Reflection: #WNDB & Beyond a Single Story

Whether they realise it or not, most Australians are familiar with the concept of a single story. It's when foreigners ask us, unironically, about keeping kangaroos as pets. Its the entire sub-genre of Australian Outback romances. I've been polling all my romance reading friends about these, and none of them have ever read an Outback romance. Even though these books are (sometimes) made and distributed in Australia, they are primarly meant for external consumption. It's the advertisements on my cable television provider for a program in which some minor British personality goes bush to search the "real Australia". Cue images of horse-wrangling, cattle stations and crocodiles, and British Guy patronisingly explaining everything despite having a day's experience of the place. It's not that the stories of rural Australians aren't worthy or important - in fact, in our internal media these are often sidelined - but their presentation to international audiences invalidates the 85% of Australians who live in urban environments. 

And countries and regions all around the world have similar experiences. Often, we even encourage the stereotypes of the outside world to brand ourselves for tourism and business purposes, Australia's Where the bloody hell are you? ad campaign being a prime example, but this doesn't make them any less alienating or dangerous.

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's talks about how we are often lead to believe that one story about a particular place or people is the only story in her influential TED talk entitled The Dangers of a Single Story. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend watching it, or reading the transcript.

She recounts how, on coming to America for university, she realised that people saw Africa as a place of "beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS", and related to her through this lens. It was not their fault; this is what the media and popular culture presented to them with little differentiation between nations, regions, cultures and religions. Adichie, however, was not in the same boat. She says:

...because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.

I thought of this quote when I was reflecting on my #WNDB Challenge as it comes up to the end of the year. Despite the fact that I had sought out books featuring characters of varying ethnicities, religions and sexualities, I have realised that 14 out of the 20 books I read were set in the US, and all but two took place in either the US or UK (and when I say the UK, I really mean England with the odd Scottish setting thrown in; Wales and Northern Ireland don't get a look-in). I undertook the #WNDB Challenge to counter hegemony, but ended up perpetuating it in another form. Unless they had immigrated to the US or UK, the people of the periphery were still silenced. No doubt about it, the fault was in my selecting skills, but this also reflects what I was exposed to on Goodreads, Amazon and other blogs.

I'm always loath to buy into romance/'light' fiction vs. 'literary' fiction binaries, but I do feel like the romance world is dragging its feet in this regard. The Man Booker prize has opened itself up to writers from all over the world and novels from all over the world are feted as literary masterpieces (this is has it's own set of problems as well, don't get me wrong). In contrast, all of the 2015 RITA Winners were set in the UK or US. 2014 had more diverse settings: one Outback, one partially set in Bangkok and one set in various European locations (but with the characters based in London). In 2013, we were back to all US or UK, excepting two fictional locations.

I have no doubt there are many romance novels set outside these conventional locations out there, but they are not making it past the literary gatekeepers and so languish in the dusty corners of the Kindle Store. In 2016, I'm making it my mission to find them. The aim is to review books from countries around the world in an aim to help myself see beyond the single story, and I would be grateful for any recommendations. 

As always, there will be an element of working this out as I go along. For example, should the author have to be from the country in which the book is set? The only things I'm sure about is that I would like to read more than one book from each country. After all, it would be pretty useless to counter a single story with a single story.

Recommendations: #WNDB Contemporaries

I don't know how everyone else is going with their #WNDBChallenge, but I've found searching for diverse books can be very time-consuming (even if it's lots of fun).  I wrote up some recommendations earlier in the year, but since then I've thought of many others, so I've listed a few contemporaries that would make very goods #WNDB reads, and are just good reads in general.

Party Lines by Emma Barry
Lydia Reales is many things: female, Latina, pro-choice and...a Republican.  Not just a Republican voter, but a Republican staffer.  For Michael Picetti, working on the opposing Democrat campaign, Lydia's completely off-limits and on the wrong side of the political spectrum, but he finds himself intrigued all the same.  Party Lines is a deft, honest and unbiased look at the way the way the US primaries and larger political system operate.  Lydia's position as a fish-out-of-water is handled beautifully; she tries to do her job and fight for what she believes in, even as she realises that, to those around her, she's merely a token, to be wheeled out when she's needed and be quiet when she's not.

Lighting the Flames by Sarah Wendell
Wendell wrote this book because she was dismayed that, despite a thriving sub-genre of Christmas romances, there were next to no romance novels set around Hanukkah.  Overall, it was a sweet, reasonably chaste novel about two long-time friends who serve as counsellors at a Jewish camp, and I found the hero particularly likeable and empathetic.

Just Not Mine by Rosalind James
Benched with a broken finger, rugby player Hugh Latimer suddenly finds himself the full-time carer for his small half-brother and sister.  He is forced to move in with them, and now spends most of his time trying not to notice the attractiveness of their next-door neighbour, Maori soap-actress Josie Pae Ata.  Several other of James' Escape to New Zealand books contain Maori protagonists, including Just for You and Just Good Friends, which I would also recommend.

The Year We Fell Down by Sarina Bowen
When Corey, left wheelchair-bound after an ice hockey accident in high school, meets Hartley, a broken-legged hockey player living across the hall, they bond instantly. But Hartley's got a girlfriend, and even if he didn't, Corey's convinced he'd never want the girl who can't even walk. The Year We Fell Down provided a raw look at the way we treat those with disabilities, without compromising the characters' relationship.   

Review: Opening Act by Suleikha Snyder

4 stars

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book in possession of a Princess Bride reference within the first two sentences is going to be an excellent read.  And Suleikha Snyder's Opening Act starts strong with a band called 'The Brute Squad' .  For those of you who have forgotten the line that comes from, or (heaven forbid) haven't seen the movie, here's a little reminder:

But back to Opening Act.  Journalist Saroj Shah has been in love with her friend, Adam Harper - guitar player of the aforementioned band - for years.  Adam's been burying his head in the sand for just as long.  But when Adam finally wakes up and decides he wants her too, Saroj isn't sure he's serious.  After all:

He was big, doofy all-American Adam.  She was Saroj "where are the twenty gold wedding sarees" Shah...No one looked at the two of them and thought, Yes, they should be together.  That makes sense.  

Most of the novel's conflict is internal, stemming from the hero and heroine's beliefs about themselves and others. When I first finished the book, I felt vaguely disappointed with this.  I kept thinking there would be some big denouement, but there never was and then suddenly it was over.  When I sat down to write this review, it was beccause I needed to vent about reaching the end before I was mentally prepared for it.  But this is not Snyder's fault; it often happens when I read books on Kindle.  The little percentage in the bottom right corner misleads me because it often includes 10%-20% samples of other titles.  

Anyway, once I got over my trauma at being abruptly ripped out of bookland, I re-evaluted and realised that Opening Act was actually a really wonderful novella.  Too often authors try to squeeze too much into a novella, or they use the format to avoid characterisation all together.  Sometimes, they manage both simultaneously.  But Snyder developed her characters and their attitudes well (I especially like the sidekick, Johnny Ray).  To have introduced an external conflict late in the piece would have spoiled the burgeoning relationship between Adam and Saroj, and overshadow Saroj's self-realisation, in which she de-colonised her mind to the point where she went "damn straight, I'm good enough for Adam and stuff what anyone else thinks".  (That's not a direct quote, guys, I promise.  Snyder's writing is heaps better than that.  See actual quote above about doofiness and sarees.)  

So, overall, I really liked Opening Act, and I probably would have loved it if I'd had a better conception of its length and content starting out.  But I do feel a bit weird about making it one of my #WNDB reads (or having them at all).  I've been reading the author's blog and she's understandably disillusioned by white people hijacking conversations that should be for POC.  I would hate to think that, in trying to broaden my horizons, I am being like those men who appear in the comments section of anything ever written about feminism.  Not the 'what about teh menz' ones, but the ones that think that my manslpaining feminism and talking over other people's lived experience, they are actually helping the cause.  It usually ends up with something like this:

But then she also wrote another post entitled If You've Read One of Us, You Haven't Read Us All, where she says: 

“I’ve read one author of color, so I’m done now” is a real thing. We feel it when we put books out there, when we pitch to editors and agents...Can you imagine saying, “Well, I read Sarah MacLean, so I’m full up. I don’t need to read Tessa Dare or Lisa Kleypas or Nora Roberts!”?"

My first thought on reading this was 'what would I do if I had to choose Sarah MacLean or Tessa Dare?' and it made me feel a bit panicky.  Back on topic, maybe fetishising diversity and patting ourselves on the back for reading something different isn't the best way to go about things.  But, then, maybe you can only fight fire with fire.  So, after talking that through and resolving absolutely nothing, I leave you with these two tweets to think about:

Reflection: My #WNDBResolution and List of Diverse Recommendations

Over the past three or so months, I’ve become increasingly aware of the lack of ethnic diversity in the romance/chick-lit world, as well as in many other genres.  In one of my periods of yearning for India (where I spent a year teaching in 2013), I started to search out novels set there.  And when I say search, I mean search.  Because, while there are some out there, they're often not very well publicised.  I’m also sad to say that some of them (particularly the historicals) seem to be written by people who  have never been closer to the Subcontinent than their local Indian take-away.  

But happily, the search for non-Orientalist Indian romance and chick-lit novels brought me to the ‘Multicultural’ category of Amazon’s romance section.  I progressed through huh, it’s so weird that they have a multicultural romance section through hey, a lot of this stuff is really good…why isn’t better known? to why the blooming heck have I never realised the racial bias in what I read?  Around the same time, I also started to notice that there was a real backlash about the whitewashing of covers in YA fiction, and so I got angry about that too.  (I know, covers are my catnip, but they're such a intensely visual example of ingrained privilege and prejudice).  

This increased consciousness was made concrete two days ago when I read this post, wherein a Guardian journalist reflects of her experience of only reading books by Authors of Colour throughout 2014.  This, in turn, lead me to the We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) movement.  They have an initiative called WNDBResolution, which encourages people to pledge to read a certain number of books with diverse characters in the next year.  So, here's my pledge: 

I'll review them on here and take part in the hashtag #WNDBResolution on Twitter to keep in the loop.  I encourage whoever is reading this to give it a go as well; you have nothing to lose, and a whole lot of new perspectives and awesome reads to gain.  To get you started, I've put down some of my recent favourites featuring non-white leads:  

My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas

Set in Victorian London with flashbacks to the hero and heroine's first meeting in Chinese Turkestan several years before, My Beautiful Enemy is the story of Ying-Ying-slash-Catherine and Captain Leighton Atwood.  It's a poignant story with an engaging plot that gave me an appreciation for the complex cultural mixing pot that is Central Asia.  

No Sex in the City by Randa Abdul-Fattah

In the chick-lit category is No Sex in the City, about Turkish-Australian Esma, who's trying to balance her faith and the expectations of her parents with the cosmopolitan Sydney life. It's witty and relatable, with a great cast of supporting characters and a cute ending.  Really gave me a new appreciation for the ways in which white Australians can be thoughtless towards their 'ethnic' counterparts.

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is not your average romance.  It's the 1920s, and as a Malayan-Chinese career girl, Jade Yeo is a fish out of water, to say the least.  Her desire to live independently and the casual way she treats sex makes for a refreshing change from the bulk of the genre.  Short and sweet, it nonetheless deals deftly with the ripple effects of British colonialism.  As Jade says so eloquently, "It is as if I were a piece of chess in a game played by people who never looked down at their fingers".  

A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev

At four years old, Mili was married in a mass ceremony.  Now, she's at university in the US, biding her time until her absent husband comes to claim her.  Instead, her husband's brother, Sam, is the one who shows up on her doorstep and sweeps her off her feet.  Dev writes beautifully and sensitively about the clash of modern, globalised India with age-old Rajasthani traditions, fleshing out her characters and developing a unique plot in the process.  One of the best books I've read in a long time.  

Talk Sweetly to Me by Courtney Milan

Being a black, female mathematician in Victorian England isn't exactly a walk in the park, as Rose Sweetly well knows.  She does her best to keep her head down, but her neighbour, renowned columnist Stephen Shaughnessy, isn't making it easy.  Rose's wariness about the world brings home the forms of discrimination and oppression that WOC have faced, and continue to do so.  Like all of Milan's offerings, Talk Sweetly To Me is different, thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining.  

The Lotus Palace by Jeannie Lin

Set in Tang Dynasty China, The Lotus Palace is about Yue-Ying, a maidservant to a famous courtesan.  When another prominent courtesan from a rival house is found dead, Yue-Ying is caught up in a sea of intrigues that bring her into contact with Bai Huang, an aristocratic scholar and well-known playboy.  The relationship between the hero and heroine was really wonderfully done, and the idea that this novel is set at the same time as Europe was experiencing the Dark Ages blew my mind and opened my eyes to my ignorance about Han Chinese civilisation and history.  

If you have any recommendations, feel free to write me a comment or - even better - post on Twitter with the hashtag #WNDBResolution so everyone can benefit.  Catch you on the other side of my first diverse read for my resolution, Indigo by Beverly Jenkins!