Welcome to Exotica or OMG I see Brown People
Evil Asian alert!
I’ve always been a bad guy. Well, at least when it came to pulp stories and pulp inspired stories. Read some Conan and you will quickly see that the people of MacEurope (a processed Europe, like processed cheese) frequently square off against the nasty people of colour of Exotica (all the cultures vaguely inspired by African, Mesoamerican and Asian societies).
It doesn’t take much work to thumb through a few issues of Weird Tales to see that as interesting as an ‘exotic’ location could be to a writer, at the same time it was often repellent. Yellow peril, African savages, stupid Natives. Such characters danced through the pages of pulp fiction and, of course, made it into sword and sorcery. When people of colour where not being put in the role of the enemy or the fool, they were completely absent.
Through the years, even with the sword and sorcery revamp and rebirth of the 60s and 70s, not much changed in Exotica and MacEurope. Part of it was due to the legacy of the pulp world, of those Weird Tale covers in which evil Asians were leering at pretty women, part of it was based on the mistaken notion that the real Europe, the real Middle Ages resembled MacEurope. This is, of course, false. Europe is a wide space made of very many different nations. The Middle Ages lasted for a long time. A Spanish man living in Seville in the 11th century (when it was under Moorish rule) would have had a very different experience from a man from Rome in the same time period. In the end MacEurope, really, seems to be inspired by an imaginary Great Britain. No wonder, then, that MacEurope was very white.
Because there were only two spaces – MacEurope (us) and Exotica (them, a place for the white adventurer to have some adventuring) – and because MacEurope was often a narrow, bizarre vision of Europe, diversity had a hard time making it into sword and sorcery.
Is this supposed to be Imaro?
Then Imaro appeared in the 1980s. The African American author Charles R. Saunders had penned several adventures of his African character before he went on to publish Imaro in 1981. Imaro was quickly labeled a black Conan. The cover of the first edition seems to agree with this: Imaro looks suspiciously as a white man with a tan. Imaro, however, was more than a pastiche or a copy of Conan. He was a complex character interacting in a world unlike any other: a land inspired by African history and mythology. Although Saunders published a sequel to the first novel, and although he also wrote stories about a female warrior called Dossouye, these seeds did not seem to take and Imaro has never been a super-popular hero. However, Imaro did help to show what could be achieved when writers abandoned the shores of Exotica and MacEurope and decided to sail other waters.
And it’s not like all was lost. Nowadays, there is a small but active group of sword and soul fans (fantasy fiction based on African culture and mythology). Examples of this include the Meji books by Milton Davis. It’s also worth mentioning that Saunders has continued to write sword and sorcery adventures starring Dossouye and Imaro. Looking in another direction, Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon is an example of sword and sorcery which abandons MacEurope.
I was talking to someone the other day who told me the Aztecs were technologically inferior to the Spaniards because they didn’t use metal armour or wield big swords. This person failed to realize that the Aztecs didn’t wear heavy armour because: a) They didn’t ride horses. There were no horses to carry your heavy ass to battle. b) They didn’t carry heavy swords, instead relying on other weapons for attack, because they didn’t have the materials to make such swords.
The Aztecs did wear armour, armour which worked perfectly well for the conditions and weapons they were going to face. Aztecs also traveled by canoe, living in a city that might have resembled Venice. They had aqueducts, saunas, and a system of agriculture which used ‘floating gardens’ to farm on a lake.
In the future, maybe writers will explore such settings more frequently, not as ‘exotic’ vistas, but as solid, well-constructed worlds where realistic heroes face adventure and magic. It will also benefit the sub-genres of sword and sorcery and Cthulhu Mythos to have more diverse authors among its ranks (call it POCs or my favourite term, multicultural) and more international writers. It’s not that MacEurope didn’t have its moments. I just want to see what’s on the other continents of this map.
What cultures and locations would you use in a sword and mythos story? Let me know. Oh, before you turn off your computer, check out this long article about Imaro that appears at The Cimmerian. Also remember to give some cash to Sword and Mythos.
This is just what I was looking for- a new culture to explore via Sword and Sorcery! Thanks for sharing the information about Mr. Saunders’ work. Now, the hunt begins for the stories in a modernly-available context. (Crossing my fingers there’s an e-book out there!)
Good point about the Aztec! They were forced into hydroponics because their population kept rising, and because jungles (like the ones they inhabited) don’t have a lot of topsoil. Unfortunately, without modern representatives of their culture, it’s difficult to pry these little-known facts out of the archaeological record. When dealing with another civilization, context is always key to understanding.
As broadly as the Internet lets us sample, there’s still cultural inertia. I would *love* to read some modern Sword & Sorcery from an alternate cultural perspective! Unfortunately, my experience would only offer where I grew up.
This doesn’t restrict my imagination from envisioning *how* the Central American cultures made pacts with Water Elementals for their gardens but it wouldn’t have the same voice, I think.
Thanks again!
Hi,
I don’t think Imaro is available as an e-book, but the anthology Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology is available for the Kindle (it may also be available in other formats): http://www.amazon.com/Griots-Sword-Soul-Anthology-ebook/dp/B005V555TA/
Actually, the Aztecs did not live in a jungle-like area, though the Mayans did. The Aztecs inhabited what was basically a swamp (they were the last group to move into the area and basically got the worst digs). However, they modified their environment, allowing them to live in a very aquatic environment of brackish water. One of their greatest feats of engineering was the levee of Nezahualcoyotl, which divided the brackish waters beyond the dike and the fresh water. In fact, one of the great mistakes of the Spaniards was that they did not understand the properties of the swampy land they were building on, building often in the wrong areas and in the wrong configurations. They also drained the lake. This is the reason why many buildings are slowly sinking nowadays. Basically the Aztecs understood their environment better, and their engineers took advantage and built in ways that worked well with the area. The Spaniards did not.
Thanks for commenting!
[...] Over at her blog, writer/editor/publisher Silvia Moreno-Garcia writes about how the pulp magazines portrayed people of color (most often as villains) and how “sword and soul” evolved. The article is titled “Welcome to Exotica or OMG I See Brown People.” [...]
[...] (When is Silvia’s work not worth reading?) two especially are worth looking at: “Welcome to Exotica or OMG I See Brown People” and “Double Trouble: Two Racists for the Price of [...]
Read some Conan and you will quickly see that the people of MacEurope (a processed Europe, like processed cheese) frequently square off against the nasty people of colour of Exotica (all the cultures vaguely inspired by African, Mesoamerican and Asian societies).
Well to be fair, you also see people of “MacEurope” fighting MacEurope and “Exotica” fighting Exotica. In fact, there are a few stories where Conan fights alongside black pirates (“Beyond the Black River”) against white traders, and pseudo-Arab bandits against white kingdom (“A Witch Shall Be Born”). The setup you suggest of a vast monolithic Europe against a vast monolith Exotica does sound a bit like “Black Colossus,” but even then there are men of many nations in Conan’s army, including the Zingarans (who are distinctly mentioned as non-Hyborian), Shemites and Zamorians. There’s even a story where Conan emancipates a hold of black galley slaves, encouraging them to rise up against their enslavers (“The Hour of the Dragon”). Not to mention that Howard frequently has Conan sympathise more with the “primitives” than the supposedly civilized people (even when they’re his enemies, as in “Beyond the Black River”).
Not to say I disagree, just that there’s a bit more subtlety and nuance to Howard and the Hyborian Age in general.
Hi,
I’m writing on the short side because I’m doing a lot of posts on pulp matters right now, so I’m speaking in terms of generalities. In general, Howard’s stories tend to have several issues in terms of racial depictions.
However, I find writers that came *after* Howard and took his same tropes with little thought, and did *less* research than Howard, to be a lot more problematic. We got a lot of low quality, poor imitations of Howard’s stories which contributed to the creation of a very monolithic landscape.
But then you have writers like Tanith Lee who take exactly the same tropes as Howard (barbaric man, enslaved woman, etc) and produce stuff that is novel and interesting. This is why I don’t think the sub-genre of sword and sorcery (or heroic fantasy, what have you) should just be tossed out.
[...] about why fresh new takes on S&S/mythos fiction are important. So far she’s talked about people of color in S&S (and did a separate piece on racism in the genre), the prevalence of beef/cheesecake in S&S, [...]