On the "r" word.

I expect I'll get in trouble for this post.

This past week, Toni Morrison died at the age of 88. She was one of my favorite authors. When I was in grad school, I wrote a paper about her -- which in no way makes me an expert, but it did give me an enduring appreciation for her work. 

Morrison was a major voice in American literature. The power of her prose was strongest when describing and explaining what we might call the black experience -- including the effects on blacks of racism, as in The Bluest Eye, and of the institution of slavery, as in Beloved.

I was reading a whole bunch of hyphenated-American literature back then: among them, Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, and Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (which he later adapted into the screenplay for Smoke Signals, a movie I highly recommmend). All of these books are magic realism, and so too is Beloved. And in all of them except Allende's book, racism plays a role.

I grew up with the classical definition of racism -- which, according to Merriam-Webster, is:

1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

2a : a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles

b : a political or social system founded on racism

3 : racial prejudice or discrimination

But the "r" word has gotten thrown around a lot in recent years, to the point where it almost means anything the writer or speaker wants it to mean. I know English is a living language and the meanings of words change -- but too often, over the years, racism as a term has been co-opted and redefined to benefit a particular political agenda. 

Ten or twenty years ago, I was running into conservatives who would call me out for my support of things like diversity policies in the college admissions process and accuse me of reverse racism -- of favoring other races over my own, to the point of advocating discrimination against whites. At the time, I filed their opinions under Things that make you go "Huh?" Nowadays, it appears conservatives have shortened the term to just racism, which is really confusing to those of us who are used to hewing to the dictionary definition of the word. Of course, for folks who like to keep people they think of as smartass liberals off-balance, that obfuscation is part of the charm.

Lately I've been seeing a similar but opposite co-opting of the word on the left. Many African-Americans correctly maintain that many white people don't understand or acknowledge the privilege their pale skin affords them in our society. But then some make a sweeping generalization and say all whites fall into that category -- that is, no white person anywhere understands or acknowledges their white privilege. And then some black folks go even further and say all whites, by definition, are racists.

That seems like an unfair generalization -- particularly when racist has, for years, been an insult. But pointing that out opens me to a charge of trying to move the focus back to me and my experience as a white person, which is not my aim at all. And let me make it explicitly clear that I am not equating this usage of racism with the pretzel logic conservatives employ when they use the word.

But we can all agree, I think, that sweeping generalizations are almost always wrong. I think we can all agree as well that the word racist has historically been considered an insult. If you want to keep your allies on your side, insulting them is not a winning strategy.

Certainly, there are racist white people out there who Just Don't Get It, like the interviewer in this video of Toni Morrison that went viral in the days following her death. But not all of us are like that woman. We get where you're coming from. We support you. Please don't run us off.

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These moments of bloggy strategy have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Why the words must come.

Pexels.com | CC0

I have a confession to make. I haven't been writing much of anything for the past couple of months. I've posted a lot on Facebook, and I've written my weekly posts here, and my monthly posts at Indies Unlimited. But it's been hard to get myself to the computer to write fiction when there's a virtual fire hose two blocks from my day job, spewing streams of shocking stuff each day. And if that's not enough, I've also been distracted by some personal business related to my mother's estate.

And yet, I need to write. All of us who tell stories need to write. Because art -- which includes literature -- is one of the few things that will help us get through this crazy time with our minds intact.

Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison wrote about it in The Nation in 2005. She recounted a conversation with a friend that had occurred just after George W. Bush had been declared the winner of the 2004 presidential election. She blurted to her friend how much the election had upset her -- so much so that she couldn't write.

I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting, "No! No, no no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work -- not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That's our job!"

I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed.

Despots, she goes on to say, "routinely begin their reigns" by destroying art. Imagination, as well as critical thinking, are their enemies. The dictator's subjects cannot be allowed to envision another way to live. They cannot be allowed to think any truth other than the party line -- because as soon as the despot's facade cracks, it will come tumbling down.

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

The concerns of 2004 seem almost quaint, compared with what we're facing today. But Morrison is right. It's at times like these that our stories are more important than ever.

So please excuse me for this shorter-than-usual post. I've got some writing to do.

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These critically important moments of blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Post mortem: Banned Books Week 2013.

From the organizers, as tweaked by Kriss Morton.

Yesterday was the final day of this year's Banned Books Week. In my usual timely manner, I'm late to the party. My justification for talking about it now is that, like most observances of this sort, we should be vigilant about the suppression of books, and the ideas in them, all year long.

And not only because I fully expect the Pipe Woman Chronicles will make the list one of these days, if I ever get famous enough.

Look at any list of banned books, in any given year, and you'll find entries from the sublime to the ridiculous.Take the 2012 list. I mean, okay, Fifty Shades of S&M makes sense. Right? But Toni Morrison's Beloved won a Pulitzer, for gods' sake, and Morrison herself won the Nobel for literature in 1992. And what's the deal with Captain Underpants, anyway? [A pause while I go googling...] Hmm, okay, I get it now. It's subversive -- the kids disobey authority. Never mind that our nation was founded by a bunch of guys who disobeyed authority.

But I digress.

Tor.com ran a series of blog posts about banned books this week, and one of them talked about Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. Like many sci-fi and fantasy novels that tackle religion, Pullman sets his series in what amounts to an alternate universe. The "evil overlords" are represented by Mrs. Coulter, but it's clear that what Pullman is really jabbing at is organized religion -- a point that was not lost on the Catholic League when "The Golden Compass," the movie version of the first book, was released in 2007. The group mounted a protest against the books, saying they were "written to promote atheism and denigrate Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism."

Pullman more or less copped to the charge in an interview with the Guardian after he won a major British literary prize, the Whitbread, in 2002. In it, he said:

The original impulses of the great religious geniuses -- with whom I include Jesus -- were, as often as not, something that all of us would benefit from studying and living by. The churches and priesthoods would benefit more than most, but they dare not.... [I]n my view, belief in God seems to be a very good excuse, on the part of those who claim to believe, for doing many wicked things that they wouldn't feel justified in doing without such a belief.

(That's not far too afield from where the Pipe Woman Chronicles end up. Alas, my series lacks Pullman's subtlety. But I digress again.)

The fight against book banning, and in favor of free speech, has been going on pretty much forever, and no one expects it to end any time soon. Whenever an author -- whether it be Dav Pilkey (who wrote the Captain Underpants books) or Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale) or Philip Pullman or Toni Morrison -- tweaks the nose of someone in authority, authority is going to try to silence that author. That's why the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is the first amendment: to protect those who dare to speak truth to power.

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Thanks to those of you who took advantage of the free days this week and downloaded the first two Land, Sea, Sky stories. Please stick around -- there's more to come. The third story, "Prophecy," will go live next month, and the first draft of Crosswind is officially in the can.  I've got a Pinterest board set up already, too, for the gods and goddesses in the new series. Why, yes, September has been a busy month...

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These moments of unbanned blogginess are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Urban fantasy and magic realism: a matter of agency.

I'm participating today (a couple of hours early, my time) in the Magic Realism Blog Hop organized by fellow indie author Zoe Brooks. 

We had a discussion about magic realism here on the blog a couple of months ago; if you missed it, click here and scroll down to the comments.  I won't reiterate that discussion, other than to say that I still think "alternative realism" is a better descriptive name for the genre, mainly because it takes the "taint" of magic out of play.

What I'm hoping to do today is to talk about whether urban fantasy and magic realism could ever find common ground.

First, a couple of quick definitions. Urban fantasy is a sub-genre of fantasy.  Unlike, say, The Lord of the Rings and other epic fantasies, urban fantasy is not set in a pre-mechanistic historical period.  Its setting is the present day, give or take a few decades, and so the characters can use cellphones and drive cars. But just as in, say, LotR, magical creatures appear, sometimes as guides to the clueless humans and sometimes as their nemeses.  In many cases, magical creatures are among the main characters. And magical tools (swords, clubs, bespelled books and scrolls) may be wielded by both the heroes and their enemies.  (Feel free to argue amongst yourselves over whether I've forgotten anything and/or painted with too broad a brush.)

Magic realism can be set in pretty much any time period -- so a present-day setting is conceivable.  And magic of a sort occurs.  The difference, I think, is in who wields the magic and how, and the reactions of the other characters when magic happens.  The magic in magic realism is woven into the fabric of society.  In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita weeps into the batter for the wedding cake she's making for her sister and Pedro, the man whom Tita loves. The cake is thereby transformed: all of the wedding guests who eat it become literally lovesick. Tita's mother beats her for poisoning the cake.  But no magical creature intervened, and Tita used no magic whisk or spoon or recipe; Tita simply cried, and her tears worked the magic of their own accord.

This, I think, is the crucial difference between urban fantasy and magic realism: urban fantasy requires an agent to deliberately effect the magical change.

Another difference is the characters' reactions to the occurrence of magic. Going back to LotR, Frodo and his pals can feel the pull of the One Ring, and they know it's not normal.  But in magic realism, the magic is taken as a matter of course.  Nobody in Like Water for Chocolate doubts for a moment that Tita's tears could have affected them so profoundly.

I should mention one other point. Magic realism is often described as giving a voice to those who have traditionally had no voice: the repressed and the dispossessed.  Tita's controlling mother thwarts her at every turn, so her emotions find an outlet in her cooking. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, the ghost of a runaway slave's dead child literally becomes bigger than anything else in her family.

So could the elements of magic realism be incorporated into urban fantasy? Maybe, but it would be tough going.  Fantasy has certainly given voice to the dispossessed in the past -- think of any coming-of-age story in which a kid grows into his or her birthright.  Magic without agency could conceivably be pulled off; anybody could cry magic tears into cake batter.  But one of the conceits of urban fantasy is that the fantastic is happening right under our noses -- it's just that most of us either aren't equipped to spot it, or are more than willing to explain it away.  The culture of the story would have to be modified so that normal people would accept odd goings-on without batting an eye -- and that strays over the line into parallel-universe territory.

So in the end, I'm doubtful that an urban magic realism fantasy could be pulled off.  If you think otherwise, please leave a comment and let's talk.

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Want to read more about magic realism? Scroll down! (Note that the event lasts through Wednesday, so some of these links won't be live 'til then.)






And as a further enticement to blog-hopping, Zoe's arranged a little giveaway.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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These moments of bloggy alternative realism are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.