The last panel I attended dealt with a quite sensitive topic; the diversity in fiction. Diversity can have different meanings; we can have an ethnic diversity, or it may be physical, or it may be a sexual orientation. Whichever it is, we don’t have to underestimate its importance and value in literature and fiction.
RJ Barker (King of Assassin) chaired the event at the Creator Stage of the ComicCon London. Along with Barker, the authors Micah Yongo (Lost Gods), Marieke Nijkamp (Before I Let Go), Temi Oh (Do You Dream of Terra-Two), Tasha Suri (Empire of Sand), and Jeannette NG (Under the Pendulum Sun) expressed their opinions and told their experience on diversity during their careers. “I’m super-weird,” Nijkamp kicked off, “I’ve always been a super-weird person.” Temi Oh focused her diversity on her origin. Although she grew up in the UK, her origins are Nigerian as well as Micah Yongo. Tasha Suri instead has a South Asian cultural background. “British,” Jeanette NG said, causing the audience to chuckle delightedly. “My diversity is to be British.” Jeanette NG grew up in Hong Kong, then moved to the United Kingdom with her parents, where she started her career as an author. Barker’s characteristic was to be eccentric, he said. “Very eccentric,” he then confirmed, before asking the writers the following question. “I haven’t ever seen myself in other people,” Nijkamp said. “I did see me in a character I’ve recently been writing about.” “I used to watch a historical TV series, when I was in Hong Kong, about a woman who had been educated in the Western society and got back to her country after decades,” Jeanette said. “She was an outsider. That woman was the person I identified with.” Micah Yongo has never seen himself in somebody else, but he saw himself doing things or being in certain places instead of the actual people. “I don’t feel the necessity to write about the group I belong to,” the author went on explaining, “but I did find numerous aspects of my culture which I felt the need to explore and deepen.” “When I was in the United States on a tour for my book, I met a group of disabled kids,” Nijkamp told the audience. “In that moment, I realised that I had to write about people with disabilities.” “I think that we also have to use our cultural background to improve certain characteristics,” Suri said. “I like to create different characters, and my multi-ethnicity helped me in their making.” The conversion then switched to which writer the authors would like to be. Yongo went for David Foster Wallace. He would like to see him nowadays and know which his opinion would be. Suri instead remained in the world of fantasy. “I would like to bring a dragon in the British Empire society,” she claimed. “A dragon sort everything out” The diversity could enrich the authors, but sometimes the media represented it in irritating or stereotyped ways. “I don’t like the continuous sexual desire black women appear to communicate,” Oh said. “I really like when an author gets out of his comfort zone,” Yongo said. “That’s the moment in which a writer can personify somebody different from him and absorb an opposite point of view.” “I don’t like to when somebody calls me ‘mistress’,” Jeanette NG claimed, making the people frowning. “It’s easy to understand why, if you want one of them, you have to pay for!” The audience and the fellow authors couldn’t help of closing the event with a heartily and booming laugh.
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