Malorie Blackman, Noughts and Crosses (2001)

We can thumbnail this famous novel as 'Romeo and Juliet in an alt-reality UK where black people are the ruling caste and white people the oppressed minority'. The story itself concerns the star-crossed love between on the one hand young Sephy Hadley, a dark-skinned 'Cross', (the daughter of a wealthy and influential politician called Kamal Hadley), and on the other Callum McGregor, a pale-skinned nought. Blackman's world used to be a slave owning one; and although slavery has been abolished at the time the book is set, society is structured via a strictly enforced Jim Crow apartheid. It's a novel primarily about the intensities of teenage feeling, and more generally it's a book about the monstrous scale of unfairness that institutional racism entails. The stylistic and narrative strokes are fairly broad, the style occasionally a touch crude, and the characters are given to rather melodramatic posturing; but then again that's what it's like being a teenager, and falling in love, and feeling intensely how unfair everything is. And it can't be denied that Noughts and Crosses generates real affective punch: it sets out to work upon the readerly emotions and it succeeds powerfully.

Concentrating on this, the first novel in the trilogy, we have to say that Blackman's world is not built, exactly. The students on my Children's Literature course were surprised when I described it as 'science fiction' (though they shouldn't have been: basically I view EVERYTHING as science fiction apart from a few French naturalist novels of the later 19th-century). And in a sense they're right: Blackman does not do what many SF writers would, by way of explaining at length how this alternative historical circumstance came about. In later novels it is intimated that this is a world in which Africa conquered Europe rather than the other way around, which if pushed too hard would turn the novel into a fable about colonialism. Blackman's ambition is broader than that, I think: she less interested in the sorts of historical circumstances that give rise racism, and more in the human as-it-were existential wrongness of racism as such. Her novel accordingly reads as a thought-experiment made flesh: imagine the racist society of 1950s America (except imagine it in Britain, because, I suppose, that's the world Blackman knows best), and then swap the skin colours. This does a couple of things that resonate well for YA audiences, although things that may strike older readers as perhaps a tad over-simplifying; and amongst those things are: 'See how arbitrary racist prejudice is!' And, to white readers, complacent in their own privilege: 'see how it could be for you! Imagine if the boot were on the other foot -- you wouldn't like it, would you?' I don't mean to snark: these strike me as both not only dramatically effective but also a worthwhile hermeneutic for younger (and for that matter, older) readers to undertake. The problem is it tends to diminish the novel's capacity to generate a sense of the density and heft of actual lived experience. Of the two prior examples of this conceptual gimmick, both sciencefictional (because, for me—well, see above), it reminded me more of the slightly airless Trek episode, 'Let That Be Your Last Battlefield' (1969):

And less of Heinlein's closer-in-concept Farnham's Freehold (1964).

(To digress for a moment: The New York Times blurb, there, says: 'Robert Heinlein wears imagination as if it were his private suit of clothes.' I've genuinely no idea what, or even if, that means.)

Anyway, that Heinlein novel is considerably more deplorable, ethically and ideologically speaking, than the Trek treatment; but it does come unforgettably alive on the page. The Trek episode comes across as a good-hearted sermon about the pointless arbitrariness of racism.

I don't mean to make heavy weather of the book's worldbuilding, by the way. It's fine; fit for purpose, narratively speaking. It falls foul of the Jared Diamond Guns Germs and Steel argument; but there are plenty of people who don't like that book. Me, I do like it, and for one reason above all. Prior to Diamond there were two main theories as to why Europe conquered Africa America and India and not the other way around: one, that it was a mere matter of chance that history shook out that way, which isn't a very satisfying theory; and two, that white Europeans were in themselves 'superior' to the black and brown peoples of the world. The problem with this latter theory is that it is clearly bollocks. Diamond's theory at least explains the historical narrative without stooping to racism.

When race comes up in discussion I generally say that I don't believe in it, much in the same way that I don't believe in Father Christmas. I mean this quite literally: I don't think there's any such thing, and more specifically think it was invented more or less out of whole cloth by a group of 19th-century scientists determined to cloak their hatred and will-to-oppress in pseudo-scientific jargon.

Influential classifications by Georges Buffon, Petrus Camper and Christoph Meiners all classified "Negros" as inferior to Europeans.[44] In the United States the racial theories of Thomas Jefferson were influential. He saw Africans as inferior to Whites especially in regards to their intellect, and imbued with unnatural sexual appetites, but described Native Americans as equals to whites.

There's no biological or scientific basis to this at all; it makes as much sense as the 1735 theory of Carolus Linnaeus (of 'zoological taxonomy' fame), when he divided the human race Homo into four 'sub-species' (Europaeus, Asiaticus, Americanus and Afer) on the basis of the exploded Galenic notion of the four humours, sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic respectively. (Not that Linneaus wasn't racist too; he was actually racist as all get out. 'Homo Sapiens Europaeus' was, he insisted, active, perceptive and adventurous; whereas 'Homo Sapiens Afer' was 'crafty, lazy and careless'. Boo to that.)

People sometimes react badly when I say I don't believe in race, because they think I'm trying to Podsnappishy sweep away behind me the fact of racism. Not at all. I'm with Adam Kotsko on this: the fact that race is a social construct makes it more malign than if it were merely a biological datum:

One often hears people declare something to be “just a social construct” as a way of dismissing its reality or relevance. In reality, the fact that something is a social construct makes it infinitely more powerful and difficult to escape than if it were, for instance, a biological brute fact. We get around biological brute facts all the time. Social forces regulate our eating, drinking, defecation, urination, sexual pairings, etc., etc. Social forces can drive us to suicide — meaning they have overcome the most fundamental biological drive of survival. Biology isn’t infinitely pliable, of course, but it is hardly destiny.

By saying that I don't believe in race I'm very specifically not saying that we should stop talking about race—for example I'm not suggesting that we should replace discussion of race with discussion of 'ethnicity' (something in which I do, as it happens, believe. 'What distinguishes race from ethnicity? Ethnicity tends to emphasise matters of culture, language and religion: part of the legal definition of "malay" in Malaysian law is that one is Muslim. Race, on the other hand, emphasizes easily recognised physical characteristics (such as skin colour) and tends to rely on a folk theory of biological origins' [John Monaghan and Peter Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology (OUP 2000), 96]). But we need to keep talking about race precisely as a made-up thing to begin to understand the way the 20th-century was so comprehensively blighted, and the lives of billions of human beings wrecked and ended, in the service of a purely imaginary Cthulu-like entity. Race continues to cast its malign spell.

The history of the way this concept has been constructed is extremely important to understand, too. The word 'racism' was invented by Ruth Benedict in 1943 ('Racial prejudice,' she wrote, 'makes people ruthless'). That date's not a coincidence. The 20th-century was the great epoch of race-inspired massacres. Contrast the tendency of previous centuries (from the Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572 through to the Armenian genocides of the 1890s) to focus such mass-murder onto target-groups defined by their religion. But the 1940s saw the increasing influence of 'race'-based ideas come to terrible fruition (UNESCO's issuing of The Race Question, July 1950, can be taken as the beginning of the 'official' global kick-back against racist ideas). That modern Fantasy begins around this time, with the racially conceived (though, I'd say, not therefore necessarily racist in the Nazi sense of the word) Middle Earth setting a kind of genre template is also not a coincidence; although the way Fantasy as a whole picked up the idea that difference should be represented 'racially' and ran with it (via Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft and a thousand Tolkien imitation fat fantasy novels) is in itself a fascinating topic for analysis.

***

Analysis for another time, though. The point of this rather meandering digression on race is to lead into a discussion of the way Blackman adapts her Romeo and Juliet source text. Because, of course, that's what Blackman does with Shakespeare's play: she racialises it. We could start by asking, of Romeo and Juliet: why do the Capulets and Montagues hate one another so much? In the play it seems that it's just one of those inter-family squabbles. It's certainly not that they come from different racial or ethnic backgrounds. WS.'s play starts off by specifying ‘two households, both alike in dignity': but the ‘noughts’ and 'crosses' in Blackman's novel are certainly not alike in dignity. The noughts are deprived of social dignity and equality. Presumably the point is to relocate this ‘dignity’ to a human level.

The midway text, I'm thinking, is West Side Story (1957), a text which racialises the familial hostility along Puerto-Rican/Polish lines (casting the icily beautiful but very Russian-American-looking Natalie Wood as the Puerto-Rican Juliet 'Maria' in the 1961 film complicates this racial logic in interestingly, though inadvertently, twisted ways I think). Still, R&J is a significant 'tragic' template to choose. As David Bevington notes, there was something ‘new’ in the play; what he calls ‘a sense of the anomalous’:

The idea of tragedy came with the sources [for Romeo and Juliet], and is not one which either the Fall of Princes or revenge tragedy provided a formula. Nor does the pattern owe anything to classical and neo-classical theories of tragedy … [Bevington, ‘Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Career’, in Claire McEachern (ed), Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge 2002), 50-68; 54]

Both the 'prince's fall' and 'revenge' models of tragedy are problematic in the context of dramatizing ‘race relations’, I think. I suppose the 'fall of princes' relates distantly to the overthrow of blancitude hinted at, in turn, by Blackman's subplot about the old-history terrorist/freedom-fighter rebellion against white rule in the novels. And I suppose 'revenge', or the ethical imperative to avert it, is behind all the ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ style stories coming out of the new South Africa. But better to follow the doomed love story logic to its end. Which is what Noughts and Crosses does.