Of Love and Other Monsters by Vandana Singh

I'm pleased to announce that Aqueduct Press will be publishing a new novella by Vandana Singh, Of Love and Other Monsters, as a volume in our Conversation Pieces series; we'll be releasing it in October. Vandana read a portion of it last weekend at Readercon (as mentioned by The Mossy Skull).

That Definitional Thing

It's very hot here in Seattle, & somehow iced tea and the fan running on high just isn't cutting it. Sad to say, I'm a weary zombie from lack of sleep. Nevertheless, I thought I'd note that a certain perennial subject came up last night at Kelley Eskridge’s reading at the Science Fiction Museum. Kelley read an excerpt from her story "Alien Jane" (which closes Dangerous Space) and longer excerpts from the new title novella, "Dangerous Space." She took care to leave about half an hour for the Q&A typical of Clarion West readings, during which she fielded a wide variety of questions about her work. Among these included a request that Kelley explain how “Alien Jane,” a story without any fantasy or science fiction elements, came to be included in a collection labeled “science fiction” and whether she had had any problem getting it published originally in genre publications.

Kelley began her response with a review of the story’s genre history. In sum: "Alien Jane" debuted in the first issue of the prestigious, beautifully produced Century edited by Robert K.J.Killheffer; it was a finalist for the Nebula award and won the Astrea Award (for lesbian literary fiction); it was reprinted in Nebula Awards 31 (ed. Pamela Sargent); and finally, the SF Channel then based an episode of Welcome to Paradox on the story. The story, Kelley noted, was treated within the genre as sf, and that was all that mattered. The label is just a label. She’s happy to have the label of being an sf writer (and herself chooses to call her work “speculative fiction”), but she doesn’t care about definitions.

On reflection, I think “Alien Jane” offers a good example for the argument that sf is not identifiable through a set of definable parameters but is, simply, what people who edit sf choose to publish and what people who read sf choose to read. “Alien Jane” is, in fact, less “speculative” than Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See.” For some reason, this didn’t provoke the sf Border Police back in the mid-1990s the way Karen’s story did in 2002. And for some reason, the SF Channel made it into a television drama. I could, I believe, make a comparable argument about “Alien Jane” to the one I made about “What I Didn’t See” in “Something Rich and Strange: Reading Karen Joy Fowler’s `What I Didn’t See’.” “Alien Jane,” like most of the stories in Dangerous Space, is in conversation with feminist sf. Like “What I Didn’t See,” most of Kelley’s stories can be read with pleasure as literary fiction: but how much richer and deeper they are for those engaged in the conversation of feminist sf!

Kelley Eskridge Reads from Dangerous Space

Aqueduct author Kelley Eskridge will be reading from her collection, Dangerous Space, tomorrow night at 7:30 p.m. at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle as a part of Clarion West's "Six Summer Evenings of Science Fiction & Fantasy" series. Kelley is currently teaching at the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

The Seattle Times review of Dangerous Space, "The alien territory of the human heart," characterizes the book as "a unique kind of science fiction, wherein the alien land we are enticed to explore is the human soul itself. Eskridge invites us into its strange, inhospitable terrain and urges us to peer at the disfigured, imperfect creatures that live there — jealousy, loneliness, yearning. Under Eskridge's watch, each emotion becomes a monster, complete with its own personality, that then preys on her human characters."

For those who've never been to the SF Museum, it's located on the east side of the Seattle Center at 325 Fifth Avenue N.

UPDATE to post on Egyptian Ban of Female Genital Surgeries: Ban Intended to Salve Westerners, Not to Prevent FGS

I wanted to include this information in the other day's post on Female Genital Surgeries, but my googling failed to provide the source. Enormous thanks to Ampersand for turning it up, based on my vague description.

*

Recently, I wrote about the many ways in which western intervention on the topic of female genital surgeries has backfired. Circumcision has been practiced on younger and younger girls. It has been forced into ever more covert circumstances, increasing the risk of fatal bleeding and HIV infection. Female genital surgeries have become, in some places, a badge of African pride, a defining part of African identity -- and this is clearly traceable to ham-fisted Western efforts to eradicate it. Groups which never practiced female circumcision have taken it up, putting thousands more girls and women at risk.

On the surface, the Egyptian ban looks different. After all, the ban isn't being imposed by colonial forces. It's been internally generated.

Sort of.

First off, the ban is not what it has been advertised as. It is not a ban on "female genital mutilation." It is not illegal for parents to seek their daughters' circumcision. What has been made illegal is for FGS to be practed by doctors, in public or private hospitals.

The original form of this ban was conceived in 1996, after an incident two years earlier in which CNN showed footage of a thirteen-year-old screaming as her clitoris was cut out by a barber. Egypt was embarrassed by the footage, which outraged westerners, who in turn threatened to withdraw foreign aid.

In its original form, the ban would have forced physicians to educate any family that came to them with a request for female genital surgeries. Doctors were to apprise families of the health risks that make such procedures an enormously bad idea. If families insisted on carrying out the procedure, they would be taken to a hospital where the girls would be given proper anasthetic and surgical care, managing the enormous pain of having one's external genitals removed and also helping to prevent the high rates of infection and death that result from amateur surgeons wielding non-sterile equipment.

American groups such as Equality Now rebelled against what they called the "medicalization" of clitoridecomy, and said they would give no foreign aid to hosptials where hte procedure was performed.

This led to a reconception of the ban, which prohibited clitorodectomy in public hosptials, although it was still permitted in private ones. Eventually, the ban was extended to include all licensed medical practitioners, although it left an out for "extreme circumstances." This ban enabled Egyptian hospitals to retain foreign aid, at the expense of Egyptian girls' health. Remember: this is a country in which 97% of women are cut. Even among the educated upper and middle classes where the incidence of FGS is reduced, the men who authored the ban almost certainly have modified daughters, wives, and sisters; the women were likely to have been cut themselves. They were aware that demand for the procedure was unlikely to lessen, a fact which they had attempted to address by building in educational and safety measures into the original form of the ban.

In 1997, this ban was challenged in a religious court which landed it back in the news. (All the scholars I've read agree that FGS is not required by Islam. However, there remain interpretations that suggest that FGS is part of a decent, observant Islamic lifestyle.) The ban managed to stand.

The newest form of the ban, the report of which on Pandagon and Feministe is what triggered this conversation, came recently in response to the death of a 12-year-old girl whose death (according to the Yahoo article) may have been linked to misuse of anasthetic. The new ban eliminates the "extreme circumstances" provision that remained in the previous ban. I do not have enough information to say whether that specific change will put more girls at risk.

This ban is not an internal attempt by Egyptians to try to change their own culture. It does not appear to be a response to a changing sentiment in which feelings about female genital surgeries have changed. Instead, it appears to be a ban made in the mold of the earlier colonial bans, in which westerners attempt to impose their feelings about female genital surgeries on a population over which they have (economic) power, without first examining the consequences of that ban.

Egytptians themselves first tried to implement a solution which is closer to the solutions that the activists who are involved in actually trying to change conditions on African soil have discovered to have a real, measurable effect on the practice. However, westerners prevented them from enacting legislation that would have ameliorated real world conditions, in favor of demanding an impressive, symbollic ban.

In demanding an immediate and complete solution, instead of acknowledging the reality that will involve years of hard work and moral ambiguity, westerners have unwittingly played into the hands of those who wish to continue female genital surgeries. The current iteration of the ban was never intended to actually eliminate female genital surgeries. It does not ban the common procedures wherein barbers wield razor blades on girls who lie prone, without anasthetic -- even though it was a barber who conducted the mutilation that shocked the west when it was caught on video in 1994.

No, the current ban is intended to appease westerners, and is remarkably effective at doing so. A ban sounds like it's accomplishing something. It sounds good when it is on the headline of a newspaper, or coming from the lips of a TV news reporter. It sounds decisive and impressive. It makes a good blog link. It creates a feeling of progress. We can say FGM is banned, and we can feel hope about the situation in Egypt. Enthusiastically, westerners continue to provide foreign aid because we feel that our activism has accomplished something.

Meanwhile, 97 out of 100 Egyptian girls will have their clitorises cut out. Most of these procedures will happen in unsanitary conditions, without anasthesia, with equipment wielded by unpracticed hands. The imposition of this ban, instead of the earlier form favored by the Egyptian government, ensures that those surgeries will be brutal and dangerous.

On this side of the ocean, one of the most pernicious side effects of this ban is that it creates a sense of accomplishment in armchair western activists, because it gives off the air of a job well done. FGS is banned in Egypt -- keep giving them money. Don't look at the ways in which this ban fails to stop any female genital surgeries, and in facts makes the actual surgeries worse. Only look at the big, symbollic law.

This ban gets in the way of effective activism, because it appears to be doing something while doing nothing. It offers us a black and white solution, while conveniently hiding away the shades of grey that we we would have been required to face if the initial Egyptian proposals had been enacted. Westerners -- perhaps all people -- have a great liking for black and white thinking. We enjoy symbols. This is the kind of thinking that makes us think we can pound terrorists into submission with bombs. Drop bombs on them and they won't dare to resist us! But of course we know that's not the way things work. When you pound people with bombs, even the ones who were sympathetic to you become terrorists. You make the situation worse. This is true even when the goal is more feminist -- you don't get people to stop using burkhas by dropping bombs on them either. Instead, you end up with a lot of women who are wearing burkhas and terrified for their lives and their families. And you also end up with women who are veiling to show their solidarity to the women who are being bombed, just as you end up with women who practice female genital surgeries to show that they defy colonialist power. Via colonialism, the western world has treated Africa really shittily. They are understandably wary when we tell them something is "for their own good." Why should they believe us if we're willing to threaten to defund their hospitals and treat them like moral infants, instead of treating them like rational actors who we need to convince?

As liberals, we are supposed to be better trained in detecting these fallacies. After all, there have been studies showing that liberals are better able to conceive of ambiguities. We know enough about our culture to pick them up when they're happening in our society. What makes us look at a foreign culture and suddenly see in two dimensions? It's a bad habit, supported by racism and colonialism.

Using the threat of withdrawing foreign moneys can be an effective tool, as famously exemplified in divestment from South Africa. I'm not sure that it's as reasonable to threaten to withdraw charity money as it is to withdraw business investments, but leaving that aside for the moment -- probably there is a way to deal with our financial involvement in Egypt ethically, and to try to pressure their government to do something about female genital surgeries.

But we have to be smart about it, not act like big stupid bullies. Demanding that they do things exactly our way, instead of listening to their more knowledgeable ideas about how to change their culture -- that's stupid. Demanding that they change everything immediately and accepting no intermediate steps, thus putting them in a situation where it's impossible to actually make productive change -- that's stupid. Dictating an end point instead of convincing people of your point of view -- that's stupid, too. And all of these things just complicate the post-colonial relationship between America and Egypt, and make it less likely that our word is going to count for anything. "STOP PERFORMING FGM!" means less than a statistic that shows clitoridectomy kills 15% more mothers and infants than intact childbirth. If we really want to accomplish our goals of worldwide health and prosperity for women, rather than just congratulate ourselves on meaningless and shiny symbols, then we're going to have to stow away our arrogance for a while and actually look for practical, efficacious measures.

New Issue of the Broadsheet

The latest issue of the Broad Universe Broadsheet is up. Among other things, it includes Samuel Delany's interview with Joanna Russ from WisCon 30 (also available in The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 1 from Aqueduct), a review of Nicola Griffith's Always, and a witty commentary on the value of volunteering from Aqueduct author Sue Lange.

A Brief Conversation with Vandana Singh

Timmi: I met you a year ago at Readercon, Vandana, when you presented a paper about science fiction in the Third World. As I recall, you not only discussed a tradition of sf in India that goes back a century, but also noted that an sf magazine in China has the kind of circulation that sf magazines in the US could only dream about. Would you talk a little here about sf in India, please, and what kind of readers it appeals to?

Vandana: Until recently there was no SF in India that was labeled and marketed as genre, apart from foreign imports like Asimov, Bradbury etc. About three or four years ago Penguin India came out with what it called the first SF book by an Indian author that was marketed as SF: The Simoqin Prophecies by Samit Basu. So it is hard to say what kinds of readers in India like SF, since that category did not exist until recently. On the other hand SF in India has existed for a long time, although marketed under general fiction. This is particularly true of SF in Indian languages other than English (there are 18 languages in India). For instance consider the extraordinary works of writer Premendra Mitra, who wrote in Bengali in the 1940’s. I discovered him only recently after a translation into English came on the market, although he’s been a major hit among Bengalis for decades. Part of the problem with answering your question also has to do with the multiplicity of tongues --- where there are no translations I cannot tell you much about the work or the readership, since I’m only fluent in English and Hindi.

On a personal note, however, I can say that for bilingual urban kids for whom English is a familiar language, science fiction is very much a thing of childhood and the teenage years, and probably more popular with boys than with girls. By the age of ten or eleven I had read Asimov and Clarke, and discovered (with much delight) Bradbury. But apparently my tastes in reading were a little unusual for a girl. In any case as children grew up they seemed to be turned off SF, at least SF in English by foreign authors. Whether this turning off also occurs in other Indian languages I cannot say, but judging by the popularity of Premendra Mitra, I doubt it. There are SF traditions in Marathi, Tamil and other languages that I know very little about; I know, however, that there are some women writers.

I should mention that fellow writer Anil Menon and I are trying to put together an anthology of Indian SF with translations from various Indian languages as well as SF written by Indians in English. I don’t know when or if this project will be complete but it is exciting and difficult, and involves following up traces, hints and rumors of Indian SF writers and their stories.

Timmi: You have published fiction in both the US and India. Are the audiences and markets in the US and India substantially different, or do you feel you can pretty much sell everything in both places?

Vandana: The fiction I’ve published in India consists of two children’s books, Younguncle Comes to Town and Younguncle in the Himalayas. Both have some fantastical elements and are completely grounded in an Indian ethos. They seem to have been a hit in India --- I heard that pirated copies might be selling in the streets of Bangalore, which I take as a sign of having arrived. I’ve also heard from various readers, from age five to eighty-five (kids start reading really early in India, when they have the opportunities) that they love the books.

The first book, Younguncle Comes to Town, was published in the U.S. in 2006 by Viking Children’s Books. The editors took a big risk because, as one of them said, nothing quite like this exists in the American market and nobody could be sure how the book would do. Perhaps it was too foreign. Maybe the Hindi words would be confusing. Perhaps the use of big words like “ambrosial” or “prosaic” would turn kids off. And indeed there were mixed reviews in which some raved and others declared that the subject matter would not interest American children. But ultimately the book seems to have done well—it is a selection of the Junior Library Guild (and so is in public libraries nearly everywhere), an ALA Notable book, one of New York Public Library’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing, among other honors. The one reading I have been able to do—at a public school in Boston—was a real eye-opener. Kids from elementary through seventh grade knew the characters and plot lines and laughed in all the right places. So I realized that American kids are like kids everywhere: because when you give them something that is interesting and does not talk down to them, then they will take to it, even if the setting and culture are unfamiliar.

Of my short fiction for adults only one story has been published in India, in an anthology called the Inner Line: Stories by Indian Women, published by Zubaan (they also published my children’s books). It got some favorable reviews. Now Zubaan is publishing a collection of my stories and I am hopeful that these will appeal to the Indian reader also. While I write for the world, the Indian audience is crucial to me.

I don’t know that my adult fiction is of interest to the American genre reader at large, since I haven’t had success selling to the big SF magazines like Asimov’s or F&SF, and in fact for some years I haven’t been sending them material. The small press anthologies, Strange Horizons, and British magazines like The Third Alternative (now Black Static) seem to like my work. The fact that two of my stories have made it to Year’s Best volumes, and have been shortlisted for awards, is also encouraging.

Timmi: Zubaan Books, which will be publishing your forthcoming collection The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, is a feminist publisher located in New Delhi. Could you talk a little about what sort of work, generally, they publish and who in India reads feminist sf?

Vandana: Zubaan Books is a non-profit publishing house descended from India’s first feminist press, Kali for Women, which changed the Indian publishing scene by promoting women’s writing and women’s voices. Zubaan continues the work of Kali for Women by publishing both fiction and nonfiction that puts women and women’s struggles in the forefront. Their books explore the areas where gender meets economics, sexuality and health, and conflict. They also have biographies of and fiction by women. Their readers include academics but also general readers. For instance the autobiography A Life Less Ordinary by a domestic worker called Baby Halder was translated into English and became a best-seller. Zubaan’s website is at <www.zubaanbooks.com/zubaan_profile.asp?Page=profile/profile.asp>.

To me, personally, it is a great honor being published by Zubaan. When I was in my early twenties, marching for women’s rights on the streets of Delhi, Kali for Women was a name I had heard about and looked up to, and I never imagined that I would one day be published by their successor, Zubaan.

Timmi: How did you come to choose to take a doctorate in physics? Has your training as a theoretical physicist been important for your fiction? And conversely, does your science-fictional imagination influence how you think about physics?

Vandana: I’ve always been fascinated by the natural world, and in my childhood I explored it through scientific observation (of birds mostly) as well as through writing. I was going to be a biologist but I was put off by the degree of rote learning involved at the time. Also I wanted to know about the root of things, and it seemed to me that in biology you couldn’t ask deep questions without ending up in chemistry and ultimately in physics. (Later I realized that this was too reductionist an approach but that is another story).

But also I was fascinated by astronomy and the possibility of life on other worlds, which stemmed from my reading science fiction. So that played a role in my taking up physics, too. I finished my undergraduate and Master’s degrees at Delhi University but I wasn’t a very disciplined student. I aced the courses I loved, including some really tough ones, and neglected everything else. My bias was toward the theoretical --- to find the great abstractions, the underlying patterns that connected apparently disparate phenomena. That aspect of physics is still what really turns me on.

So I came to this country for a PhD. Feeling like an alien (and a card-carrying one at that) I turned back to my old and neglected love, science fiction, only to realize that people like me didn’t seem to exist in most science-fictional futures. (This was the cause of much despair until I came across Ursula K. Le Guin’s work). As far as physics was concerned, the area I researched for my thesis was the truly bizarre realm of quark interactions. The problem I looked at was very tough and had to do with the question of why a quark, the smallest particle of matter (as far as we know) is never observed alone, but always with at least one other quark. You might rephrase that in these words: why is there no lonely quark in Nature? The solution involved a massive simulation on a supercomputer that was mostly frustrating but also challenging and fun, and we got hints of an answer that led to quite a bit of work in the area by other people, long after I had left research.

Although I dropped out of physics research after a year of post-doctoral work in India— I came back to the U.S. after marriage—the break from academia allowed me to start writing. It also made me question some of the assumptions and paradigms that were driving my field of particle physics—reductionism, for instance, which, while powerful and useful, is not without its limits. The appropriation of science by Wall Street and the military also has negative consequences. I home-schooled my daughter for eight years, and during that time I had time to think broadly about physics. But on the other hand I really missed being actively involved in it, and it was natural that I started writing science fiction because that was the only way I could get my intellectual “highs” then. Even though my science fiction was as much or more about humans and their peculiarities the science appeared sometimes directly, sometimes as metaphor, and I found this intellectually fascinating.

About four years ago I found my way back to academia, to teach basic college physics at a liberal arts college. It was and is a wonderful experience and keeps my brain happy and active. I get ideas for stories while I’m teaching (although I generally can’t write until the summer break). For instance one short story that is coming out in my collection The Women Who Thought She Was a Planet is called “Conservation Laws,” and it occurred to me while I was conducting a lab on rotations. So the story is an amalgam of classical physics, a very weird extrapolation of modern physics, and the regional characteristics of people from my home state, Bihar. It is also a tribute to the giant of Bengali SF I mentioned, Premendra Mitra. I’ve also written the first draft of a novella that is about a woman marooned at the other end of our galaxy in a massive spaceship—some of the science is based on my PhD thesis but it is also about what identity means when you are (possibly) the last human.

Physics and literature are to me like breathing and eating. I need them both to be alive, and in a sense they give me a sort of binocular vision of the world. And sometimes my speculations about science are not too far off. For instance I learned that the way I had portrayed the force of gravity in the aforementioned novella is actually one way that modern physicists are looking at it now.

To me the great divide between what C.P. Snow called “The Two Cultures” is cause for much sadness. I think that the sciences, especially physics, are taught quite poorly in general, not introduced early enough in the school curriculum, and the people who teach it are not trained, supported or compensated sufficiently. The other thing is that what I’ve seen of American popular culture is very anti-intellectual, and erodes away at our natural tendency to be awed by the universe. I’ve spent a good few minutes of introductory physical science class passionately recounting (to future elementary school teachers) how we originate from the stars, and that the heavier elements in our bodies were forged inside supernovas—and while I get the occasional “Cool” from my audience, I’ve also gotten the dreaded question: Will this be on the exam? I think that to lose the ability to connect with the physical universe, to lose awe, is to die a sort of death.

I’ve given talks at a local Unitarian Universalist church about science and art, and their possible reconciliation, and some of the people most excited by this are senior citizens, especially women. They’ve spent much of their lives divorced from and bored by science and now they are curious and want to learn more about it. My most recent talk involved an introduction to the forces of Nature, looking at them from the scientific perspective as well as the mythological (without being disparaging to either), and I can’t begin to tell you how enthusiastic my audience was, and with what childlike curiosity they performed the experiments. Grandmothers were like five-year-olds!

So, to sum up: to me, science and the arts are part of the great continuum of human experience and creativity, and despite their true and great differences, they arise from the same bedrock. The happy place where the two cultures meet make it possible for me to be fully alive in this universe, to be open-minded, curious, critical, suspicious of authority, and lost in awe at the miracle of a spider-web or a rainbow.

Timmi: Thank you so much, Vandana.

Correction to Previous Post: Writing the Other is by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

In a previous post, I attributed a concept that's presented in Writing the Other to the writer Nisi Shawl. Shawl did not write the book alone; she collaborated with another writer, Cynthia Ward. I should have attributed the concept to both of them. I apologize for my error.

(I actually misremembered the concept as having been attributed specifically to Nisi in the book, but having gone back and reread, I see my memory was faulty.)

Anyway, Writing the Other is an amazing book. I refer to it all the time in my writing and teaching. If anyone hasn't read it, I recommend recommend recommend.

Again, apologies to Ms. Ward.

(This post will be replicated on Alas, A Blog, and my personal livejournal, where the original essay was cross-posted, within the next few days.)

More on Writing About Other Cultures

Rachel asked, did her post come across as being against writing about other cultures?

No, not a bit. Quite the contrary. But thinking about the issue, I ended up thinking about the problems of writing about other people and cultures.

For example, my response to the question, how does one write about other people is, write them as people. Focus on their humanity. But what is meant by their humanity? Are you going to end by writing all characters as if they are the kind of people you know? I know mostly white Midwesterners; and it seems to me there is a very real danger that I will write all characters as if they are white Midwesterners, even if I give them different skin colors and non western last names.

In my Lydia Duluth stories, most people are black, because they need the protection against the radiation of many different suns. But they aren't (most of them) African-Americans or Africans. They are genetically modified humans from all kinds of different backgrounds. I have introduced black people into my stories, but avoided the problem of writing about existing human cultures I don't know especially well.

Because the Lydia Duluth stories are (to an extent) parodies of space opera, the dominent human culture is a space opera culture, which means Hollywood American.

What I keep wondering is -- to what extent do I come to grips with writing about other cultures, and to what extent do I slip away from the problem, finding some way to use other cultures that will make it difficult for critics to nail me?

I go ahead and create characters from all kinds of different backgrounds, because I think that's more realistic than imagining any era of human history -- past, present or future -- as all white and European. But I don't feel sure that I'm doing a good job. In the end, what I really know is being Eleanor Arnason.

It's absolutely necessary that there be people writing SF from all kinds of backgrounds, because we need the depth of experience that comes from living in a culture.

It's also necessary, I think, that people like me push ourselves and write outside our experience, because the future does not belong to one kind of human. The next 100 years looks like one crisis after another, and we are going to have to work together to get through.

I'm talking about my work, because I know it and because the last time I talked about possible unconscious racism in another SF writer's work, I ended in trouble.

Problematizing Legal Approaches Toward Stopping FGS

On Pandagon, Amanda relates what she calls some good news: Egypt has outlawed FGM.

From the article:

Officially the practice, which affects both Muslim and Christian women in Egypt and goes back to the time of the pharoahs, was banned in 1997 but doctors were allowed to operate "in exceptional cases".

On Thursday, Health Minister Hatem al-Gabali decided to ban every doctor and member of the medical profession, in public or private establishments, from carrying out a clitoridectomy, a ministry press official told AFP.

On the Pandagon thread, a commenter called Dan writes: "Obviously, banning FGM is always a step in the right direction..."

I am not convinced that this is obvious. Nor am I necessarily convinced that this outcome is good news.

Some Background
One thing that one learns in the study of anthropology is that culture is a holistic entity. That means that you can't split it up into tiny bits and interact with those bits piece by piece. You can't hold up -- say -- dowry burnings and say "this is what dowry burning is, this is what it means" outside the context of the rest of the culture, anymore than you could hold up "I Love Lucy" to people who didn't understand Western gender roles or Western materialism or a Western sense of humor and expect them to understand it.

Female genital surgeries (FGS) are the same way; they exist within a cultural context that gives them meaning. The cultural contexts are different, so the meanings are different.

Let me take a brief digression to deal with the issue of terminology. I'm going to call the procedures FGS, which is the term that an anthropologist friend of mine favors when he teaches Intro to Anth. FGS is not a perfect term. However, it is an attempt to ameliorate some of the problems with other terms. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a term that many African women, and others, object to as stifling conversation because the term itself is alienating and inflammatory. Female circumcision is inaccurate, and leads to a false equivalency between male and female circumcision since it creates an ersatz linguistic link between the two procedures.* FGS is an attempt at a middle ground.

Female genital surgeries exist in many different forms, in many different cultural contexts. Here are some of the physical manifestations of the surgery:

• Nicking of the clitoris or removing the tip of the clitoris - relatively unusual


• Clitorodectomy - the most common form of FGS, involving removal of the clitoris. Often practiced along with the removal of the labia minora. May or may not be accompanied by a procedure intended to kill the clitoral nerve, such as pressing hot needles into the affected area.


• Infibulation - the removal of the clitoris, labia minora, and labia majora. The inner walls of the vagina are scraped and then sewn together, leaving a hole as small as a woman's pinky finger. This procedure can make menstruation and urination very difficult and lead to an increased probability of health complications like uterine prolapse. Tough, inelastic scar tissue is unyielding, making birth a dangerous process. Infibulated women must be cut open for sex and birth, and are often resewn afterward.

FGS are also done for a variety of reasons. Each culture that practices FGS will be practicing its own variation -- in terms of what the surgery consists of, and why it is done. For this reason, it's very difficult to talk about FGS as a monolith. And there's a good reason for that. FGS are not a monolith.

For instance, it's not uncommon to encounter feminists arguing that FGM is done to eliminate female sexual pleasure, or to prevent women from cheating. FGS are not done solely for either of these reasons, although they are some of the reasons stated by some cultures.

For the Kikuyu in Kenya, who practice clitorodectomy, FGS is practiced as a rite of passage in order to create a more visible separation between men and women. The clitoris, or masculine part, is removed to make the woman more womanly (conversely, the foreskin which is seen as being like the labia, is removed to make men more manly). Therefore, any attempts to eliminate FGS among the Kikuyu will have to react to these cultural motivations.

It would be inappropriate for the same solutions to be attempted among the Kikuyu as would be used in infibulation-practicing East African countries like Ethiopia and Somalia, countries that are very patriarchal and have clear interests in establishing inheritance laws. Unlike the FGS practiced by the Kikuyu, Ethiopian and Somalian infibulation appears to arise from an interest in protecting paternity rights (Carolyn Martin Shaw). They want to make sure that inheritance goes to genetic sons. Women - often upper-class women - bear the brunt of this (as they did in Europe with chastity belts, in the middle east with seclusion, in China with footbinding) because the patriarchy (supported by both men and women) views them as vessels for heirs. Reducing their ability to become pregnant by men who are not their husbands makes it more likely that inheritance will go to genetic heirs. Cultural practices grow around this desire. Later, these practices are fetishized.

Clitorodectomy and infibulation are both practiced by some cultures that believe the touch of a woman's uncircumcized genitals will sap a man of his ability to hold an erection, cause hydrocephally, and/or kill any infant the woman bears. This myth is enduring. You may think that decades of interaction with white women who are uncircumcized and yet able to bear children would have shaken the myth, but this is often not the case. White women often choose not to bear children or to bear very few children, which means that white women are often seen as infertile. Thus it is possible for African women from FGS-practicing cultures to interact with uncircumcized white women and still believe that circumcision is necessary for fertility.

The point of all this is: FGS is not something that exists in isolation. It exists for particular reasons. You don't get rid of those reasons by changing the law. All you do is create a situation in which the reasons still exist (need for a rite of passage, to ensure paternity, to ensure fertility), but the traditional method of meeting those needs has been outlawed.

Laws Against FGS Analogized to Laws Against Rape

On a Feministe thread about the ban, Jill writes in defense of the law. "I don’t think anyone is saying FGM is going to disappear," she writes, acknowledging that the ban will not be a cure. She goes on to say, "But it is important that they’ve outlawed it, since that reflects a profound social shift, and it allows people to be prosecuted for it... Rape laws don’t get rid of rape, but I’d rather have them than not."

I think Jill is erring in comparing FGS to rape. FGS is a culturally sanctioned, overt part of how the society functions. Rape is at best a covert part of our cultural function. While it holds up patriarchy by limiting women's movements, it also subverts patriarchy because it is a threat to paternal property. FGS is not like that.

In my opinion, a better analogy would be to compare FGS to - say -- capture marriage as its practiced in Nepal, in which a young man kidnaps a young woman and marries her by force. To western eyes, these marriages look superficially abhorrent (and they're certainly not 100% good). But we're missing the subtleties of the capture marriages. These marriages are often arranged before hand and approved by both families as a way of allowing a young couple to marry when they do not have the financial resources to put on a huge wedding. In many (I think most) capture marriages, the woman is not actually in danger, or experiencing surprise; she feigns both ritualistically. However, the bride is not always told of the capture marriage beforehand. Capture marriages are a culturally sanctioned process which serves particular culturally sanctioned purposes (allowing a way for the children of families who have fallen on hard times to marry), and which puts the interest of families above the interests of the woman.

It would be possible to make laws against capture marriage, in ostensible defense of the woman's independence. However, the kinds of laws that tend to get enacted in situations like these are made with a western gaze. We see the surface effect of a capture marriage and apply it to known situations -- the biblical Sabine women, for instance. We aren't looking at the reasons why capture marriages exist, or how they are rooted in the culture. Addressing the symptom by making capture marriages illegal may actually make the situation worse for women.

And this is what we have seen, time and time again, with regard to legal remedy for FGS.

A Brief Overview of Some Historical Consequences of Outlawing FGS

Missionaries who got down to Africa really didn't like FGS. Well, I don't either. Many of them did what seems like the logical thing to do when you are in ostensible control of a group of people who are doing something that you think is a major violation of human rights, moral decency, and God's law. They decided to ban it.

Early bans had a number of consequences (not all of which occurred in all places).

• Circumcision began to be performed on younger and younger girls. Because it was less likely that missionaries or western colonial agents would be messing in the lives of infant or very young girls, and because infants and very young girls would be less likely to understand what was going on well enough to discuss it with missionaries or western colonial agents, it made sense to do it on younger girls. (Here, again, we reach the problem with discussing FGS as a monolith. Some cultures started out performing FGS on younger girls. But many didn't, and many of those started performing the surgeries on younger and younger girls.)
  
  Why is this a problem for women? Among other things, it decreases the likelihood of sexual function. Among the Kikuyu of Kenya, circumcision rituals were proceded with kinds of genital stimulation and body play that appear to have been intended to teach women how to orgasm once they had been cut. Adolescent girls and boys would wrap their bodies in tight strips of leather and rub up on one another. This kind of all-body stimulation is likely to have been instructive in helping women adjust to the altered physical sensations of a circumcized body. When circumcisions are done at a younger age, these kinds of rituals are likely to decline or disappear altogether.
  
  Women are also much more likely to acheive sexual pleasure after circumcision if they have orgasmed before circumcision. This is, obviously, more likely to be the case in girls who are adolescents than girls who are toddlers or infants.
  
  Circumcisions and younger ages also contribute to:


• The destruction of social practices that surround circumcision, such as coming of age rituals, that provide context and meaning to the procedure. These contexts may not have anything to do with sexual pleasure (which is why I'm making this its own category), but are likely to have to do with community building and the function of a healthy culture. Destroying these rituals, but KEEPING the circumcision, is the opposite of good. The better option, of course, is to figure out how to keep the rituals while changing their object (as some activists have worked on doing).


• Circumcision was often driven underground, to be done in private, furtive spaces, which makes it difficult for the procedures to be done in clean, healthy ways that minimize risk to the girls.

Perhaps the most important effect of banning FGS is that it created a dichotomy, the effects of which activists are still dealing with today. It underlined the idea that female genital surgeries are African, and not practicing female genital surgeries is American. Not to practice female genital surgery is to capitulate to colonialists. To practice FGS is to be genuinely African.

When Western feminists insist on framing the discourse about FGS on our terms, we make this problem worse. When we emphasize statements like, "African women are being denied sexual pleasure," as if it were the worst part of the situation, we grind home this dichotomy.

It has been repeatedly proven to be much more effective to talk about FGS in terms of women's and children's health. FGS kills women and children. According to a study linked by Feministe last year, women who've undergone infibulation are 50% more likely to die or to lose their infants than women who have not. Women who've undergone clitorodectomy are 15% more likely to die or to lose their infants in childbirth than women who have not.

This is the kind of information that tends to persuade women, because it is culturally situated. It addresses what they are worried about. Sexual pleasure tends to be coded as decadent and western. It is therefore not only not of concern, but can be specifically opposed. It's therefore not always useful to talk to African women about it. Our insistence on framing the narrative in our terms can damage African women's actual lives.

Because while sexual pleasure is a big deal, in my personal opinion, poor childbirth outcomes are probably a bigger deal. Spreading HIV through the use of dirty razor blades is a bigger deal. Injury and lameness are bigger deals. Uterine prolapse is a bigger deal. Death is a bigger deal.

There are real world harms to the ways in which westerners have typically framed debates about FGS. The dichotomy I mentioned earlier, where FGS is coded as genuine, African, and anti-colonial, gained teeth during the pan-African movement. Since that time, in some places, FGS has become a marker of cultural superiority. Cultures that did not practice FGM have taken it up, in order to emulate other cultures that are considered more prestigious. And other cultures that did not practice FGM have taken it up, specifically in order to show that they are African and anti-colonial. Our attempts to legally ban FGS have not lessened cultural attachment. They've increased it.

The Egyptian Ban, in Particular

FGS has been effectively banned in Egyptian hostpitals for some time. The original ban was put into place in 1997, although it left a loophole for "exceptional cases" in which surgeons were allowed to operate.

As of 2000, 97% of Egyptian women were circumcized.

What do we know about those procedures? Almost all of them were performed without the benefit of hospital medical care.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to calculate the number of girls' deaths that are caused by female genital surgeries. However, the procedure is risky. Clitorodectomy involves surgery near nerves and arteries. There are manifold risks to health, including bleeding out, cutting major tissue, and passing AIDS through non-sterilized equipment.

There are two ways to control those health risks. One is to provide adequate medical care. The other is to eliminate female genital surgeries.

Certainly, the second is preferable. But in the past 10 years of the ban on female genital surgeries, the number of circumcisions does not appear to have moved. A survey in 1995 shows the same rate of 97% that the 2000 study shows. In fact, the rate showed to be constant in 1997, 2000, and 2003. The ban has not had ANY effect on the practice of female genital surgeries. It has only made it unlikely that gilrs will receive adequate medical care -- and soon it will be impossible for girls to receive it.

If these figures are accurate, supporting this ban seems insane. Our stated goal is to improve the lives of women. This ban does not improve the lives of women. It makes female genital surgeries, which are going to be carried out with or without the ban, more medically risky.

I am reminded of pro-life advocate's devotion to the idea of outlawing abortion, ostensibly to prevent abortion, even when they are unwilling to take other measures that would actually prevent abortions, such as funding government-provided birth control. Are we actually dedicated to the idea of improving women's health, safety, and quality of life? Or are we more attached to the symbollic ban of something we don't like, placing the idea of women's sexual pleasure above the possibility that fewer girls -- who are going to be cut anyway -- will die, be maimed, or infected with HIV?

Solutions that Actually Work

There are solutions that actually work to reduce the incidence of FGS. Some activists are working on finding ritual substitutes for genital cutting that can stand in for the procedure, allowing the ritual function to continue without the surgery.

By far the most successful direct method has been educating women. Educated women are less likely to have their daughters circumcized, even in Egypt (this has some breakdowns by class). Educating women specifically about health is likely to dispell some of the myths that have grown up around circumcision, by showing that uncircumcized women are clean, and fertile, and can have children who do not suffer from hydrocephaly or death. It can also show the dangers of FGS, including the horrific child birth statistics listed above.

However, none of these methods are likely to be permanently effective until women in Africa have economic self-determination. They need to have enough money to be able to make their own decisions about FGS.

One chilling thing that has happened in the past is that activists have been able to convince families that FGS is a damaging practice. The families agree not to circumcize their girls -- and then the girls discover that there is no room for them in their society. Such girls have often agreed to be circumcized so that they will have a place in their cultures.

Women who are economically dependent can not make independent decisions about FGS. Money and education will allow them the power to choose.

The Angel in the House in science fiction

In her post “The persisting problem of what makes a heroine, oursin links to This spaceship needs flowers!, an interesting post by badgerbag:

The fantasy of domesticity and women is that wherever we go, we are the angel in the house. It does help, it civilizes and humanizes, it makes others feel happy, it demonstrates love. But when you start doing that work, you are choosing not to focus on other work. And it is all too convenient for others to praise that domesticity and take a free ride. Other forms of work are not loaded with "demonstrating love". So buying into that whole package of ideas means that you are tying your willingness to provide free labor (often for men) to your essential value as a person, to your "goodness" at human relationships.

Many girls are raised to associate personal decency and self-respect—indeed, their sense of femininity—with the neatness, comfortableness, and hospitality of any space they inhabit (however temporarily). The sense of responsibility this fosters often leads not only to women automatically pitching in to do the “shit work” she encounters outside her own home, but also to a sense of proprietary territoriality in which one woman may see another’s working in her kitchen, for instance, as a violation of her space, even if the chore she performs is as lowly as sweeping the floor. As a feminist, I’ve long since come to understand that it’s retrograde to denigrate such work (which includes far more than housework) by that label, since this is necessary work that must be done (over and over and over again). In a world in which feminism no longer needs to exist, everyone will do this work to the extent that they are able and everyone will feel a sense of responsibility for it. (In real life, this can actually happen in households: it may take 25 or 30 years, but it’s not impossible.)

In fictional narratives, of course, it’s more complicated than that, as both oursin’s and badgerbag’s posts discuss.

Writing About Other Cultures

I've been mulling over this topic since Rachel posted on using other cultures in fantasies.

I'm not going to limit myself to writing about middle aged white women in the American Midwest, especially since I write science fiction and fantasy. The whole point of SF is to escape limits. So I have to write about other people and cultures.

I also think of myself as an affirmative action author. I make a point of including all kinds of people in my stories and of drawing on many human cultures.

My story "Knapsack Poems" is based directly on Basho's Journey to the North, though I added a couple of incidents from the Egils saga Skallagrimssonar.

The hwarhath in Ring of Swords are a mixture of viking and Confucian traits, and much of their culture is based on the culture on Shogunate Japan: all those lumpy pots and gorgeous brocade gowns and the plays, which are based on Noh. I read every translation of Noh plays I could find, when I was writing Ring of Swords.

However, once you write directly about other people and cultures, not disguising them as aliens, you lay yourself open to charges of ignorance and prejudice.

I have tended to hedge my bets. Most of my characters are mixed culture, so it's hard to argue that I have gotten their culture wrong. There are a few exceptions: Eddie Whirlwind in A Woman of the Iron People was my attempt to describe a pissed off Native American academic. One of the reviews said no one could hold a grudge as long as the characters in my novel. I think the reviewer was talking about Eddie.

I figure, you does your research,and you takes your chances. Anything is better than a white bread future or fantasy.

I will point out that the writers of generic fantasies do not know the European cultures they supposedly draw on. They are imitating Tolkien or imitators of Tolkien, rather than going back to the original sources. At this point, generic fantasy has its own culture, which part Tolkien, part fairy tale, part D&D and part Hollywood versions of the middle ages.

There are two issues here. One is setting fantasies in non-European cultures, always worth doing. But the other is creating fantasy worlds that are not based on a specific historical culture, but draw on something besides the generic fantasy world. There is no reason why the people in a fantasy need to be white. They aren't in the Earthsea Trilogy. There is no reason why the world of a fantasy needs to be Hollywood Euro-medieval.

Book Recommendation: Carol Emswhiller, The Secret City

I’ve loved Carol Emshwiller’s fiction since I first encountered “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” in the late 1970s in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology[1], and she’s never disappointed me. Emshwiller plays and gambols with sf conventions as no author I can think of—not to mock them, but as conceits for helping us to think about and understand our world. This combination of playfulness with dead seriousness suffuses her narrative imagination, extending even to her narrative voice, which in The Secret City (Tachyon Publications, 2007), her latest novel, is slyly ironic without being cynical.

The Secret City features extraterrestrial aliens from a planet called Betasha who live in the western United States as homeless, undocumented migrants (literally “illegal aliens”) who when they are discovered are classified as surviving “Neanderthals” rather than recognized as extraterrestrials. Clute and Nicholls’ Encyclopedia of Science Fiction classifies the “first contact” trope as falling within the scope of its entry titled “Communication.” “First contact” may entail state diplomacy, or a consciousness encounter between two species meeting for the first time, or a scientific study by one species of another. The Secret City offers none of these.

Although the Betashans apparently have strong reasons for visiting Earth, they also want to conceal the existence of their planet from humans, and so they callously kill humans whenever they believe they’re at risk of discovery. Interestingly, though, because they are successful in preventing their discovery (which is to say, they are not in a true “first contact” situation with humans), individual Betashans who are in effect second-generation immigrants lack identity and therefore are as socially invisible as most homeless persons in our society must be. Emshwiller’s novel gently, ironically, and yet soberly explores the social marginality and lack of identity that follows on homelessness. In doing so, she refuses the delights of the sense of wonder that usually characterizes encounters between alien species in sf novels even as she offers us the dry, ironic insight of fresh perspective. The Betashans may be extraterrestrials, but the difficulties of communication in this novel result from homelessness and social displacement, not neurological disparity.

The novel’s protagonists, Lorpas and Allush, are the children of extraterrestrial tourists inadvertently stranded on Earth. By the novel’s opening, most of the original visitors have died, waiting for rescue. A servant remains, as well as the now adult (and even aging) children of the “tourists.” While they were waiting for rescue, the tourists’ efforts to indoctrinate their children against human society and culture effectively made it impossible for the second generation to assimilate. None of them owns property or has the education and skills to take any but the most menial jobs. Lorpas, who is the most assimilated of them, sleeps outdoors and takes the occasional odd job---and, lacking a permanent address, is frequently busted by the police for vagrancy. Allush, by contrast, grew up in the “secret city” in the mountains, where Betashans hid themselves as they waited together for rescue.

The “Secret City,” though secret, is not a city. Bored and determined to impress their children with the beauties of “home,” the tourists constructed false doors and arches leading nowhere, carved with Betashan symbols. It is a terrible life, and as the secret city’s population ages and the original generation dies off, the grown children are left with a peculiar notion of “home,” a set of rules they blindly obey, a harsh, tenuous day-to-day existence, and a longing to escape “Down.”

In the first chapter, which I’d read previously as a standalone short story, Lorpas is busted by the police for sleeping in an old lady’s yard; when he escapes, he returns to the old lady’s house (in search of his few possessions, which he concealed under a bush) and for a while lives with and takes care of her. I read the standalone story as ambiguous until the ending resolves it, and constantly wondered: is Lorpas an alien, or is he (or his parents) delusional? (The copy on the book’s back cover makes the answer obvious to the reader.) The signs of his non-humanness are his extraordinary strength—“Here on this world with less gravity, we’re stronger”—and his belief that he possesses the power of “the Freeze.” We get a glimpse of his strength on the first page. Because the police grab him while he was sleeping, before he knows what he’s doing, he’s inflicted physical damage on the officers (because he’s exceptionally strong). He’s locked up with the likelihood of being charged not just with vagrancy, but with assaulting a police officer. When he’s planning his escape from custody, he says

The three Fs: Flight, Fight, or Freeze. I hold one of the mice in my stare. He doesn’t move. I count to twenty, then I let him go. Or maybe he held me and let me go. Or maybe we just stared at each other, one creature to another, and then decided that was enough.(12)

And then he notes, “I won’t need to test the freeze. My strength is why I’ve never needed to try it.” In the standalone story, of course, this passage usefully preserves the ambiguity that is absent in the novel. Later, in an incident parallel to the arrest that opens the novel, he resists being “rescued” when Betashans with weapons confront him. His opponents may be Betashans and therefore stronger, but they “look flabby and pale and ridiculous.” Lorpas, it soon emerges, has been shaped by his social marginality into as autonomous and independent a person as it’s possible for an individual to be.

Regardless of his social marginality and his mother’s efforts to prevent his assimilation into human society, however, Lorpas is well enough socialized into human society to enjoy friendly relations with his jailers (despite his assault on their colleagues). He also manages to make a place for himself in the old lady’s household, and is useful to her even as he makes use of her resources. Later, he wins the trust of a temporary employer even in the face of the trouble Lorpas’s presence brings into his and his daughter’s life. Interestingly, although the individuals Lorpas comes to care most for—Allush and the old servant, Mollish—are Betashans who’ve been living in the secret city for years (whom he loves as a potential mate and a sort of foster mother respectively), he is on the whole more comfortable with humans than with Betashans who have not lived among humans. And when it comes right down to it, he instinctively resists being returned to Betasha. If Earth is not “home,” neither is Betasha.

Perhaps one of the most effective—and also charming—aspects of this novel is the shift in thinking that Emswhiller’s choice of viewpoint characters not only permits but demands of the reader. At the outset Lorpas appears to be a homeless man who believes he’s an extraterrestrial being rousted by the police. I found the voice of his first-person narrative so genial and decent that I was immediately invested in his escape from custody; and by the time he takes up uninvited residence with Ruth, a fragile old lady, my sympathies were full engaged (which would ordinarily not have been the case given similar circumstances and a less engaging character). And at the end of the chapter, when his presence in the old lady’s house ends badly for her, I didn’t hold him at all responsible. Rather, I saw him as allied with humans against Betashans he can’t understand because “they haven’t bothered to learn our language.” Our language, he says: though up until now Lorpas’s “we” has referred to Betashans, and “home” has referred to Betasha.

But on the run from both humans (the police) and “rescuing” Betashans (who behave like police or soldiers), Lorpas stumbles on the Secret City and bonds with another “we”: Allush and Mollish. The Secret City, though, is not a hospitable home, not least because a sociopath named Youpas, another second-generation Betashan stranded on Earth, hates him on sight and is determined to kill him. Lorpas notes several times that Allush is the first woman of the right age who looks like him that he’s ever met, and that her physical appearance appeals to him more than any human woman ever has. Fleeing Youpas, Lorpas again goes on the run, this time with Allush and Mollish, only to be intercepted on a narrow mountain ledge by a second team of Betashan “rescuers,” a situation that results in a couple of deaths and Allush’s instant arrival on Betasha. When Lorpas resumes his flight, it is with a Betashan companion he calls “Jack,” whom tells people is his “retarded brother” (to explain the Betashan’s cultural and linguistic ignorance); and although “Jack’s” learning curve is sharp enough to call the designation of “retarded” into question, as Lorpas says, to humans, all Betashans look alike. Repeatedly, Lorpas passes into new situations that he takes in stride. Repeatedly, Lorpas must evaluate the ethics of each new situation. In Lorpas, Emshwiller gives us a character of integrity, able to adapt to and find an ethical basis for acting in each new circumstance he encounters, despite his social marginality. How can we not cheer him on, seeing our world through his eyes?

Allush, on the other hand, lacks Lorpas’s adaptability and “Jack’s” self-confidence, likely because she knows only the world of the Secret City, which she has been taught is inferior to Betasha; Jack, on the other hand, knows himself to be from a superior world, and so can confront the novelty he encounters as an adventure. The pain of Allush’s marginality is, for that reason, considerably acute. The narrative presents us with a parallel situation: while Lorpas mentors “Jack” in adapting to human culture, Olowpas mentors Allush in adapting to Betashan culture. Jack is fascinated by everything he sees and has a sexual attraction to a teenaged girl, which speeds his acculturation. Allush, who is as ignorant of Betashan language and customs as “Jack” is of English and human customs, by contrast, gets little help and is acutely aware of being a figure of derision on the homeworld; repeatedly her sense of wonder is drowned by the misery of social marginality and her disgust with Betashan food and drink. All her life she has been taught that Betashans are far superior to humans; but from the moment of her arrival on Betasha, she realizes that the apparent glories of Betasha may not be for her. It comes as a great relief to her when she is sent back to Earth on a mission to retrieve “Jack” and the other Betashan rescuer.

If the narrative had been told from “Jack’s” point of view, perhaps it would have been infused with the sense of wonder typical of first contact narratives, for it’s all an adventure to him. But Allush’s narrative, though affording us the perspective of someone repeatedly encountering new and strange technologies and mores, focused as it is on her need to cope with a lack of a place, her lack of status, and her painful losses, is entirely devoid of glamour. Similarly, Lorpas’s narrative is in no way glamorous simply because it is told from the perspective of someone who has been homeless and temporary migrant labor for years. He spends the novel trudging through the mountains on foot, securing food and shelter and clothing while trying to remain invisible to as many as three different parties at a time who may be hunting him.

Similarly, the usual toys of extraterrestrial sf are mere props in this tale, props that not only don’t inspire a sense of wonder, but also demand that the reader take them as givens that won’t bear much scrutiny. The weapons that are also transporters are conveniences of the narrative. But it doesn’t matter, because they simply aren’t the point. Emshwiller’s story is a fable about social marginality and immigrants and homelessness. Her characters’ experiences, emotions, and actions work brilliantly and bring us insight into our world. When I read a story like The Secret City, I have to wonder what Geoff Ryman is talking about when he complains that writing about “magic interstellar travel” (which we find in this novel), extraterrestrials (“there is no evidence whatsoever of intelligences elsewhere in the universe”) is “harmless fun” and wish-fulfillment, “a dream of escaping being human.”[2] But then he seems to be saying that science fiction is supposed to be about creating and living in the future. I myself, however, have always agreed with Samuel R. Delany and so many others who insist that sf is about the world we live in now; to the extent that it helps us understand who we are, it will help us figure out where we want to go and how to do that. For those interested in that kind of window into the future, I highly recommend The Secret City, which is Carol Emshwiller at her brilliant best.

______________________________________

[1] I’ve written about this in “Carol Emshwiller: An Apreciation,” which is available at http://ltimmel.home.mindspring.com And my essay “What’s the Story? Reading Two Early Stories by Carol Emshwiller,” is available on my site as well.

[2] See Geoff Ryman, “Take the Third Star on the Left and on til Morning!” in The New York Review of Science Fiction, June 2007.

We Interrupt These Fascinating Conversations for a Fiction Alert

The latest issue of Farrago's Wainscot is up and includes, among a slew of good stories, poems, and artwork, my story "God Bless." The story is particularly suited for those looking for a brief fiction respite in the middle of the workday: it's quite short -- might even qualify as flash fiction in some definitions of that genre.

Another Brief Conversation with Nisi Shawl

Timmi: Nisi, you wrote in a comment on my conversation with Anna Tambour:

I don't think that analogizing the woman artist/muse relationship from the man artist/muse relationship works. As a writer, I see it more as a process of identification, or rejection of identification, than one of romantic desire. More about a mirror than a kiss. For women artists, our muses are our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, as well as our lovers. Our babysitters. Our deepest and/or highest selves.

At least, that's been my experience.

This raises all sorts of interesting questions for me. About 30 years ago the received idea about male and female psychology was that while “normal, healthy” men desired women (the assumption was that men who desired men were sick and aberrant), women only desired to be desired. At the same time, though, psychologists saw “normal, healthy” girls as learning to identify with their mothers and other adult women (whom they would themselves become as adults). As it happens, I've just had the pleasure of watching Sally Potter’s film Orlando again, and was struck by the scene where Orlando, now a woman wearing a huge hoop skirt in a salon in 1750, listens to Mr. Pope, Mr. Swift, and Mr. Addison make generalizations about women. Mr. Pope looks at her and remarks that she looks angry. All the men look at her and wait to see what she has to say. And she replies something to the effect that though all these poets take women as their muse, they despise women. Though the men protest this characterization of their attitude, they say that women ought to be led by their fathers and husbands. What if they have no father or husband, Orlando asks. Why then they are lost, the men reply. Also apropos to our conversation is that the significance of male desire is played out throughout the film. Near the beginning, when Orlando is a man, he tells Sasha, the woman he is in love with, that she belongs to him simply because he desires her. (She rebuffs him.) Near the end, the Archduke Harry proposes to Orlando and tells her that she belongs to him because he desires her. (She rebuffs him.) Sally Potter is, of course, showing us the modern gendered (albeit pre-1990s) view of desire.

Does the drive to write (the muse function) work differently in men and women? (I’m not implying any sort of essentialist reduction of male and female here: I’m talking instead about most men and most women who make art in our culture without reference to biology. Nurture obviously plays a role.) I ask this question, Nisi, because I have no idea! But I’m certainly interested in exploring it. (And “explore” is probably the correct word, since I’ve long had the sense that desire [though not of a sexual object per se] is the motor of my own drive to create, though since I’ve never thought much about it I’m not at all sure what exactly the nature of that desire is.)

Moreover, although received attitudes about women and desire have recently changed (at least partly, I believe, because lesbians have become considerably more visible and less pathologized), I’m curious as to whether this has had an effect on how younger women conceptualize their drive to write. Are you aware of any changes? Or is it your impression that younger women continue to find identification or a refusal of identification more powerful in their drive to create than sexual desire.

Second, for me first as a young girl and then as an adolescent, identifying with women I admired (whom we called “role models” back then) constituted the most powerful emotional relationships of those years, and such relationships continued to be important to me through my mid-twenties. So when you say that for women artists, our muses are “our deepest and/or highest selves,” I find this a seductive and appealing idea. Your mentioning the “rejection of identification” is equally fascinating. I have an idea of what you mean, but I’d be interested in your elaboration of it.

Third, you say “at least that’s been my experience.” I’d love to hear more specific details of your experience.

Nisi: Oh, there's so much here. So much in your questions, and so much in the mind I draw my answers from.

The first question you ask is whether the muse function, the drive to write (or to create using other arts) works differently for men and women. Perhaps the drive itself is the same. My thought is that women's relationships to that drive are different from those of men. Say, everyone creative wants to create, but the ways we discover and express that desire, how we accommodate it in our lives and recognize it, and what we expect from it, are different.

The identification of arts and civilization with the feminine goes on in many societies, Western and non-. For instance in my African-based spiritual tradition, Ifa, Oshun is the goddess of sexual love, culture, and money. So if the creative drive is feminine, and I perceive myself as feminine, obviously I'm going to have a different relationship with creativity than someone who perceives that they are other than feminine.

The case could be made that the traditional male artist's relationship with the Muse, mapping itself along the lines of romantic and sexual relationships between men and women, is a mere shadow of the more intensely intimate relationships women can achieve.

As a budding writer in the 1970s I was offered the longstanding muse model at the same time that a wave of feminist thought challenged my understanding of sexual roles. I could have done many things in response to the contradiction between my vision of myself as a creative person and the dominant vision of women as inspirational rather than productive. I did do many things, some of them simultaneously, some of them at odds with one another. I played as best I could the muse role to certain men; I chose a woman I loved as my muse; I chose men ditto; I created art that I meant to function as a muse does, causing my audience to create their own art.

Desire played a part in all I did in this regard, of course. Desire is integral to creation. And for me, desire is integral to everything, really; I tend to equate sexual and romantic desire with many other sorts, so that it's easy for me to slip aside from the consideration of the muse as babysitter to that of the muse as crush. I did indeed say that for women the relationship could be likened more to "a mirror than a kiss." That's because the former has been more fruitful to me than the latter. Also, though I didn't say this then, there are so many other paradigms for the muse/female artist relationship that I believe the kiss to be outnumbered: in addition to the lover who gives or withholds that kiss there are the mother, the daughter, the sister, the rival, the teacher, the goddess, the grandmother, the healer.

Here is the one poem I wrote for the woman I wanted for a romantic-model muse, Barbara Drubel:

I Saw Her

I saw her burning flowers
As if death were a gift,
A benison.

She has nothing to make anything out of
But she creates, anyway,
A certain
Destruction.

I've written many, many stories, and two novels, which owe their existence in some sense to the mirror. (Though maybe a better analogy would be a window, one made of Bob Shaw's "slow glass," as in "The Light of Other Days.") In these, my muse is a young girl. She appears as Anniette in "The Rainses'," Ousmani in "The Pragmatical Princess," Mo Kree in "Matched" and The Blazing World, and so on. I love her very much. I court her, and I also try to protect her, and to provide a place for her to have adventures in. In some sense she is my daughter, as I'm older than her and protective of her. In some sense she's my mother, as I have come to be the woman I am through her.

Those "role models" you mention, the women we admire, I call flashlights. Or torches or candles. Stars or moons. We want to burn like them. They show us the way. The only example of my doing this that I can come up with from my finished work at the moment is another poem, "Good Job." It's too long to quote here, I think. It's about my godmother, the Ifa priest Luisah Teish. (I'm working on another story right now that is inspired by Sandy Denny and, in a very roundabout way, by Octavia E. Butler. It probably qualifies also.)

Deep communication with divine creativity is available through possession. Oshun, Ifa goddess of desire and the arts, has spoken directly to me at ceremonies. I have danced with her.

As I've said, the most productive model for me so far has been the mirror. The muse as a version of the self. As I've also said, while part of what happens with this model is the incorporation of the characteristics of whomever or whatever is being cast as mirror, another part is the rejection of or differentiation from them. We do both these things with our mothers, of course; I'm betting there are psychology courses covering that. This is also what friends are for, especially during adolescence. How do I know I'm fat? Because you're thin, and we're different. How do I know I'm a lily? Well, you're a rose, so I most definitely am not. I'm something else.

It's too late to ask Alice Sheldon if that's what went on with her and her mother. It could have. "You're a writer? I must be a painter, then." And perhaps assuming a masculine persona helped her to accept authorhood because it rejected another characteristic of her mother's: her feminine identity.

My mother gave birth to three children. I have none. She had a career as a high-level manager in a government bureaucracy. I freelance. My refusal to follow her example has shaped my whole life, including my life as a writer. I learned in recent years that my mother is afraid to write! It's like climbing on a roof in platform heels for her. How could I not have known that? If I knew it, and at some level I must have, I rejected that fear, would not allow it to become my own.

In your questions you bring up the denigration of women's romantic and sexual desires by the literary and psychological establishments. As I've mentioned, those desires are strong in me, and I believe they're important. I have these kinds of feelings for men as well as other women. I've tried to use various men as inspiration and have gotten the occasional song out of it. That tactic has been a little more successful in terms of quantity than my attempt to do the same thing with Barbara Drubel, but rightly or wrongly, I view the work I've done in this vein as less worthwhile, less significant than my other accomplishments. It's certainly smaller in scope.

Here's what I've mostly seen happening as far as desire and the idealized masculine: groups of young women bonding through their shared attraction to the same male figure (I can't say "the same man" because it often turns out that what they're attracted to bears the same relationship to a human man that the White Goddess bears to Robert Graves's Laura Riding). Desire and idealization are there in these interactions, but they never seem to lead to the creation of great art, unless you count Harry Potter fanfic.

But perhaps this is different for younger women writing. I don't know. Do they even think about muses?

I do feel sexual arousal when writing well. This has nothing to do with what I'm writing. It is all about the act itself. The words turn me on, the shaping and placing of them. The balance and fill of them. The hum. The thrum. The thinking thought, the choices chosen. I'm pleasing myself.

Rather than desiring to be desired, I desire to feel desire, and to be satisfied.

When I write now (and for some time this has been true; I am a bit fuzzy when it comes to dating this sort of stuff) I invoke for a whole boatload of helpers. I invoke my ancestors. I invoke the Trickster, Exu Elegba, who is almost always personified as male. Still, I don't view Exu as my muse in any traditional sense; Exu opens the way but does not necessarily lead me to or along any particular path. In other words, he *enables* my creativity, but that's not the same as compelling, inspiring, or rewarding it. I offer my three Exus honey, sacred to Oshun, and I eat honey myself also. There are other Orisas, spiritual entities, whose aid I ask depending on the story I'm writing. If it's about business, or death and transformation, I invoke Oya; political and social tension and resolution, Yemaya; justice and defending children, Chango; and so on.

The stories themselves come from and through my head. In Ifa cosmology, your Head is venerated as a source of wisdom and a connection to the divine. Your highest and/or deepest self. Your best self. Your true self. Your you.

I hope what I've written here makes sense. It does to me.

Timmi: Thanks, Nisi. You've given me even more to think about. I'd be interested in hearing more about this from other writers, especially younger writers. The muse, after all, is not a subject likely to come up in science fiction writing workshops...

Fiction That Alerts Us to Women's History

Weekend Edition Sunday had an interview this morning with Lisa See about her most recent novel Peony in Love.

The novel is set in 17th Century China and is based on an historical phenomenon of the time known as "lovesick maidens" -- young women who literally starved themselves to death because that was the only part of their lives they could control. It is tied to an opera from 1598 by Tang Xianzu called The Peony Pavilion -- an opera that was banned in its time and is still censored today in China.

Here's how See describes the opera and its affect on women in an essay on the novel on her website:

The Peony Pavilion was the first piece of fiction in the history of China in which the heroine -- a girl of sixteen -- chose her own destiny, and that was both shocking and thrilling. It entranced and fascinated women, who, with rare exceptions, were allowed to read the opera but never see or hear it. The passion this work aroused has been compared to the fanaticism for Goethe’s Werther in 18th-century Europe or more recently, in the United States, for Gone with the Wind. In China, young educated women from wealthy families -- typically between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, and with their marriages already arranged -- were particularly susceptible to the story. Believing that life imitates art, they copied [the heroine] Liniang: They gave up food, wasted away, and died, all in hopes that somehow in death they might be able to choose their destinies, just as the ghost of Liniang had.

Two other things really struck me from listening to See and looking at her website. First, in the mid-17th Century, China had more published women authors -- literally thousands of them -- than the rest of the world combined (and yes, apparently some of that work is still available, though she didn't say if any of it has been translated from the Chinese). And second, she points out that because of the political upheaval of that time:

men left the front gate open and women, who had long lived in seclusion, went out. They became professional writers, artists, archers, historians, and adventurers. Other women -- in what might be considered an early form of the book group -- gathered together to write poetry, read books, and discuss ideas.

Alas, this brief period was shut down toward the end of the century: women were told "there was no 'writing' or 'self' in the four virtues" and were pushed back into silence.

I'm intrigued enough to want to read the book and am even more interested in finding out much more about 17th Century China. We come across bits and pieces of similar stories from other cultures from time to time, though it strikes me that so far most of the hidden history of women that historians have uncovered has focused on individual women. I wonder how many more outbreaks of feminism -- for that strikes me as the best way to describe a time when women previously confined to the home became "writers, artists, archers, historians, and adventurers" -- are still hidden in humanity's collective past.

And considering the efforts of the Christian religious right in the US, and fundamentalist movements that limit the role of women in various religions through out the world, I hope our own breakthroughs will not be wiped out as well, to become a bit of history some other writer discovers 400 years hence.