Darcy Hongyue

According to the in universe narrator in LaCE, the child is given a name by their father and usually though not always by their mother. As they grow up they also took on one or more chosen names. It was also said that some elven mothers had a sense of foresight, and this was sometimes a component in the mother-names. These names were considered especially powerful and were called essi terencenyë or names of foresight

There was a ceremony dedicated to the chosen names called Essecilmë (name choosing). It was held after the child had developed what was called lámatyávë, meaning “sound taste”, which was defined as individual pleasure in the sounds and forms of words. Elven children were said to develop this at around seven years of age and could then take pleasure in word play and phonetic arts. This itself is such a cool concept to me!

the problem of racism in tolkien fandom will not be resolved for as long as people believe that the mere act of critique is a violence in itself, and that therefore having made a critique, the person who has made a critique can either be unpersoned or that norms of politeness no longer apply. of course, this fandom is too "polite" to do slurs in askboxes for the most part, but there are other mechanisms of rude communications that fly in the name of "debate". do you think its polite to misread someone and then accuse them via that misreading, of not extending enough grace to a dead historical figure? personally, i think that's quite rude as a quibble, not least because of the total disengagement with the actual arguments being made. do you think its polite to send people snide asks for weeks on end, insisting on them defending their viewpoint, their specifically racial critique of the canon? personally, i think not! but you know, ymmv.

the problem of racism in tolkien fandom will not be resolved for as long as it takes (primarily) non-white fans doing the careful work of exposition and critique in order to uncover and engage with tolkien's racism and genealogies of his thinking for any non-apologetic engagement with tolkien and race to occur in fandom. and what do i mean by non-apologetic engagement? i mean that so far outside of a very small selection of tolkien academics (and a tiny handful of white fans) who i can all roughly count on my fingers, very few expositions of race in tolkien's work are not accompanied by a cringing apology that insists that a) tolkien was not racist himself personally and b) he was a man of his time and c) that there clearly were "exceptions" to his racial ideology in his works. this defensive pose allows the protective psychological mechanisms of political whiteness to continually step in and therefore absolve itself of engagement with race in tolkien's text. to put it plainly: i am claiming that the problem of racism in tolkien fandom, in specifically making tolkien fandom a hostile space for fans of colour, will not be resolved for as long as white fans cannot call tolkien a racist. if that sounds hardline, so be it.

the problem of racism in tolkien fandom will not be resolved for as long as it is largely only non-white fans investing the time and energy in expositing and critiquing race and tolkien specifically within a fandom space. it will not be resolved for so long as non-white fans are forced to rehearse and explain racist ideas, histories and thinking to white fans who refuse to do any amount of research themselves, or who settle on an anodyne "listen to non-white voices". believe me it is not very hard to do the research if you are actually interested in creating a non-hostile atmosphere and space for non-white fans. but that process has to be co-creative. i am inviting you to participate in actually doing this hard work of critique and conversation because you care about race and because, hopefully, you care about your non-white brethren within fandom spaces.

the problem of a hostile atmosphere towards non-white fans in tolkien fandom is not a problem that non-white fans can resolve, but one that i think falls to white fans to police, resolve and make socially unviable. if there is something i want to communicate persuasively, i think it would be this: what exactly do the norms of "politeness" in the fandom serve? how are you thinking about what is polite and what is not? what feelings are you prioritising when any attempt to engage with race is treated as "hurting" people's feelings or making things "less fun"? what feelings are being prioritised when discussions abt race in the texts are labelled "fandom discourse" or "fandom wank"? what feelings are being prioritised when a non-white fan is being asked to extend grace to a dead white historical figure? are you able and willing to police such communications even internally, even when you think non-white fans are absent from your conversations? when they aren't watching? or is it only something you become aware of when a non-white fan turns their eyes on you? these are questions i would like liberal white fans to ask themselves and to have a serious debate about.

Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:

If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.

I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.

I am saying this as someone who has never once picked up a “popular on booktok” canva art romance novel, and rarely reads any 21st century literature at all—who finds a lot of contemporary anglophone lit to be banal, obnoxious, and utterly tedious. I couldn’t care less about the artistic merits of fanfiction as “legitimate literature” either way, and I find the “character-first” approach to storytelling most people in fandom circles employ to be reductive and a bit exhausting…

if you seriously think that the kinds of people writing gay fanfiction on ao3 about the main characters from a mainstream hollywood production are the same kinds of people who would otherwise be experimenting with the form of the novel in artistically groundbreaking ways, then I really don’t know what to tell you. and if you think the phenomenon of novels being written for the emotional (and sexual) gratification of women being derided as a perversion of an otherwise elite artform is a new phenomenon that sprung up within the past decade, then you obviously don’t know enough about the history of literature to be making these kinds of claims with such dismissive arrogance.

sry if my questions got a touch rambly, ur post got me thinking quite a bit

ok so I think "vibes-based" was kind of imprecise and…. perhaps a vibes-based word choice from me  ☠️ so I did not mean the felt-sensory immediate experience of prose, I obv think that's legitimate also also pretty much the whole point. like the experience of a sentence landing, or doing something unconscious and unprocessed or word choice creating a feeling that can be analysed inside-out, that’s a great reading experience etc etc…  

what I did mean by vibes-based is the use of that immediate felt-sensory response as a terminal judgment rather than the beginning of an inquiry. so the difference between "this sentence feels odd and I want to understand why" versus "this sentence feels off from the shape of what i think it should be, confirmed bad/fake, next" in, specifically, literary-critical reading practice. 

so it's not that felt response to writing is unreliable, it's that felt response is somehow treated as self-explanatory, as not requiring any further account of itself for being where the reading stops. like the latter is totally fine to explain why i DNF a book where i didn’t enjoy the writing style or main character, but not if i’m doing an expert read of a work of literary fiction for a globally renowned prize ygm. essentially i think the culture around reading+analysing ‘world’ or ‘global’ litfic, specifically top-level prize culture and review culture, has gotten to a place where it doesn't really go further than ‘this is what i think this should look like’. which imo is evidenced by how "evocative" is pretty much a complete sentence in that judge's citation, without ever explaining how it is evocative of what or to what end.

"... writing in 1863, H. L. Mansel castigated the new subgenre [sensation novels] as "preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment" (357). Since early in his anti-Sensation diatribe Mansel refers to "A pale young lady in a white dress" (358), we can be certain that his chief target is Wilkie Collins, whose The Woman in White (1860) initiated the Sensation mania." (VictorianWeb)

mansel's dislike of Collins leads me to my next point: many novels that are currently held to be classics and assigned without objection in middle and high schools were the center of controversy when they were new. we're having the same panic about romantasy that we had about sensation novels that we had about gothics.

it is a moral educational fable and lesson about race or colonialism; this can either be heartwarming or tragic

it is a portal into a world of misery that is simultaneously designed to instruct and to affirm the fortunate nature of their own world

it is unreal and magical

it is impenetrable, incomprehensible and unknowable because it is a portal into the impenetrable, incomprehensible and unknowable

which really is just two categories: either you are easily knowable entirely through the lens of your country and race, or else you are inscrutable and incomprehensible. you are either a simplistic child, or you are the inscrutable and unknowable [oriental].

-- this was the beginning of, i think, the fourth or fifth draft of this post, which i have been writing and rewriting for the past week, trying to nail down exactly what i want to say about this whole wretched affair.

the first draft went into a long and winding diversion about the perils of how non-white authors are (mis)read today, no matter how they write. that was not what i wanted to say, but what i had to end up saying in order to justify and clarify what i wanted to say which is that non-white readers get to demand higher standards of style of their writers and interlocutors. i said "get better taste" then clarified all the ways in which i meant to absolve non-white authors of the burden of better taste because i recognised they work in a poisonously white industry.

the second draft went into a long and winding diversion in which i ended up trying to defend jhumpa lahiri's latest short story collection from being misread and cut down to being about "immigration", when in fact these stories are much deeper than review allows them to be.

the third draft required another long diversion, because i observed that the reviewer in the guardian who cut ms lahiri down to a writer who writes merely about immigration in the ways we imagine it - from the global south, characterised by precarity and poverty - was in fact not a white person. it was vital to discuss the problem of double consciousness and the processes by which we come to acquire the tastes of the very institutions that refuse us full personhood. no one knows this better than me, who speaks only english with any reasonable fluency, and grew up reading more english novelists from the 30s - 50s than the average english person appears to.

the fourth draft finally got somewhere that i wanted it to be: that we cannot mistake unintelligible writing filled with beautiful words with difficult writing that articulates difficult thoughts perhaps through not very exciting words, perhaps through the poetic. that deliberate strangeness and defamiliarisation deployed as literary technique is different from a mere statistical combination and shuffling of words done by a machine. that we must insist on our own comprehensibility on our own terms and legibility to the white gaze be damned; but we must not allow them to confuse our illegibility with a flattening incomprehensibility.

however, all of this is really just four different ways of describing a) the processes by which those four misreadings outlined above are enforced on non-white writers whether they like it or not and b) some thoughts on escaping this, or ignoring it, or doing our own thing. the object lesson was: no matter what we do we will be bundled into category 4 if we say anything too uncomfortable, but we must not mistake the difficult for the nonsensical and vice versa simply because white people cannot do this. in other words, what i was really asking us to do was to stop reading like white people.

the other problem with this is that the ode to difficult writing can be misused anyway. witness sam kriss' concern for us: "white people eat this shit up and hand out condescending prizes; Indians tend to prefer people like R K Narayan or Sadat Hasan Manto, who actually know how to write." mind you, sam kriss is not indian and this follows on from a tirade in which he deliberately decontextualises and misreads an arundhati roy quote from god of small things (a quote, if which, taken in context is actually an interesting and effective use of language and repetition to tie across a particular thematic strand across the novel) and where he accuses salman rushdie of writing things to the effect of "she fed me the chapatti of her lies and the rotis of her deceits". needless to say: that's kind of immensely fucking racist. i don't think more close reading is actually going to solve this problem and neither do i think more difficult writing will, because there is always some bozo in the world who is going to insist that it is, in fact, nonsensical.

so what to do?

anyway, i witnessed a very interesting conversation earlier today in which some people we talking about how a particular adaptation of a work had made the work "more racist". in this conversation, an essay by a very thoughtful non-white writer had been deployed as "proof" of how the adaptation had become "more racist". of course a close and thoughtful reading of the essay in question might have suggested that the "more racist" was perhaps something written with a level of anger or bitterness, or perhaps an emotional statement: the bewilderment of encountering something so vilely racist, seeing no one react to it, and trying to make sense of it by grappling at the nearest racist thing and gesturing at it. which in this case, is the actual literal source text. there is no "more racist" in this case, because the source text is essentially mired and dripping in it and the escapes from its racism are slim to none; accidental rather than intentional.

this is interesting to me because it reveals a very different reading strategy than the one deployed above: if non-white writers are read either as moral fables or unreal or as nonsensical, white writers are read as real, as universal statements about the human condition, as stylists; are given reparative readings of every kind. writing by white euramericans, therefore:

is universal and therefore particular: it speaks for all but it does so by speaking in specifics of themes and emotions and experiences

is a work of art, made with a particular style, whose artistic processes can be analysed and studied to yield greater appreciation

draws from the real to tell real stories, even when its magical and fantastical

surpasses and transcends politics, which is to say that nothing can be said about the text by looking at the world from which it comes

comes from a world which is simultaneously both a product of its time (exculpatory) and the vanguard of its time (laudatory) and thus, it cannot be held responsible for any of its views

therefore, there are no racist texts or authors, only accidentally racist ones. therefore, jonathan franzen writes about family, but arundhati roy writes magical realism and unreal people in an incomprehensible indian family. therefore, tim o'brien is writing about the horrors of war, but bao ninh is writing about the misery of vietnam, the country. therefore, tolkien is writing about the horrors of environmental destruction and war, but arundhati roy is writing about the unreal because a muslim character is displaced into living in a graveyard after a literal pogrom. therefore, jilly cooper, heyer, christie and sayers are all products of their time, but [insert woc author of the week getting cancelled here] is a racist, sexist, imperialist etc etc etc. wodehouse, is ofc, innocent of collaboration with the nazis (despite having made actual propaganda for them, tho he claimed he didn't understand what he was doing), but r f kuang is normalising genocide*. on and on it goes ad fucking infinitum.

provocatively, therefore, i would like to invite an experiment: what if we were to switch up modes of reading for the two? what if i was to say that since they're all from england, that therefore pratchett, susanna clarke and tolkien are only ever saying something about england and its miseries, and those miseries concern england's flirtations with eugenics driven aristocratic racism (remember, after all, clarke & pratchett exists downstream of and inherit from tolkien)? what if i was to say that wodehouse is writing magical realism, because surely no one can behave that farcically and surely nothing can shake out so improbably; surely jeeves must be a magical construct of some sort? or perhaps tim o'brien is, in his evocations of war and its aftermaths. what if i was to insist that sylvia plath is incomprehensible, because her language is rich and strange, or that victor hugo is writing incomprehensible word salad because of his digressions. what if, instead, you were to understand that arundhati roy is an artist, that perhaps brandon taylor is more interested in gay life than race, that there is no particular lesson to be learned from the sorrow of war except that war is hell, that perhaps jhumpa lahiri is telling you stories about women in unhappy marriages first, and immigrants second? what if you were to understand salman rushdie's midnight children as a real story about real things? what if you could stop feeling that thrill of glee every time some non-white writer gets taken down? what if you could feel less self-satisfied that the author you were told is important turns out to have been unimportant? what if your first instinct wasn't to insist that either the author or the text is unreal or impossible when encountering a piece of writing by a non-white author that you can't wrap your head around? what if you tried? what if you tried even a little?