Describing characters of color in writing, pt 3 - N. K. Jemisin

I was re-reading a favorite novel lately, because its sequel is coming out soon and I wanted to refresh in preparation. Anyway, I was struck by the fact that it contained really good descriptions of several characters of color. So I thought that book — Griffin’s, below — deserved a shout-out, as do some others I’ve read that stuck in my mind. Which means — you guessed it — time for another post on describing characters of color! Other People’s PoC (OPPoC) Edition.

(Previous iterations here and here.)

As with the previous articles, this isn’t a claim or judgment on what’s right or wrong. In this case, they’re just descriptions of people of color in fiction I’ve read and liked. Also, I’m annotating this because good descriptions aren’t just a matter of picking the right adjectives; sometimes there are worldbuilding techniques or stylistic tricks involved.

From Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games:

This one isn’t a quote, but a worldbuilding note. I don’t often see science fiction or fantasy novels dealing with the ways in which race itself — who belongs to which group over time, what characteristics have which meanings, etc. — changes and evolves over time, but this book tried to. I spent awhile trying to figure out the protagonist’s race, the first time I read this YA book. Katniss supposedly comes from what used to be Appalachia in the United States, which is a predominantly (and stereotypically) poor white region, yet she’s described in the story as having straight black hair and olive skin. Later, it becomes clear that the people of each district are so isolated from each other that they’ve essentially homogenized; each district’s citizens have become their own recognizable, unique phenotype (though probably all of them are multiracial). So the people from District 11 are mostly dark-brown-skinned i.e. black; the people from the protagonist’s district resemble American Indians, east Asians, or light-skinned Latina/o people; and — in what I thought was a very nice touch — the people of the Capital play games with race, surgically coloring themselves blue if they feel like it, or dyeing their hair pink. It highlights the difference between this ruling class, for whom race is malleable and optional, and the oppressed classes, who have had their races imposed on them.

From Carol Berg’s Transformation:

A similar worldbuilding trick to The Hunger Games: this novel (first of the Rai-Kirah trilogy) is set in a secondary world in which the races never corresponded to ours. For example, one of the main characters is a member of an Arablike desert-dwelling tribe of pale-skinned redheads. The protagonist is something like an American Indian (despite the first book’s cover art). I’m starting to see more of this in fantasy — and have used the trick myself, to some degree — but it isn’t always handled well. Too often the darker-skinned characters read to me like white people with Boehner-tans and “exotic” long hair. (Oh. Ohhhh, that wasn’t an image I wanted in my head. Oh, no.) There are rarely corresponding cultural differences, or consequences to those differences. Berg doesn’t skirt either.

Anyway, in the below scene, the protagonist meets a member of an enemy race.

How could I have failed to notice how different he was? White-blond hair cut short and straight about his face. Smooth, pale, white skin, absolutely unlike the ruddy, weathered Derzhi or the reddish-gold color of my own race.

From C. S. Friedman’s When True Night Falls:

Most of this trilogy is set in a society of white people which values tanned skin, because paleness is usually a sign of somebody who dabbles in dangerous magic. But in the second book, they meet people from across the sea, who are even darker. I’m fascinated by this because it hints at a racial division somewhere in this colony’s past (their ancestors are from Earth, and may have initially brought racial baggage with them) which has since been forgotten.

His skin was a rich brown, doubly dramatic against the white of his outer robe, and the sun picked out copper highlights along high cheekbones, a stern forehead, a strong jawline. His features were broad and well-formed and his black hair, closely cropped, did nothing to distract from them.

From Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites:

Butler always did a good job, IMO. An especially nice touch in this example: in the Xenogenesis trilogy Butler didn’t really describe any of the human characters while Lilith was primarily among aliens. Only when Lilith joined a small human society did race begin to matter again; at that point the descriptions of the characters became frequent and noticeable. Also, although the aliens just find the variety interesting, Lilith’s part-human children definitely notice race — as in the example below. Note that the Joseph mentioned in this passage is a Chinese man, and Lilith is an African-American woman. (Both are parents of the viewpoint character.)

The man was shirtless, black-haired, clean-shaven, and stocky. His hair was long and hung down his back. He had cut it off in a straight line across his forehead. Something about him reminded Akin of the picture he had seen of Joseph. The man’s eyes were narrow like Joseph’s, but his skin was almost as brown as Lilith’s.

From Kate Griffin’s A Madness of Angels:

This book contains not only multiple descriptions of individual CoCs, it also depicts the multiculturalism of London itself in the background — subculturally, class-wise, racially, whatever. Griffin does an especially good job of describing the white characters as well as the CoCs, so that the CoCs don’t stand out as exceptional. (I do have an issue with her use of “coffee” here; I get really tired of seeing African-descended characters described in terms of the goods that drove, and still drive, the slave trade — coffee, chocolate, brown sugar. There’s some weird psychosocial baggage attached to that. But I can overlook it in this case because the same character gets other descriptions throughout the book; she’s a major character.)

Next I became aware of the tension in one man, with a long, pale, horselike face, who sat hunched forward, knees locked together, white-knuckled fingers clasped on his lap… “Is this a sorcerer?” asked (another) man, who wore what I assumed was some sort of African tribal costume, despite his being as pale as snow in December, and ginger… Of the other two in the room, one was a woman in jeans, with skin the colour of roast coffee, and a tight black jacket which bulged in odd places; she looked like she was ready to set something on fire… (later description of the same woman, who becomes a major character) She smiled again, lips shockingly pink in an otherwise dark, finely formed face. Her black curly hair was braided so close to her skull it had to hurt, and her eyes were wide and alert.

From Steven Boyett’s Elegy Beach:

Boyett does a weird and complex thing here. The protagonist lives in a world in which a catastrophic change has caused race to cease mattering, though only quite recently. Because of this, the protag’s father (who grew up in modern-day America) has all the usual social baggage attached to race, while the protagonist himself just treats color as another detail. This is never explicitly stated, but it’s implicit in what’s not mentioned. Hard to capture that in an example, but I’ll try.

Here, the speaker (the protag’s father) is describing some time he spent among Vodoun practitioners in the Baton Rouge area. By context it’s clear they’re black or predominantly so; the father is white. As he narrates this passage in which he meets the protagonist’s mother, I feel like he uses the typical modern white American technique of tiptoeing around the word “black”, as if just saying it is an epithet, because he’s probably been raised to believe that it is. His son, however (whom we eventually realize is biracial), describes his mother explicitly as “big and dark”, and doesn’t hesitate to mention skin color at other times, in the very few descriptions the novel contains. The father’s color-averse description stands out (relatively speaking; it’s all very subtle) by comparison.

While I was recovering from whatever had laid me out there was this girl who’d show up sometimes. She was a hoodoo woman, sort of a wiccan and midwife and nurse. Serious mojo. It didn’t hurt that she was about my age and awfully easy to look at.

From Cherie Priest’s Not Flesh Nor Feathers:

Just started reading this one recently, and I’m not done with it. But noticed this early in the book:

Though the girls looked much alike, Lu was the older, taller, and stronger of the pair. Her hair was knotted into black braids and her jeans were ratty around the knees, showing brown skin and scabs where she’d fallen one time too many.

From Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier:

Something this book made me consider: it’s set in Africa (Sierra Leone, during its horrific civil war), with an almost all-black cast, so there are lots of descriptions of characters of color. But Beah almost never describes their hair or the specific shade of their skin. He seems to take these things for granted. Having seen American writers (white and PoC) go through agonies trying to figure out how to describe kinky hair, or the various shades of brown skin, I’m reminded of this discussion on the unmarked state in anime/manga and how Americans habitually resort to exaggerations of PoC physical features in their art — exaggerations which people from other cultures don’t see or employ themselves. I’m beginning to wonder if the emphasis American writers place on black hair texture and skin shade is another example of such exaggeration. Or maybe this emphasis is simply necessary in a multiracial society, and not in monoracial societies.

Mamie Kpana was the name that my grandmother was known by. She was tall and her perfectly long face complemented her beautiful cheekbones and big brown eyes. She always stood with her hands either on her hips or her head. By looking at her, I could see where my mother had gotten her beautiful dark skin, extremely white teeth, and the translucent creases on her neck.

::whew:: OK, enough of that; got a book to write, after all. I’d love to see other examples in the comments, though, if folks have the time to go look ’em up!

Describing characters of color in writing, pt 2 - N. K. Jemisin

This is something I was going to do on my own blog, as a followup to an earlier post on ways to describe characters of color in fiction. But since a) I was coming up short on something to write about for this week’s Magic District post, and b) this is International Blog Against Racism Week* (IBARW), I figured I could kill two birds with one stone.

I’m a Harry Potter fan, if you haven’t guessed it by now from my repeated references. I’m such a fan that initially I only wanted the British versions of the books, so the first one I read was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I did this because I found it suspect that the publisher had changed the name for the US release to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, completely ignoring the alchemical history that the original title evoked. If they were going to change something like that, I reasoned, who knew what else they would change?

So when I later got the US version and compared the two, I wasn’t surprised to see that a number of words and lines had been changed. Most of these changes were minor, for example clarifying Britishisms that USians might not have picked up on, like using the word “sweater” in place of “jumper”, since in the US a jumper is a kind of girl’s dress. But in several places I noticed a more curious difference. For example, at one point the character Dean Thomas is explicitly stated to be black in the US version — a line which doesn’t even exist in the UK version.

Now, note: Dean is described in the UK version in ways that strongly suggest his race, but it’s subtly done. His dredlocks are mentioned repeatedly, as is his love of a particular soccer (sorry, football) team which is known in the UK for having a lot of black players and fans. There are other clues. But somewhere along the way, some US editor for Rowling’s book decided that US kids just wouldn’t pick up on the clues, and decided to add that line to make it clear.

I can understand why that editor made the decision. Americans know diddlysquat about British football teams, for one thing. Also, some cultural characteristics are racially ambiguous. I’ve known lots of white people with dredlocks, for example (though this is a separate discussion, because even the name “dredlocks” is a culture-specific thing that has been co-opted by outsiders). My problem, however, lies in where that added bit of description was applied, and to whom. Basically, Dean Thomas got text labeling him as black, but there’s never a line pointing out that Harry or Ron or Hermione, etc., are white. The same subtle cues are used to convey their race — the Weasleys’ red hair, for example, or the (predominantly white) section of London where the Dursleys live. But these are just as racially ambiguous (I’ve got red hair at the moment, and I’m black), and the editor didn’t feel the need to add a line clarifying these characters’ whiteness.

Thus we see an example of the racial default at work: the inescapable fact that in any Western society, no matter how multicultural it might be in actuality, most people in it will assume that any character who’s not described otherwise is white. The editor is to be commended for realizing that this tendency to “default to white” exists in USian readers… but the particular method he or she used to address the problem feels almost painfully heavy-handed. Worse, by treating the characters of color so differently, the editor adds to the problem by implying that whiteness is “normal”.

Personally, I prefer Rowling’s method of dealing with it. She didn’t label the white characters white, or the black characters black, or the Asian characters Asian, etc. She drops broad hints about all of them, from culturally-distinct surnames like Patil and Chang and Granger, to culturally-associated styles and foods (braids, sari, Harry’s love of the quintessentially-British treacle tarts), to more subtle cues like Dean’s football preferences. But she does this equally for the white characters and the characters of color. No group is treated as “normal,” or by exclusion/emphasis “abnormal”.

Rowling took some flak for this in the US, though the problem was actually with her US editor, and apparently along the line someone got the message, because later books in the series stop labeling the characters of color in this way. (I think… I haven’t read all the US versions.) But I say all this just to illustrate a problem.

Because so much of fantasy takes place in settings that in no way resemble the real world, featuring species that in no way resemble human, fantasy writers often have trouble dealing with regular people. This is something that, I think, isn’t as much of a problem for mainstream writers, because they can simply describe the world around them and come up with a reasonably accurate representation of humanity. They can also fall back on the plethora of real-world terms used to describe human beings, racially and otherwise. But using these terms makes no sense if you’re dealing with a world that doesn’t share our political/cultural context. You can’t call someone “African American” if your world has no Africa, no America, and has never gone through a colonial phase in which people of disparate cultures were forcibly brought together, thus necessitating the term in the first place.

That said, it’s equally illogical to populate your fantasy world with only one flavor of human being, which is what far too many fantasy stories default to. Granted, many fantasies take place in confined cultural spaces — a single small kingdom in a Europeanish milieu, maybe a single city or castle within that city. (But how did that castle get its spices for the royal table, or that lady her silks? What enemy are the knights training to fight? Even in the most monochromatic parts of the real Ye Olde Englande, I can guarantee you there were some Asian traders, Sephardic or Ashkenazic Jewish merchants, Spanish diplomats or nobles partly descended from black Moors, and so on.) I get that lots of countries on Earth are racially homogeneous, so it makes perfect sense that some fantasy settings would be too. But whiteness is the default in our thinking for Earth-specific cultural/political reasons. So while it’s logical for fantasy realms to be homogeneous, it’s not logical for so many of them to be homogeneously white. Something besides logic is causing that.

So. It’s a good idea for all fantasy writers to learn how to describe characters of color. And I think it’s a good idea to learn how to describe those characters in subtle ways, since they can’t always rely on Earth terminology. Now, doing subtle description increases the chance that the reader might misidentify the character racially — and to a degree, I think there’s nothing you can do about that. You’re working against a lifetime of baggage in the reader’s mind. But you can still insert enough cues so that when combined, they’ll get the idea across.

Below are some examples from my own writing in which I feel I’ve done this. As before, these aren’t necessarily the “right” way to do this, nor are they by any means the only way. They’re just my way.

Oh, and unlike in my first post, I’m going to provide some commentary with each. And there will be fewer of these, because this post is already too long. =)

In the mornings, Adele girds herself for the trip to work as a warrior for battle. First she prays, both to the Christian god of her Irish ancestors and to the orishas of her African ancestors — the latter she is less familiar with, but getting to know.

OK, this is a real-world setting, so I cheat a little here and use Earth-specific terminology (Irish, African). I’m noting it as an example, though, because a determined person could still see this character as white if she chooses. She’s clearly part white (though the “whiteness” of Irish Americans has fluctuated over the course of US history), and on some level we are all Africans. But I didn’t call her capital-B black, or describe her skin and features. There are a few other subtle clues in the story — her diction in lines of dialogue, the neighborhood in Brooklyn where she lives (Flatbush) — but these are things only people familiar with the real-world setting would pick up on.

He knelt before the dais that held Dekarta’s chair, his waist-length red braid falling over one shoulder to curl on the floor… I was surprised to find that he was even paler beneath his clothing, and his shoulders were covered in faint spots, like those of a leopard but smaller and random.

An example from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, taken from two very different scenes to demonstrate that clues sometimes need to be layered/overlapped. Paleness is a relative thing, after all; I am paler than my father, not as pale as my mother, and all three of us are black. In this case the narrator is herself dark-skinned — this has been established earlier in the story — and most of the story’s characters are pale in comparison to her. But that could simply mean that the “he” being described is a lighter-skinned brown person. The critical clue, I think, is the mention of freckles. That’s racially ambiguous too; light-skinned people of every race can have freckles. But paired with the earlier mention of “his” hair being bright red, I think this gets the idea across.

It fell to the mayor’s daughter, Atlehina Delgado, to escort him. From the first she was skeptical, for Turner hardly looked the savior. He was a thin brown man with a quiet manner and a noticeable slouch. “I’ll see the stone first,” he said when Delgado met him. She had never heard an accent like his, slow and thick as oil.

This is from a story set on a colony from Earth on another planet, centuries after Earthlike racial distinctions have ceased to have meaning for them. However, they retain the genetic and cultural legacy of the original colonists, including surnames like Delgado. Delgado’s not specific to any single racial group; the etymology is Portuguese, and thanks to colonization there are Delgados among people of Hispanic ethnicity, African descent, European descent, etc. Later in the story, however, I describe Atlehina as having long black hair. It’s still ambiguous, but I’m hoping to suggest that she’s Latina.

I’m trying a more subtle trick with Turner, though I’m not sure it works. I do explicitly mention that he’s brown, but he could be a white guy with a tan. However, I mention his accent. Now, after several hundred years on a colony world I know their English will be as incomprehensible to us as Beowulf is to modern Americans; they’re not really speaking anything we would understand. But Turner’s using dialect of some sort, which Atlehina notices. I’m hoping that, coupled with Turner’s brownness, this will send a big hint that he’s a black guy.

So. Those of you who are writers — care to share your own examples? Please feel free, in the comments.

* This is actually the fourth IBARW; there have been hundreds of posts on various topics over the past few years. If you’ve got a few hours to kill sometime, check ’em out.

Describing characters of color in writing, pt 1 - N. K. Jemisin

Some examples from my own writing, submitted for your consideration. Not a claim of correctness or The Best Way or anything of the sort. Just my way. And yeah, this is in part inspired by a certain very lengthy discussion of race, representation, and respect in the SF/F community that took place recently in the blogosphere. But I also just felt like sharing.

ETA: And because this post continues to get hits months later, folks might be interested in Part 2, which was posted at the Magic District, and part 3, written a few months later.

Some of this is published, some forthcoming, some is not pub’d and never shall be. Taken from shorts and novels.

Across the park’s wide avenue stood a new figure. He had depicted himself as a tall middle-aged male, Shanghainese and dignified, dressed in an outdated business suit.

Meroe stared at the girl, not liking what he was seeing. The avatar was just too well-designed, too detailed. Her features and coloring matched that of some variety of Latina; probably Central or South American given the noticeable indigenous traits. Most of their kind created Caucasian avatars to start — a human minority who for some reason comprised the majority of images available for sampling…

To protect himself, Meroe adopted his default avatar: a lean, bald human male clad only in black skin and silver tattoos. Zo became a human female, dainty and pale and demurely gowned from neck to ankle to complement Meroe’s appearance.

He was a thin brown man with a quiet manner and a noticeable slouch.

He watched the blackeyes of my nipples rise and fall…

I sat on the riverbank, twisting my hair into rows along my scalp. It would dry overnight and then I could let it loose to dangle in spirals like a cloud-dragon’s neck.

His skin was darker than any glancing touch of the sun could produce, a color that reminded Jinn of a warm late-autumn day.

She would never have taken up jogging if there’d still been people around to watch her, maybe point and laugh at the jiggly big-boned sistah trying to be FloJo. Before the prolif she’d only just begun to shed her self-consciousness around the Japanese. They rarely stared when she could see them, and her students had gotten used to her by then, but on the street she’d always felt the pressure of the neighbors’ gazes against her back, skittering away from her peripheral vision when she turned. The days of Sambo dolls at the corner store were mostly over, but not a lot of Japanese had seen black people anywhere except on television.

Wealthy men had commissioned sculptures with lips less lush, bones less graceful; sugared currants were not as temptingly black as her skin.

Instead he had only Anai herself to contemplate: a plain-faced female of distressingly common mien, whose thin frame at the moment was adorned by a stained burku wrap and a magnificent black eye. Anai could guess the old bastard’s thoughts from his face. This is the Shadow? he was doubtless ranting to himself. This gutter scum, the color of tea dregs? She’s not even pretty enough to be a whore.

He had no skill at gauging human ages, but she seemed only two, maybe three decades old, not even halfway to death yet. Lean as an alley cat, equally quick and graceful in her motions; brown-skinned and white-toothed and clever-eyed.

He wore very little, trusting the darkness of his skin for camouflage as he crept along the tower’s wall guided by the sounds of the city.

He had strange eyes — a clear, pale brown, like amber from the tall forests across the sea. Amazing that these Gujaareen had allowed even their royal line to be diluted by northern stock.(Note: this is from a novel in which nearly all the characters are southerners, who are generally black in varying shades; context makes it clear that “northern” = “white”.)

Where they were shades of brown and red-gold, his skin was a matte deepness of black, hinting at blue in the Hall’s variegated light.

Up close, he saw that despite the masculine dress she was pretty in a lowcaste sort of way: small but sturdy-built, her face broad and high-boned, with skin the warm ocher of ripe pears.

She had no idea of the Banbarra’s origins, but they had clearly mixed themselves less widely than Hanani’s folk. Though she caught the occasional glimpse of hazel eyes or paler skin, for the most part they were brown of hair and skin and eye, with sharp features that seemed naturally fierce to Hanani.

She’d ornamented her natural attributes carefully: gold and topaz to emphasize the shading of her flesh, sapphire to offset her black hair.

I got the crown of his head at first, and marvelled as always at the feel of hair like my own — soft-curled, dense but yielding, thick enough to lose my fingers in. The first time I’d touched him I’d thought he was one of my people, because only Maroneh had such hair.

Men praise parts of me endlessly — always the parts, mind you, never the whole. They love my long legs, my graceful neck, my storm of hair, my breasts. (Especially my breasts.) Most of the men in Shadow are Amn, so they also comment on my smooth near-black Maro skin even though I tell them there are half a million other women in the world with the same feature. Half a million is not so many measured against the whole world, I suppose, so that always gets included in their qualified, fragmentary admiration.

My hair, which someone had tied back into a puff in an effort to control it, broke the tie and clouded loose behind me.

I am not very interesting to look at. It might have been different if I had gotten the traits of my two peoples in a better combination. Amn height with Darre curves, perhaps, or thick straight Darre hair colored Amn-pale. I have Amn eyes: faded green in color, more unnerving than pretty. Otherwise I am short and flat and brown as forestwood, and my hair is a curled mess. Because I find it unmanageable otherwise, I wear it short. I am sometimes mistaken for a boy.

Observations after looking at this:

• I frequently write stories in which all or most of the characters are PoC, and thus I describe them only in contrast to each other. (e.g., one is old, the other is young…) In such stories brown becomes the default, so the only characters I describe explicitly are the white ones.
• Am also surprised to realize that I write a lot of stories in which appearance isn’t described at all, though race is obvious from context — e.g., “Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters”, which takes place in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina. There’s a handful of white, Latino, etc. folks in the Ninth Ward, but I took the risk of assuming that anyone who’s watched Katrina coverage on TV will default to assuming that the characters are all black (they are). So again, I only described them in relation to each other. Also, since I lived in NOLA for several years, I took care to use the particular city dialect used by black New Orleanians vs. white New Orleanians (actually there are several variations of each, but I picked the black NO dialect I was most familiar with, which actually may not be accurate because I mostly hung out with people from NO East, not the Ninth Ward, but anyway), but I suspect that’s too esoteric for most people to pick up on.
• Am also surprised at how often I describe white people. Going to have to come up with some new words for them, though… I overuse “pallid”.
• I often use names to convey ethnicity. In “Commission on the Establishment of Extrasolar Trade:
  Evaluation” (unpub’d), the two viewpoint characters are named Paul Srinivasan and Thandiwe Solomon, and later it’s noted that Thandiwe is from South Africa (it’s a Xhosa name). Stole Srinivasan’s name from a friend’s Indian husband. The same story has a Gilberto (Brazilian), a Wei (who is the only one explicitly identified in the story as Han Chinese), a Principe (Puerto Rican), a Wheton (could be anyone in any Commonwealth/Western-colonized country, but I intended her to be British, and white), and a Rafkind (ditto, but intended to be American, and white).
• I also use a lot of indirection that’s unfortunately easy to misinterpret. In “The You Train”, I never mention that the viewpoint character is black. Her dialect hints at it, as does her mention of a blonde co-worker. But she could just be Southern; a lot of white Southern (and for some reason, Midwestern) women talk the same way. And maybe she’s a brunette. But anyway.

ETA: Whoops, forgot one from The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. That last quote is a description of the protagonist there.

I’m curious to see others’ descriptions. Anybody reading who’s a writer — would you be willing to post some of yours, in the comments?