The ownership of stories in indigenous Australian culture

This post is based on Gillian Polack's talk, Three Indigenous Australian Writers at Loncon3. The writers in question were Ambelin Kwaymullina, Melissa Lucashenko and Yaritji Green (links to their Goodreads pages). The talk raised some of the usual issues about non-western 'speculative fiction': the tendency to fall outside genre boundaries for various reasons and the inevitable politicization of people's cultures and identities.

What I really want to talk about is the systematized way cultural property works in indigenous Australian culture in contrast with the 'openness' of multiculturalism in Britain, and what I see as a more Americanized discourse on cultural appropriation. It's complicated, so I'm going to attempt it over several posts.

The first challenge is to communicate what's actually involved in indigenous Australian cultural property. I liked Yaritji Green's explanation in this discussion on The World SF Blog (now demised). I really recommend reading the whole thing, but I'm copying the bulk of Yaritji's contribution in case it disappears:

I have written this doorstopper of a fantasy based on dreaming entities from the Yankunytjatjara side of the family. I wrote the bulk of it while studying a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Creative Writing) at Flinders University. The degree I did allowed me to choose the topics I wrote my assignments on, and through my studies I came across this thing called copyright: a strange and wonderful thing which is good for the western world but does not fully protect the creative and intellectual rights of Indigenous Australians. We are the world’s oldest surviving culture yet we often find ourselves on the back foot playing catch up to legislation and policies that often were not explained (if explained at all) until too late and that does not address or cover Indigenous copyright or ownership principles.

So back to this copyright thing. Indigenous copyright is conceived as a heritage that is passed down; you learn the stories of the land and its inhabitants so that you can pass it down to the next generation. Our stories also have borders; we can own a story up to a certain landmark and then the neighbouring community owns the story from that landmark onwards. Some stories or characters can be shared between nations. However with the westernised concept of copyright, ownership generally goes to one person/corporation. Then once the copyright holder dies copyright remains in place for 50 years then it becomes public domain: then anyone can use it.

So back to my doorstopper, it is sitting there, waiting. It sits there wondering if it might ever get out into the world. Sure, I could make some quick money by getting it published. Use the ‘exotic other’ of my Indigenous culture, my ‘exotic other’ Indigenous name, my western knowledge and my western networks to get this story out there and milk it for all its worth. But at what cost? I’m not prepared to sell out my community’s heritage. With Australian copyright laws the way they are, the cost is too great; it takes too much from my people.
As far as how the culture I’m living in now affects my work, I am careful about what I write. I speak to my Elders. I share what I am going to write about. I had this idea, I thought was wonderful, so I shared the basics with family and other Indigenous writers but after a discussion it turned out that some parts of my idea would conflict with culture. So I thought, okay, I can’t do that but I can still do this, this and this, and my story will still have strength without selling out. Everything is about respect. Respect for culture.  Respect for others. Respect for myself. If I can’t respect my culture then I have no respect for myself. It may be a different story if I wrote outside of Speculative Fiction. I wouldn’t have to be so careful – well other than, you know, avoiding being libellous. I want to write the stories I want to read, stories my community might want to read.

Adding to what Yaritji said from what I've learned in the field of art history, I think it may help to understand that it's not just the right to tell stories (or paint them) which is owned by specific communities, individuals, genders, age-sets and so on, but the right to hear them. In the case of painting, the issue is not just seeing a painted story, but seeing and understanding it without having the right to do so. So, a 'man's painting' may be viewed by western women who are not expected to understand it, but if a woman of the relevant community views it, even accidentally, the penalty may be severe. In Australia exhibitions of Aboriginal art often carry warnings and have separate viewing spaces to prevent inadvertent viewing.

Some people, especially westerners I suspect, might like to understand the approximate nature of these secrets they are not to understand. I'm reading between lines quite a bit here, but I think it's very much tied to the specifics of an area of land. If you can recognize the individual landscape elements referred to and interpret the stories which go with them there may be a problem. It's as if knowing the story for a given waterhole signals ownership of that waterhole. (If you're reading this and know better please offer corrections or expansions on this!)

To return to written stories, Yaritji Green explained indigenous ownership by comparing it to western systems of copyright, intellectual property, etc. I think it also helps if we add a comparison to non-literary story cultures in other parts of the world. In Europe, we have a long-standing tradition of archetypal stories which have been told in some form throughout Europe, Eurasia, perhaps even the whole of the Old World (and its diasporas). We have lots of regional and individual variations and adaptations of those stories but only specific published instances of them can be owned. The archetypes or story structures are not property at all. They aren't used to confirm ownership of anything or signal any kind of group membership. They're used to give form to ideas, hopes and dreams. Sometimes they can be quite political, sometimes they're escapist. Often, as oral tellings, they've been associated with people who had no connection with any kind of ownership (especially land ownership) since so long ago it might as well be for ever. It's well worth paying attention to this non-elite aspect of the deep-rooted differences between western and non-western cultures, especially since non-westerners usually forget (or don't know) about it in their analyses.

Back to painting and the differences between current notions of 'cultural appropriation' and traditional Aboriginal ownership... We might imagine the term cultural appropriation applying to someone like me, a European, deciding to paint my own bit of European landscape in Aboriginal style. This would certainly be problematic if I commercialized my work as 'Aboriginal' because a) it would offend a mainly western notion of authenticity and b) it could divert income and attention from the Aboriginal artists who depend on it. It might also seem a surprising choice to Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals alike. But it isn't an act which transgresses traditional indigenous Australian notions of cultural property per se, because (except exceptions) indigenous Australians don't claim ownership of pieces of European land, the particular stories attached to them or particular designs for telling their stories.

Somewhere near the other end of the scale, we have the openness of multiculturalism in Britain which I'll hopefully get round to writing about in a day or two.

Best of Loncon

The best thing about it obviously, is being with people who share strong emotional experiences around the same things I do. I'm still processing some of it, but my little heads up goes to the writers on the Race and British SF panel and somehow manage to press all my buttons. All they did was mention, quite casually really, the immigrant experience trope and also the importance of landscape in British fantasy. Those are very big buttons for me.

When people meet me in the UK, it's not immediately obvious that I've had an immigrant experience. I look and sound like I belong here, but errr... it didn't quite happen like that. Not at all. I arrived in late childhood, completely disorientated and very, very homesick. It was only through British landscape-oriented fantasies, Tolkien, Lewis, Garner, Cooper, that I was able to start building a connection with my... well, even now, I have a hard time uttering the words 'new home'. I'm not sure if it would be an exaggeration to say those books saved my life, but they certainly helped form my identity (in difficult circumstances). So, yes, science-fiction and fantasy are more than just fun to a whole lot of us for a whole lot of reasons. That might be why I'm actually enjoying the heady world of fandom more than anything else at this convention. It's all done by people who care a lot.

On Saturday, I went to a panel talk on Race and British SF with Amal El-Mohtar, Tajinder Hayer, Stephanie Saulter, Russell Smith and Dev Agarwal which I'll probably write more on in a bit.

Obstacles to diversity in SF/Fantasy

More on Loncon 3... Did I mention that 'diversity in speculative fiction' was a specific theme of this convention? Hence all these posts which need a home and probably shouldn't really be here. Anyway, I have a couple of observations on obstacles to diversity which came up across a range of talks...

THE BOUNDARIES OF GENRE

 It's pretty much part of the definition of genre fiction that it will conform to a set of expectations in terms of content, but also form. When authors start to push against either of those boundaries, their work tends to get categorised outside the genre, perhaps as magical realism, or just literary fiction. Many western authors find themselves in this situation, but it becomes particularly likely for authors from other traditions - not surprising since the content and forms of SF/Fantasy genre are a tradition of western origin. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, at least not for the authors themselves. Literary fiction is taken more seriously in some circles and may reach a wider audience.

The downside is that it complicates the inclusion of such works in SF/Fantasy centered events in ways that are currently bothering some readers and authors. Works shelved as 'literary' aren't likely to receive genre-based awards if they aren't perceived as exemplars of the genre. They and their authors don't get included in conventions and discussions around the genre, even if some* readers like myself don't really distinguish between fantasy and magical realism in their reading and thinking. This is quite odd in that we merrily group SF and Fantasy as if they just naturally went together. At Loncon 3 I've been quietly navigating around all the SF stuff because it isn't really my thing. Then, when I go to discussions on the stuff that is my thing, we're talking a lot about 'magical realist' authors without having them directly included in the proceedings

* allowing for the fact that some readers are hardcore genre fanatics.

THE LACK OF TRANSLATIONS

I'm very frustrated about this obstacle right now because of the tantalizing existence of books I want to read and can't. The English-speaking world does very, very badly at facilitating the flow of translations compared to other cultures. However, other cultures mainly translate from English, so they have their own problems of access to diverse literatures. Whole swathes of literature are essentially out of our reach, though often not from the groups we usually think of first when we talk about diversity and inclusiveness.

Africa, North America, large swathes of Oceania and sections of Europe and Asia are quite well represented by authors who write in English (although also by authors who don't). South and Central America have largely dropped off the map, along with very considerable areas of Europe and Asia. The exceptions are authors who make it really big in their native language areas and perhaps Japan, since demand for Japanese work has been high enough to generate frequent translation.

What I'm very much hoping is that the rise of low-investment publishing and small independent publishing houses could be used to address this problem in the near future. I really don't think it's due to a lack of willing and capable translators.

Representing social breakdown in SF versus Fantasy

I got another interesting pairing of talks at Loncon 3 on Thursday. The first was on the representation of refugees in science-fiction, the second was called Vampires and National Identity. They don't seem obviously connected but it turned out the second talk offered solutions to the problems raised by the first.

The panel talk on refugees featured writers with direct personal experience of refugees in the real world. It digressed quite a lot on real refugee experiences which was certainly useful, and the general agreement was that not much was going to change in future worlds. Different transport technologies and perhaps different planets... Here, as elsewhere in the conference, we heard about the difficulties of representing a situation in writing while holding on to another story thread. As Lauren Beukes said, if she'd tried to represent the real nature of a refugee hostel, "it would have taken over the whole book".

In the fantasy field, it's easier to use the paranormal as allegory and metaphor for social and psychological situations. The speakers discussed the idea that vampires, who occupy the border between living and dead, can be used as a metaphor for social collapse and individual dehumanisation, and as a xenophobic othering mechanism by host populations. It's easy to imagine a similar narrative mechanism with zombies where the differences between vampires and zombies map relatively easily onto issues of socio-economic class and refugee agency which got discussed in the SF talk.

This is when I realized that the most creative suggestions from the SF talk used technology to achieve a similar 'undead' state. The writers on the panel proposed life on a time-share basis, with refugees forced into artificial sleep for blocks of time, or alternatively, in retreat from the physical world altogether into the virtual realms of the 'uploaded'. Either approach seemed to express the 'dehumanised' status of refugees who are reduced to an incomplete life, very often in terms of basic needs, almost always in terms of cultural identity and social participation.

All very interesting, though a talk I intended on Friday offered some completely different options, which I'll discuss in the next post.

The talks I attended were Refugees Have More to Worry About Than Revenge with Jean Johnson, Dev Agarwal, Erin Hunter, Lauren Beukes and Sean McLachlan and Vampires and Identity with Nin Harris and Deborah Christie. Nin Harris based her talk on the works of Alaya Dawn Johnson.

Diversity in SF/Fantasy and the cognitive overload

I'm at Loncon 3 right now, mostly attending talks of professional interest, plus the odd, film, play, etc. Here, I'm going to talk about the first two panels I attended together because they had many points in common.

The first was about the representation of non-traditional families in SF/fantasy, the second about how we represent non-human sexualities, for example vulcans or vampires (but not gods, despite the long history of that particular trope). In a way, the first talk had a wider field to choose from. There was a focus on gay relationships and polyamoury but more traditional alternative families were mentioned: single parent, recombined, adopted... some of these alternative families are in lack of representation at the moment, others have been tropes since time immemorial. Some of this may be due to social prejudice but because of the way the talks developed, I think it's worth considering the narrative reasons a bit harder.

It's a trope to start a story with a family that's just been split apart by death (or divorce in the modern world), partly because it allows the author to begin at a moment when the characters enter a new situation (or at least radically changed conditions), are already under stress and, lets face it, in a position to elicit reader's sympathy. It's a trope to start a story with an orphan in search of family, for the same reasons and also because it allows the author to cut the backstory to a minimum. Here, more than anywhere else, the protagonist starts with a cleanish slate and a usually a desperate need.

At the talks I heard today, people were keen to read and write about non-traditional families and sexualities but they still saw it as a challenge to be overcome. They mentioned the usual concerns about acceptability to a wide readership and commercial pressures from publishers and editors and a whole lot of other issues. But there were some concerns to do with the craft of writing which transcended both talks.

It's in the nature of SF/Fantasy that the story is often about a quest, a political upheaval, or other adventure. This is what these authors/readers wanted, but with characters that 'just happened to be' polyamorous werewolves (or whatever). Their narrative problem was that as soon as they strayed too far from the common ground of so-called neutrality, they needed to fill their readers in on the details of their protagonist's situation. If they weren't actually entering info-dump land, they were at least introducing undesirable amounts of distraction from the main plotline.

To minimise the narrative impact of the character's alternative lifestyle and also because they desire this for our future, many authors let ther characters live in worlds in which their lifestyles attracted no particular attention. The alternative: dealing with all the conflicts, the juggling of priorities, the closeting and passing and asserting of rights would distract from their desired storyline even more.On the other hand, so would dealing with the structures and institutions a supportive society might be expected to build around accepted lifestyles.

I think writers would be probably be best served by addressing the issue of the lifestyle they want to introduce head on as an aspect of world-building, plotting and character design. It is actually bad writing to have a character who 'just happens to be..' It isn't done with 'neutral' characters either - they just require less leg work. The character's situation, their society, and the people in their lives need to be built into the main storyline, as antagonists or allies, obstacles, opportunities, motivations, providers of stakes and sanctions...

I introduced the idea of cognitive overload into the title of this post, as something which describes the way this overload of 'stuff that must be dealt with' applies to real as well as fictional people. It's hard to write someone living a minority lifestyle in a not altogether supportive society while getting everyone to focus primarily on their pursuit of some other goal. In real life, the same burden falls on real people and gets in the way of their goals too. It's a real social problem and if we can't overcome it even in fiction then we should be doing a lot more to acknowledge its impact on the lives of real people.

The talks I attended were: Reimagining Families with Jed Hartman, David Levine, Rosanne Rabinowitz, Laura Lam, Cherry Potts and The Domestication of Spock with Jude Roberts, Nick Hubble, Mary Anne Mohanraj and Justina Roberts.