Arabic Urban Fantasy Detective Story?

MormonMobster said:

So I want to write an urban supernatural detective sort of story, but I want to make it a little more exotic, (and to me personally, more interesting), so I want add Arabic elements to it.

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This right here is a big problem IMO. This combined with the fact that you know nothing (by your own admission) on the subject of any Arabic or Moslem cultures is a recipe for pure disaster--in the form of inadvertently racist writing, troubling cultural appropriation, and awful cliche. YES it is cool to write about other cultures, assuming you've done your homework. But NO it is not cool to write about other cultures because they are "exotic". Google "exoticizing" if you aren't sure why racist notions are inherent in the concept of the exotic. I assume you don't know why this is problematic, so here are some linkies of helpfulness that explain it far better than I can:

http://chroanagram.zxq.net/blog/?p=2357

http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10087

http://www.sfwa.org/2009/12/transracial-writing-for-the-sincere/

Please note that I am not calling anyone a racist in this thread--but certain ways of writing about people who are "other", or "not us" lead inevitably to racist stories, even when the author has good intentions.

You might want to check this book out when it's released. Not UF, but an Islamic fantasy by someone who knows the culture -- and can write.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0756407117/?tag=absowrit-20

Sounds like you've got a lot of research ahead of you, MormonMobster! What part of the country are you in? There are large Arabic communities in Michigan, Arizona, Kentucky, SoCal...quite a few places that might surprise you, and many are quite open to talking about cultural traditions and linguistics. I imagine even a few hours of immersion would give you a bit more focus and help you discern truth from preconceived notions.

Good luck!

I agree with what's been said. You better know your topic very well or you could inadvertently insult people or worse, gain a reputation as a clueless writer who can't be bothered with doing proper research.

Kitty Pryde said:

But NO it is not cool to write about other cultures because they are "exotic".

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We can't write about anything exotic any more?

I would totally love to read an Arabic UF.


However, this part kind of worries me (in addition to the lovely Kitty's links(

MormonMobster said:

Heck, I don't even know if I want my MC to be in an Arabic country, or simply an Arab mystic detective in another country (perhaps the US; a lot of our desert regions have similar climates as the Middle East).

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What has the US desert got to do with an Arab? Why do they need/want to to live in a desert? This isn't a 'no, don't do it!' Just a 'why is that an issue?' question. Maybe they fall in love with the changing seasons of a more temperate part of the US? Maybe New York is what they've been searching for all their life? Maybe they have a need to make a little part of home in San Fransicsco?

Why the desert?

Arab =/= desert.

Shadow_Ferret said:

We can't write about anything exotic any more?

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Kitty Pryde said:

Google "exoticizing" if you aren't sure why racist notions are inherent in the concept of the exotic. I assume you don't know why this is problematic, so here are some linkies of helpfulness that explain it far better than I can:

http://chroanagram.zxq.net/blog/?p=2357

http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10087

http://www.sfwa.org/2009/12/transracial-writing-for-the-sincere/

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The very very short version is that when we assign the quality of "exotic" to another person/group/nation/culture/geographical region, we take away some of their personhood--they are relevant only in the ways that "they" are different from "us", and it also creates a monolithic "Other" that we can easily describe in depersonalized terms without making any efforts to know or understand a group of individuals with many-faceted personalities. Again, nothing wrong in writing about other places and people from different backgrounds, but the mere concept of "exotic" carries about a million tons of racist baggage.

Google "exoticizing" if you aren't sure why racist notions are inherent in the concept of the exotic.

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Note: possibly cos I'm in the UK, that google search on exoticizing doesn't actually give me any helpful info on what you're talking about. There is some stuff about Vesuvius though Maybe it's a more US thing?

IdiotsRUs said:

Note: possibly cos I'm in the UK, that google search on exoticizing doesn't actually give me any helpful info on what you're talking about. There is some stuff about Vesuvius though Maybe it's a more US thing?

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The UK pretty much invented it! But I will try to come up with a few more helpful links on the subject.

And to lighten things up, Exoticising The Otter: http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mv...TO&Product_Code=CG-OTTER&Category_Code=CG#pic

Kitty, quoting a part of your post that I'd already looked at didn't really answer my question.

We write fantasy. We can't create exotic lands and people or is exotic somehow been removed from our vocabularies? We can't have exotic music? Exotic food? Exotic planets?

MormonMobster said:

As I said above, I have experience with the Mountain West; I honestly don't feel entirely comfortably writing New York or San Francisco because I have never been there. I understand my ignorance in assuming that the Mountain West would be more "comfortable" for an Arab character, but if I don't use an actual Arabic country/city (which, since I have never been to any of those either, is another problem), I don't know how else to write the residence of my MC. New York is nearly as exotic to me as Damascus or Abu Dhabi.

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Now that might be fair enough ( I don't know) it's just that the way you phrased it, in your original post made me think what I did. That doesn't mean you meant it that way. (he's an Aran so I'll plonk him in a desert) It's just how it came across to me.

If that's not what you meant, that's cool with me. But I'll let others who know more about this shit chime in with better opinions.

The idea of Arabs moving to the US to live in the desert... I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry.

But I will say, I think you need to write another project first. While you're writing something else, start reading work by Middle Eastern and Muslim authors and track down some community blogs for the area you're interested in. The life experience of a Middle Eastern person in the US is going to be very different from someone living in Iran. You need to decide location pretty early on.

I second the Saladin Ahmed recommendation and add Amal El-Mohtar. There's also 'A Mosque Among the Stars' edited by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad and Ahmed A. Khan, and the Apex Arab/Muslim issue (#18, November 2010).

Kitty Pryde said:

This right here is a big problem IMO. This combined with the fact that you know nothing (by your own admission) on the subject of any Arabic or Moslem cultures is a recipe for pure disaster--in the form of inadvertently racist writing, troubling cultural appropriation, and awful cliche. YES it is cool to write about other cultures, assuming you've done your homework. But NO it is not cool to write about other cultures because they are "exotic". Google "exoticizing" if you aren't sure why racist notions are inherent in the concept of the exotic.

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This. Especially the exotic.

Write what you love. If you think the culture's of interest to you, by all means, do the research but be prepared to make mistakes. For real, human languages, I always recommend learning a smattering of the underlying language. Arabic in particular can be really flowery.

I've been to Islamic countries several times, and I really truly love Moroccan art in particular. I don't feel ready to write something set in that area, though. Here's some street photos from Morocco I took in April.

Also: there's no requirement that Moslems live in deserts; probably most do not. Certainly northern Morocco is about as lush as the San Francisco area.

Not all of the Arab world is desert, either, and even in deserts there are oases.

Shadow_Ferret: the problem in treating people as "exotic" is that you are not actually treating them as human, you're treating them as "other." Even the word "exotic" implies distance, and is that what you want your reader to have from your subject?

Deirdre said:

Shadow_Ferret: the problem in treating people as "exotic" is that you are not actually treating them as human, you're treating them as "other."

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I guess my age is showing here. But to me exotic just meant the people and culture are just different and unfamiliar from your own culture and experiences. To an 18th Century Englishman, Japan or China, the East and Middle East were exotic. Or if you're writing a medieval fantasy, and your character travels across the world to another land, another culture, why can't that be described as exotic?

Deirdre said:

Even the word "exotic" implies distance, and is that what you want your reader to have from your subject?

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I'd say Yes, but I'm thinking that's wrong for some reason.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Kitty, quoting a part of your post that I'd already looked at didn't really answer my question.

We write fantasy. We can't create exotic lands and people or is exotic somehow been removed from our vocabularies? We can't have exotic music? Exotic food? Exotic planets?

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No, the point was, read those links. I'm not the word police nor do I think we should stop using the word "exotic". Look at what the word means though. In the context of this discussion it basically means othering, IOW making a group of people by default less. I'm not saying don't write about cultures and people that are different, or unique, or difficult to understand from your/your readers' perspective, or wildly made up.

Kitty Pryde said:

The UK pretty much invented it! But I will try to come up with a few more helpful links on the subject.

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We did?*googles more * *kicks stupid google*

ETa: there are lots of links with words like conceptualsiation and 'writing hexzagonaly' (??) and

how Hexagonal authors have used the notion of sensory exoticism to re-establish a sense of difference in their treatment of immigrant North African characters,

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all that jargon and stuff.

I'd kinda prefer it in a language I understand. Please? Cos I know what the individual words mean, only...

It's kind of unsettling to discover that a word, which all my life I thought meant alluring, fascinating, glamorous, and romantic, is actually a racist term. It's like someone pointed out, "You know, you're using the 'N' word."

Um.

Okay, I may be completely off base here, and I don't mean to offend anyone, okay?

One of my favorite first fantasy books was Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword. Maybe it doesn't have a "the" in it, I'm tired and lazy.

Loved the idea of deserts and riding and swords. LOVED IT. Loved the magic.

I hear MormonMobster talking about how he wants to write a modern detective story with some urban shaman sort of elements and a distinct Arab influence.

*No stepping on toes.
*set in territory he's familiar with
*maybe some mythical creatures and magics that -do- exist in Muslim legend (there are a LOT of these BTW), but nothing offensive


It sounds to me like what most of us do in an urban fantasy. Lots of completely made up stuff that is VERY well planned out backed up by lots of research into some historic fact, some modern setting, some modern culture, and lots of random who knows what.

So what is the problem?

He's trying to make it actually Muslim.
He's trying to make it real.

I think if you just give your MC a vague origin with no association to any particular existing sect or race, but absolutely give credit where credit is due (you know, as it comes up in the book "I learned this from Grammer JimmyJoAlllah who was a blankittyblank") then you should be just fine.

Will it offend people? Maybe. Most books offend some people. Is it exoticising? Um, I don't think it is any more than any of us normally do. I think it's a brilliant idea. Great origin for an MC, and it has lots of areas to draw on for ideas.

MormonMobster said:

What I was asking for is more of a group effort to help me brainstorm what exactly I'm trying to get out of having an Arabic MC, and what influences from Arabic culture would fit such a story. Also, the true meanings of various terms and their cultural significance, so I can make sure that say, a dervish would be appropriate in this or that situation, and that a random Sufi tradition with a history of thinking about magic is represented correctly.

I realize that choosing the Arabic culture just because it's "exotic" cheapens and otherrizes it a bit, which is why I'm trying to make sure everything's appropriate. I don't want to be stuck writing only what I personally have experienced.

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Awesome. Glad to hear that.

As for what you get out of the background, it depends a lot on the character. Everyone's got conflicts with different underlying assumptions.

I can tell you my own tale, though it's about a different ethnicity. In the course of researching Polynesian cultures for a novel, I worked on a Hawaii travel desk, which gave me the opportunity to talk to people who'd studied Hawaiian culture for decades. I also helped lobby for the Tahiti desk, though I didn't stay long enough to see it implemented. I learned smatterings of four Polynesian languages and incorporated three into my novel. (As a complete aside, I very nearly went to BYU Oahu; I was admitted but decided not to go as I'm not Mormon. I just wanted to study Polynesian languages. This was 20 years before starting the novel, too.)

So I was writing an unrelated short that was set in Hawaii, and I was struggling with one aspect of how the character behaved. I didn't have a cohesive idea of his transformation as the story was ostensibly more about another person.

Then I realized he was from a Hawaiian family and had been born and raised on the mainland. From that point forward, the edits clicked, because I understood why that character would go there and proceed in the manner he did.

MormonMobster said:

Where I'm personally? I'm from Utah, but if you mean the whereabouts of the MC, I haven't decided yet. I want to use somewhere in the Mountain West because of my experience with it and it's slight climate similarity to parts of the Middle East (which yes, I understand is a bit of a misguided and ignorant thought), but that's not set in stone.

[...]

As I said above, I have experience with the Mountain West; I honestly don't feel entirely comfortably writing New York or San Francisco because I have never been there. I understand my ignorance in assuming that the Mountain West would be more "comfortable" for an Arab character, but if I don't use an actual Arabic country/city (which, since I have never been to any of those either, is another problem), I don't know how else to write the residence of my MC. New York is nearly as exotic to me as Damascus or Abu Dhabi.

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That's absolutely fine. You're combining "write what you know" with some things you don't know.

IdiotsRUs said:

I'd kinda prefer it in a language I understand. Please? Cos I know what the individual words mean, only...

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This first link Kitty Pryde provided seems pretty clear to me.

Which country is your MC from? Because "Arab" can cover anyone from Morocco to Iran and Iraq, and there's a HUGE difference between those cultures. "Arab culture" isn't monolithic, any more than European culture is monolithic, or American culture for that matter. If you're not careful and you don't focus your research, it's going to be blatantly obvious that you've just cherry-picked the coolest-sounding bits of a range of Arabic cultures and mixed them up. Pick a part of the Arab world and stick to it.

Most Arabs don't live "in the desert" - they live in large cities in the desert, usually in houses with very good air conditioning, what with the whole "being in the desert" thing. Point is, the desert is a harsh environment to live in and I've never yet heard an Arab go "Gosh, I really miss the seering, deadly heat and the endless, perilous dunes of the desert. This mild climate is just too pleasant." As IRU says, there's no reason that Arabs would be drawn to deserts in the US just because they grew up in a desert country; that's making the assumption that people (i.e. Arabs) can't adapt to a different climate or living conditions and would, like mindless herd animals or migratory birds, be drawn inexorably towards a familiar environment. This is silly. Arabs in the US and UK live where they can get a job and no one is racist towards them.

"Arabic terms" (language) is going to be tricky, given that Arabic has several different dialects. Do you mean Fus-ha Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Algerian Arabic, Egyptian Arabic?

Also, not all Arabs are Muslims and not all Muslims are Arabs. Don't conflate the two because it's a dead giveaway that you're unfamiliar with the culture and that part of the world. There are many, many countries that are Muslim but not Arab (if you're looking for wacky superstitions, try Pakistan sometime...)

Arabs (even diaspora Arabs) often have very different political attitudes to Westerners. More so if they actually live in the Middle East or the Maghreb. They generally don't have a very high opinion of America, for a start. Also, Arabs don't necessarily like each other (Saudi doesn't like Iran; Kuwait doesn't like Iraq) and there can be tension between Sunni and Shia Arabs. Oh, and almost everyone thinks Saudi Arabia is CRAZY.

You'll need to research Madhabs as well if you plan to write anything about Muslims. Pro tip: Salafis think everyone else is Doing It Wrong, and Arabs are often very derisory about the Hanafi madhab because it's a South Asian school of thought. Arabs can be pretty arrogant when it comes to non-Arab Muslims (South Asians and Africans in Saudi often suffer a lot of racism).

This is a great idea for a story and mixing up UF with some other cultural influences is a great idea. But you need to be careful, as others have said. There is no such thing as "Arabic Culture" - at least not as a homogenous entity. And Arabic Culture isn't the same as Islamic Culture (although there is some overlap). In short: "Arabic Culture" is HUGE, covering everything from food and clothes to family life and politics. You're going to need a LOT of research to get it right.

It can be done though. Just be careful how you do it, and good luck!

Deirdre said:

This first link Kitty Pryde provided seems pretty clear to me.

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Oh Kitty's links were cool.

I was trying to google more. It made my eyes cross...

MormonMobster said:

Heck, I don't even know if I want my MC to be in an Arabic country, or simply an Arab mystic detective in another country (perhaps the US; a lot of our desert regions have similar climates as the Middle East).

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If you want to write about an Arab detective in the US, you should probably actually research where people in from the Middle East tend to live in the US. Hint: it tends to be urban/suburban places like Metro Detroit than the desert.

Also, as someone above already posted Arab does not always = Muslim. There are a lot of Arabs who are not Muslim - for instance Chaldean Catholics who make up a large percentage of the Arab population where I live. There are also a lot of people who are not Arab but who are Muslim - for instance, people in from Malaysia and a fair percentage of people from India, etc...

If you're serious about doing this idea well, it's going to take tons of research and work before you ever sit down and write a sentence.

You got a LOOOOOT of thinking to get through before you can make this work without othering.

Think first - your Arab character, be they an immigrant in their own lifetime, or did their parents/grandparents/great grandparents come here? Did Dad move to the USA and marry a nice, local girl? What religion do your MC's parents follow? Are they the same faith as each other, and how serious are they in their faith?

Your MC, if Muslim, won't just be a Muslim-'cause-they're-Arab, but might be a Muslim because both their parents were strict Muslims and MC embraced their faith. Or because Mum was very religious and, although Dad was more of an agnostic, MC experienced a lot of warmth and positive experiences related to their mum's faith. Or in rebellion against their parents who aren't religious at all, or as a means of wanting to "get back to their roots" if their family secularised and abandoned a lot of cultural traditions when they moved.

The generational thing will also have some impact on where your MC lives. Here in the UK for example, you tend to get a high percentage of recent immigrants along the South coast, so Dover, Folkestone etc, because that is generally where a lot of people come into England across the channel. But you also get higher percentages of minorities and a greater range of cultures in places like London and Essex, although these tend to be people whose parents and grandparents were born here, as opposed to recent immigrants.

If you're writing an Arab character in the USA and you specifically want to stick them in what you think of as an "Arab climate" you'll need to know why they are there that goes beyond "it's sort of like Arabian countries". Is the area one that generally has a high population of migrants? Did they move there for a particular career? Did their parents move there for a career, and settle? Is the area famous for a really good university, and MC studied there, met the love of their life there and settled down there?

Now, I know a few other people caught on to a risk of othering in your plan. I'm not saying you're racist or anything negative, but I can see where the concern came from. Just for the sake of clarity, and to avoid misinterpretations of your work, you may benefit from steering clear of phrasing like "Arab mystic detective". It isn't clear whether you mean this is a person who investigates the supernatural who is also of Arab descent or a Magical Black Guy with Noble Savage Wisdom who uses his Magical Foreign Powers to solve supernatural crime (I know, Arab not black. My point stands).