiction by writers from India, but a lot of what he says is applicable generally to sf by authors of colour, or authors from non-Western cultures. For instance:

"A significant factor is the lack of cultural intimacy between reader and writer. The reader of sf from another culture has to thoroughly understand the culture of the story because he/she now has to understand not only the culture but also the sometimes subtle deformations introduced into the culture through extrapolation."

I run into that problem myself. My history and background combine Canadian, Trinidadian, Jamaican and Guyanese cultures. "Culture" is no one monolithic thing for me, and I draw on that varied heritage when I write. But if I introduce a "soucouyant" into a story, perhaps only readers from the Eastern Caribbean will know what that is. If instead I say "succubus," I'd lose some readers' comprehension and gain others'; and if I write "vampire," chances are that pretty much everyone would have some idea of the kind of creature I mean. Through the weight of books and films generated by the sf industry, vampires have a greater intercultural penetration than either soucouyants or succubi. (Yes, I am smiling as I write this.) But because I want to write about a soucouyant, which is neither a succubus nor a vampire, but has characteristics common to both, I have to spend time describing the being, its appearance, its habits, the mythology that spawned it. I risk boring a small segment of informed readers who are--hopefully--impatient to have me get on with the story. Or I can leave out the explanation and frustrate a larger group of readers who haven't a clue what I'm talking about.

If I make my soucouyant male, or an infant, only informed readers will know how that departs from the myth. They will understand that

I'm generating an extrapolation that is one more remove from the existing lore. But to everyone else, a baby soucouyant is just as remarkable as a grown one. They won't know that I've just made the impossible even more so.

It's a series of choices I have to make every time I write, weighing speculation against information. So I know what Mehan means when he speaks about Indian sf writers battling

"the difficulty of living with a double consciousness and, conversely, the impossibility of living without hybridity."

I'm haphazardly creating my own personal library of fantastical writing by authors of colour, particularly those of African descent.

Some months ago I went into a Canadian sf bookstore (no, it wasn't Bakka) looking for the novel Green Grass, Running Water by Canadian First Nations writer Thomas King. The woman behind the counter said that she had read the novel and it was wonderful, but did I understand what kind of bookstore I was in? Yes, I responded, biting back the urge I sometimes have to say, "I may not look like it, but I write the stuff. I do know what sf is."

Green Grass, Running Water is magic realism--admittedly not what is called "genre" speculative fiction, but fantastical writing nevertheless. The same bookstore that saw no reason to carry it was stocked with novels by Tim Powers, whose work is also magical realism. The difference is one of positioning. Tim's publishers aim his work at sf markets. King's publishers put his work out and leave it up to people who love fiction to find it. So I'm not blaming the bookstore for an informed judgement about what their customers might be likely to buy. Arguments about the merits of "literary" fiction over "genre" fiction wax bitter. They also collapse under examination, but I'm not going to enter in the fray here. (I do that on the site for Toronto's THIS magazine , where I have an essay in the Features section on the commodification of culture)

If I include non-genre fantastical writing in my collection, there are more works of speculative fiction by authors of colour than I have shelves to house them. Black artists in particular tend to go far outside the boundaries of mere text in creating science fictional worlds; black expressions of the future happen in visual arts, music, media, digital art, you name it.

(Check out The World Ebon, a website which (among other things) tells the story of the Black Church 10,000 years into the future, and a site maintained by Kenne Estes about black sf authors: Limited Color Palette)

Jeffrey A. Tucker, Ph.D, wrote his dissertation about the work of Samuel R. Delany. He has a short essay on line about the significance of Delany's work: Racial Realities and Amazing Alternatives: Studying the Works of Samuel R. Delany. I like Tucker's notion that Delany's work is a "postmodern intervention" into sf. Colonizing other places is a central myth of science fiction, one which has been explored with varying depths of criticality. I wonder if the field might not be ripe for a postcolonial approach to writing. At the close of Octavia Butler's novel Parable of the Talents, the black protagonist expresses her dismay that the first generation ship to go to the stars has been named the Christopher Columbus. For her, his name evokes the spectre of colonization as holocaust. Cultures which are still clambering free of that particular legacy of colonialism will likely have a different take on science fiction's central myth.

Speculative fiction has reinvented itself repeatedly at the hands of the new wave, feminist, cyberpunk and queer writers. Perhaps idealistically, I believe that it will also open up to fantastical expressions from communities of colour.