November 1st, 2008
by
Liz Henry
We interrupt this annotated reading of A Wrinkle in Time to bring you a few thoughts on Always Coming Home. Yes, I interrupted a 200 page book to read a giant cement block of a book, I know it’s crazy.
Always Coming Home is one of the books everyone assumes I’ve read. Nope. I hadn’t. So, to prepare for Potlatch 18 and come up with some programming ideas, I sat down to read its Books of Honor, Always Coming Home and Growing Up Weightless. (More about Growing Up Weightless, next week.)
Always Coming Home book cover
My initial reaction was that I had to struggle to suspend my initial reaction, which was something like, “Why not just go read Jerome Rothenberg, or go to some original sources? Isn’t this just more cultural appropriation, a ripoff of a few Pacific NW Native American cultures, set vaguely in a post apocalyptic future?” Also, while I like a nonlinear narrative and I like poetry and specifically Le Guin’s poetry (and translations) I felt like I was missing the point of the book. Despite that I read on, because I was curious, because it’s the Potlatch book of honor, because it’s Ursula Le Guin and therefore likely to be awesome (and capable of being way over my head), and last but not least, because so many people I respect like Cynthia1960, heyiya, and Laura Quilter have praised it so highly. It was disconcerting to have enormous doubts while reading a book I expected to love. “Do I even like this book?” I kept asking myself. I was not sure, even days later. I have settled now on liking it and wanting to talk about it.
There is a linear narrative, told by a woman named Stone Telling, of herself as a young girl, when she was named North Owl. On page 41 it is interrupted; there are extensive footnotes. If you want to read the linear narrative, you can follow the “Turn to page 173″ and continue on. Otherwise, there are chunks of poetry, a play, folktales, maps, histories, and all sorts of stuff.
But it’s not like reading the appendix of LOTR; it’s like reading Technicians of the Sacred or American Indian Myths and Legends or some book like that, that tries to present many different kinds of story, many literary forms of a primarily oral tradition, mixing them up and giving a variety of perspectives. If you have read anthroplogists’ writings from before 1900, or often, translations of stories into English from many other cultures oral histories or not, they are re-told Western European style as folktales or fables. I’m no expert here in anthropology but methods of trying to represent one culture to another definitely changed. Whether they succeed in being less colonialist or imperialist is debatable. But by being “difficult” , literature presented in an unfamiliar way can definitely kick your mind into a new frame of reference as you try to understand a new context.
So, as readers of science fiction, what if we approach stories of future people like we might a culture we aren’t a part of, whose context we don’t understand, who don’t speak or tell stories in our ways of narrating?
The practical advice I give you-the-reader is twofold. Either plow through like I did, trying to keep your mind very open, and let it cook a while before you judge the story. This requires patience. Or, that you are lucky enough to read extremely fast. If you don’t really have that kind of patience, or you can’t stand poetry, I totally respect that and recommend you skip around, read the linear narrative of Stone Telling, and dip into the other bits of stories and histories as you please.
That story of North Owl is a good one, about a girl, her town, her family background, and her desire to experience new things and to prove herself. In the fine tradition of Feminist & Utopian SF, she comes out of a somewhat free (though not perfect) existence and enters a horrible patriarchal dystopia, where she is oppressed, imprisoned, and enslaved. We should list off a whole bunch of those “descent into being controlled by patriarchy” and perhaps think of them as political descriptions of what happens when a relatively free girl child hits puberty and crashes into a wall. (And, often, returns or recovers or escapes.) If that is your experience surely you know what I’m talking about! So, North Owl visits the horrible Warlike patriarchy who view women as property and have a patrilineal aristocracy. I won’t spoil the rest of it.
Anyway, I’m still thinking about Always Coming Home and letting it wash over me.
I raised the idea of cultural appropriation and of the Kesh people of the Valley as “other” meant to kick “us” (who??) into an unfamiliar frame of reference. But, we don’t need to assume that “us”. The book presents a future heavily influenced by western Native American cultures, which did not necessarily “evolve” straight from native american sources but which may have been adopted by whoever happened to survived the the Fall of Civilization. That is completely unclear. So there is an implied cultural appropriation in the very setting of this future history. It’s not rewriting a past where native americans remained predominant, more powerful, or in control of the area. And I don’t think it posits a survival of specific people or races; more like whoever avoids the fatal mutations. The presentation of a new culture with roots in older ones looks quite interesting, and makes me think about the role of written records, histories, computers, etc. Another thing left quite unclear on purpose is who is telling or receiving the story; it is not “for” the people it is about. None of this is, well I’m not saying it’s not problematic. But I don’t find it to be the ripoff I halfway (and guiltly… I mean… Le Guin!!) feared. It succeeded for me in making the immersive experience of the book very complicated. What does, or would, or could, the future of culture in this place look like? Making it be in this place, on this world, identifiably in future California, instead of in space on some other planet, with some other “race” of humans or aliens? I still feel uncomfortable and uncertain about what it’s doing, how people read anthroplogical works, or the literature of other cultures; the way white people in the U.S. fetishize native american cultures, etc. What do you think? Does it succeed, does it offend you? I’d like to open that book & talk about cultural appropriation issues.
I enjoyed the book and continue to enjoy thinking about it especially in the context of utopian & feminist SF. I’d like to talk more about war & utopia, and what are the conflicts in a utopia. Also, what makes the Kesh culture seem utopian at all? I think the key is war and violence, consent and autonomy. In the war scenes, it is made very clear that particular people on both sides of the conflict between the valley people and the others is a personal choice — not always made for the best of reasons but all the warriors decide to become warriors and to go risk death & to kill others. Then… they stop. Fabulous, much better than the total lack of war and killing in some utopian fiction (Herland, I’m looking at YOU.) I liked the discussion of the aftermath of the war in the Valley, very much.
The larger war with the Condors, I’m still thinking about, and it’s a bit hard to discuss without spoilers.
I also liked the plays very much.
I like the ways that the poetry feels like imprecise, struggling translations (I’m a translator of poetry, so notice that stuff.)
*** Belatedly — here is a link to the Wikipedia entry on Always Coming Home. (More links tomorrow.)
I’m going to try to post (much more briefly than this) every day this month, as part of National Blog Post Month. Most nights it will not be more than ‘Here’s a neat book that’s on my shelf, and a pointer to a real review, and what I remember of my impressions of it”.
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- More blogging by
Liz Henry at
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Filed under Books & Literature, Utopia/Dystopia | Comments (31)
I first read Always Coming Home looking for the linear narrative: it was on my second read that I started to look at the other sections. My first picture of it was that it was “North Owl’s story”.
I find it very disconcerting when people pick out some cultures and say “writing fiction in those is cultural appropriation”. Should white people then only write stories about other white people?
On the other hand, given who LeGuin’s father was, there is something very disconcerting in reading this book, being aware of her own family history – is this redemption? Daughterly commentary on her father’s – and her mother’s – activities? I wouldn’t expect LeGuin to explain it, but I would hope to live long enough to read a good biographical analysis of it. (The kind of analysis I am thinking of is typically written – may the day be long in coming – only after the author’s death.)
Another thing left quite unclear on purpose is who is telling or receiving the story; it is not “for” the people it is about.
Actually, I found that part quite clear, if a little whimsical. LeGuin is telling the story: we are receiving it: it is an anthropological text from reverse-time, the “present” discovering the culture and the artifacts of the “future”.
I read it a long time ago, when I was reading retro anthropology and a lot of utopian bioregionalist propaganda, and I took it as her fictional expression of both. Essentially it was her answer to the question: what would it mean if the people of Northern California readapted to their place? I think you’re right that it assumes no cultural continuity with Native America, but rather the speculative idea that any sustainable relationship with a specific place would naturally lead to some common geographically appropriate cultural characteristics.
I also took it as a tribute to her parents and to Ishi, who died long before LeGuin was born but who must have been a palpable presence in her home. Their remarkable, if commonly romanticized, story is felt throughout the book. (Although sometimes I think of Ishi’s survival as more like a holocaust tale than a quest tale.) If your readers don’t know Ishi, the Wikipedia article isn’t a bad place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi
It took me 2 or 3 tries to like Always Coming Home. It’s not an easy book.
The conflict you have with the concern regarding cultural appropriation is certainly valid. But the Kesh, I think, do have some attitudes that possibly weren’t shared by any Native American culture; and then there is the whole joy of Le Guin’s writing itself–I take comfort that in this world, most folks of adult age are comfortably round….
I am really glad you brought this up!
I first read ACH when I was 13. In one of the more joyously serendipitous literary moments of my life, I found it in a cupboard in a chalet my mum and a friend had borrowed from the friend’s boss for a couple of weeks’ holiday by the sea in rainy Argyllshire in Scotland. I started with Stone Telling and moved through the rest, and I lived inside the book for all of that holiday and to some degree ever since. It shaped my feeling for land, my sense of myself, the desire that I later managed to realise to go to California. The only book that has influenced me more, probably, is Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
So I approached the book as a completely clean slate and a foreigner to book. I knew, for example, absolutely nothing about Native American history in California. Coyote, earth and sky, people as all living beings, all the rest of it, I thought Le Guin had made that up. And I’ve never quite known how to feel when I’ve learned that these things were not original. Especially as I’ve started to learn about Native American history and the power dynamics of colonialism and cultural appropriation, the ways that western anthropology has taken knowledge that wasn’t meant for outsiders and sold it on. I can never figure out quite to what extent Le Guin is conscious of her own position in that, to what extent she wants to think through continuities and commonalities about connections to land and to what extent she is appropriating. In a larger question, whether this is a kind of appropriation that is respectful enough, nonfetishizing enough, and self-critical/decentering of colonial whiteness enough for its face value to be acceptable.
I honestly don’t know. I wish I could go to Potlatch and/or find a group of people with a critical consciousness of race, people who’ve read books like Andrea Smith’s Conquest, and talk it through in depth. Not that I think there is a final answer to be had or because I want to write the book off; I could never do that. But I don’t want to give Le Guin a pass on serious critique just because her writing has been so important to me.
I forgot something–which is that I think the Pandora sections are Le Guin’s somewhat sidelong analysis of the politics of her writing this future from that present. She doesn’t talk specifically about appropriation or similarity to a past, but I think that in her/Pandora’s relationship of incommensurability with the Kesh we can see some acknowledgement of Le Guin’s racialized relationship to the colonized/anrthopologized other… Maybe.
heyiya: I knew, for example, absolutely nothing about Native American history in California. Coyote, earth and sky, people as all living beings, all the rest of it, I thought Le Guin had made that up. And I’ve never quite known how to feel when I’ve learned that these things were not original.
The first of Shakespeare’s plays I went to see (and the first one I ever read by myself) was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I vaguely knew that Theseus was not original to Shakespeare (I wasn’t 10 yet, but I was fascinated by Greek legend/mythology). I had no notion, however, that Shakespeare had not simply invented Puck/Robin Goodfellow: the next (few) times I encountered references to Robin Goodfellow in fiction, I attributed that to the power of Shakespeare’s writing.
I doubt if William Shakespeare believed in Robin Goodfellow, or Oberon, or any of the fairies/fairy superstitions referenced in Dream. But people living then certainly did believe in them – at least as much as they believed in witches. Shakespeare took their beliefs and stories and made use of them. Was this cultural appropriation? Certainly. It wasn’t his culture – he was an educated, middle-class man, who had lived in cities all his life: he took it because it made a good story.
Honestly, I see the specific difficulty, given LeGuin’s family history, of taking the culture of the original Californians and making it into the culture of the Kesh.
As a general principle, however, the idea that writers ought not to mine other people’s cultures for fiction is one I oppose.
I don’t think we ought not to do it; I think we get to talk about the politics of it!
I’m fine with talking about the politics of it.
I’m not fine with the instant reaction that it’s a bad thing for people to write fiction using cultures that are not their own, which is what I get, frankly, from the use of “cultural appropriation” to describe a work of fiction.
I love the plays. I love the effort to tell a romance story about a nuclear family in a non-patriarchal culture – how does point of view work, what is narrative structure like, what is the idea of causality (or is there one?) in a Job-like story of a culture with no vengeful God to persecute Job?
Always Coming Home is really one of the most hopeful post-Apocalyptic novels out there, and the idea that multiple modes of being could coexist – the Condors & Stone Telling’s people do coexist most of the time, and there are also the Machine people and other people that Stone Telling’s people trade with.
I think one of the things that marks a book as feminist is a concern with the details of daily life – no magical handwaving over clothing, cooking, and settling disputes among people who live together, because that’s “women’s work” and it will get done while the narrator considers the fate of the galaxy. Le Guin is so good at considering things like: When a parent of young children divorces, what happens? What are people not talking about when they talk about using common resources? How do young people become adults if the markers are not military service, marriage, capitalist achievement, or parenthood?
I first read Always Coming Home when I was fourteen or fifteen. I loved it, but I think I loved it because it didn’t occur to me to approach it as a — novel, or even a piece of fiction, really. I read it as if it was a roleplaying game supplement book (which I was also devouring at that particular point in my life), and in that context the details of everyday life presented without narrative (what they wore in the Valley, what they ate in the Valley, what the Houses were and what each one was in charge of), combined with bits of poetry and story, made sense in a way that they wouldn’t have if I’d tried to read it as, well, as a normal book. I read it to pieces, but in the same way I read to pieces the Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern or a D&D book about the culture of wood elves.
It wasn’t until years later, when I reread it in college, that I saw how it could be seen as all of a piece, a book.
I wrote a paper on ACH for an anthropology course I took in 1987. Have no recollection what I said, but I treated the book as a collection of ethnographic materials. The first time I read it, I started on p. 1 and kept going. I’ve reread it at least once more like that, but otherwise I tend to pick and choose, most often Stone Telling’s sections. I also like the origin tales and generally the idea of a culture that has access to technology and internet-like networking but does not obsess over it. It was an exploration of sustainability before “sustainability” became a buzz word.
I’m particularly fond of the language, especially the glossary; heyiya was one of my user names in the 1990s (hi heyiya!), and my wireless network is named wakwa. The only thing I’ve ever bid on in a Tiptree auction was a Freddie Baer t-shirt on which UKL had written in Kesh (I didn’t get it).
Le Guin and cultural appropriation: hm. She does draw on many different cultures for material in her books, but rarely gets to a level of specificity that seems exploitative to me. If she had taken individual real life cultures as models for her Valley tribes, Always Coming Home would be problematic to me, but I see no evidence that that is true. Everything’s a mish-mash of multiple influences, some from various Native American tribes, some not (Taoism and Greek myth being two important examples).
I have a bit more trouble with some of her other novels, including The Telling (because it is so clearly about China and the Cultural Revolution) and The Word for World Is Forest (a transparent Viet Nam war commentary). These are some of her more simplistic works, I think because her focus was so clear in her mind. Always Coming Home is definitely not like that.
By the way, there is some interesting commentary on the book in the online essay “Native Shading in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin“. The old Feminist SF book discussion group had some good back and forth on it, too. The archive of that conversation (including posts by yours truly) is here.
Hooray – therem, thanks for the links!
I’m with Therem in terms of the appropriation issue. The fact that it’s not a direct lift is important–though the major issue of whether white authors should appropriate at all is something I’ve never been able to sort out my feelings about. (Where does one draw the line?)
This was a good analysis, and it inspired me to reread, as I haven’t read it in about three and a half years. I personally see it predominantly as an experiment by LeGuin into academic world-building and how readers can construct a narrative themselves. I think it’s a successful one in the long term.
And also, perhaps a love story to the Pacific coast.
*long time reader-long time lurker* thanks for posting on this book!
I read this book about 5 years ago and really loved it. It has stuck in my mind ever since and I often find myself thinking about the world created in the story. The heroine mets a man she adores – a man who is wrong for her – and is in control of both getting into the situation and getting herself out of it. I have even often thought – while walking with my own little daughter – how very long it must have taken Stone Telling to get home.
I am not from America and didn’t twig to any specific American Indian references. The villages seemed to me more like the sort of place I wanted to live during my ‘hippy’ phase (before more children and a mortgage). The value of hand crafted items and those who create them, the gentle steady passage of days etc – I am not sure if these are specific to any pre-industrial society. Also I haven’t read enough about Le Guin’s own life to read any of the other subtexts in the story.
I thought it was interesting and charming – and you have inspired me to re-read it.
OTT – thanks for an interesting blog and the great recommendations for books to track down and read
Wow, two posts in a row about which I have quite a lot of opinions! This is great!
Although I don’t know that my opinions about Always Coming Home are very well organized. It’s probably my favorite Ursula Le Guin book while also being the one about which I have the most doubts.
White people writing about people of color and cultures-of-people-of-color: I don’t know how to feel. Who is the audience? De facto (and more so when Le Guin was writing this book) science fiction fandom in the US is substantially white. So the book (I think) works in the world as something mostly “for” white people, even if that’s not authorial intent.
Personally, I believe that authors are responsible for thinking about that stuff (I believe this more since I’ve started to write a bit myself.) Some books are exploitative, work harm in the world, etc, and an author on the left has to write with awareness of that. So I’m uneasy with the way the book doesn’t talk about where Coyote comes from and all that. There’s such a long history of white people remixing native and POC culture and not crediting it…and as far as I know from conversations with POC, that ends up feeling like a huge slap in the face, even if it’s not meant to.
It troubles me persistently that the book doesn’t explain (and it could; it’s a bizarre and rambly book) how things came back to Coyote rather than to something completely new and random.
…On another topic, I once read a criticism of the book that I disagree with completely–someone argued that the book depicts native cultures as “eternal” and “timeless”, orientalizing them. But what’s good in the book is the non-timelessness. No one lives, really, outside of change and time. No one lives outside of history. The people of the valley live outside of our kind of History: battles and Progress and “development” and growth-for-the-sake-of-growth; that’s why Le Guin capitalizes the word.
But the Valley is full of events and change over time. Structurally, the “native” culture of the valley commingles a lot of things you wouldn’t see in your classically orientalist utopia: people publish novels, there’s electricity, people use computers; there are cities….There’s no purity; we’re not returning to a mythic golden age; history has been at work. And then all the little stories (which I love)–the story of the disagreement with the cotton people, the story about Jade and what’s-her-name where there’s speculation and evidence that this is a true story handed down; the stories about the various houses. This isn’t the classic appropriationist move of describing an un-self-aware utopia where people have “returned” to some kind of “primal” state.
Self-awareness, that’s another key–the people of the valley are very self-aware. They think about how things work all the time; they think about history all the time. (There’s that key moment where Stone Telling speculates about how the Condor people had been nomadic and a sort of misfortune of history had moved them into a harmful stasis). The classic exploitative utopia postulates a kind of (feminized?) innocence, naivete–the perfect “primitive” society is perfect precisely because its members don’t analyze it, don’t have a sense of history. There’s this bad idea that if “we” could only get back to “nature” we would find a natural balance and we’d never have to think again.
You might even argue that the Valley is a critique of certain kinds of bad left thinking, certain ways of being stupid about back-to-the-land. People in the Valley don’t achieve a “natural” stasis or balance; they work hard at maintaining a decent way of life.
Frowner, are you seriously arguing that LeGuin ought to stick to writing exclusively about cultures that could be derived from white European/white American culture – that white writers ought to ignore all the non-European cultures around the world?
There is enough of a tendency in white American/European writers already to assume that the culture of North America/Europe is the whole world. The notion that this is right, good, just, proper – that white writers do well just to stick to that – I’m finding that not just annoying, but now completely inexplicable.
Most of the people in the world are not white. Most of the world’s cultures are not the creation of white peoples. The dominant culture in the world is that of the US/the colonising countries of Europe. It is terribly, unthinkingly easy for US writers in particular to write as if the US was the whole world. To actively recommend that they do so, to suggest that any attempt they make to write about people who are not white is wrong… that’s radio KFCKed.
Hi Yonmei. When I said that I didn’t know how to feel, I meant exactly that. Alison Bechdel has written about drawing women of color as a white cartoonist–tricky, rewarding, better to do so than not; I wish JK Rowling had written a major character of color in Harry Potter; I’m on the fence.
I’m really troubled by Always Coming Home, in no small part because I have had several conversations with SF fans of color who’ve said they felt it was orientalizing. My point isn’t that any particular SF fan of color has the last word on any book about POC, or that only POC can speak meaningfully about race, but I do weight that kind of conversation pretty heavily, especially when I’ve had zero conversations with fans of color where they said, “No, hey, Always Coming Home is teh awesome!”.
This is something I think about a lot (I’m running a class right now about left-wing science fiction–strictly an amateur class; I’m not an academic). It occurs to me today that maybe the most useful way to think about this book is precisely not to derive any universal principle from it but to try to think about how this particular book works in the world.
(There’s certainly a place for big generalizations about SF, of course.)
The way I see Always Coming Home–it’s a book that imagines a future based on really-existing North American native cultures but that doesn’t explain that fact. It’s a book that idealizes native traditions rather than situating them in history. It’s a book that can be read as arguing that if we all lived in this de-historicized “native” manner, everything would be stable and unchanging and “natural”. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Edward Said’s book Orientalism…
(if you are, forgive me) It talks about how the Middle East is denigrated by the west by being described as timeless and eternal, how there’s a great deal of emphasis on the “essence” of Middle Eastern culture, which never changes and which determines all aspects of daily life in the Middle East. It’s an otherizing strategy–in the matter of the Middle East one that’s used to justify imperialism.
Anyway, I feel like there’s kind of an orientalism-of-praise at work in Always Coming Home–the people of the valley have (somehow; we don’t see how) returned to a native way of being that is timeless, eternal, “best”. Saying that someone’s way of life is (unlike every other human society’s) timeless, eternal, pure, “natural”–that’s noble-savagizing, if you ask me.
And again, I’m really troubled by the idea of a white SF writer writing a book that remixes native cultural stuff for a white audience. There’s a pretty long tradition of white people doing that, white people doing imitation “native” art…I live right next door to Little Earth, a big native community in Minneapolis, and I’ve seen first hand how bitter relations can be between native people and white people, and it has a lot to with the perception that somehow native people and native culture are some kind of show or resource or exotic-other-to-visit. (I mean, the stolen land and perpetual economic injustice have a lot to do with it too!)
Always Coming Home mystifies…that’s the word I’m looking for…it mystifies native cultures. They’re just a big pot of interesting stuff from which Le Guin can draw to make an amorphously utopian future. I wish I didn’t feel like this was the case, because I really like the Valley; if I could go and live in a utopia, that would be the one I’d pick.
More generally, about white writers writing characters of color: what I believe is that it’s important to be actively anti-racist, and that writing characters of color in a stupid way, or in a way that reinforces stereotypes, isn’t anti-racist. For example, it really annoys me in Harry Potter that the characters of color don’t (and I admit to having skipped the last half of the last book) change or develop or play any important role, that Kingsley and Lee are just brought on every so often to do something Good and Responsible so that We All Know That People Of Color Are Good And Responsible and that Rowling Includes People of Color. I wouldn’t be happier with the book if all the characters were white; I’d be marginally less happy. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend that I think Kingsley Shacklebolt is some kind of blow for anti-racism.
Yes, my expectations keep rising–I expect that authors will include people of color, and after they include people of color I expect that they’ll try to write real, meaningful characters of color who face actual moral choices. I expect that authors I value will think about race and writing, will think about what fans of color have to say, will think about hurtful ways that race has been written in the past. I expect that a left-wing white SF author writing in the eighties will have a take on race more sophisticated than a left wing white SF author writing in the twenties. I also expect that left-wing authors will consider their political goals and how their writing about race forwards (or slows) those goals.
So, also yes, I think that a book that creates a gummy mixture of native tropes without explaining anything about where those beliefs come from or why they’re now a gummy mixture…a book that does this while also obviously having an anti-racist left agenda….Well, perhaps it’s best to say that I think this book has some serious internal contradictions.
And yeah, I think there are some white authors who write about people of color badly, stupidly and harmfully. Gene Wolfe’s “Seven American Nights”! Bruce Sterling’s “We See Things Differently”! (Those crazy jihadis killing teh American rock and roll star!) I’m troubled by Always Coming Home because I like it and think there’s a lot of good stuff in it; I absolutely can’t stand “We See Things Differently”.
I don’t know–there’s a difference between saying “white authors can’t write about people of color” and “if I think a book is stupid about race I’m going to say so; and I think white authors ought to think very hard about how they write people of color”.
I suppose this comment has gone on long enough….
…And furthermore…The thing is, I distrust books I like, especially books by white/straight/middle class people. Far too often, I’ve read more or thought more or had conversations with people and figured out that the book I liked had some large, obvious problem to which I was totally blind, often because of white- or middle class-privilege. (Bridge of Birds; Tanith Lee’s Flat Earth books; Orson Scott Card’s…well, pretty much everything by Orson Scott Card).
I worry a lot about being strongly influenced the wrong way…reading some kind of book that makes a big change in how I see the world and having that change rest on something problematic. (And honestly, both The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home are big political influences for me; I can pretty much recite from Always Coming Home). I don’t want to think “gee, this way of life is just great!” and have that be because I don’t perceive something major/exploitative/dehistoricizing in it.
A book like, oh, I don’t know, some random book by Gene Wolfe…well, I don’t care very much about that book’s philosophy because conservative neo-Catholicism and deeply problematic ideas about the “nature” of women aren’t my thing; I’m just not intellectually tempted by them. I don’t care much about Slave Dancers of Gor either, because when I’m doing political work I’m absolutely not going to be influenced by the…er…ideas expressed there. I care a lot about the ideas in Always Coming Home because those ideas attract me.
If that makes any sense…
Frowner, thanks for your comment.
Thank you also for responding to my rather grouchy comment at such length – I think I mostly agree with you. I’m not sure I can pin down any specific area of disagreement.
I don’t know–there’s a difference between saying “white authors can’t write about people of color” and “if I think a book is stupid about race I’m going to say so; and I think white authors ought to think very hard about how they write people of color”.
Yes. This I do very much agree with, especially the latter. Equally one can expand that to: when writing people who have had experiences that I have not had. (I wrote a 130 000 word novel mostly from the POV of a deaf Catholic priest: I am not deaf, I am an atheist, I never was Catholic, I am not a man…)
Thinking about it, I think the problem comes from assuming that you know what a person’s experiences are/ought to be – and that racism/white privilege is awfully apt to make a white writer think they know all about what a character of colour is going to be like. Or else (which is where I have often heard the argument) that a white writer can’t possibly know what it would be like not to be white, and so shouldn’t write non-white characters – or, as I think J. K. Rowling did, hold non-white characters at arms-length.
I guess my pride as a writer gets touched if I’m told “You can’t write that” – (because you’re a girl, you’re white, you’re British, you’re a lesbian, you’re … etc) I don’t care about being told “You wrote that badly/stupidly” (well, I do, but I care more about being a better writer): but you can’t brings out the angry arrogant “I bloody well can” writer in me. Which is what my problem was in this thread…
OT, but – Frowner, I live 10 blocks south of Little Earth & I would be totally psyched about a leftist SF class – is it a physical group, is it open to newcomers?
I smell a WisCon panel. :)
Oh, hey, Yonmei….I think my initial comment could read as judge-y rather than as full of self-doubt, and it wasn’t really clear. Plus, I’m always glad to respond at length to virtually anything (Others: “Do you need to do laundry?” “Where’s the printer cartridge?” Frowner: “Blah blah blah blah blah…”)
I think writers have to figure out for themselves what they can and can’t write, and I think they/we need to bring humility and modesty to that. It’s something I’m struggling with in the thing I’m writing–one of the narrators is a biracial punk girl (why? well, I wanted to write a main character of color because SF novels need to, the character needed to be connected to anarchism but have a critical relationship to the anarchist community and one of my friends in school was a biracial punk girl so I feel like I’ve at least had some conversations about being biracial and punk rock…those are a weird and politically imperfect melange of reasons, but now that I’ve thought about them the character has taken shape for me and I’m starting to know how she thinks… )
Oddly, I’m lending Always Coming Home to two friends this week.
Rosa–the class is a physical one, meeting every other week at my house. Next we’re reading a Samuel Delany short story which I’m scanning and sending–on the 15th he’s speaking at the Walker, so that will be our class. After that we’re reading (or re-reading, as the case may be!) The Female Man…You can email me at jfranklin at yahoo dot com for further details, and of course it would be great to meet! someone! from! the! internet!
Frowner, thank you for your long comment! I chickened out of explaining what ‘cultural appropriation’ means to me in this thread, but you’ve articulated my discomfort with ACH and my reasons for it with absolute clarity.
It’s exactly the *non*specificity, the use of native cultures as a resource for a land-based utopia without identifying them (and the fact that I learned about Coyote but thought Le Guin made her up) that are problematic. And it doesn’t detract from what one gains from the book to acknowledge that power, race and colonialism make writing about some kinds of others more politically difficult, nor does it deny that the issues are complicated.
I really enjoyed your long comments, Frowner. However, I am still unconvinced that there is cultural appropriation going on in Always Coming Home. You say that the book, “imagines a future based on really-existing North American native cultures but that doesn’t explain that fact”, but the only specific detail you mention is the presence of Coyote. This isn’t particularly damning given that a version of Coyote shows up in the tales of over a dozen different tribes across the western United States, and Le Guin certainly knew that. (See this Wikipedia article for more info.)
My guess is that there are other elements of the book that were drawn, at least broadly, from Native American cultures, but that’s just a guess. Without specific knowledge I don’t think I have grounds to say that Le Guin has done anything wrong, and I don’t think a generic “person of color” does either. Only a specific person whose culture has been appropriated (or someone with inside knowledge of same) has the authority to say that this is what has happened.
I consider all of this to be separate from the question of racism or orientalism (which is really racism in a slightly different outfit). You say that in Always Coming Home, Le Guin depicts the Kesh as living in a timeless state of noble savagism, and that she orientalizes her subjects. But in one of your previous comments you said you completely disagreed with this argument! Color me confused. Personally, I think Le Guin provided a lot of detail about misunderstandings, fights, feuds, dissatisfaction, etc. to avoid this very problem; the Kesh are not saintly tribal folk, they are only human, with clearly recognizable problems, hopes, and fears. The most important difference between them and us is that their environment is poisonous, and they can’t reproduce in large numbers. This is the science fictional underpinning of the book, and the cultures Le Guin writes about are her gedankenexperiment about what would follow from that premise, just as The Left Hand of Darkness was her exploration of what would happen if humans had no fixed gender and lived on a frozen planet. The people themselves haven’t changed emotionally or mentally or (mostly) physically — it’s the circumstances that are different. I think that’s pretty much the opposite of orientalism.
I think writers have to figure out for themselves what they can and can’t write, and I think they/we need to bring humility and modesty to that.
Absolutely.
I have been told, though, and told often, given that I write slash stories ;-) that as a woman I can’t write men. In particular, they tell me, I can’t write gay men. I have been told by fanfic writers that they “can’t write Foreman” (or other black characters/characters of colour) because, they say, they can’t possibly understand how a person of colour will think/feel/react. And to me.
The situation is different when privilege writes about disprivilege, yes – because it becomes harder to achieve the state of humility before a culture you are not familiar with, and the necessary arrogance to continue to write. (To a certain extent, after all, no writer can be humble – you have to have a certain degree of self-willed arrogance to be able to get through anyway.)
Do men write women characters badly? Yes, often: they have a female stereotype in their heads and they write to that stereotype rather than thinking about real actual female human beings. Is that a reason for arguing that male writers shouldn’t try to write about women? Well, the books they frequently easier to read when they do avoid writing stereotype-cardboard characters… but I’d rather male writers did learn how to ignore that female stereotype in their heads and learn how to write like feminists… ;-)
Doesn’t this apply to other kinds of privilege writing about disprivilege? To straight writers shaking off the gay-stereotype or the presumption of universal heterosexuality and learning to write about LGBT characters who are just everywhere and human?
…and to white writers/of European descent learning how to write about characters of colour/cultures that are not derived from European tradition?
For anyone who’s interested in reading yet more discussion on this topic, Abi Sutherland at Making Light posted an entry recently about Ishi in Two Worlds, by Theodora Kroeber (Le Guin’s mother), and how Ishi’s life may have affected Le Guin’s fiction. There’s also some discussion of Tony Hillerman’s Navajo mysteries and whether or not he “noble savagizes” them. (The conclusion eventually seems to be “no”.)
I noticed that A Door Into Ocean tries very hard to avoid “noble savage” by showing petty fights, likes and dislikes, etc. of the Shorans.
Interesting discussion! I just recently read Always Coming Home as well, and I’m still percolating a bit in terms of what I think about it.
The plays were absolutely my favourite parts of the book – but what struck me was that they seemed linked inextricably to ancient Greek plays.
I’ve got to say I don’t think I have the background understanding to properly “see” or recognise the issues of appropriation in the text, although it occured to me at times when I was reading the book, obviously, it feels a bit out of my grasp (as both Native American and general US culture are things I can only appreciate as an outsider).
I picked this book up in a convenience store in Toronto, Canada in paperback form in the eighties.
I didn’t get to sleep that night; I had to read straight through. I have given dozens of copies away, and I re-read the book every year.
I wish I could find my notes on the Portland, Oregon Westercon panel years ago, (I believe, if my memory serves, that Ursula LeGuin was on that panel.) That panel was my introduction to the ongoing discussion of writers and readers about the meme of “cultural appropriation”. I don’t need to add to that. I have a different idea.
I compare LeGuin’s book _Always Coming Home_ to Leslie Marmon Silko’s book _Ceremony_ . These are my scattered thoughts about those two books.
They are equally stories of a wounded, marginalized human being who takes a journey away from, and finally back home to, a place that feels like home: they do this by consciously turning away from using or supporting violence.
The meme that human beings can have choice, and what a mystery choice is, and the consequences of choosing nonviolence, is what the two books are about, in my opinion.
How different that story always is, and must be, for a woman! No other story compares to the way _Always Coming Home_ tells that story for a woman, just like no other story compares to the way _Ceremony_ tells it for a man, in my opinion.
“People who make the world into war fight it first with people of the other sex.” Has no one else noticed that the community that North Owl is born into makes judgements about her mother and father’s relationship? And that they do that in all different ways? And that her father’s culture also judges it, but only in one way?
Willow has a happy fantasy in her mind – her husband loves her, he’s just away for a while for his job, and he will be back someday to take up his position in her family and heyimas.
But Willow’s mother says, “They leave their own women to come and rape women they don’t even know!” That statement says a lot about what North Owl’s grandmother believes about what happened. Her saying so doesn’t hurt the grandfather, a big promoter for “the Warriors” who are training to fight the Condor… and becoming much like Condors.
However, North Owl sees her mother’s reaction to the remark, sees her face change, sees the pain that comes into it. Is it the pain of a memory of forced sex breaking through her fantasy, or is it the pain of the undercurrent of shame her heyimas makes her feel, because of the way she decided to find a lover and get pregnant by a man outside the Valley? Which do you think it was? Or was it something else? LeGuin never tells us.
LeGuin never shows us the central fact of the novel. We never learn exactly how North Owl was conceived, or whether or not Willow had a choice. Did anyone demand that she abort the fetus? Did she want a moon child, a child of one house, and did Condors sneak into Moon Dances? Did she get raped, did she fall into a casual relationship, or or did she fall head over heels in love with a beautiful man and choose to come inland with him and bear a child with him?
Since the idea “moon child” is already a choice in the Valley, the only thing that would explain why North Owl is called “hwikmas” by some other kids, and feels as though she is growing up “half-house”, is her own explanation: “Education and ceremony were disturbed in my childhood… “. Why? Because the meme of “militarism” was creeping into the Valley, from continued contact with the Condor People?
In _Ceremony_, the woman Tayo falls in love with explains to him about the necessity for the healing of the stories themselves. Rooted out must be the stories that “the witches” like: “The violence excites them, and the killing soothes them.” Tayo knows that Emo actually enjoys killing and destruction, and uses hatred of “whites” to justify it. Tayo refuses to think or live that way.
In the valley in North Owl’s youth, what was the guiding metaphor? Instead of the metaphor of “the house, and bringing in”, people were sometimes beginning to deal with each other using the metaphor of “war”. When your own people fight a war, they themselves become like the enemy. North Owl was the child of an enemy soldier. Such children are sometimes feared and hated.
This book is one of the most important books to have been written by LeGuin, in my opinion.
North Owl was trying to become a whole person. She decided to go with her father out of love, just like Tayo decided to join the army because the brother he loved, and wanted the love of, was joining: his brother Rocky was already assimilated to the goals and desires of the world that this book calls “white”.
But neither of the brothers were *witches*, who, in _Ceremony_, seem to me to be people of any and all races and cultures who choose to enjoy violence and the adrenaline rush of destruction. [This is not how I define "witches"; to me, we are healers. But for the purposes of reading _Ceremony_, I am happy to give up, for the moment, my definition of "witch", and let Silko talk to me in her own words.]
_Always Coming Home_, like _Ceremony_, is about a human being who is part of two different cultures, one based on the metaphor of “war” and the activity of violence, and one based on the metaphor of “home” and the activity of negotiation and bringing into the house (of culture?) exactly what one chooses to have there. North Owl lives for a while in each, and is trying to understand all this, and to understand how *she* can be a human being.
This idea is important for everybody to think about right here, right now, especially if we accept the idea that everyone and everything is related. This idea that we are all related does not belong to any one culture. It keeps showing up in human culture because it’s true, not only in the world that we make up (culture and memes, which live in the abstract world of our minds, and about which we make choices), but in the world that made us up (our biology and ecology, this planet where we are evolving and will live and die for real — and maybe we have some choice about how to do that).
That’s exactly what Tayo is trying to do in _Ceremony_. The peak of the book is an act of refusal. Tayo refuses to come out from his hiding place and kill the men who are torturing and killing his friend. He refuses to take part in *their* ceremony. It is the hardest thing for him to choose. But because he chooses not to kill, he later can come back to the old men in the kiva and tell them who he is. That’s who he is, Arrowboy, who acts against the violent witches by witnessing their game, and choosing not to play.
According to Silko, their “ckoyo” magic just won’t work if someone is watching them. If we can step away from violence far enough to watch what it does, it loses its hold on us. Tayo lives, to plant the seeds that his lover collects, to heal the story and use the healed story to heal all of them together as the land itself heals.
North Owl refuses to stay with the Condor; she sees them tearing themselves apart, executing “enemies of the state”. Her father also finally turns his back on his culture when he helps his daughter escape. She knows, and maybe he knows too, that having lived by the sword, he will soon die as he does. But North Owl makes the other choice. And she brings with her, back into her home, her womanhood as Woman Coming Home, her daughter, and her Condor sister.
The game of militarism is eating up the substance of our planet so badly that we are spending our children’s ecosystems on the adrenaline rush and the cult of “brave brothers dying” for the rest of us.
Unlike North Owl, we have no place to run home to. War is everywhere, eating up our planet, and we’ll take war with us when we start using up the other planets, unless we choose not to do that.
Unlike Tayo, not all of us have elders waiting for us in the kiva, to integrate us into peace. We have to do it ourselves. Part of the way we do it is through speculative fiction, in my opinion. Fiction helps us look at our own metaphors, step out into meta-culture, where we get to look at all of the stories that human beings have made, and think about our own particular life stories and choices.
Tayo must mend story itself, because the story must be inclusive of everything, so we can all heal together; there is no separate healing. We are all in the same ceremony.
Woman Coming Home goes on studying how to be human after she comes home; she is always coming home.
Koto FARMER
“Sevivhwa”.
I reread very little; this is one of the few that has repaid every rereading. I use this in several of my Language and … courses, very successfully. For those not prepared, a good first read is to do the three Stonetelling sequences first, and then each of the special types together: tales, poems, information, the back of the book, and then, last, because this is who is telling the tale, Pandora. And then, reread Stone-Telling. All the other ways work also; I first read cover-to-cover, but that does not work for students. The reread is important; one loses so many subtle references to the whole on first reading — a student just confirmed that for me again.
On appropriation: we all learn from each otherr all the time & we forget that. Today at lunch about a presentation on Jaqaru/Kawki database we were reminiscing about how America (the original, before so named) feeds the world: potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, squash … . Potatoes of the Andes and their names as in our db was the take-off point. We all appropriate at all times. The real question is: do we respect? And how do we show that respect? ACH does, in my book, and I do teach this stuff. I say, let us learn from each other — and the *from each other* being the operative word; appropriation means stealing and claiming as one’s old. For some that may be a subtle difference, but it is a major one. learning from others can be seen as a high sign of respect; that I carried my babies on my back Andean style was so perceived, e.g., such that I was criticized when not doing in correctly (an involver verb tense, not a hierarchical one), and taught the proper way.