Trash Talk Tuesday: Review of The House of the Scorpion

"Very dark indeed is his majesty when he wants to be. 

When he was young he made a choice, 

like a tree does when it decides to grow one way or the other. 

He grew large and green until he shadowed over the whole forest, 

but most of his branches are twisted."

-Nancy Farmer, The House of the Scorpion

There are some children's books that I read and my brain screams "How is this for children!?" Some people argue that children aren't capable of grasping the concept they are reading. I don't agree with that. I believe that children understand the horrors and sadness they are reading/watching/hearing but they don't have the words yet to explain their grief. I thought about this a lot throughout the course of reading Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion.

I wish I had read this book as a child. It is a shocking and intense introduction to science fiction. I wanted to cry so many times throughout reading it. 

My only "trash talk" about this book is that I wouldn't call it feminist. The women were mostly bad mothers because they cared about political issues or evil or cute little girls who want to save kittens. Only Celia was a feminist character but even that could be argued. 

This was a great coming of age novel that dealt with too much for one child. Which is why I wanted to cry so often. I suggest this book for people who love science fiction and children's stories. You should also read it if you want to read a story about a character of color. 

The House of the Scorpion is about science, corruption, power, and what it means to be human. Strangely, it is both a celebration of the will to live and the acceptance of death. My overall score would be a 3.5.

Writing Wednesday: The obligation to write non-white characters

 “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” 

-Toni Morrison

This is a touchy subject, but one that has been brought up a lot throughout my writing classes, and even in conversations with friends. I was reminded of this subject, once again, after reading the article: Young Adult Books Too Often Present a World Without People of Color from Bitch Magazine the other day. I agree completely that we too often have to read books about white characters without any mention of people of color, and that if there are characters of color they are read as white rather than as the ethnicity the author intended. Anyone else remember the racist posts on Twitter about The Hunger Games film? Oh, how I wish those were some terrible joke.

Is the problem with the writer? Or is the problem with what is published? Or is the problem the readers? I find the problem to be all three.

What is a white author's obligation to write non-white characters? Having spoken to several professors about it, the obligation seem to come simply from being a writer. You don't only write about your boring life. You write about other experiences, other worlds, other timelines. Why not write about someone who doesn't look like you? The moment this idea really hit home for me was when a professor asked, "You don't worry about a man telling you don't understand the experience of the male you are writing, do you?"

As a writer, I find the problem to be choosing the right words.There is no way to please everyone, but in matters of race and ethnicity I feel as though there is no winning with anyone. Either I blatantly describe my character as Hispanic and someone tells that I know nothing about the experience of a Hispanic person, so I'm a bad writer. Or, I subtly have my character speak Spanish or have a Hispanic name and someone still reads the character as white, so I'm a bad writer. This problem usually causes me to stick with names I deem to be "American" and let people imagine them as anything. But we live in a culture that has raised us to read all characters as white unless told otherwise. We need to rectify that problem.

In the end, no one has an "obligation" to write characters into their novels that aren't white. But do you really know no one of another ethnicity? Are you too scared to write about "them"? My biggest question to the people who publish books that are only about white people is WHY? There are plenty of writers in the world who are better writers with better ideas who aren't afraid. Go find some better writers and publish them. The world will thank you for it.

Recommended reading:
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison