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Earthsea's miniserie adaptation
From Ursula Leguin's website http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2004/12-15-04.htm
Most of the characters in my fantasy and far-future sf books are not white. They're mixed, they're rainbow. In my first big sf novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, the only person from Earth is a black man and everybody else in the book is Inuit (or Tibetan) brown. In my first fantasy novels (the ones the miniseries is "based on"), A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, everybody's brown or copper-red or black, except the Kargish people in the East and their descendants in the Archipelago, who are white, with fair or dark hair. Tenar is a Karg, a brunette white person. Ged is an Archipelagan, a redbrown man. Vetch, from the East Reach, is black.
This color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in sf had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and all the leading women had "violet eyes"). I didn't even believe it. Whites are a minority on Earth now -- why wouldn't they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?
The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from North Europe, which is why it was about white people. I'm white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for "young adults") might not identify easily straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees -- hoping that the reader would get "into Ged's skin," and only then discover it wasn't a white one.
I was never questioned about this by any editor. No objection was ever raised. I think this is greatly to the credit of my first editors at Parnassus and Atheneum, who bought the books before they had a reputation to carry them. These editors took a risk without complaint.
But I had endless trouble with cover art. Not on the great cover of the first edition -- a strong, red-brown profile of Ged -- or with Margaret Chodos Irvine's four fine paintings -- but all too often. The first British "Wizard" was this pallid, droopy, lily-like guy -- I screamed at sight of him.
Gradually I got a little more clout, a little more say-so about covers. And very, very, very gradually the cover departments of major publishers may be beginning to lose their blind, panic terror of putting a colored face on a book. "Hurts sales, hurts sales" is the mantra. Yeah, so? On my books, Ged with a white face is a lie, a betrayal -- a betrayal of the book, and of the potential reader. A brown face might hurt sales in the short run, but my books are long-distance runners, and for the long haul, only the truth will serve.
I think it is possible that some readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don't notice, don't care. Whites of course have the privilege of not caring, of being "colorblind." Nobody else does.
I have heard, not often, but very memorably, from colored readers who told me that the Earthsea books were the only books in the genre that they felt included in -- and how much this meant to them, particularly as adolescents, who'd found nothing to read in fantasy and sf except the adventures of white people in a white world. Those letters have been a tremendous reward and true joy to me.
I have not had protests from white readers who resented reading about colored people, but racial bigots often hide their bigotry behind accusations of "witchcraft" and such. The Earthsea books have been forced many times to run the school banning gamut operated by fundamentalist Christians. These censorship operations against schools and libraries are stronger than ever in the present religio-political climate. They often focus on fantasy and sf books, which foster that deadly enemy to bigotry and blind faith, the imagination.
So far no reader of color has told me I ought to butt out, or that I got the ethnicity wrong. When they do, I'll listen. As an anthropologist's daughter I am intensely conscious of the risk of cultural or ethnic imperialism -- white writer speaking for nonwhite people, co-opting their voice, an act of extreme arrogance. In a totally invented fantasy world, or in a far-future sf setting, in the rainbow world we can imagine, this risk is mitigated. That's the beauty of sf and fantasy -- freedom of invention.
But with all freedom comes responsibility. . .
. . .which is something these film-makers seem not to understand.
The books are about two young people finding what their power, their freedom, and their responsibility is. I don't know what the film is about. It's full of scenes from the story, but in this different plot, they make no sense. Its hero goes through lots of Ged's experiences, but learns nothing from them. How could he? He isn't Ged. Ged isn't a petulant white kid.
It's like casting Eminem as Jim in Huckleberry Finn.
And how did Danny Glover, the Token Mage, get into this Clorox archipelago? What island is he from? Poor guy! No wonder he gets the true name and the nickname mixed up, and solemnly baptizes Ged with his nickname!
I really am sorry for the actors. They all tried awfully hard. It's not their fault.
Overall, I definitly agree. In SF it is not always so grevious, but I always had the feeling that in fantasy there was an overabundance of european influenced societies (especially celtic, of course) compared to anything else. You sometimes have the token oriental-spunned world, mostly Japanese, and the Arabian Nights series (Tanith Lee's Tale of the Flat Earth and Weis&Hickman's Rose of the Prophet springs to my mind), but otherwise tales with emphatically non-white characters shine by their absence. I love celtic mythologies as much as anyone else, but it was good that there was one famous, critically acclaimed story where most of the protagonists were emphatically described as black, or dark-skinned. That was Earthsea. Apparently this mini-serie sucks for many other reasons, but that's the one thing that extremely annoys me about it.
Comments ?
Most of the characters in my fantasy and far-future sf books are not white. They're mixed, they're rainbow. In my first big sf novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, the only person from Earth is a black man and everybody else in the book is Inuit (or Tibetan) brown. In my first fantasy novels (the ones the miniseries is "based on"), A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, everybody's brown or copper-red or black, except the Kargish people in the East and their descendants in the Archipelago, who are white, with fair or dark hair. Tenar is a Karg, a brunette white person. Ged is an Archipelagan, a redbrown man. Vetch, from the East Reach, is black.
This color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in sf had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and all the leading women had "violet eyes"). I didn't even believe it. Whites are a minority on Earth now -- why wouldn't they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?
The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from North Europe, which is why it was about white people. I'm white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for "young adults") might not identify easily straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees -- hoping that the reader would get "into Ged's skin," and only then discover it wasn't a white one.
I was never questioned about this by any editor. No objection was ever raised. I think this is greatly to the credit of my first editors at Parnassus and Atheneum, who bought the books before they had a reputation to carry them. These editors took a risk without complaint.
But I had endless trouble with cover art. Not on the great cover of the first edition -- a strong, red-brown profile of Ged -- or with Margaret Chodos Irvine's four fine paintings -- but all too often. The first British "Wizard" was this pallid, droopy, lily-like guy -- I screamed at sight of him.
Gradually I got a little more clout, a little more say-so about covers. And very, very, very gradually the cover departments of major publishers may be beginning to lose their blind, panic terror of putting a colored face on a book. "Hurts sales, hurts sales" is the mantra. Yeah, so? On my books, Ged with a white face is a lie, a betrayal -- a betrayal of the book, and of the potential reader. A brown face might hurt sales in the short run, but my books are long-distance runners, and for the long haul, only the truth will serve.
I think it is possible that some readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don't notice, don't care. Whites of course have the privilege of not caring, of being "colorblind." Nobody else does.
I have heard, not often, but very memorably, from colored readers who told me that the Earthsea books were the only books in the genre that they felt included in -- and how much this meant to them, particularly as adolescents, who'd found nothing to read in fantasy and sf except the adventures of white people in a white world. Those letters have been a tremendous reward and true joy to me.
I have not had protests from white readers who resented reading about colored people, but racial bigots often hide their bigotry behind accusations of "witchcraft" and such. The Earthsea books have been forced many times to run the school banning gamut operated by fundamentalist Christians. These censorship operations against schools and libraries are stronger than ever in the present religio-political climate. They often focus on fantasy and sf books, which foster that deadly enemy to bigotry and blind faith, the imagination.
So far no reader of color has told me I ought to butt out, or that I got the ethnicity wrong. When they do, I'll listen. As an anthropologist's daughter I am intensely conscious of the risk of cultural or ethnic imperialism -- white writer speaking for nonwhite people, co-opting their voice, an act of extreme arrogance. In a totally invented fantasy world, or in a far-future sf setting, in the rainbow world we can imagine, this risk is mitigated. That's the beauty of sf and fantasy -- freedom of invention.
But with all freedom comes responsibility. . .
. . .which is something these film-makers seem not to understand.
The books are about two young people finding what their power, their freedom, and their responsibility is. I don't know what the film is about. It's full of scenes from the story, but in this different plot, they make no sense. Its hero goes through lots of Ged's experiences, but learns nothing from them. How could he? He isn't Ged. Ged isn't a petulant white kid.
It's like casting Eminem as Jim in Huckleberry Finn.
And how did Danny Glover, the Token Mage, get into this Clorox archipelago? What island is he from? Poor guy! No wonder he gets the true name and the nickname mixed up, and solemnly baptizes Ged with his nickname!
I really am sorry for the actors. They all tried awfully hard. It's not their fault.
Overall, I definitly agree. In SF it is not always so grevious, but I always had the feeling that in fantasy there was an overabundance of european influenced societies (especially celtic, of course) compared to anything else. You sometimes have the token oriental-spunned world, mostly Japanese, and the Arabian Nights series (Tanith Lee's Tale of the Flat Earth and Weis&Hickman's Rose of the Prophet springs to my mind), but otherwise tales with emphatically non-white characters shine by their absence. I love celtic mythologies as much as anyone else, but it was good that there was one famous, critically acclaimed story where most of the protagonists were emphatically described as black, or dark-skinned. That was Earthsea. Apparently this mini-serie sucks for many other reasons, but that's the one thing that extremely annoys me about it.
Comments ?