Jewel of Medina

The Jewel of Medina is a controversial new novel, telling a fictionalized story of Aisha, the wife of the Prophet Mohammad. The book was pulled from publication by Random House before being picked up later by Gibson Square. The drop was apparently due to fears that it will "become a new Satanic Verses", offend Muslims, and provoke violence. Those are three very different reasons, by the way, and have been discussed elsewhere with much more knowledge and sensitivity than I can provide here.

No, as always, I'm interested in the trivial, pop culture questions.

For those connoisseurs of romance novels among you (as I'm sure there are many), Smart Bitches Read Trashy Books is a must-read blog. They're hilarious, and take romance novels just as seriously as they deserve to be taken (which is more than you'd think, but less than the cover illustrators would hope.)

Anyway, over at Smart Bitches they were having a very lively discussion about the topic, complete with input from Muslimahs of varying flavors of Islam and a few side-tracks into the definition of censorship.

I'm interested in the defense that some of the commenters are employing -- the "it's fiction, so facts don't matter" gambit.

So let's look at that in a little more detail...

This is a central problem for all historical fiction: maintaining factual accuracy. Anyone who has ever discussed Braveheart with a Scotsman has encountered the visceral hatred that historical inaccuracy can provoke. Offenses can range from the minor (Pirates didn't dress like that!) to the major (basically all of the Patriot). The response to this is often some variant on "story comes first", often coupled with "people aren't stupid", i.e. they don't get their facts from movies.

Oh ho ho, I beg to differ.

Of course people get their facts from movies. I pointed out in a previous post that criminals learn from CSI. How many people can point to Grey's Anatomy as the source of all their medical knowledge? How many people think you can be knocked over by a bullet (argh), see laser beams (Argh), or hear sounds in space (ARGH)?

Anyone who teaches science -- or for that matter, history -- can tell you that people get their facts from pop culture.

So, the next question is, who cares? Does it matter if Random Individual Alpha has woefully wrong ideas about the common clothing of pirates, the correct procedure for an emergency tracheotomy, or the relative speeds of light and sound?

Sometimes, no. I'm sure pirates did not dress, act, or speak, like Jack Sparrow, and frankly my dear I don't give a crap. It makes for great cinema. In cases like that, particularly for fantastic or wish-fulfillment genres (see also: Action, Adventure), some degree of poetic license is expected, and the inaccuracies are generally harmless.

But sometimes, yes. Someone who learns CPR from movies will most likely do it wrong. Someone with a particularly poor understanding of physics may end up on the wrong end of a lightning bolt. The odds of this are admittedly pretty small -- outside the Darwin awards, I doubt it's a common cause of death.

But there is another, more insidious factor at work here. A pirate does not know or care if we completely fabricate his entire culture. A Navajo man does. Or an African woman. Or anyone outside the Hollywood "all-American" mindset, really. If the villain is a Southern Baptist preacher, most Americans know that it's not an accurate portrayal of the religion. If the villain is a Vodou houngan, most Americans are not going to know the difference between fact and fiction -- and the fiction is usually not favorable. For a practitioner of Vodou, is the constant portrayal of their religion as voodoo dolls and zombies just a case of poetic license? Or does it tie into centuries of cultural oppression and attempts to use their religion against them?

It's not just the negative portrayals that can have damaging effects. How many people know anything about the Romany that they didn't learn from Hollywood? How much of that Hollywood image do you think is accurate? The romanticizing of "gypsy" culture provides a rose-tinted, fantastical vision of a life of freedom and music, while obscuring the real issues of prejudice and poverty faced by Romany populations around the world. It makes it hard for them to obtain assistance or sympathy -- after all, people who dream of running off to join the gypsies aren't going to understand why anyone would be unhappy in that life.

So what's the bottom line? For me, I'd say awareness and sensitivity. If you have to change a fact -- fashion, or food, or shaved armpits -- that doesn't play into harmful stereotypes, further the oppression of a unprivileged group, or misrepresent a significant cultural or religious practice, then I say have at it. Go ahead. Let that pirate wear his 17th century shirt with his 19th century pants and 20th century mullet.

But if you're writing a story about how happy slaves were in the antebellum South, come here so I can hit you.

And if you're fiddling around with the sacred texts of another religion, one that is not your own, one that is frequently misunderstood and deceptively portrayed by the majority of mainstream media, one that is demonized regularly to provide movie villains or political scapegoats....it'd better be a DAMN good story.