Yesterday, I finished everything except the final grading for the semester: there are no more conferences, wired doorbell chimes no more committee meetings, no more emails in the middle of the night to students who are having difficulty with their final portfolios. Today, I met with some of the wonderful people who will be involved in distributing and publicizing The Thorn and the Blossom wired doorbell chimes . And I finally got some sleep.
Tonight, I wanted to write about a blog post that Nnedi Okorafor posted yesterday. In case you don’t know, Nnedi is a wonderful writer, the author of books such as Zahrah the Windseeker , Who Fears Death , and Akata Witch . (I was fortunate enough to have her in my Clarion class.) The post was called “ wired doorbell chimes Lovecraft s Racism & the World Fantasy Award Statuette, with Comments from China Miéville .” This year, Who Fears Death won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. wired doorbell chimes Nnedi is the first black writer to have won the award. All of the World Fantasy Awards look like the head of H.P. Lovecraft. wired doorbell chimes Like this (on the right, next to the poet Elah Gal and some other wonderful works of art that I need to frame, hang, or both):
The post is about her realization that Lovecraft was a racist, and her thoughts about having a statue of his head on her shelf. It’s smart and thoughtful, and it includes some additional wired doorbell chimes thoughts from China Miéville, last year’s Best Novel winner for The City and the City , who has written on Lovecraft.
“Anyway, a statuette of this racist man s head is in my home. A statuette of this racist man s head is one of my greatest honors as a writer. A statuette of this racist man s head sits beside my Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa and my Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award (an award given to the best speculative fiction by a person of color). I m conflicted.”
“Do I want ‘The Howard’ (the nickname for the World Fantasy Award statuette. Lovecraft s full name is ‘Howard Phillips Lovecraft’) replaced with the head of some other great writer? Maybe. Maybe it s about that time. Maybe not. What I know I want is to face the history of this leg of literature rather wired doorbell chimes than put it aside or bury it. If this is how some of the great minds of speculative fiction felt, then let s deal with that . . . as opposed to never mention it or explain it away. If Lovecraft s likeness and name are to be used in connection to the World Fantasy Award, I think there should be some discourse wired doorbell chimes about what it means to honor a talented racist.”
I think this is a wonderful conversation to have, and a wonderful time to have it, and I’ll tell you where I stand: I think the award should be changed, although not because of Lovecraft’s racism.
That racism is real, and not excusable: the sort of instinctive and virulent racism you see in some of his writing was more accepted during wired doorbell chimes the time period (I’ve seen plenty of examples in my research), but there were plenty wired doorbell chimes of people then, as now, fighting those attitudes. I’ve seen evidence that Lovecraft may have changed his views later in life, but I think Miéville is right to point out that fear and hatred of a racial other was at the heart of many of Lovecraft’s stories. So we need to talk about how we read Lovecraft.
But the award itself should be changed because it purports to be a “world” “fantasy” award, and Lovecraft does not represent either of those terms adequately. He is an important American writer wired doorbell chimes who represents one particular strain in the long, rich history of fantasy. That history originates in myth and folklore, and its recent wired doorbell chimes development includes other figures such as George MacDonald, wired doorbell chimes Lord Dunsany, C.S. Lewis, Hope Mirrlees, wired doorbell chimes and of course J.R.R. Tolkien, who also influenced the development of the genre in important ways. The award should not be a bust of any one person. Tolkien talked wired doorbell chimes about the soup of story, about the ways in which writers put something into the soup and take something out. We are all drawing out of the soup, and there have been many cooks involved.
I’ve heard some suggestions about what the award should be, so I’ll add my own. I think the award should be different each year, and it should be designed by a contemporary fantasy artist. Imagine winning an award designed by Shaun Tan or Charles Vess or Omar Rayyan! That would also recognize the wonderful work being done in fantasy art, which is such an important part of book publication in this “genre” (a word I use for convenience, since I don’t think fantasy is a genre).
Now, back to Lovecraft. wired doorbell chimes How do you read a writer when some of his views are reprehensible? This is how I think about the issue. For me, literature has a life of its own. It is never reducible to its creators. I know that when I write a story, wired doorbell chimes when it’s good and it’s vital and it lives, it contains more than I consciously p
MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment