Carve the Mark Bonus — How (Not) To Write Racial Diversity
So this post's about a year in the making, which I think makes it my biggest act of procrastination on this blog—possibly in my entire life, although there's another strong contender I still need to deal with right now.
But yeah. Remember Carve the Mark? Let's talk about it again while we wait for me to get through my massive pile of work to do so I can get around to reading the sequel. Fun times ahead for everyone.
See, I wasn't the only one to read racial connotations in that text, and Veronica Roth, a woman who every signs points to being pretty well-meaning and progressive, felt the need to address it. And so we're gonna talk about that now.
The main source of what I'm going to be discussing here is this post from her blog, but this isn't really a response to it or a breakdown of it, or even really a rebuttal. I'm not trying to have a conversation with Veronica Roth—I don't think it would be very constructive, and as someone who doesn't think authors should generally argue with their critics, I am not making this post in an attempt to bait her into doing that exact thing. If somehow Ms Roth comes across this post…hopefully she can learn a thing from it. Or not. I don't know. To everyone else reading this: I invite you to read her blog post, for the sake of fairness.
I will state this once again: I do think Veronica Roth means well—based on what I've heard from her before, and on how the blog post opens and is generally phrased. And as a white person working on a fantasy book with a biracial protagonist and a variety of cultures, I feel for her and I certainly don't claim a moral high ground. I'm literally just trying to share my insight into the past few years of trying to figure out how to navigate these pitfalls. Not quite as a peer, since, you know, I'm not published (yet?), but something close to it.
Finally, I'll point out the obvious: I'm not going to speak for all critics of Carve the Mark, obviously. I haven't actually read many people's opinions, because…I don't really have the time and I didn't even dislike Carve the Mark all that much. Like, I felt it was an okay book that botched its execution and landed somewhere in the "mediocre, but interesting" territory. This means some of the point Roth addresses aren't even my own points. But hey, we'll make do with what we've got.
Okay, I think that should be all the disclaimers I need for this.
I will give Roth this: she does seem to have done her research on the sensitive issue of racial representation (and, more generally, of any representation) in sci-fi/fantasy stories. Acknowledging that you can't deflect criticism by claiming it's not the real-world culture, because what matters is how real-world readers read the characters…well, it sounds like the most basic thing to say on this topic, and I'm sure it kind of is.
But it's also a step further than a lot of hardcore fantasy fans and authors are willing to take. Fantasy and science fiction are kind of dominated by straight white men with no intention to check their privilege like that. The bar isn't very high, is what I'm getting at. But credit where credit is due.
With that said…well, the rest of the post is basically a defense and a correction. Like the accusations of racism are all based on just a misunderstanding of the book's text. So that's what we're actually going to talk about. Because yes, Roth makes some good points, but I feel like she misses the forest for the trees by focusing on said corrections.
Okay. So. First and foremost, the race of the characters—specifically how they're portrayed.
The concern that I’ve seen raised more than once about Carve the Mark is that there is one light-skinned, straight-haired race of peaceful people (Thuvhe) warring against a dark-skinned, curly-or-thick-haired race of warriors (Shotet).
Roth's general point here is that Thuvhe and Shotet people are "physically indistinguishable from each another" due to being people of blended origins. Which…okay, I can't speak for her intentions, obviously, but I'm going to say that, purely on the high-concept level, this isn't how the book reads. The Shotet are a diaspora, and Shotet heritage can manifest among literally other culture in the world of Carve the Mark; so yes, the Shotet aren't uniformly "savage" brown people. But that said…I never got the impression that Thuvhe was also such a diverse culture?
Thing is, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does feel like Roth is trying to over-specify the criticism aimed at her, so that she can more easily dismiss it. I never really pictured the Shotet as "dark-skinned, curly-or-thick-haired", i.e. what we would call black in our world. Most of the descriptions that came to mind led me to picture them as people of color, but more of North African or Middle Eastern descent. Although, again, it's also pretty clear that they're from a diaspora.
I mean, it's literally a plot point that some of the (Shotet) characters are all blond, and therefore, related. And, conveniently…that's exactly the issue Roth is missing here.
Most of this section of her blog post is devoted to quoting bits from the book that show that Shotet characters have plenty of different hair or skin colors. And it's fine—these quotes include very minor characters, but I won't fault Roth for being thorough. But the problem is that you can't treat all descriptions are equivalent in how the book reads.
First impressions are important—and the first look we actually have at Shotet characters with specific descriptions come from Cyra's chapters, and she's talking mostly about her family, who are either described as having brown skin and dark hair or not described at all. The latter part is important, by the way. Roth uses two quotes to establish that Ryzek is meant to be white. First:
Ryzek: “…his skin was so pale he looked almost like a corpse.” (p60)
The latter is easy to tackle: it's just flat-out a misused word—and a pretty common one among white writers. "Pale" does not mean "white"—"pale", when talking about skin, usually refers to pallor, when your skin grows lighter due to a variety of emotional or physical distress. Pale is also used to describe a lighter, more desaturated version of a color, but either way, pale just does not mean the same thing as white when it comes to skin. People of color can grow pale too, under the exact same circumstances. This specific quote is especially unfortunate, since "he looked almost like a corpse" seems to point at pallor—since pallor actually happens to corpses, among other things.
Reading this book, from an author who by her own admission tries to be sensitive about topics of representation, I (and I assume others) assumed that she knew this, because…well, "don't use pale to mean white" is a pretty common talking points when discussing racial representation. If you want to avoid "white", I've seen people suggest "fair" or "light/lighter skins" as alternatives (the latter especially if your setting doesn't have a concept of whiteness or a "white" ethnicity), but "pale" isn't one.
The second quote is this:
Cyra and Ryzek, compared: “I was tall, too, but that was where my physical similarities with my brother ended. It wasn’t uncommon for Shotet siblings to look dissimilar, given how blended our blood was, but we were more distinct than most.” (p61)
And…well, in the context of this post, it becomes obvious that the intent of the line is it includes Ryzek's skin being white. The problem is: you're not actually saying that. And it turns out, "dissimilar" to brown skin can mean anything, including a darker shade, a different undertone, or a lighter shade of brown that wouldn't register to us as "white".
"Representation should be made explicit" is a pretty common maxim, and one I think Roth knows about, because she mentions several time that Cyra has brown skin. And that's fine. But if you want to establish that her culture is more varied than that, you need to have other characters where you explicitly portray them as white. Note that, of the other quotes Roth uses, all she has is another "pale" character (which, again, not the right word)—the other Shotet characters all either have brown skin or undescribed skin.
Meanwhile, her examples of descriptions for Thuvhesit characters are limited to Akos and his siblings. Akos has fair skin (there's one of the words you should use if you want your character to be read as unambiguously white), and his siblings' skin tones are undescribed, but Eijeh has green eyes, something that's commonly associated to white people.
Roth points out how both Cisi and Eijeh have curly, dark hair, as if that proved they're not white. I guess I have some news for most of my maternal relatives, then? I know that our image of whiteness tends to default to straight blond hair (you might even say…Aryan), but it's not like white people don't have curly or dark hair (or both).
And since these are literally Roth's only examples of Thuvhesit people…you can easily see why a reader would assume Thuvhesits are meant to be read as white. I mean, Roth herself couldn't find an example of a Thuvhesit character who isn't white.
This, I think, is the crux of the issue here: Roth cannot differentiate between what she intends and the book she actually wrote. I actually pointed out a few times that descriptions in Carve the Mark are way too sparse—not just for the characters, but for settings as well. Voa, the city most of the book is set in, is only described to us near the end of the book, for instance. Thinking back to Divergent, I don't think there were a lot of descriptions there either.
And that's most of the problem, really. If all the Thuvhesit characters are white, and all the Shotet characters who get a description is either "brown", "undefined", or "blond, but it's so rare that we can assume those characters are all related", it creates a mental picture. Probably not the one that was intended—I am fully willing to believe Roth on that. But it's still the one that's there.
Don't forget, too, that whiteness is ultimately a very fragile concept. A lot of biracial people will, at best, "pass" as white, because whiteness is basically treated as a recessive trait—either both your parents are white and you are, or one or both of your parents isn't white and you're not either. Biracial people will generally attest that, even if they pass as white, the moment their racial background becomes known they start experiencing racism. [Note that I do say "treated as a recessive trait", not that it is one, because race isn't genetic, but that's a topic for another time. I think I have a post about that on the blog already, so feel free to use the search function.] So by virtue of being a diaspora often described as "mixed", the Shotet will read as majority non-white.
Add to that the fact that the Shotet still do have elements of the "savage foreign culture" in the way they're described to them. Maybe that was unintentional, or maybe Roth was trying to subvert the trope—it kind of sounds like the latter, actually, based on an article she wrote about world building on John Scalzi's blog. Like she wanted Akos to progressively find there's more to the Shotet than that stereotype.
Which Akos…sort of does. To an extent. But it still doesn't change the fact that your culture, which as I've explained reads as primarily people of color, has those tropes associated with it in the first place. And that a lot of the subversion stems from there being more to them than those tropes, not the tropes being wrong in the first place. So it's still a very delicate position to be in.
After talking about the descriptions of the characters (where, to summarize, the issue seems to be "you didn't describe your characters enough, Roth"), she goes on to talk about some aspects of Shotet culture. Specifically, language, religion and the Marks (i.e. scarification/tattoos).
The issue of language is a simple one. Apparently most of the criticism compared the Shotet language to Arabic languages. I personally read it as Hebrew, but since they're all related (specifically they're Semitic languages, part of the Afro-Asiatic language family), I think it's roughly the same idea. Roth's counter is that it's actually based on Hungarian, from her own time living in Romania and meeting the Hungarian community there. She also says that, ironically, she did use Arabic as an influence for the Thuvhesit language, but she also mentions French and as a French speaker I didn't see that, either. Which, she wanted to make something alien and only use the sonorities, so…mission accomplished, maybe?
And…yeah, okay. All I can say to this is "death of the author" and move on to the other points. For now. You'll see what I'm getting at in a moment.
On the religious aspect, people have apparently likened the Scavenge to Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca in Islam that all Muslims who can perform should at least once in their life. I hadn't seen it, since I read the Shotet as more Jewish due to the diaspora aspect, but it makes sense to me. But not to Roth, apparently:
But the sojourn is not a religious practice […] The Shotet sojourn may be a pilgrimage, too, but it’s a way of ensuring that they remember their history, when—for a period of time—they didn’t have a permanent home in the galaxy.
This is a really weak argument, and…well, I'm not gonna lie, an argument that only a religious person could make, in my humble atheist opinion. Now, I agree that the religious aspect of Hajj is intrinsic to it. But acting like there's a fundamental difference between a religious ritual and a cultural tradition seems…extremely myopic. Religion, in the end, is a set of traditions and ritual.
But also, in the text of the book, this just flat-out isn't true. The Shotet explicitly worship the current (like, these are words that are said in the book), and the current is what determines where the Sojourn goes. The Sojourn, therefore, is a ritual that at the very least holds a religious significance. So that doesn't even work.
Roth also mentions (in her conclusion rather than in the section about the Sojourn, which…weird) that the Sojourn was mostly inspired by her own husband. Which, cute, but not relevant.
And finally, again, death of the author. I'm getting to that big point, I promise. Before we move on to the last point, I'll point out that Roth describes her background in religious studies and collectively calls the Abrahamic religions as "western religions". It's a little petty to call attention to it, but the use of "western" is already pretty problematic when trying to prove you're not racist, and referring to Judaism and Islam as "western" is flat-out offensive when "Western" culture is built on centuries of antisemitism and Islamophobia.
As for the Marks, she also took those from Eastern Europe, specifically how tattoos were used to mark criminals and political prisoners in Soviet gulags. But…
However, since the book came out I’ve felt like I didn’t fully consider the associations that most people have with scarification, which is primarily with non-white, non-Western, often marginalized cultures. This is definitely an area I feel I should have tread more carefully. I can’t undo what’s already done, but I think it would be best to de-emphasize this Shotet practice in the next book in the series as much as possible, to minimize its potential damage.
First of all: I don't think that de-emphasizing it is really the solution. Especially because, honestly, the Marks are probably the most nuanced aspect of Shotet culture (plus, it's in your title and all), and even if I can see the parallels with real-world cultures, it's a parallel that feels a lot more subtle and empathetic than…say, the duels to the death.
Maybe I'm missing something here, because, again, I'm white myself. But it really strikes me as the wrong thing to accept as your one genuine mistake, and the trying to tone it down in the sequel strikes me as a bad solution to it.
More importantly, this is where we get back to that "death of the author" point. Because, ultimately it seems Veronica Roth understands that major tenet of criticism. Yet she fails to realize that if people can read the Marks as evoking "non-Western" cultures even if she didn't intend it…they can likewise read the Shotet language as similar to Semitic languages even if she didn't intend it, and they can read the Sojourn as similar to the pilgrimage to Mecca even if it was unintended.
They can even read the Shotet as a race of mostly brown people with certain problematic tropes. Because ultimately, your intent doesn't matter. I know it's unfair. As I said, I'm a white person who also hopes to someday publish books, and in those books I want to feature racially diverse characters—and yes, I am scared that that will backfire someday. It sucks, but, you know, that's just part of the risk you take when you try to do something better than a bland white story.
You know what's missing from this blog post as a whole? An apology. She doesn't even give a "sorry you felt that way" non-apology. The closest we get is her conceding she should have been "more careful"…on the specific issue of the Marks, rather than the racial portrayal as a whole.
And that, ultimately, is the biggest problem. The post comes across as extremely defensive. Trying not to justify why she made the mistakes she made, but to dismiss them as mistakes at all as much as possible. And that's…not a good look, regardless of how well-meaning you are. She should have listened, apologized, and tried to see what she can improve, and she did only the latter, and only for one (fairly minor) point rather than for the problems as a whole.
As I said, I don't mean that post as a message to Roth directly. Mostly I hope it can help other people (let's be honest, other white people, I'm not going to whitesplain representation anytime soon) think more critically about racial representation—in their own writing and in other people's. That's all I'm hoping to achieve here. Hopefully I did that.
