Racial Assumptions

[jducoeur]

I'm currently in the middle of reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, and quite enjoying it. It's so very like American Gods, and yet so very unlike it, largely because of the difference of protagonists.

The first book's hero, Shadow, is cool, quiet, strong -- never in control of the situation, but never quite at the mercy of it either. All through that book, a part of me was sure that Shadow would get, if not necessarily a happy ending, at least a glorious death worthy of a hero. By contrast, the second book's Fat Charlie is *painfully* human: always so easily mortified by the things that go wrong in his life that I wince in sympathetic pain pages ahead when I see which train is about to run him over this time. I have a quiet suspicion where his story goes, and that it's rather different from Shadow's.

But I'm "reading" these books on audio. (Which is how I'm getting most of my fiction these days.) It took time to get used to the first book's reader, whose gruff Middle-American accent was appropriate but so utterly unlike Neil Gaiman's voice that it grated on my expectations. The second book's reader, by contrast, is a verbal chameleon, sliding from accent to accent with great ease. (And whose base narrator accent *is* rather like Gaiman's.) It's lovely, but so good that I'm having trouble with my mental images of the characters.

The thing is, Fat Charlie, and indeed most of the characters, are pretty clearly black. The story doesn't make a big deal about it (indeed, race is more often mentioned for the white characters), but from context it obviously must be so. But he has a middle-English accent, and is living a relentlessly, blandly middle-English life, as are those around him. And I'm finding myself with the weirdest cognitive dissonance from it. The way the accents and behaviours work out, Charlie "reads" as a big, slightly thick white guy; Rosie as a very slightly plump redhead; Daisy as a petite blonde. Every one of these is clearly wrong, but the back-of-the-mind impressions are astonishingly strong.

I have just enough classic modern American liberal in me to be really rather bugged by this, in ways that are hard to define. I expect myself to be able to see these characters on their own terms, as they clearly must be in the story, but the British accent still twigs "white" to me. (Despite the Beeb's best efforts to break that assumption in recent years.) And it's hard to break: in my mind's eye, I'm having real trouble forming likely-accurate mental pictures of these characters.

Hmph. It always annoys me when my mind runs stubbornly along unintended tracks like that...

Comments

[bkdelong.livejournal.com]

Are you listening to the one by Lenny Henry? If so, he did an excellent job, I felt with the different accents. I didn't realize he was the same person as the lead character on Chef! (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0377901/) or (of less import.), the voice of the talking shrunken head on the Knight Bus in the 3rd Harry Potter movie.

I had a similar problem initially but then over the last few years I've become more and more of an anglophile with regard to my television-watching that those stereotypes continue to be broken. I think of the characters Mickey the idiot and Martha Jones from Doctor Who or....pretty much any character played by Colin Salmon (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0758760/) (Doctor Who appearance aside, I saw him a bit in the American show "Keen Eddie").

I think it's the fact that we are so hamstrung by how much easier it is to distinguish African-American accents and speech mannerisms than it is British accents.

[jducoeur]

It's interesting. On Doctor Who, I simply don't *notice* race. Mickey's kind of annoying, but Martha is perhaps my favorite character of the whole series. But in both cases, after perhaps the first episode or so, race utterly stopped registering with me -- the characters were simply the characters, and they look as they look.

Which is part of why I'm so startled by my reaction here. Without the physical images to build a character around, my brain is filling them in as it always does with stories -- only it persists in filling those characters as white. That's a disconnect I wouldn't have expected...

[alethea-eastrid.livejournal.com]

What's funny is that when I first listened to this, Lenny Henry triggered as so very clearly black to me that it was a little annoying, because it completely negated the rather clever job Gaiman did of reversing the default racial assumptions.

[jducoeur]

Interesting. Some of accents are utterly, totally black -- the various little Jamaican women in the story are easy to visualize as such, and Spider reads kind of like Wesley Snipes with a dangerously whimsical sense of humor. But his British accents read as completely white to me...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"(indeed, race is more often mentioned for the white characters)"

Gaiman has said that he explicitly wanted to write a book where the default, assumed race for all the characters was black, and where the white people would be explicitly called out as exceptions.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I had kind of gotten the impression that that was a quiet little agenda here. Indeed, this post was inspired by the explicit mention that Daisy's flatmate was white -- which was the point at which I suddenly realized that Daisy probably wasn't...

[tpau]

itis a funny phenomenon. Wehn i went to Germany for the first time, i was nto aty all starteld that everyoen spoke German. but seeing Black and Asian peopel speak German was sjut... disconcerting to me.

[richenza.livejournal.com]

I also have (and love) the audiobook for this book. I found it to be very obvious from the beginning that the characters were black, largely due to Lenny Henry's reading. I am not sure why exactly - something about the way he rolls his vowels is different, and something I associate with Carribean Britons.

That said, I had a Japanese-Canadian coworker. I never stopped being surprised by his thick Canadian accent. It was so thick, it almost seemed like a parody - "aboot" and "eh" every three words. He looked like your sterotypical Japanese grandfather but didn't speak a word of Japanese.

I think our minds get set in a particular track, and it is quite dificult to pry them loose, even when the evidence is standing right in front of you saying "how aboot showing me where the sandwiches are, eh?"

[jducoeur]

I am not sure why exactly - something about the way he rolls his vowels is different, and something I associate with Carribean Britons.

Interesting -- clearly a subtlety that I'm missing. (You're not the only one to remark about this.) His reading of the Caribbean characters comes across as clearly black, but his "narrator" accent sounds very neutrally British to me...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. I found Lenny Henry's audio performance of Anansi Boys (which I assume you're listening to) quite amazing, and in my mind's eye most assuredly black on all fronts. But I'd had the 'secret' of the characters' race spilled to me beforehand, however, and perhaps that altered my perceptions. Or perhaps there are enough similar black people in my past to attach a physical description to each affected voice.

Contrariwise, it took a fair amount of (TV) exposure to blacks with typical English accents for it not to be weird any more; there's a strong double stereotype there to overcome. Danny Hunter was one; folks in Lock, Stock and etc.; I can't remember the others. So perhaps a matter of repeated exposure could overcome your ingrained habit?

Prejudice, in its broadest sense here, is a subtle thing, and insidious...

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Shadow -- I didn't really like American Gods, because Shadow to me seemed psychopathic throughout. Calm, collected, in control...to the extreme. Some of why this is was of course revealed, but it turned me off to him as any sort of sympathetic character or something to identify with or care about the perils of.

Charlie is the complete opposite, of course, though one does wish he would grow something resembling a spine. (Daisy ends up being my favorite character, therefore, though Rosie also gets a nod.)

[jducoeur]

I liked Shadow more than that, but I can see why you had that reaction: he's never quite normal...

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

I really wish audiobooks worked for me; I'd much rather be "reading" than listening to most of what I do in the car. Unfortunately, I'm completely unable to focus on spoken audio when I'm in the car. Half the time I completely miss what's on the traffic report, even if I specifically change stations to listen to it.

[jducoeur]

Audio text seems to work reasonably well for me. Not always: if traffic gets "interesting", I need to stop the book and focus my absolute attention. But it generally works for me on highway and other routine driving...

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall that I have the same "wait, what did he just say?" in highway driving, but I may have to try it again to make sure. I realized later that I don't seem to have the same trouble following lyrics in music. Maybe if stories hadn't gotten away from the oral tradition and were still in verse, I'd do better. ;-)

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

There were three black kids in my school, out of about 600 total, and they all spoke with the same accent I do, so I never got the "this is how black people sound" meme til I moved to the big city. But even so, I did a double take when I met a black girl from Manchester, England when I was about 30