I’ve been so busy with stuff related to the conference and panel I’m going to be on that I completely forgot I had a stack of lovely books on folklore and fairytales from the uni library. I decided to photograph a couple for your visual delectation.

And here’s the stack of books that I’ve been poring over as I try to write the Conference Paper From Hell. I love the topic I chose, but my line of argument is frustrating me because I can’t find the right words to frame my thoughts. Tearing my hair out here!

While I pack my bags for the conference, I think about the care I take with assembling the clothes I wear and why fashion is important to me. It’s a point that was driven home today by this beautiful post by definatalie about how big/fat women are marginalised by more than one means, and one of them is fashion. I think most of us who have spent most of our lives overweight know how difficult it is to be taken seriously, and why fashion/appearances, to a certain extent, mean a lot to us. The way you carry yourself can either add to or mitigate the degree of marginalising your experience. I still remember the turning point in my life when I realised I could wear normal clothes like jeans, be halfway “hip” and how empowering it was for me. It’s not just about looks, it’s about how it makes you feel inside to take control of your own destiny and interactions. These things become necessary in a world where, lamentably, these little visual triggers add up to society’s mental “imaging” of who you are as a person. Strangers assume it’s okay to give you unsolicited advice about everything from your eating habits to how you dress, people assume you’re lazy and slothful, or just mentally retarded. I’ve found evidence of this behavior even amongst the supposedly highly educated, and I think it’s a societal anathema. More so than us well-meaning, well-rounded individuals who struggle to balance diets with busy schedules and our body chemistry that often fights against our efforts.

I don’t post about clothes and fashion on this blog, mostly because I’ve grown comfortable not talking about the personal aspect of my being here. It’s more of a privacy thing, but I really admire people like definatalie who are part of the fatshionista movement, because they are bringing positive thoughts and empowerment for women who may come in bigger shapes and sizes but are still beautiful. Some days, we all have to be reminded we’re beautiful.

Public Service Signal Boost

In other, book-related news, Norilana Books is celebrating its 4th Anniversary. An independent publisher, Norilana Books has an impressive list of books in its catalogue, inclusive of the Clockwork Phoenix series of anthologies (and if you haven’t read them, you should! The stories are quite awesome!), Vera Nazarian’s own lyrical fiction, Eugie Foster’s Returning My Sister’s Face, which I’ve reviewed over at m/c reviews as one of the best books to come out of 2009, as well as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies. The state of the economy has made times hard for the press, so if you have money to spare and have a liking for any of the books, do buy a book or two, for yourself or as a gift. I’ve got, in my personal library, five books from the press (bought during the course of two years) and I’m happy with all of them. They’re beautifully designed and bound, the typeface is kind to the eyes, and the stories are lovely.

I was at Alison Goldfrapp’s show at The Tivoli tonight, but decided not to bring a camera. Earlier today, I was puttering around the garden with my Olympus, capturing moments in sunlight, thinking of my old chiaroscuro poem, and I knew that I did not want to photograph the gig. It was a lovely gig, and she played my favourite songs from Felt Mountain and Black Cherry. I had good company, one of my music/gig buddies who is one of the good folks (aka, an sff geek). However, the impetus for gig photography was no longer there.

Perhaps it was because I knew I did not want to be too close to the stage. Or perhaps it’s merely this:

I want to dream with my camera again. I want to move from the ontic quality of performance to the inarticulate possibility found within nature and inanimate objects.

Here’s a picture I decided to go crazy with. So I messed with different levels of color and saturation, and added some more of my crazy handwriting. Mostly, I wanted to capture the feeling of the ocean in another world, or another planet. There’s a beach in Malaysia with red sands, and I visited it once when the haze was thick in the sky, and the sea was almost green. That inspired a scifi short story I began but never finished. I should get around to finishing a draft at some point. Also, now that I am no longer a pauper, I should go to the beach! Soon!

Speaking of scifi, I finally got around to finishing Clockwork Phoenix, and was enchanted by the last three stories. I read it while waiting for Goldfrapp’s warm-up act, and finished it with a satisfied sigh. There were so many lovely tales in the collection but hands-down, my favourites were The Moon-Keeper’s Friend by Joanna Galbraith and Root and Vein by Erin Hoffman. I’m looking forward to reading Clockwork Phoenix 2 and Clockwork Phoenix 3. When I have the time.

This month is going to be all Nnedi Okorafor, all the way, since I have a conference paper to write.

P.S.: Hmm, looks like three years ago, in July, I had a lot to say about the craft of writing. Does me good to read these entries again.

Some days you fly, others you glide, yet others you dive, deep beneath the subterranean waters to retrieve glimmering offerings as though you were a maiden offered to La Serenissima’s liquid embrace.

Fourteen years ago, while still in law school and reading translation after translation of Dante during my mad Italian Renaissance kick (which came hand in hand with my mad mahler classical music kick), I wrote a three part poem to reflect the internal sea-changes within myself, as I made the transition from dreamy schoolgirl to older undergrad. It was a period of intense creativity coupled with undergraduate angst. I offer you the first part both because the poem is in my head today, and as an exhibit in the ongoing discourse concerning hybridity. I wrote poems reflecting how words by Italian renaissance poets and writers affected my insides, but I was never ontologically insecure. How could I be when these lines were pencilled in a notebook as I sat outside a lecture hall on cement steps, bathing in the heat of an equatorial afternoon? How could it be, when I returned home to a typical, working class Malaysian neighbourhood that was bordered by a Malay village? I did not consider myself escaping. I straddled worlds. I painted pictures of the in-between hidden places. I wrote byzantine texts that welded the Italian Renaissance with African history, with Asian myth. An on-going process, that. Some of that made it to the Yrole Triptych.

This poem is still raw, for I was still young. I did think of cleaning the whole thing up for submission somewhere or other, but I’ve had it on the web for over a decade before I took all the poems from the Chiaroscuro and White Feathers collections down, so I think that will not happen. It will make it into the What the Woods Mean anthology at some point, though.

Milan in Tangles: I
(c) Nin Harris. All Rights Reserved.

milan in tangles
a woven tapestry
of water-lapping stones.

the musk, it hides a message
for a discerning nose
while my anxious feet still
ache to tiptoe

across the secret routes of history

mahler holds the baton while i stop
to suck my thumb, ponder in indecision
whether my flying days have come

and still…

my thoughts are yet but fragments,
a chiaroscuro of sensation
and hidden porticoes.

where’s il paradiso?
(June 1996)

>> American Gods, and London literary novelists
>> Review: The Opposite House By Helen Oyeyemi (the review in question, which, I just noticed was written over two years ago. Hah!)

I am posting this here because there seems to be a plethora of comments raging and I really don’t want to get involved. But, as someone who is writing her phd thesis on Helen Oyeyemi and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I can’t help but be deeply irritated. You have here a young, intelligent Yoruba woman articulating a deeply sensitive and deeply personal reaction to the gods of her culture, and what do people focus on? The fact that Neil Gaiman is being overlooked! Golly, why couldn’t this fracas have happened when some woman took the idea of a school of wizardry and…

Right, because the parties appropriated from didn’t have a posse to defend them.

No, this is about privilege. It’s the privileging and value-adding of one writer above another which I take exception to. Granted, the original review could have been worded better. Granted, it was rather bold and a bit irresponsible to assert that Oyeyemi was the first to talk about displaced gods. My issue is not on that valid point. My issue is with someone saying that anyone reviewing Helen Oyeyemi’s novel should also mention American Gods and the subtext of that. What if she had been influenced by other writers who wrote about displaced Gods? Like, say, Wole Soyinka or Amos Tutuola? Both of them are Yoruba writers whom Oyeyemi has cited more than once, and who have done a considerable deal to hybridize the Yoruba Gods. What about the fact that Oyeyemi is situated between two very strong canons, the Western canon and the heritage of african literature? To me, that is what I take issue with. Do the Yoruba, the Igbo or people from other postcolonial nations not have their own personal, psychological reactions to the transference of their gods, orishas and/or mythic structures across time to different cultures? No? This smacks of the “mimic man” argument which is still so prevalent on so many levels that it makes me heartsick. Now, we all know that not all reviewers are alike and it is not the fault of one reviewer or the other that they have read predominantly in certain genres to the exclusion of the other. So I don’t know what the reading influences of the chick who wrote the Oyeyemi review are, but she shouldn’t be criticized just because she may not have read Gaiman. To me it’s a kind of reverse-snobbery. People with different cultural backgrounds and upbringings read different things. This isn’t a bad thing. On the other hand, I will assert that culturally hybrid reviewers and grad students like me are no longer that unique, not a peculiarity in being well-read in both the literary and sf/f genres. Therefore, the gap IS closing, and there are many more young academics and postgrads who are similarly situated. IMO this blowing up of the “perceived” clash of the ghettoes doesn’t help. It just manufactures reaction. Which is what MAINSTREAM CULTURE has been doing for decades. Surely we’re better than that? Why set up strawmen?

For what it’s worth, Oyeyemi’s treatment of the Yoruba Gods is definitely not the same as Gaiman’s in American Gods. Also, while she may “seem” to be mainstream, anyone who reads her novels would understand there’s some serious deep shit and genre-fuckery going on there. Why else would I be writing a thesis on her and Adichie? There may be some haunting similarity in both Gaiman’s and Oyeyemi’s work in that both deal with what happens with the Gods and the otherworld when people migrate, but if we’re going to be talking about precedence, may I also note that writers like Charles de Lint, Robert Holdstock, Terri Windling, Midori Snyder as well as countless other writers from sf/f, magic realism, as well as “emerging” or “new” literatures, primarily diasporic writers, have also dealt with the theme of myths crossing the boundaries of time and space? If we’re talking precedence, magic realism started in a non-English speaking country. If we’re talking precedence with regards to myths and the impact of modernization and culture upon said myths – gods. Where do I even begin? This is why we’ve been beating on our drums over at Mythic Folk. It’s about the diversity of different experiences of mythic and ontological structures derived from different cosmologies while there are some common themes. I think every single one of these writers have literary and artistic merit and trying to say one person comes before the other is pointless.

Also, some of us sf/f geeks are in literary academia, so we’re not nearly as blinkered as people who perceive themselves to be in “ghettoes” choose to say we are. But is it true that most mainstream publishing circuits discredit sf/f? Of course! But the same can also be said of younger, newer writers from postcolonial nations trying to juggle constructs and ideas. Some of us are fucked on both sides of the equation.

The Opposite House is a novel that stands on its own merit, as does American Gods.

If you asked me to choose which spoke to the ache inside my own postcolonial heart, I would say it was The Opposite House. This doesn’t mean I chose one genre over the other, I pretty much straddle both postcolonial literary fiction and fantasy. And I think both should support the other. Rag on the clash of the ghettoes all you like, but I do suggest people read The Opposite House before they succumb to the viralness of twitter and blogging culture with secondhand information. As usual. I suspect this post will be futile. But at least I get to vent my spleen. And look. American Gods has probably sold way more copies than The Opposite House ever will, so tell me, who is really the unknown here? And which writer would suffer more? The mere fact that Oyeyemi is young and nailed big publishing contracts doesn’t make her any less of a writer or a writer with any less integrity. As for the influences, she’s asserted in more than one interview that she’s influenced by two cultures.

To be honest, I think a lot of sf/f is going mainstream with the mainstreaming of geekhood and things that used to be subculture. And I’m not sure I like it. Sure it sells more books, but the downside of it is that writers who have more sales and numbers get privileged over others. And mainstreaming of subcultural proponents always has side-effects. FWIW I have heard of more than one postgraduate thesis on Neil Gaiman, far more than there are on Oyeyemi! AFAIK I am the only one! (if you’re reading this and you’re doing an Oyeyemi phd topic also, email me!). Also, anyone who has actually read The Opposite House or any other of Oyeyemi’s works would get why “the ghetto that doesn’t realize it’s a ghetto” stuff that’s going on over in comments is so ironic as well as offensive on so many levels – where do I even begin. Sigh.

Note: I’m disabling comments and pings because I really don’t have the time and mental energy to want to consider if this is being read and rebutted. I’m not saying you can’t! As always, there is risk in putting stuff out there, but I need to prioritize my time! I’m really writing this for my friends and people who actually follow the blog or students of African literature who visit. My hands hurt and I’ve got a backlog of work that’s a bit terrifying. Also, I hate herd mentality and viral blogging/tweets. I wish people would take the time to research things first, truly I do. My views are my own as a postgraduate scholar of African and mythic fiction, as a postcolonial gothic and mythic writer, and a woman writer of color. In no way does this reflect any organization or institution I may be affiliated with, but I respectfully assert my right to have these views.

The incredibly talented and charismatic Black Jesus Experience, fusing hip-hop with funk, jazz and traditional Ethiopian/African sounds and vocal techniques.

I’m still kicking myself that in the craziness of everything I didn’t get around to getting a CD :-/