Illustration by Jade Schulz
“Tamara, a 37-year-old fic writer from Texas, started out writing fanfiction starring The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully. She put down her pen for about a decade, and was only moved to pick it back up when television gifted her the perfect protagonist: Scandal’s Olivia Pope. “I think because it was a black woman starring in the show, and a show produced by a black woman,” she said. “It was inspirational. If Shonda Rhimes can write this, I can write too.” As blacklitchick on FF and AO3, Tamara has since turned her hand to – yup, you guessed it – The Walking Dead, and Michonne. “There’s no other character on TV like her. She has so many layers. Of course she’s strong, but there are all these other things. And Danai is such a great actress – again, she makes me want to write.”
Of course, the character of Michonne is many things besides a black woman: she has a painful past that influences much of her present behaviour; she is a skilled and brave fighter with a head for strategy; she is a compassionate friend and a level-headed influence on Rick and the band of survivors that make up “Team Family” in TWD. So the right to write fics about her does not belong exclusively to black women. But there is no escaping the fact that she lives in the world as a black woman, and a topic that comes up every time I’m discussing favourite fics is the creator question: Can you tell when the fic writer is not black? I have pretty good “blackdar” on this, and so do some fic writers and readers. It’s almost always tiny details, both concrete and intangible – for example, the contrast in the overarching kindnesses offered to nonblack vs. black characters. For Kendra, this was striking in the Doctor Who fandom, in the way many writers imagined Rose Tyler (the 10th Doctor’s white companion) and Martha Jones (Ten’s black companion). “I noticed I could tell who was writing it by the way that they treated Rose versus Martha,” she said. “A lot of the time, [writers would] give Rose the benefit of the doubt.” This was not the case for Martha. The lack of generosity to black characters also manifested even more explicitly: a resistance in some quarters to explore a romantic connection between Martha and Ten, a relationship many fic writers were happy to write for other Companions. (See also: Mercedes and Sam on Glee, Carter and Reese on Person of Interest, Bonnie and Damon on The Vampire Diaries, and even Uhura and Spock in the 2009 Star Trek reboot. The list goes on.) There is something to be said about the fact that all these black characters have been paired with white men; In her essay, When White Men Love Black Women on TV, Tressie McMillan Cottom addresses it by saying, “…it is disingenuous to argue that power dynamics of representation and even economics do not influence with whom we mate.”
To give Michonne a surname is to confer dignity to the character.
Another giveaway is the language of the descriptors used for Michonne’s physical features. Calling her hair “dreads” instead of “locs”, for example, pulls me up short. When a writer chooses to describe her lips as “thick” over “full”, a tiny alarm goes off. When a writer marvels, over and over, at the contrast between the colour of her skin and Rick’s, a feeling of mild unease settles in my stomach. These things rarely read as malicious, but they betray a shallow intimacy with the reality of a black woman’s lived experience (a similar tone-deafness comes from all-white writers’ rooms). Getting the essence of Michonne, for example, means understanding the reality of her existence as a black woman (even in the midst of a herd of walkers). “In my mind, I am Michonne, she is me,” Kendra said, laughing.”
—Bim Adewunmi wrote about black women and fanfiction. Read more here.
