Michele Lee

This month I talk about my experiences self publishing and why “traditional” publishing isn’t dead yet.

There is a post here about underrepresented cultures in SFF and a post here where a commentor calls out another commentor who dismissed my friend Maurice Broaddus‘ book King Maker (actually they cite all of Maurice’s work) as an example of a minority author forcing “their” politics on readers.

I have two initial reactions to this. First, I was really excited about the concept of King Maker and thought a black inner city gangland was a bloody brilliant place to put a King Arthur story. More than the very apparent war-like, broken land atmosphere I also had full confidence that Maurice would put in some sort of commentary on one of the aspect of racism I find most abhorrent, the condemning of people as “acting white” or “selling out” for pursuing education. This is a personal soft point because there really are worse and certainly more dangerous bits in racism, but the very idea of denying someone education or hating them for seeking an education because they’re a certain race, gender, income range or at a certain family status (like childless people who throw fits over paying taxes for school because they “aren’t benefiting from it”) is utter bullshit because I believe EVERYONE benefits from a more educated society and the pursuit of knowledge and ability to analyze knowledge and use it should be a celebrated skill.

However I didn’t like King Maker. Oh I really really liked parts of it. The parts directly related to the theme, but I thought the book was too slow to establish and use that world. Way way too slow.

But my disappointment isn’t going to stop me from sitting with Sam Sykes in asking “What the hell?”

Because my second initial reaction to the original comment was “Have you READ SF lately??” What’s winning awards and is getting all the buzz is usually very political period. So much of the SF I read is making some sort of statement, often on humanism, environmentalism, population control, colonialism, war, the nature of religion, the increasing corporate control on genes including gene specific drugs and genetically modified foods…to name just a few.

SF comes from such a political and sociological/anthropological place these days that chiding POC authors for including their politics in their stories is completely ridiculous. I have to ask the original commentor (and you really should read at least Sam Sykes’ blog entry on the matter because it’s better than mine, and contains less cursing, and it focuses on “books I don’t like doesn’t equal crap” which I can’t even get to in this little rant) are you really saying that it’s okay for the white writers to go political but black writers doing so is unacceptable? That’s pretty much a textbook example of racism in my book.

Which, of course, brings me to my book.

In Rot there was only one black character. This was purposeful. She had a very small, and possibly cliched role as a voodoo priestess. I debated over it a lot (I also debated that Patrick was too much, too blatant, and of course that the whole thing was a cliched pit of suck.) and in the end I went with it because yeah, she’s the only black person in the book, but she’s the only level-headed, intelligent character. And it seemed ridiculous to have zombies and not have at least a little nod to voodoo.

Right now I’m working on a book length sequel to Rot. Dean from Rot and the voodoo priestess, Em, are two of four primary characters. Three of those four characters are black. I’m nervous about this decision.

I’m scared that I’m going to come at this story the wrong way, or miss some essential part. Mind you I’m always scared of that when writing stories, but I feel a little extra responsibility to be well researched and to write well with Last Brother because it’s not in my default realm of knowledge. Also, it’s been fun to research too.

From what I know, many branches of voodoo are really open. They have a patron loa of gays and transexuals and even a separate one that covers lesbians. Many houses accept people regardless of race, and the religion is even so flexible at its heart that it can easily be practiced with other religions. Quite simply is can be one of the most tolerance religions out there and is heavily aimed at promoting a healthy, strong community.

But voodoo’s roots are very clearly African (primarily West African, but go back very, very far). The African diaspora to Haiti/West Indies had significant changes on voodoo, leading to entirely new interpretations of their traditions and the loa themselves, even giving rise to a whole new family of loa, who reflected the rage of people forced into slavery not just by whites, but by their own people (Dahomey was a vicious place). When the migration to America came it changed things again, and yet today one studying voodoo could simultaneously study West African, Haitian and New World voodoo at the same time.

Given how vital these things have been to the very shape of the practice there was no way I could white wash my lead. It would be better for me to make a mistake and have to apologize for it than to fail completely by being too damned scared to write the story correctly in the first place.

So yeah, I’m nervous that I’m going to be put under fire for something in the book, thought what, I couldn’t tell you. Rot was called to task once for the voice–that of a middle aged white male–being unconvincing. I don’t see how I could do Murphy, the lead of Last Brother, any worse. And in the end without Murphy I couldn’t tell this tale, because it’s his story not some generic majority race, majority gender, majority religion stand in’s.