Report from Planet Midnight by Nalo Hopkinson Read Free Book Online Page B

of colour who dare to call you on your racism, that’s using derision, minimizing, and discrediting as tactics ofsuppressing dissent. And we see you coming a mile away.
    Sure I’m angry. I also love this community and this genre to pieces. This literature and some of the people in this community have kept me alive; in these past four years, sometimes literally so. That’s why, as much as I can, I keep fighting for and with the community to be the best it can be, to live up to its own visions of worlds in which no one is shut out. I’m very, very happy to be here, and happy to have been offered a podium from which to talk to this group of people on this topic. Any space created in this community for people of colour, and any space we can make for ourselves makes it possible for more of us to find it easier to be ourselves, to speak up; makes it easier to write, or possible to write at all. That is true when we do it for any disenfranchised group of people within the larger fantasy and science fiction community: women, disabled people, queer people, poor and working class people, chronically ill people, old people. I’d lay odds that everyone in this room experiences at least one of those disen-franchisements. Making room makes room for all of us. It makes the possibility for even more great writing in a field where we are already blessed with so much of it. How wonderful would that be? And come right down to it, the writing is why we are all here, nah true?
    AFTERWORD
    A postscript, if I may; a few minutes after I gave this address, an audience member approached me privately and asked whether I was a Marxist. Surprised, I asked him why he thought
I might be. He said it was because I had “reduced” the lofty subject of art to a mere question of labour. (Paraphrasing mine.)
    To him I’d like to say, Mister, I am an artist who supports herself on the strength of her art and her ability to keep producing it. You’d be hard put to convince any artist that art isn’t work. And you can’t convince me that there’s no art to labour. You can’t convince me that art and the labour that creates it can be easily teased apart and considered as separate objects, and you sure as hell can’t convince me that the latter is somehow base and impoverished in comparison to the former.
    And how sad is it that you apparently managed to ignore the main gist of my speech so profoundly that all you got from it were the few paragraphs I used to contextualise a much larger discussion of how fantasy and science fiction approach race?
    1 . By “(active) science fiction community” I mean the people who attend and organize science fiction and fantasy conventions, who identify as science fiction/fantasy fans, and who are conversant and current with much of the body of science fiction/fantasy literature, a genre of storytelling that can be found in text-based, time-based (films, television, etc.) and visual media.
    2 . You’ll notice that my “we” shifts according to context. In other words, when I say “we,” I don’t always mean the same group of people. Think Venn diagram.
    3 . I’m not asking people to do anything I haven’t done. I’ve wronged and probably will wrong enough people in my time that I’ve had ample opportunity to put myself through the process of apology, addressing/redressing and hopefully reconciliation. I know in my bones how badly it grates. But I also know that it works, and that the subsequent healing soothes away the grating feeling.
    4 . See Rydra Wong’s LiveJournal blog at http://rydra-wong.live-journal.com/l46697.html .
    5 . Papa Legba, ouvre baye pou mwen, Ago eh! In African-derived religions of the Caribbean, the “horse” is a believer who, during a ceremony of worship, voluntarily consents to being temporarily inhabited by one of the deities. The worshipper then exhibits characteristics specific to that deity (sometimes in defiance of their own physical capabilities when not in trance state), and