It took me Nick Wood<\/b> a good few years before I plucked up the courage to write the 'Other', i.e. to me, someone who was not white and male. I firstly wrote as a 'white woman' in God in the Box<\/i> (2003), set in an increasingly familiar London. Phew - that was picked up, published in the British science fiction magazine Interzone<\/i> - and I wasn't scorned as a 'sexist impostor'! The leap to crossing the 'colour' divide took a bit longer for me though - part of my fear was that, given South Africa's history, it would be seen as a form of colonisation of experience. Then, one day, I sat down and thought long and hard about it.<\/p>\n
Slowly, a series of thoughts dawned. In not writing about characters of colour, I was in essence deleting them from my stories, replicating an apartheid mindset. Furthermore, I was holding on to an implicit internalised belief that perhaps the 'gap' between us was so large, I would get it completely and catastrophically 'wrong'. Again, apartheid had taught us that the 'racial' gap was an unbridgeable chasm - which in essence meant we needed to be kept apart. I realised with some degree of horror that, in excluding characters of 'colour' in my writing, I had thus been - at least partly - colluding with an apartheid mindset. <\/p>\n
So in 2004 I wrote about 'Kerem' in The stone chameleon<\/i> (Young Africa imprint; Maskew Miller Longman), a so-called 'coloured' character in a futuristic Cape Town. The book 'passed' the test read of several selected township readers. Phew again - but this time, I knew it was right to write about the Other - as long as it was with respect. Further, as long as I checked the voices I was using with someone from within that culture - and if the characters felt 'right' for that particular story.<\/p>\n
I eventually came across Nisi Shawl<\/b> and Cynthia Ward's<\/b> (2005) book on Writing the Other<\/i>, which has also proved a useful tool. However, even in that book, there was what sounded like an inauthentic white South African character's voice included in a story excerpt. The book itself uses an acronym - 'ROAARS' - which covers what the authors see as central potential areas of difference to be considered in your characters, i.e. Race, (sexual) Orientation, Age, Ability, Religion and 'Sex' (gender): http:\/\/booklifenow.com\/2010\/03\/nisi-shawl-and-cynthia-ward-on-roaars-and-the-unmarked-state\/ <\/a>. <\/p>\n As a South African, I think class and culture are additional important considerations too. I don't know what it's like now, but when I was at (then an all-white) school, there was an acute awareness about the relative wealth of where people came from. This was such, that there was overt snobbery shown towards perceived 'poorer' whites, coming from a less affluent nearby white suburb in Cape Town.<\/p>\n
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