In acting school many eons ago, an instructor asked the class whether we thought actors had to be Russian in order to play Chekov. We scoffed en masse and said no! Or course not. We'd studied history and first person accounts of the end days of Tsarist Russia. With a little imagination, we could grasp the sensibilities of the time and place. No problem.
We were naïve.
We had our noses rubbed in our naiveté when a group from one of the big national theaters in Russia came to Seattle on tour. They did a show (in English) we'd all done several times ourselves. So we recognized the scenes, the situations, and the text. Yet, these people who'd lived in Russia all their lives and who'd absorbed the history of their nation and their people as lived experience, brought a deep well of nuance and resonating emotion to the play we'd never achieved as Americans and Canadians trying to reach for every sliver of meaning underlying Chekov's script. Granted. These people were professionals who had hundreds, if not thousands of shows under their belts. We were students. We were still humbled by our presumption that it'd be easy for us to get at all the richness of a script written about a culture and experience not our own.
Representation in fiction is, to me, entirely the same. No author can assume they can either know or imagine someone else's experience. The only thing any of us has to build from is what we know. Most of us have experienced alienation and deliberate attempts to cut us. Junior high, anyone? We can extrapolate from that and create characters who can speak that experience. But in no way can I conflate angsty preteen loneliness into any of the horror of having been a slave in the American South. Or a mother of color in the modern US having to bury a child who'd been shot by police. Or a mother separated from her child at a border. If I tried, I'd be that naïve college kid again, believing that another human being's deep pain was somehow fathomable.
Pretty damned arrogant.
As it is, I write from an extremely privileged position. Writing science fiction, I get to pretend that all cultures, all colors, all genders, no genders, nonbinary, and all orientations just are. I get to pretend that no one polices anyone else's existence other than being at war over resources/territory. There are still cultural clashes, yes. In fact that's part of the theme of Enemy Games. Jayleia comes from one culture and species base. Damen comes from entirely another. His species didn't evolve from apes. They evolved from a feline-like species. Their culture is based on that fact. He's openly bisexual, but no one bothers him or ostracizes him for it. The story touches more on the cultural differences between Jay and him and the main theme of learning to define family as something other than bloodlines.
In Enemy Storm, the heroine is deaf. It does play into the story and there are instances of prejudice and deliberate attempts to alienate her because of it. It's not the point of the story so I don't hit it hard (because not my wheelhouse), but it does show up. Not because I feel like I have anything unique or helpful to say about it, but because of who my characters are. That's where I think maybe one key lies - who are these people? What do they want? What do they need in the course of the story to step into becoming better versions of themselves? Edie has prejudices of her own to work through, so it was useful for her to face someone else's about her if she was going to decide she didn't want to be someone who judged other people based on nothing but where they had come from.
Will I make mistakes? Likely. I hope not, naturally. I do the best I can, and I check in with the communities I represent just to make sure I'm not being a dick. But what I Do Not Want is to pretend the future is all one color. All one orientation. Or culture. Or belief system. If the Chronicles of the Empire as a whole has an over arching theme, it is that diversity is strength and beauty. So I'll keep writing people and writing them as self-actualized beings as much as possible. Even when they aren't, strictly speaking, *people*. And I'll keep writing multiple skin colors, races, specific adaptations, sexual orientations, and identities.
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