I’m going to disappoint you. This post isn’t about C. S. Lewis and his racism towards Middle Eastern people. This post isn’t about Tolkien’s coding of Sauron’s allies and Easterlings. It’s about authors whose works and worlds are almost as famous as Narnia and Middle-Earth. So let’s prepare yourself for Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, and Tamora Pierce being criticized.
So, you could have heard of what is orientalism and how it manifests itself, and that the concept was described the most widely by Edward Wadie Said. Yes, recently I’m a lot into Said and his works, and his awareness of how a text is a product of its culture. And its biases. Orientalism has several meanings, but one of them is showing Middle East, or Asia in general, in a stereotypical way. It creates a dychotomy which presents the East as mysterious, superstitious and sensual, and the West as well-known, rational, and moderate. The East is shown as inherently alien, and inherently detached from the West. Eastern people can’t speak for themselves or govern themselves. Western people do it for them.
Are there these aforementioned harmful tropes related to works of Pratchett, Wynne-Jones, and Pierce? Surely, they are.
Terry Pratchett, in such books as “Sourcery” or “Moving Pictures” may not show the East (or its evocation) as in the need of white control, but he certainly shows it as “exotic” and alien. Ank-Morpork, Lancre, and other northern states and cities are the deafault on Discworld. Klatch, a strange mixture of West Asia, India, and some of Africa (because it’s roughly the same, you know) is always unfamiliar or, at best, sprinkled with those several elements a Westerner can evoke and comprehend. The said elements include curry, palms, deserts, elephants, “exotic” tribes, turbans, luxury, and, of course, sexuality. One can see it especially as Rincewind, one of the protagonists of “Sourcery”, is baffled by erotic carvings displayed on the walls of the biggest Klatch’s city. East is strange and sensual, West is familiar and moderate, remember. Several years later, George R.R. Martin did literally the same, showing the city of Quarth as “oriental” and sensuous in his second installment of ASoIaF. So, no improvement. And the sad thing is that Pratchett, writing against stereotypes as he did many times, didn’t confront his (and readers’) stereotypes on “the Orient”. I don’t mean that he did it maliciously and in aim of purposeful ridiculing West Asia and North Africa’s people. But his book series is a product of an empire, of Anglo-Saxon and Brititsh cultural domination. And Britons of colour won’t find themselves represented there just as ordinary human beings, I’m afraid. Thus, if I prefer Discworld books not about Klatch, that’s not becasue I don’t want Middle-Eastern people to be shown in fantasy genre. I want them to be represented. Not orientalized.
The same can be said of “Castle in the Air” a book by Diana Wynne Jones which left me with an impression that if you don’t know how to write about people of colour, you’d better don’t write about them at all.
The protagonist, Abdullah, is an orphaned son of a merchant, a dreamy boy who falls in love with a princess. Meanwhile, princesses from all over the world are kidnapped by a half-demon and imprisoned in his eponymous castle in the air, and Abdullah’s love interest is one of them. Abdullah is described as a dusky guy with hawkish featues, a thing which quite falls into the stereotype of how Middle-Eastern people look like. Abdullah is also diminished by the family of his stepmother, the first wife of his father. That family offers him a marriage to twin sisters with an overweight. Who are ugly because they are overweight. And of course that in those exotic Arabian-like lands everybody has at least two wives, didn’t you know? So yes, the book definitely has problems with fatfobia and ethnic/racial stereotypes. Of course, it’s nice when sometimes the said stereotypes are reversed; for example, Abdullah points out that inhabitants of his homeland are usually cleaner than the white-coded northerners. But fightning stereotypes isn’t about perpetuating another set of them, it’s about freeing our culture from them. Or at least trying to do it. Again, I don’t mean that “Castle in the Air” is an “evil” book you should by no means read if you strive to be antiracist and antixenophobic. I just mean that there are fantasy books where WENA/MENA people are represented in a better way. By themselves. Just check Renee Ahdieh, Tahereh Mafi, Hafsah Faizal and many other contemporary fantasy authors.
And here we get to “Alanna: the First Adventure”, a 1983 book by Tamora Pierce which is orientalist in yet another way. It’s a story of Alanna, a girl who wants to be a knight in her brother’s stance, and so she is passing as a boy, becoming a page. Orientalist elements pop up only by the end of the story. What their background is? The majority white kingdom of Tortall has colonized a desert nation of Bazhir, who are clearly coded as Middle Eastern. The Bazhirs do not trust the people of Tortall but in the book it is implied that they actually benefit from the colonization, and that it is good that the governor doesn’t like them and they don’t like him, because this mistrust is for some reason fair. I hope that I don’t need to highlight how toxic it is, and how harmful, to reproduce neo-colonial and imperialist apologetics in a story where your default character are white? In any story, actually?
But here’s the thing. Tamora Pierce is one of those authors who’s redeemed herself, and even long before diversity in the genre became a thing. She introduced Black and Brown characters in her 1990’s series “Circle of Magic”. And those characters aren’t tokens or merely Best Pals and Buddies of the protagonists. They are protagonists themselves. Just as in later books on Tortall people of colour appear in all but the way the Bazhirs were described. It doesn’t mean that Tamora Pierce has solved all the problems with her writing on PoC people, especially on people coded as Middle Eastern. Making a good representation of particular group of people of colour dosen’t mean that the writer represents other people of colour in a valid way. But the question of the said representation has certainly improved in her novels since the 1980’s and in comparison to many other authors, it was fresh and groundbreaking. There are authors who have learnt how to add diversity into their universe, even if it was a gradual progress. Tamora Pierce is one of them. Terry Pratchett and Dian Wynne Jones, I’m afraid, weren’t such authors. It doeasn’t mean that you shouldn’t read their fantasy classics. It only means that as every human being, they had their biases.
Left Hand of Fiction 