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Representation Matters
Apr. 1st, 2018 01:05 pmA bit of literary heresy —
Representation never made a lick of difference to me when I was a child.
Maybe it was growing up in segregated Louisiana. I knew there were Black doctors, lawyers, etc. Maybe it was a solid family structure who told me that I could be anything. I don’t know.
But I read the Narnia books, Asimov and Norton, and hundreds of others (I spend almost all of my free time in the library) without noticing that those books did not “represent” me. That they excluded me. I was going to be some type of scientist or engineer. That’s what my parents encouraged and I drowned science and science fiction like those seven and a half ounce Coca Colas that we used to buy at the neighborhood drug store.
It wasn’t until I got to college, to LSU, that I met professors who were still trying to adjust to women in their classrooms. Let alone Black women. We were constantly subjected to tales of how engineers solved complaints about a slow elevator by placing mirrors in the elevator lobby. That stopped the complaints from the secretaries—get it? It wasn’t until my second or third year there until my mother told me about the high school counselor (not my counselor, thank G-d) that told them that while I might have stood out at a Black school that I would never make it at LSU. They were only too glad to show her the school newspaper showing that I was on the Dean’s List at LSU.
And I probably didn’t read Heinlein juveniles until I was in college. I didn’t hear of them before then. I think it was “Podkayne of Mars” that made me realize that many of my favorite writers had a particular type of blindness. “Time Enough for Love” had felt liberating. In “Podkayne of Mars”, the only thing I remember about the book is the main character’s disdain for her parent’s choice to store their fertilized eggs and ‘uncork’ their children when they were ready for them. Indeed, most of the disdain was directed toward the mother avoiding her true function in life. After that, no more Heinlein.
I am an adherent of representative novels. I buy them. I vote for them for Hugos—when I like them. Sometimes, they offer me a window into a culture I don’t know. Sometimes, they decorate a room of a cultural house that I inhabit.
I am, nonetheless, torn by the representation argument. I refuse to believe that kids can not pour themselves into any imaginative vase available. I loved the imagery of DuVernay’s “Wrinkle in Time” but I loved that book when I read it in elementary school. I loved it enough to buy as an adult when I was long past its target age range. If you asked me, I couldn’t have recited L’Engle’s description of Meg, because I was Meg.
I guess I am saying that I want them both. I want the kids who feel left out because their books have no inhabitants of the future who are people of color to have them. But I want them to also inhabit those books that don’t explicitly have them. Snatch those ideas out of the hands of their oppressors and make them their own. Be the future LSU professors that know that women and POC can be anything.
Representation never made a lick of difference to me when I was a child.
Maybe it was growing up in segregated Louisiana. I knew there were Black doctors, lawyers, etc. Maybe it was a solid family structure who told me that I could be anything. I don’t know.
But I read the Narnia books, Asimov and Norton, and hundreds of others (I spend almost all of my free time in the library) without noticing that those books did not “represent” me. That they excluded me. I was going to be some type of scientist or engineer. That’s what my parents encouraged and I drowned science and science fiction like those seven and a half ounce Coca Colas that we used to buy at the neighborhood drug store.
It wasn’t until I got to college, to LSU, that I met professors who were still trying to adjust to women in their classrooms. Let alone Black women. We were constantly subjected to tales of how engineers solved complaints about a slow elevator by placing mirrors in the elevator lobby. That stopped the complaints from the secretaries—get it? It wasn’t until my second or third year there until my mother told me about the high school counselor (not my counselor, thank G-d) that told them that while I might have stood out at a Black school that I would never make it at LSU. They were only too glad to show her the school newspaper showing that I was on the Dean’s List at LSU.
And I probably didn’t read Heinlein juveniles until I was in college. I didn’t hear of them before then. I think it was “Podkayne of Mars” that made me realize that many of my favorite writers had a particular type of blindness. “Time Enough for Love” had felt liberating. In “Podkayne of Mars”, the only thing I remember about the book is the main character’s disdain for her parent’s choice to store their fertilized eggs and ‘uncork’ their children when they were ready for them. Indeed, most of the disdain was directed toward the mother avoiding her true function in life. After that, no more Heinlein.
I am an adherent of representative novels. I buy them. I vote for them for Hugos—when I like them. Sometimes, they offer me a window into a culture I don’t know. Sometimes, they decorate a room of a cultural house that I inhabit.
I am, nonetheless, torn by the representation argument. I refuse to believe that kids can not pour themselves into any imaginative vase available. I loved the imagery of DuVernay’s “Wrinkle in Time” but I loved that book when I read it in elementary school. I loved it enough to buy as an adult when I was long past its target age range. If you asked me, I couldn’t have recited L’Engle’s description of Meg, because I was Meg.
I guess I am saying that I want them both. I want the kids who feel left out because their books have no inhabitants of the future who are people of color to have them. But I want them to also inhabit those books that don’t explicitly have them. Snatch those ideas out of the hands of their oppressors and make them their own. Be the future LSU professors that know that women and POC can be anything.
