#bilquis

[rogueartistjyn]

Cover for the special edition Hardcover of "Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow" by Tom King

Bilquis Evely artist, Mat Lopes on colors.

[redpool]

You're going to have to pry American Gods out of my cold, dead hands.

[mask131]

What I really wanted to post about, when writing this previous entry, was the Bilquis scene of American Gods.

You know, THE famous "devouring sex" scene of Bilquis. Neil Gaiman was sometimes asked about it on his Tumblr and he always had vague or joke-y answers such as "This was put as a test, so the reader would know what they got into and could stop before going further". And so it was sort of the common consensus - that the scene was deliberately placed by Gaiman here just to weird out and blow the mind out of the reader, to prepare them for all the weirdness to come...

But I found an earlier answer about the why of the Bilquis scene. A much more thorough, interesting and relevant reason as to why this scene exist... However Gaiman never spoke of it on his Tumblr. Which I find... strange. Interesting and strange - I have no "conclusions" to get out of it but I just want to bring forward this unusual thing. Because according to interviews he gave at the time of the release of the book, the scene was a gift/homage to... Kathy Acker.

Gaiman talked about three or five times in total about Kathy Acker on his Tumblr account, and never much in depth. Saying which works of hers made him discover her work and turned him into a fan ; or saying she is one of the persons he missed and wishes he could have a lunch with again... He shared how his Orpheus-based poem was written soon after Acker died, as a reaction to her departure (you can see it here). But he never talked about Acker's link to American Gods.

I mean, it is kind of obvious Kathy Acker's work influenced American Gods since the literal dedication of the book, the first thing we read, is "For Kathy Acker and Roger Zelazny". Zelazny's influence over American Gods is very big and obvious when you know the basic Zelazny works - Gaiman clearly wrote it own as an homage and even pastiche of Zelazny's work (notably imitating his narrative style in the Amber Chronicles). But I am not familiar with Acker's work, meaning I couldn't guess on my own which part she played on American Gods, and I saw nobody mention her link to it - not even Gaiman.

Yet I found back an interview Gaiman gave for the release of the book. It was hosted on a website that doesn't exist anymore, at the page https://raintaxi.com/gaiman.html, but hopefully the Wayback Machine saved the page from when it was still around, in the distant years 2001-2002. And here is the segment I am referring to:

Rain Taxi: You dedicate American Gods to "Kathy Acker and Roger Zelazny, and all points between." How do you view the literary continuum, and how do you see yourself in it?

Neil Gaiman: It’s an interesting dedication because it’s about three things. It’s about absent friends, and it’s about writing a book for absent friends. It’s also about the literary continuum--there’s this thing that runs from here to here and very elegantly and peculiarly, it runs from A to Zed. In the ’90s I lost a number of friends, but the two big friends I lost who were also writers were Kathy and Roger. Roger was someone who I had not known as well as I should have done. We’d see each other at conventions and things and talk on the phone, and we’d always have long conversations about how sooner or later I had to come down to New Mexico and hang for a week . . . it was always something I figured I had plenty of time for. When he died it really shocked me, and I did wind up going down to New Mexico for the memorial. Kathy was somebody who I was very good friends with in London from 1985 onward. I remember I got an email one day saying she was dying, which seemed a little odd because I had spoken to her six months before. I phoned some friends of hers in England and was told: No, no, she’s just being a drama queen, she’s fine, she’s got flu, whatever. I sent back an email to these people saying "my people say she’s just got flu." "No, she’s dying in a hospital in Mexico, here’s the phone number." She was in room 101--I thought, there you go, there’s a literary reference. It was good, I got to say my goodbyes, tell her I love her, tell her to hang in there. We said a few words and she was dead a couple of days later. That one hurt. So I wanted to write something for them. In many ways, I have no idea if Kathy would have liked it. I think she would have done. I know she would have liked chapter two with the extreme sex in it--that was there for Kathy. But I sent a copy of the book to Jane Lindskold who was Roger’s partner in his last few years. She wrote back and she said, you know, Roger would have loved this book. I felt very happy about that. It was interesting because I wasn’t trying to write a Zelazny-ish book. I think Roger was probably the best fantasy/SF writer of the ’60s and ’70s when he was on form. I really wasn’t trying to emulate him. I was just trying to write a book that I thought he would have liked

That was the part. There's other interesting things in this old interview, but I just wanted to highlight and bring forward this sequence in regard to all the talks that have been going on for now. The influences of Neil Gaiman. What he took inspiration from. Gaiman and women. Gaiman's works "erasing" or "eclipising" female authors. The plagiarism accusations. The weird, bizarre, fetishistic sex scenes that for some aged badly.

Again I have literaly no point to make here. I just share some pieces of information that have been swept away by the decay of the Internet and that nobody seemed eager to bring back up. Doing my little archive of forgotten answers and ignored facts.

[misanthropemom]

I'm watching American Gods, and as much as I enjoy it and having read the book and enjoyed that, it's driving me fucking nuts having the Gaiman revelation occur in between, playing try to spot the biases in this fucking story.

And, as wonderful as it was to see Bilquis reunited with the Oshun, it's all wrong. She is a desert goddess, and the Oshun are water goddesses. Skin color should not matter.

And can someone fucking tell me why a desert goddess settled in New York City instead of Vegas. You know, in the desert, where there's lots of people who only are there for the weekend or a short amount of time, where it's hot, where it's dry, where prostitution is legal. Come on honey, you could have the Queen of Sheba Temple and Casino, it would be wondrous.

[thesorceresstemple]

Ancient writing on stone in the Bilqis Temple ruins in the Saba Valley.

[khaleesiest]

I have a type

[thetealhummingbird]

Gorgeous Supergirl art by

Bilquis Evely artist

Mat Lopes on colors

Variant cover by @mooncalfe-art

[succulentsiren]