Some remarks on representation
Guest of Honor Tings
A preamble: My latest novel Harmattan Season is officially out in the wild. Buy it, borrow it, gaze lovingly at it through the storefront window, wait expectantly for the package in the mail, read it and tell your friends, or read it and sit alone with the experience, however you engage with books. Have at least as much fun reading it as I did writing it.
And my upcoming essay collection Racebook: A Personal History of the Internet is currently swimming in the pre-pub womb and available for pre-order. October 21 will be here before we know it, and if you dig any of the writing I’ve splashed onto this canvas, I think you’ll dig the book quite a bit. Smash that like button and be sure to subscribe and all that jazz.
Now that that’s out of the way—
Over the weekend, I was privileged to serve with inimitable Sarah Gailey as Guest of Honor at the Locus Awards. (The speech they gave had me on my feet like I’d just seen a Jafar Panâhi film at the Venice Film Festival.) Among my duties was to give a speech. You can find it at the 44:00 min mark.
At the prompting of friends, I’ve included the remarks in full below.
Often, when asked to speak, I’ll blank. Unprompted, I’m a fount of opinions. On Elden Ring, on credit default swaps, on who would win in a fight between 100 men and 1 gorilla. Hell, I’ll talk your ear off about Sleep Token and their latest album. But if there’s a lectern involved or the words “prepared remarks,” well there’s a cat somewhere in here walking around with a stolen tongue. But I have been thinking a lot. Call it the curse of sentience, so maybe I can get away with thinking out loud for a little bit. About genre fiction, about writing, about the world, about our many worlds.
Because that’s what it’s felt like for at least a decade now. Instead of any shared reality, we all occupy our own strand in the multiverse. There are no more large-scale musical trends, everything whittled down to hyper-personalized playlists. Watercooler TV is naught but a pile of ashes in King’s Landing. News reports will tell you that all of Los Angeles is on fire, yet friends in the area answer my phone calls at brunch or having miraculously just found parking. Reality isn’t so much divided as it is smashed into tiny, tiny pieces, each one an island with a population of 1.
And a part of me wonders if our literature has gotten smaller as a result. Or maybe this smallness—if, indeed, that is what it is—may have played a part.
In my journey as a writer, I’d say a canon event was reading The Count of Monte Cristo for the first time. All that swashbuckling, the false identities, the deliciously convoluted revenge plot, the sparkling humanity glittering throughout. It was rapture. And discovering that Alexandre Dumas was the same color as me was greater validation for my literary efforts than anything an English teacher could have told me. That’s what I wanted to write, and Dumas being who he was and what he was seemed to say that, yes, I was right to want that.
I returned to that moment, reading that book, when the spark was lit many times over, during those conversations that have erupted within that past decade over the issue of representation. The mandate to infuse our popular literature with a diversity of racial representation, of gender representation, of religious representation, that mandate bore in its DNA a glowing nobility. It was a moral mandate. There is so much experience out there. Let those who’ve lived it tell their stories. And it was glorious. Until you looked up from the book you were reading and noticed who was sitting at which lunch tables. Black writers writing gloriously about Black people. Queer writers writing gloriously about their queerness. Muslims writing gloriously into and through their religion. Dozens and dozens, hundreds of gloriously realized realities, crafted expertly for our readerly pleasure. And, yes, we readers could load our plates with delicacies from all over the world. But in that feast, it can be easy to miss the fact that so many of those dishes were made in isolation. Local recipes made by craftspeople engaged only with their own corner of the globe.
We worried about appropriation. Why should I try to cook the food of another peoples? If I post a picture of my jollof rice, they’ll drag me on social media! And besides, the Nigerians do it just fine!
But I think something is lost when we cut ourselves off like this. We call it “writing the other” and turn what could have been an adventure into a series of duties to be undertaken with the sternest of expressions and the noblest of intentions. “Getting it wrong,” so to speak, brings visions of apocalypse. We’re perpetrating horrid stereotypes, we’re pouring venom into the cultural ether. What we do, what we write, people will die because of it. But if these things are true, then they are true with every tweet. With every skeet. With every Instagram caption. With every conversation we ever have.
Fear of getting it wrong keeps us from looking out our window past our front yard and seeing, engaging with, this beautiful, tormenting world we share with billions upon billions of others. Fear of getting it wrong stifles the imagination. It stops the pen. It kills the story.
Far be it from me to start talking about art and obligation, as though writing the other were a mandate. But I do see something of an antidote in it. An act of bridge-building that unites one island with another and those two with yet another.
A writing that engages with the world. It is so powerful. So necessary. And so powerfully, so necessarily political. A book won’t end Russia’s crimes against Ukraine. No piece of art can deflect a missile aimed at Tehran or Tel Aviv. But what it can do is offer us a vision so that when someone says “free Palestine,” we have already seen—in a novel, in a short story, in a song—what that might look like.
There is a version of writing the other that’s animated by fear and solemnity. But there is another version animated by love and by adventure. We mustn’t forget that revolution can be fun. That, perhaps, it’s supposed to be.
So build the bridge. And once that’s done, head over to that other island and practice a few of their recipes. Our hearts and our stomachs will thank you.
Currently reading: The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
Currently listening: Falling Away from Me - Halocene, Violet Orlandi
snapping along like a Beatnik
thank you so much for this :) I was at Locus for part of the day but wasn't able to stay 'til the end--I loved your panel earlier in the day, and I think you really nailed something important with this speech. Looking forward to seeing what you do next!