Why Orient, Oriental and Orientalism are Offensive Words: A Bird’s Eye View of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’

Sunday 08th January, 2012

(As io9 have recently published an exert from Jessica Langer book Postcolonialism and Science Fiction, now seems like a good time to post this…)

So, the tl;dr version:

The ‘Orient’ is a construct of the European powers (mainly British and French) of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. ‘Orientals’ are people who live in the Orient. Characteristics were ascribed to the land and people, building up an impenetrable wall between European civilisation and Oriental barbarism. Those behind the Oriental wall had no way of representing themselves, and the Europeans who took it upon themselves to represent them projected their own prejudices onto them, seeing what they wanted to see and reporting back to an audience who implicitly trusted their scientific objectivity. The Orient thus became a place directly opposed to, and therefore lesser than, Europe: where Europe was civilised, the Orient was barbaric; where Europe was naturally predisposed to self-government, the Orient was naturally predisposed to tyranny; where Europe was scientific, the Orient was mystical.

Over time, this built up into a powerful narrative and was used as the justification for imperialism, invasion and repression of the Orient and Orientals. National, cultural and individual differences were erased and the same simple set of basic ‘barbarous, stupid and cruel’ attributes was applied to over a third of the world. These narratives of Orientalism are still incredibly powerful today, and still serve to shape Western attitudes and political policies towards the Orient. The Orient and the Orientals do not exist outside the Western construct, a construct consistently used over the last two hundred years to destroy the cultures and countries who live in the geographical region covered by it.

Do you use the word ‘nigger’? Then you shouldn’t use the word ‘Oriental’.

And I bet you thought there were over seventy countries there...

The long version is behind the cut.

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What I’ve Learned About Writing in 2011

Sunday 01st January, 2012

Around the end of last year, I made a post of what I’d learned about writing that year. So, I thought I’d do the same again this year.

First, the figures:

2011 saw 25 submissions of a total of 12 new stories. Only two of them have found homes, but both are in very reputable places and one of them will be earning me royalties (details to come shortly).

2010 saw 24 submissions and three acceptances (one of which fell through, unfortunately). But only nine new stories.

So, more new work of submission quality this year. I’ve also got some very positive feedback from editors over the last year.

Progress, I’m assured, is best when it’s slow and steady.

Now, my lessons:

1) Don’t use verbs ending in -ing
It’s a symptom of the passive voice, which is a Bad Thing as far as modern Western sensibilities are concerned.

2) Use active description
Describe the action, not the result of the action or the conclusion drawn by the character from the action.

3) Don’t use, ‘I/He/She felt–’. Describe the thoughts or actions which the character is experiencing.
So, rather than saying, ‘she was angry’, describe the thoughts in the character’s head and the way their body is reacting to those thoughts.

All of the above are about writing ‘active’ prose, instead of ‘passive’ prose. (The descriptions are unnecessarily judgemental, in my opinion, but they’re what we’ve got.) The aim of active prose is to take the reader out of the back seat of the story and put them not just in the front seat, but strapped to the front grill with their nose an inch from the tarmac. The distance between the reader and the action should be as short as possible.

That’s kind of a woolly way of putting it, but I’ve got to be honest–my grasp of grammatical theory is beyond poor, so I can’t relate it in technical language. However, he’s some examples so maybe you’ll see what I mean:

1) Passive prose: She was running.
Active prose: She ran.
2) Passive prose: She was running hard.
Active prose: Her heart beat like a mouse having a panic attack.
3) Passive prose: After just ten minutes, she felt tired.
Active prose: After just ten minutes, her limbs were numb and vision blurred, and each step was more of a stumble.

In each case, there’s more of a sense of direct engagement with the character in the active prose. It’s the actions themselves that are being described, not the results of the actions (she knows she’s running hard because of her heart rate and respiration; being tired is a result of the way her body is acting).

I know that my description above of active prose is probably wrong on many levels.  I’m still looking into and learning about it, but it’s a slow and uphill journey.

4) Put the question first
Your readers need a reason to read your story, a question or a conflict that interests them enough to keep them reading. And it’s not as easy as opening up with a murder scene, either–people need a reason to care about who’s been murdered and why. It’s the answer to this question that will make your readers want to finish the story.

However, this isn’t an opportunity to taunt the reader. The initial question needs to be carefully opened up like the bud of a flower–everything you put in the story needs to be there, in the first few paragraphs, in potentia. You shouldn’t pose your initial question, and then spend the first half of the story dumping new questions on the reader peppered with obscure hints it’s all going to make sense in the end.

Think of the question as a well-baited hook. World-building, character development, landscape description, cunning linguistic gymnastics… all these have to wait until you have the hook firmly lodged in the reader’s gut and they’re willing to let you drag them around the lake. If you start trying to drag them around before they’ve swallowed the hook, well, they’ll just swim away.

5) The editor is your friend
For someone like me, who is terrified of other people, an editor coming along and saying, ‘change this, this and this’ about my story can be an horrific thing. It can feel like someone saying, ‘this story is a part of you, and you’ve failed.’ But it’s not like that at all. Once an editor has invested the time and effort to send you changes, they’ve already passed you. They want the story to succeed, to be the best that it can be.

What I hadn’t realised until recently is that, when the editor invests the time and effort to send changes, the story ceases to be mine. I’ve said before that fiction is an extension of my cognitive space, and that’s why someone telling me to make changes felt like such a threat. However, by investing time in it the editor is making it part of their cognitive space, too. It’s no longer my property, but a shared property.

And that’s okay. In fact, it’s a good thing. It’s the height of hubris for any writer to claim absolute ownership of anything they write: an astute reader can find parts of TV programs we’ve watched; conversations we’ve had; books we’ve read; adverts we’ve glanced at and so much more flotsam and jetsam from the world around us in our fiction. Consciously or unconsciously, all we’re really doing is taking shiny bits of the world and arranging them in a pleasing pattern. Our fiction is already a shared cognitive space, an open playground the world and his wife have already helped themselves to.

Editors aren’t invaders. They’re friends, other human beings who want to help create something with you.

After all, editors taught me all of the above lessons.

6) Plot is not the same as stuff that happens
Plot is the thing pulling your reader through the story, it’s the answer to the question you hooked them with in the first couple of paragraphs, that gentle opening of the flower. Stuff that happens is like the plate you serve the plot on. If all you’ve got is empty plates… then you’ve got no meal.

For example, your main character goes to a seedy bar to talk to their shady contact about the antagonist. That’s just something that happens. The bar and the contact can be a window for the world-building you’ve done and without which the climax won’t make sense, but it’s still not plot. It only becomes plot when it relates back to that original question. What does your main character learn/discover/experience in the scene that helps to answer it? If the answer is ‘nothing’, then all you’ve got is an empty plate.

So, that was 2011 in fiction. I’ve currently got three stories in slush piles, awaiting responses. 2012? Let’s see what happens.

From The Mouths of Babes

Thursday 29th December, 2011

I saw this on Andrew O’Neills blog, and have unashamedly stolen it to post it on mine.

Transcript:

Riley: Would it be fair for all the girls to buy princess and all the boys to buy superheros?

Adult Male with Camera: Well, why?

Riley: ‘Cause girls want superheros, and the boys want superheros. And the boys don’t want pink stuff.

Adult Male with Camera: Boys want both, but why do you think they do that?

Riley: ‘Cause the colour is to try and trick the girls into buying the pink stuff instead of the stuff that boys want to buy, right?

Adult Male with Camera: But you can buy either, right? If the boys want to buy pink, they can buy pink, right?

Riley: Yes, but why do all the girls have to buy princesses? Some girls like superheros, some girls like princesses; some boys like superheros, some boys like princesses…

Adult Male with Camera: Absolutely

Riley: So then why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff, and all the boys have to buy different colour stuff?

Adult Male with Camera: That’s a good question Riley.

Humanity, is, Essentially Good

Thursday 15th December, 2011

For proof of my initial assertion, I want to turn to what, I think we can all agree, is one of the most morally lamentable periods in human history: the Holocaust. (Okay, ‘morally lamentable’ is the kind of understatement we English are famous for. The fact is there’s no word big enough to describe it so we’ve got to make do with what we’ve got.)

During the Nazi invasion of Russia, the SS started the wholesale slaughter of undesirables: Jews; Slavs; other ‘sub-humans’. This was really the start of their attempts at genocide. Undesirables had been held in concentration camps and used as slave labour before 1942, but there was no real concerted effort to eradicate them. The method of eradication first used was simple: the undesirables would be made to dig a ditch, then stand in front of it while SS officers shot them.

The program only lasted a few months. The SS officers quickly became traumatised by what they were doing and had to be given other duties. They simply couldn’t do it.

I want you to take a moment to remember that, when I talk about the SS or Nazis, I’m not talking about some diffuse caricature goose-stepping around in jackboots. I’m talking about individual human beings. People no different from you or me, from your parents or your friends.

The solution Nazi command came up with was very telling: they split the process of extermination into individual tasks, and gave every task to a different group of people. One group would take them to the ‘shower block’. Another group would put them into the room. Another group would drop in the Cyclone-B. No individual was responsible for the deaths. Every person involved in those deaths could say, ‘I was just an insignificant link in a long chain’. Even within each task, responsibility was spread out.

You see, those SS and Nazi troops–those individual human beings–couldn’t carry the moral responsibility of what their gut insisted was a fundamentally immoral act. Of course, the Holocaust still happened and many, many sickening acts were committed by individuals during the course of it. The reasons why and how it happened are very complicated and almost certainly a product of the unique circumstances of that period in history, evidenced by the fact that genocide is the exception rather than the rule in human history.

That gut feeling of morality comes from empathy. The problem is that humanity comes with a whole host of tools to over-ride that empathy. Some of the time, it’s necessary: if your five-year-old son punches your three-year-old daughter and steals her desert, then your son needs to be punished. Naturally, he’ll resist being punished and basic empathy will kick in, telling you, ‘your son is unhappy and hurt because of what you’re doing, so you need to stop it’. But you know in the long run that not punishing your son here and now will do him, your daughter and your entire family far more harm than good, so you force yourself to go through with it. Let’s use the umbrella term, ‘conviction’ for this ability to over-rule empathy, and so let’s see each decision as a tussle between conviction and empathy. (Unfortunately, anything beyond this childishly-simplified vision is beyond the scope of a lay-person writing a general-purpose blog entry. Needless to say, I’m sure you know from your own personal experience that empathy and conviction aren’t two separate and discrete entities who never talk to each other.)

Both empathy and conviction have serious flaws which lead both to exploitation. Both, for example, require knowledge, and knowledge is something easily withheld and manipulated by those whose empathy and conviction rest on different scales to yours.

Let’s take a modern, relevant example: the clothes you’re wearing. Did they come from a High Street retailer? If they didn’t, then imagine they did.

Now, does your empathy tell you that every human being deserves to live a life free from fear, poverty and disease? Of course it does.

Were your clothes made in a third or second world sweat shop which denied those fundamental human rights to the workers?

I’m betting you answered either, ‘maybe’, ‘probably’, or ‘I don’t know’. If you answered, ‘probably’, then why did you buy them? Most likely, I suspect, because you didn’t have the money to buy something you knew was more ethically produced. Your empathy for your family–who you see every day and want to keep warm and fed–was stronger than your empathy for some diffuse ‘worker’ in a foreign country you’ve never met and are never going to meet.

(And, of course, as an end consumer you’re just one link in a long chain and so not personally responsible…)

Lack of knowledge prevented you from developing a sufficient empathy with the worker to stop you buying the clothes. You don’t know your clothes were produced in a sweat shop. You don’t know the workers who produced them.

Conviction is based on the idea of the ‘greater good’, and is likewise dependent on knowledge. Let’s say I see a homeless man asking for change, and I want to help him. It would take a hard heart to turn him away, however conviction allows it. I’ve been told, for example, that he’ll probably spend the money on booze–not because he’s morally weak, but because he’s cold and desperate and I’d probably do the same in his situation. I know that I’m actually doing more harm than good by giving him my money, and if I really want to help him I should donate to a homeless shelter. So, my conviction allows me to turn away.

However, where did the knowledge that he’d probably spend the money on booze come from? It certainly didn’t come from the homeless guy. Maybe it came from a media outlet whose agenda says that the homeless are a self-created drain on society, and the greater good of society demands we don’t enable them. As they don’t ever have to meet the homeless people themselves, their empathy with them is kept sufficiently low that their conviction can win the fight.

Of course, we’ve got to give fear its due. Maybe the homeless guy will attack me. Maybe he’ll follow me home and threaten my family. Maybe he’ll want more from me than I’m able to give. Fear, as you can see, is rooted in empathy–a desire to keep yourself and the things you care about safe. Let’s cast it as empathy’s brother, a wild card that can take either side in the fight and as dependent on knowledge as the other two combatants. And there’s anger, of course, with roots sunk deep into fear, empathy and conviction… but I told you it was complicated.

But even conviction is based on the idea of doing, ‘the right thing’. (If your son doesn’t learn that using violence to steal is wrong, he most likely won’t grow up to be a happy and productive adult.) It differs from empathy in that it’s an intellectual construct, rather than an emotional one. Even when committing unabashedly evil acts, we still believe we’re doing the right thing. We still believe we’re good. Our definition of ‘good’ is just a long, long way from emapthy’s.

So, yeah:  humanity is essentially good.  Very few actions are taken out of pure malice or cruelty. It’s just possible for our conviction to be lead a long way from our empathy, and fear will often lend one side an unfair advantage. But, face-to-face, a human will almost always try to do the right thing by their fellow human, and in a highest possible stakes, winner-takes-all fight, no amount of conviction and fear will be able to defeat empathy–empathy has to be tricked.

Poem: God Destroys the Tower of Babel

Tuesday 13th December, 2011

God Destroys the Tower of Babel

They build.
I hear the myths they tell,
Paring down the world
Into a single story,
A single thought.

They build.
They have one language,
Pared down to five words.
Down to one person.

When they find me, they will hate me.
I am a many-fractured thing.
I made the universe from myself,
And the universe is infinite.
I am a trillion words.
A trillion more things that have no words.
They will measure me, and find me sadly wanting,
And they will hate me.

How am I to teach them?
How are they to learn?

I crack their five words into forty-thousand.
I scatter those words to every wind that blows,
Make them fragile things that shatter when spoken.

They cry:
“What am I?”
I hear the myths they tell,
Shattering words with every syllable:
Miners cracking rocks
And spilling answers like chippings.

Dear Parliament and Wake: I Give You a Nine Out of Ten for Effort and Intent, But…

Thursday 08th December, 2011

Parliament and Wake have written a long and pretty interesting piece on why they feel Steampunk still matters. Their thesis seems to be that in creating imaginary worlds that are better to our own, Steampunks can help to reshape the real world.

Steampunk and politics? You bet I have a rant coming up.

First of all, I don’t believe in ‘imaginary worlds’. Well, that’s a lie. Imaginary worlds don’t exist. I fell asleep thinking about this last night and the sheer impotent rage it generated inside me kept me awake for a long time. I’ve spent my whole life looking for imaginary worlds. Every single one of my thirty-one fucking years. And I can tell you, there’s no magical doors to Narnia. No one’s going to drop out the sky and whisk you away to a galaxy far, far away. There’s no computer hardware that allows you to step into your dream worlds.

There is only one world. There is only this world.

If you go to a Steampunk convention that’s held at sea-level, it doesn’t matter if you’re talking to Lord He-Haw and pirate captain Lady Dinglebat, acceleration due to gravity is still 9.98 metres per second squared. The speed of light in a vacuum is still 2.998 x10⁸ metres per second. If body A exerts a force on body B, body B will still exert an equal and opposite force on body A.

Novels, comics, dreams, roleplay and everything else takes place in the real world, and is part of the real world. Escapist fantasy doesn’t let you ‘escape’ into anywhere. You’re still here. Maybe you’re in a bit of ‘here’ that you ignore most of the time, but you’ve not gone anywhere. It’s like walking into the spare room of your house: it may not be a room you think about much, but you’re still in the same house.

The salient point is that imaginary worlds are built from the substance of the every day world, and can only be as good as the materials they’re built from.

Take this, for example:

If an escapist wishes to shout down Steampunk as apolitical but is willing to participate in a fantasy space in which European explorers interact on equal terms with women and indigenous peoples and in which pirates are ethically justified in robbing from exploitative industrialists – well, he can continue to believe that he isn’t endorsing a political movement, but for all the reasons we’ve discussed above, he’s still helping.

It entirely misses the point that those women, those indigenous peoples, those pirates and those exploitative industrialists are there solely for the escapist‘s benefit. Far from teaching the escapist important lessons about equality, it’s teaching him (it’s almost certainly a ‘him’) that other people exist for his benefit and amusement. This is reinforcing the message given to every privileged white Western man from the day of his birth to the day of his death.

And what if women want to play this escapist game? Well, so long as they wear corsets and are there for the sexual gratification of men, then fine, they can play. Or they can be mothers, of course. People of colour? Fulfil a ‘native’ stereotype and you’re in.

These escapist fantasies reinforce the systems of power and privilege present in our world and our society because, when you unthinkingly make your fantasies from the every day world, you unthinkingly reproduce every thing that’s good and bad in the every day world. And, what’s worse, this often-repeated veneer of equality makes people lap it up and be thankful for it. ‘Yay! I get to wear a rigid device that will alter the shape of my body to male-dictated standards of desirability at the cost of my health, my dignity, my independence and my life–but it’s okay because I get to carry a gun and say, ‘yaaarrrr! I’m finally free of male oppression!’

Pieces like Parliament and Wake’s are well-intentioned and welcome, but ultimately frustrating. They only scratch the surface and in doing so excuse–even validate–the crimes they’re arguing against.

P&W (hey, it’s 2011–none of us have the time inclination to type out long names any more) make the point that fiction such as 1984 can help us avoid undesirable futures. If they can, it’s only when the warnings they give are in line with the agendas of the current ruling elites–1984 warns us against a future controlled by totalitarian Socialists which, when it was published in 1949 at the start of the Cold War, was, I’m sure, a message very welcome by the corporate overlords of the day. And hey, the UK–Orwell’s country of birth–has about one CCTV camera for every 14 people in the country. I’m sure the Party would approve.

So, any fantasy built on rotten foundations is going to be rotten, and is going to make the rot further entrenched and even less visible. Imagining a different world is a way of avoiding the problems in this one.

The real power Steampunk has is to convince people go away and educate themselves. To educate themselves about how the systems of oppression were constructed and how they work in the real world.

Why Steampunk? Well, because so much of it is about the joy of exploration, of ‘the path untravelled’. When you start your Steampunk roleplay or novel or whatever, you have two choices: senseless ego-masturbation; or actually learning something. You can take what you think you know about the world and make it up from there, or you can go out there and find out what the world is actually like. Nothing worth a damn has ever been created by doing the former. Do you want your creation to be worth a damn?

The world as we’ve been taught it–society, history, race, gender, everything–is bullshit designed to ensure those with power keep it and those without power are gratefully subservient to those who do have it. History, progress, science, society, whatever you look at, it’s presented as a straight line ending up where we are now, a natural and inevitable transition. A slow and steady progress from barbarism to civilisation.

And that’s bullshit. When you start to look for those paths untravelled, time and again you find the reason why they weren’t travelled was because it would mean those with the power and money would have lost both. And when you find the means by which power was maintained, you find that the same things are being done by the same elites today.

In the nineteenth century, Britain invaded the Middle-East to civilise it, to bring an end to despotic rule and bring democracy. Sound familiar? The industrial revolution saw the profits of already-rich corporate owners put above the welfare and rights of their workers. Sound familiar? James Watt and Matthew Boulton used a technological innovation to achieve vast personal wealth, while systematically and successfully crushing any attempts by other individuals to innovate or create anything new based on Watt’s initial ideas, and in doing so arrested any technological progress for decades. Sound familiar? The Victorian period saw the explosion of advertising aimed at controlling the way women thought and felt about their own bodies… you get the idea.

So, Steampunk gives you two choices: you can swallow all that shit with an imaginary sugar coating; or you can take the chance to educate yourself, change yourself, and have half a chance to change the world.