A Whitewashed Earthsea
How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books.
On Tuesday night, the Sci Fi Channel aired its final installment of Legend of Earthsea, the miniseries based—loosely, as it turns out—on my Earthsea books. The books, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan,
which were published more than 30 years ago, are about two young people
finding out what their power, their freedom, and their responsibilities
are. I don't know what the film is about. It's full of scenes from the
story, arranged differently, in an entirely different plot, so that they
make no sense. My protagonist is Ged, a boy with red-brown skin. In the
film, he's a petulant white kid. Readers who've been wondering why I
"let them change the story" may find some answers here.
When I sold the rights to Earthsea a few years ago, my contract gave
me the standard status of "consultant"—which means whatever the
producers want it to mean, almost always little or nothing. My agency
could not improve this clause. But the purchasers talked as though they
genuinely meant to respect the books and to ask for my input when
planning the film. They said they had already secured Philippa Boyens
(who co-wrote the scripts for The Lord of the Rings) as
principal script writer. The script was, to me, all-important, so
Boyens' presence was the key factor in my decision to sell this group
the option to the film rights.
Months went by. By the time the producers got backing from the Sci Fi
Channel for a miniseries—and another producer, Robert Halmi Sr., had
come aboard—they had lost Boyens. That was a blow. But I had just seen
Halmi's miniseries DreamKeeper, which had a stunning Native American cast, and I hoped that Halmi might include some of those great actors in Earthsea.
At this point, things began to move very fast. Early on, the
filmmakers contacted me in a friendly fashion, and I responded in kind; I
asked if they'd like to have a list of name pronunciations; and I said
that although I knew that a film must differ greatly from a book, I
hoped they were making no unnecessary changes in the plot or to
the characters—a dangerous thing to do, since the books have been known
to millions of people for decades. They replied that the TV audience is
much larger, and entirely different, and would be unlikely to care
about changes to the books' story and characters.
They then sent me several versions of the script—and told me that
shooting had already begun. I had been cut out of the process. And just
as quickly, race, which had been a crucial element, had been cut out of
my stories. In the miniseries, Danny Glover is the only man of color
among the main characters (although there are a few others among the
spear-carriers). A far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned. When I looked
over the script, I realized the producers had no understanding of what
the books are about and no interest in finding out. All they intended
was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a
generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and
violence.
Most of the characters in my fantasy and far-future science fiction
books are not white. They're mixed; they're rainbow. In my first big
science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, the only
person from Earth is a black man, and everybody else in the book is
Inuit (or Tibetan) brown. In the two fantasy novels the miniseries is
"based on," everybody is brown or copper-red or black, except the
Kargish people in the East and their descendants in the Archipelago, who
are white, with fair or dark hair. The central character Tenar, a Karg,
is a white brunette. Ged, an Archipelagan, is red-brown. His friend,
Vetch, is black. In the miniseries, Tenar is played by Smallville's Kristin Kreuk, the only person in the miniseries who looks at all Asian. Ged and Vetch are white.
My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't
see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe
or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white
(and why all the leading women had "violet eyes"). It didn't even make
sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn't they still be
either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool,
in the future?
The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from Northern Europe,
which is why it was about white people. I'm white, but not European. My
people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I
was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the
books were published for "young adults") might not identify straight
off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin
color in by degrees—hoping that the reader would get "into Ged's skin"
and only then discover it wasn't a white one.
I was never questioned about this by any editor. No objection was
ever raised. I think this is greatly to the credit of my first editors
at Parnassus and Atheneum, who bought the books before they had a
reputation to carry them.
But I had endless trouble with cover art. Not on the great cover of
the first edition—a strong, red-brown profile of Ged—or with Margaret
Chodos Irvine's four fine paintings on the Atheneum hardcover set, but
all too often. The first British Wizard was this pallid, droopy, lily-like guy—I screamed at sight of him.
Gradually I got a little more clout, a little more say-so about
covers. And very, very, very gradually publishers may be beginning to
lose their blind fear of putting a nonwhite face on the cover of a book.
"Hurts sales, hurts sales" is the mantra. Yeah, so? On my books, Ged
with a white face is a lie, a betrayal—a betrayal of the book, and of
the potential reader.
I think it is possible that some readers never even notice what color
the people in the story are. Don't notice, don't care. Whites of course
have the privilege of not caring, of being "colorblind." Nobody else
does.
I have heard, not often, but very memorably, from readers of color
who told me that the Earthsea books were the only books in the genre
that they felt included in—and how much this meant to them, particularly
as adolescents, when they'd found nothing to read in fantasy and
science fiction except the adventures of white people in white worlds.
Those letters have been a tremendous reward and true joy to me.
So far no reader of color has told me I ought to butt out, or that I
got the ethnicity wrong. When they do, I'll listen. As an
anthropologist's daughter, I am intensely conscious of the risk of
cultural or ethnic imperialism—a white writer speaking for nonwhite
people, co-opting their voice, an act of extreme arrogance. In a totally
invented fantasy world, or in a far-future science fiction setting, in
the rainbow world we can imagine, this risk is mitigated. That's the
beauty of science fiction and fantasy—freedom of invention.
But with all freedom comes responsibility. Which is something these filmmakers seem not to understand.
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