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Response from Alaya Dawn Johnson
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From: Merri Lindgren <mlindgren_at_education.wisc.edu>
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 10:43:24 -0500
Alaya Dawn Johnson has thoughtfully responded to questions posed during this discussion below. We're so grateful she was willing to participate in this conversation!
1. June's world seems very pansexual or all-queer or at least very open to the Kinsey scale rather than the black-and-white-ness of sexuality. Was that something that just came out naturally or did you deliberately design the world to be that way (like, is that your idea of a utopia or your prediction of where the world will go, or something else)? (from Hannah)
In the very earliest stages of planning this book, the sexuality of the world wasn't something I focused on very much. I am in general interested in writing books that present a spectrum of sexuality, so it was going to be in there somehow, but the way that it became part of the fabric of the worldbuilding happened very naturally. I think the crystallizing moment for me was when I sat down to write the first scene of the book (which is now something like the fifth--when June and Gil are waiting breathlessly to see who will be elected summer king). I had loosely planned for June to have a best friend, but until the exact moment I wrote Gil's first lines, I had thought that friend would be female. But I found myself writing Gil instead. I'm not one of those writers who has characters having conversations in their head, but occasionally inspiration does take me like this: as if the story is revealing itself to me, instead of me shaping a story as its author. Gil was Gil from the moment he appeared, and I sensed that this was the kernel at the heart of my story. June's mother was already in a lesbian marriage with Auntie Yaha at that point, and the fact that Gil would fall in love with Enki crystallized my sense of how the sexuality in this world worked.
For me, it wasn't so much about creating a sexual utopia (though I think June's world deals with that issue much better than ours!), and certainly not about predicting the path of future societal mores (one can hope it will go this way, but I sure don't know). My concerns were more immediate and practical. I wanted to write a novel for young adult audiences where sexuality was dealt with in a frank, open manner, where there was room for a great deal of range in how people expressed themselves sexually, and it wasn't an issue. There are already few enough YA novels with queer characters. And for obvious and important reasons, their queerness is often part of the conflict of the story. This is an expression of the real, lived experiences of queer teens and I definitely don't minimize the need for these stories. However, I felt that I as a teenager would have hugely benefited from seeing a range sexualities presented as completely normal and accepted. So that was really the driving factor behind the way that I portrayed June's world: I wanted it to be present and important, but not an issue.
2. What made Brazil the place to set this story? What would have been lost by putting it elsewhere? (from Hannah)
My major impetus for setting the story in Bahia, Brazil was to portray a science fictional society that was firmly part of the African Diaspora, and had continued to celebrate that heritage while also changing in ways that I hoped were consistent with the historical background that I postulated (plague, global climate change, nuclear disasters). This I think I can trace to two big dissatisfactions that I have with most SF literature: 1) overwhelmingly white futures and 2) overwhelmingly American futures. There's amazing exceptions to this, of course, but the general trajectory of the Science Fictional imagination of the future is that it's white and American. But it seems to me that global problems are going to have different impacts all over the world, and different cultures are going to react and adapt to them differently.
So basically, removing Brazil/Bahia/African Diaspora from this book makes it a fundamentally different project. And it's hard to really think about, because of course putting it elsewhere would entail an entirely different set of cultural expectations, background, everything. The US isn't neutral territory. There are always unspoken cultural assumptions in everything (Including my book! My attempts to question and change my underlying cultural assumptions are not entirely successful). I wanted to attempt to subvert and change and make them an overt part of the book as much as possible.
3. How/if the author thought about community versus individual as she mapped out the story. And privilege, too. How did she think through that? (from Debbie)
This is an interesting question, because I think that issues of community versus individual are ones that are more relevant to what I'm writing now than my thought process when I was working on The Summer Prince. Which isn't to say I didn't think about it, but I think my conceptions have matured a little since then. So one of the major questions at the heart of The Summer Prince is what is the role of this singular individual, this summer king who is the most popular and charismatic and subversive figure to rise to that position in decades? And how does his arrival coincide with the boiling point of certain cultural pressures which have been building for much longer than his lifetime? How much is Enki the product of his time, a figure who encapsulates social forces that already existed, and how much does he himself change through the force of his singular vision and personality? Well, I can't answer that question exactly (or I can, but I don't think my answer has more validity than anyone else's). But I can say that in the earlier drafts of this novel, the emphasis was vastly more on Enki's vision as an artist using his life as a canvas, and June's growing societal awareness. The scenes themselves were not hugely different, but the emphasis was on how these two young people helped to remake the world. And during the revision process, after a lot of thinking about all of the elements that was juggling to attempt to make Palmares Três a fully realized world, I decided that what I was missing was the other half of this story. The community half. Yes, these people are both important in their world and also my main characters. But I personally hate that "revolution novel" which is all about how George Washington sat down with Thomas Jefferson and created the United States, or how Rosa Parks stood up on a bus one day, Martin Luther King gave some speeches and they rounded up the civil rights movement between them. I wanted to portray, through my POV characters, that the things Enki and later June were fighting for were issues that already existed and were being articulated by the community to which they belonged.
Still, I think in the end the weight of the change of the novel probably rests more on the shoulders of my singular main characters than a societal movement. And I do believe that this happens--that remarkable, charismatic individuals coincide with social movements and produce change that neither could have managed on their own. But I also think that the tendency to rewrite history as the story of "Great Men" is one that Americans in particular are culturally prone to, and perhaps I erred to much on that side of things.
As for privilege, questions of it are throughout the novel, but tweaked from a modern context to one that is specific to my imagined culture. As just one example, there is a persistent question of how this African Diasporic society reacts to Enki's unusually dark skin color, at once fetishizing him and also feeling that it sets him apart from being a true Palmarina. It's colorism (not reverse, as Enki points out, though it's a little different from today's) and I wanted to explore how privilege of skin color affects African Diasporic communities, even ones rich in resources and political power, like Palmares Três. Also, of course, there's the "reverse" privilege of being female in this matriarchal society, which nevertheless is a little complicated (the summer kings can only be men, after all). But I tried very hard to avoid that hoary SF trope of matriarchal dystopias, where the women are evil feminazis and somehow even though the world itself is run by women, the entire focus of the novel is on men's rights.
4. One question I have for Johnson and listmembers is whether The Summer Prince is truly YA. What makes a book a young adult novel?
(from Ebony)
I never once questioned, from the earliest stages of writing The Summer Prince, that this was a YA novel. I also knew from the beginning that I would frankly explore issues of teenage sexuality, power, and conceptions of adulthood.
However, I think my answer to this boils down to how I would define a Young Adult novel. First, this is fundamentally a marketing category, and a relatively new one at that. I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong that-- I love YA and am ecstatic that it has its own marketing category so I can more easily find books that I love. But there are thousands of books that were published prior to fifteen years ago that were never categorized as YA, which would most likely fall into that category today (the "young potboy goes on fantasy adventures and saves the world" subgenre of epic fantasy, for example, basically fits today's YA marketing parameters). YA is a literature for young adults, yes. It is also a literature about young adults. So teens may love Slaughterhouse Five, but that doesn't retroactively make it YA. And I've encountered this less often, but there are novels about teenagers which nevertheless feel as if they are written primarily for an adult audience (the premise of The Flame Alphabet, for example, could have been an amazing YA novel with a different author, but its concerns were explicitly those of adults).
But even with these caveats, I don't think The Summer Prince falls into the latter category. I would feel like this even if I hadn't had many teenagers approach me and tell me how much they connected with my book (though that has been amazing!) Why? Because there's something that I feel fundamentally defines today's marketing category of YA: these books aren't just about teenagers, they are about the experience and struggles of reaching adulthood. It is, in essence, a bildungsroman, but with protagonists all on the younger end of that spectrum. And you can make many arguments about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the explicit sexuality in my novel, the approachability of the prose, the density of the layered political problems, but The Summer Prince is fundamentally concerned with the process and struggle of reaching adulthood. My protagonists are teenagers on the cusp of self-actualization in a world that has redefined childhood to extend into one's late twenties. They are ambitious and unsure and adventurous and questioning in a way that is definitely part of the modern experience of reaching adulthood.
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 10:43:24 -0500
Alaya Dawn Johnson has thoughtfully responded to questions posed during this discussion below. We're so grateful she was willing to participate in this conversation!
1. June's world seems very pansexual or all-queer or at least very open to the Kinsey scale rather than the black-and-white-ness of sexuality. Was that something that just came out naturally or did you deliberately design the world to be that way (like, is that your idea of a utopia or your prediction of where the world will go, or something else)? (from Hannah)
In the very earliest stages of planning this book, the sexuality of the world wasn't something I focused on very much. I am in general interested in writing books that present a spectrum of sexuality, so it was going to be in there somehow, but the way that it became part of the fabric of the worldbuilding happened very naturally. I think the crystallizing moment for me was when I sat down to write the first scene of the book (which is now something like the fifth--when June and Gil are waiting breathlessly to see who will be elected summer king). I had loosely planned for June to have a best friend, but until the exact moment I wrote Gil's first lines, I had thought that friend would be female. But I found myself writing Gil instead. I'm not one of those writers who has characters having conversations in their head, but occasionally inspiration does take me like this: as if the story is revealing itself to me, instead of me shaping a story as its author. Gil was Gil from the moment he appeared, and I sensed that this was the kernel at the heart of my story. June's mother was already in a lesbian marriage with Auntie Yaha at that point, and the fact that Gil would fall in love with Enki crystallized my sense of how the sexuality in this world worked.
For me, it wasn't so much about creating a sexual utopia (though I think June's world deals with that issue much better than ours!), and certainly not about predicting the path of future societal mores (one can hope it will go this way, but I sure don't know). My concerns were more immediate and practical. I wanted to write a novel for young adult audiences where sexuality was dealt with in a frank, open manner, where there was room for a great deal of range in how people expressed themselves sexually, and it wasn't an issue. There are already few enough YA novels with queer characters. And for obvious and important reasons, their queerness is often part of the conflict of the story. This is an expression of the real, lived experiences of queer teens and I definitely don't minimize the need for these stories. However, I felt that I as a teenager would have hugely benefited from seeing a range sexualities presented as completely normal and accepted. So that was really the driving factor behind the way that I portrayed June's world: I wanted it to be present and important, but not an issue.
2. What made Brazil the place to set this story? What would have been lost by putting it elsewhere? (from Hannah)
My major impetus for setting the story in Bahia, Brazil was to portray a science fictional society that was firmly part of the African Diaspora, and had continued to celebrate that heritage while also changing in ways that I hoped were consistent with the historical background that I postulated (plague, global climate change, nuclear disasters). This I think I can trace to two big dissatisfactions that I have with most SF literature: 1) overwhelmingly white futures and 2) overwhelmingly American futures. There's amazing exceptions to this, of course, but the general trajectory of the Science Fictional imagination of the future is that it's white and American. But it seems to me that global problems are going to have different impacts all over the world, and different cultures are going to react and adapt to them differently.
So basically, removing Brazil/Bahia/African Diaspora from this book makes it a fundamentally different project. And it's hard to really think about, because of course putting it elsewhere would entail an entirely different set of cultural expectations, background, everything. The US isn't neutral territory. There are always unspoken cultural assumptions in everything (Including my book! My attempts to question and change my underlying cultural assumptions are not entirely successful). I wanted to attempt to subvert and change and make them an overt part of the book as much as possible.
3. How/if the author thought about community versus individual as she mapped out the story. And privilege, too. How did she think through that? (from Debbie)
This is an interesting question, because I think that issues of community versus individual are ones that are more relevant to what I'm writing now than my thought process when I was working on The Summer Prince. Which isn't to say I didn't think about it, but I think my conceptions have matured a little since then. So one of the major questions at the heart of The Summer Prince is what is the role of this singular individual, this summer king who is the most popular and charismatic and subversive figure to rise to that position in decades? And how does his arrival coincide with the boiling point of certain cultural pressures which have been building for much longer than his lifetime? How much is Enki the product of his time, a figure who encapsulates social forces that already existed, and how much does he himself change through the force of his singular vision and personality? Well, I can't answer that question exactly (or I can, but I don't think my answer has more validity than anyone else's). But I can say that in the earlier drafts of this novel, the emphasis was vastly more on Enki's vision as an artist using his life as a canvas, and June's growing societal awareness. The scenes themselves were not hugely different, but the emphasis was on how these two young people helped to remake the world. And during the revision process, after a lot of thinking about all of the elements that was juggling to attempt to make Palmares Três a fully realized world, I decided that what I was missing was the other half of this story. The community half. Yes, these people are both important in their world and also my main characters. But I personally hate that "revolution novel" which is all about how George Washington sat down with Thomas Jefferson and created the United States, or how Rosa Parks stood up on a bus one day, Martin Luther King gave some speeches and they rounded up the civil rights movement between them. I wanted to portray, through my POV characters, that the things Enki and later June were fighting for were issues that already existed and were being articulated by the community to which they belonged.
Still, I think in the end the weight of the change of the novel probably rests more on the shoulders of my singular main characters than a societal movement. And I do believe that this happens--that remarkable, charismatic individuals coincide with social movements and produce change that neither could have managed on their own. But I also think that the tendency to rewrite history as the story of "Great Men" is one that Americans in particular are culturally prone to, and perhaps I erred to much on that side of things.
As for privilege, questions of it are throughout the novel, but tweaked from a modern context to one that is specific to my imagined culture. As just one example, there is a persistent question of how this African Diasporic society reacts to Enki's unusually dark skin color, at once fetishizing him and also feeling that it sets him apart from being a true Palmarina. It's colorism (not reverse, as Enki points out, though it's a little different from today's) and I wanted to explore how privilege of skin color affects African Diasporic communities, even ones rich in resources and political power, like Palmares Três. Also, of course, there's the "reverse" privilege of being female in this matriarchal society, which nevertheless is a little complicated (the summer kings can only be men, after all). But I tried very hard to avoid that hoary SF trope of matriarchal dystopias, where the women are evil feminazis and somehow even though the world itself is run by women, the entire focus of the novel is on men's rights.
4. One question I have for Johnson and listmembers is whether The Summer Prince is truly YA. What makes a book a young adult novel?
(from Ebony)
I never once questioned, from the earliest stages of writing The Summer Prince, that this was a YA novel. I also knew from the beginning that I would frankly explore issues of teenage sexuality, power, and conceptions of adulthood.
However, I think my answer to this boils down to how I would define a Young Adult novel. First, this is fundamentally a marketing category, and a relatively new one at that. I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong that-- I love YA and am ecstatic that it has its own marketing category so I can more easily find books that I love. But there are thousands of books that were published prior to fifteen years ago that were never categorized as YA, which would most likely fall into that category today (the "young potboy goes on fantasy adventures and saves the world" subgenre of epic fantasy, for example, basically fits today's YA marketing parameters). YA is a literature for young adults, yes. It is also a literature about young adults. So teens may love Slaughterhouse Five, but that doesn't retroactively make it YA. And I've encountered this less often, but there are novels about teenagers which nevertheless feel as if they are written primarily for an adult audience (the premise of The Flame Alphabet, for example, could have been an amazing YA novel with a different author, but its concerns were explicitly those of adults).
But even with these caveats, I don't think The Summer Prince falls into the latter category. I would feel like this even if I hadn't had many teenagers approach me and tell me how much they connected with my book (though that has been amazing!) Why? Because there's something that I feel fundamentally defines today's marketing category of YA: these books aren't just about teenagers, they are about the experience and struggles of reaching adulthood. It is, in essence, a bildungsroman, but with protagonists all on the younger end of that spectrum. And you can make many arguments about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the explicit sexuality in my novel, the approachability of the prose, the density of the layered political problems, but The Summer Prince is fundamentally concerned with the process and struggle of reaching adulthood. My protagonists are teenagers on the cusp of self-actualization in a world that has redefined childhood to extend into one's late twenties. They are ambitious and unsure and adventurous and questioning in a way that is definitely part of the modern experience of reaching adulthood.
--
Merri Lindgren, Librarian
Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
School of Education / UW-Madison
4290 Helen C. White Hall
600 N. Park Street
Madison, WI 53706
608-263-3930
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Received on Sun 23 Mar 2014 10:43:57 AM CDT
