- We had an Ahuizotl in our Historical Lovecraft anthology. Because who says you can’t?
Nnedi Okorafor has an interesting post today in which she talks about the issue of Lovecraft and racism. She talks about the fact that the World Fantasy Award statuette is shaped like a Lovecraft head and Lovecraft was a racist (hating on African Americans and a number of other minorities alike), which can leave a sour flavour in the mouths of minorities.
There are some suggestions on Facebook that the bust should be changed to reflect another writer (Borges was brought up) or into another shape (please, not a phallic rocket ship or sword, oh lord). While I’m not against modifying the statuette (and hell, I’m Latin America and a minority, so Borges would be kind of neat), I want to talk a bit about Lovecraft and racism.
Lovecrat was a racist. That should come as no surprise to anyone who has read about him. He was also a knot of contradictions (not only because he married a Jewish woman after railing against Jewish people), which is no excuse, it’s just fact. I won’t even bother with the product-of-his-time thing because he was, and yeah. Lovecraft’s fears about everything (and boy, he had a number of fears) were channeled into his stories, so that it becomes pretty obvious that he didn’t like people who looked like me (“Red Hook” anyone?).
But just because Lovecraft was one way it doesn’t mean we have to be the same way. This is the mantra behind Innsmouth Free Press, where we’ve had a multi-cultural issue (Ekaterina Sedia, Charles R. Saunders and others contributed to it) and now two anthologies (Historical Lovecrat and Future Lovecraft) with writers from more than a dozen countries, some of them translated into English. The latest anthology, for example, has contributors from places like Nigeria, the Philippines and Germany. And the stories and poems are not about polite gentlemen from New England. “Tloque Nahuaque,” translated from the Spanish by me and penned by Nelly Geraldine Garcia-Rosas, puts the Higgs boson debate in a decidedly Mexican context (Tloque Nahuaque refers to a Prehispanic deity).
When Paula R. Stiles and I read slush, we still find a lot of stories that try to emulate Lovecraft by placing the tales in New England, with upper-crust white men as protagonists. During our Historical Lovecraft submissions period we got a big wave of the Victorian white gentleman, which caused me to blog about this and request more stories that veered from that narrow location and era because, hell, who wants to read an anthology called Historical Lovecraft and find out all we are representing is Boston 1880 to 1910? Instead, we managed to obtain some colonial Mexico and a bit of Egypt, among other things.
So what I don’t want to see with this debate is minority writers saying “shucks, I’ll never write a Lovecraft story because he was a racist asshole.” Because Lovecraft does raise interesting points and you can construct a refreshing dialogue by taking his settings, characters, idea or the like, and adapting them to your needs. If we don’t go there and start creating our own stories upon those Lovecraftian shores, nobody else will.
I think talking Lovecraft, having a dialogue about the statuette, all that is pretty cool, but I hope writers don’t dismiss Lovecraftian fiction in general as an exclusionary zone we must keep out of. There are no fences here, folks. I hope you join us al lado de Cthulhu. There are cookies and tamales.
Borges has problems, too:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/clives_lives/2007/02/jorge_luis_borges.html
But I agree completely with your conclusion.
Hi,
Yeah, I would prefer if we had an animal/object/plant rather than the bust of a person because it just seems easier/better than picking another writer (like, I wouldn’t want Tolkien to be the statuette either. No offense.).
I was thinking an alebrije would make a good statuette, which is a fantastical Mexican creature; something of that sort.
I don’t thik boger is a real fantastic writer. His works are more intellectual exercises that, at least in my case, left the same sensation of fill a crossword. His work lack the necesary quality of revelation that all fantasy require. As for the racism of Lovecraft.. well…
I just googled alebrijes. Someone could do a very cool story about Linares creating them after a feverish dream.
I also have problems picking any writer to represent fantasy. Tolkien and CS Lewis are both problematic. Dunsany might amuse me, and I might make an argument for Shakespeare, but all things considered, I would also prefer something fantastical, whether humanoid or a critter like an alebrije.
I’m very temped to rant about how Mexico is invisible to USans, but I’m sure I wouldn’t be saying anything you don’t already know.
Sorry for the misspelling of the name «Borges», but my free internet hour was running out of time. To me, the better option for a statuette that represent fantasy is, and always will be, that of H. P. Lovecraft. No matter if his outright racims makes him a non political correct guy.
But for the benefit of argument I cast my vote for William Blake; because he pre-date as a fantasy universe builder all the others, and better yet… from a visionary poetry.
My thoughts process is:
1. The World Fantasy Award should represent the world and thus the award should not be the likeness of any given author. Something else (a chimera and a world tree have been suggested by others) can encompass the global vision of fantasy, especially nowadays when we are moving towards a really, truly global spec fiction community (in the latest Lovecraft antho I edited there were writers from more than a dozen countries). The problems posed by the likeness of an author are multiplied when the likeness is of a problematic writer (due to his racism), which makes it even less inclusive of a variety of authors.
2. As some people have commented, the Pulitzer prize has the likeness of Pulitzer. But the Oscar, for example, does not have Valentino’s face representing the whole film community. H.P. Lovecraft’s likeness appears in another – very appropriate – award: the Lovecraft Film Festival Award.
Although I am a publisher, editor and writer of Lovecraftian fiction, I would be happy to see a different World Fantasy Award statuette.
At the very least, I am glad Nnedi blogged about this since it has produced some interesting discussions on the subject.
If we happen to come to that point, Silvia… I totally agree with you. Really the whole debate is useless, since the image of an author like Lovecraft doesn’t need to be represented in the statuette of the WFA. But, in the other hand, is not a subject that should be offending our proud for belong to another culture different from that of Lovecraft. I’m from Dominican Republic; I’m not white. But the issue of Lovecraft’s racism, never have been an obstacle to get the better out of the legacy of his imagination. Let’s it be…