What Does Positive Representation in Fiction Really Look Like?

As a mixed-race woman raising mixed children, representation in literature is something I am keenly aware of. We are doing better now than the white-washed characters of my youth, but my children’s faces are still missing from the majority of the books they love.

Myths, legends, and fairy-tales are still my favorite genres to read, with or without children. Be they only a few pages long, or woven into the themes of a novel, they seem to reach deep into our imaginations and conjure up the roots of our identities, and all our fantasies of who we are and what our lives could be. So, in this genre, more than any other for me, positive representation is essential.

I stumbled across a collection of six magical fairy-tales called Blackberry Blue by Jamila Gavin, and I was confronted by a character description so beautiful and so different that it is something I have returned to over and over again.

Her skin was as black as midnight, her lips like crushed damsons, and her tightly curled hair shone like threads of black gold. When the baby looked up into the woman’s face, her eyes glistened like blackberries.

It was only in reading those words that I was struck by the fact that I had never read them before. I am a lover of words and some writers regularly stop me dead with a sentence so sumptuous that I want to read it over and over again. This description had the same effect. I wanted to drink it in and hold it close. I wanted to show it to everyone in my house and then share it on every social media platform I could think of. I wanted to say,

‘Here see, my skin, my face, me.’

I wanted to show my daughters and say

‘Look, someone sees you, you can be the fairy-tale princess, the lead, the heroine, it wasn’t just a mother’s bias.’

It brought to mind another book in which race plays a central theme, Noughts and Crosses. In the five-book series, Malorie Blackman creates a world in which modern racial tensions are reversed. Africa has colonised the UK and society is divided into two races, the Noughts, and the Crosses. The Crosses with their dark skin are in positions of power and are seen as superior, while the white-skinned Noughts are the underclass.

I was trying so hard to understand how and why things were the way they were. The Crosses were meant to be closer to God. The Good Book said so. The son of God was dark-skinned like them, had eyes like them, had hair like them. The Good Book said so. But the Good Book said a lot of things. Like ‘love thy neighbour’, and ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. If nothing else, wasn’t the whole message of the Good Book to live and let live? So how could the Crosses call themselves ‘God’s chosen’ and still treat us the way they did? OK, we weren’t their slaves any more, but Dad said the name had changed but nothing else. Dad didn’t believe in the Good Book. Neither did Mum. They said it’d been written and translated by Crosses, so it was bound to be biased in their favour. But the truth was the truth, wasn’t it? Noughts . . . Even the word was negative. Nothing. Nil. Zero. Nonentities. It wasn’t a name we’d chosen for ourselves. It was a name we’d been given. But why?

There is a powerful moment of simple description early on in the first book, which encapsulates the subtleties of the daily experience of racism and how we as authors can reveal so much, with so little.

‘Hi. I’m Sephy Hadley.’ I thrust my hand under the nose of the nought girl I was sitting next to. She had a dark brown plaster on her forehead which stuck out on her pale white skin like a throbbing thumb. ‘Welcome to Heathcroft.’

And just like that, the reader pauses for a moment to think about the plasters in their medicine box. Such a small innocuous item, but one whose colour is referred to as ‘skin tone’.

We know representation matters, we’ve discussed it so much over the last year, but how does that representation show up in your work?

It’s time to get honest and look at your work objectively. When you pick an image for an article, whose are the faces you choose? It might not be deliberate, and you don’t want to be tokenistic either. It’s a hard line to walk but intention and awareness are the keys to change.

It is not enough to have diverse characters within the pages of our books, those characters must be as vivid and as achingly beautiful as the others. How else will we change our readers' perceptions of the people around them and of themselves? Think of it as drawing a picture with your words and read back over your character descriptions, what do they actually look like? Is that what you see?

As writers, we have a hand in changing the fabric of the reality that we are living within. It has long been debated whether art reflects life, or life reflects art, but I say that as our pen touches the paper and weaves worlds and characters into being, we are creating more than just fantasy. We are responsible for creating a lens through which we see ourselves and the possibilities of our world.

‘A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader.’ Victor J Banis

We might not be in control of the world we live in and we may often feel impotent in our impact out there, but in here, on the page, you are in control. You are the master of your world and you have the power to create anything you want. To quote that overused line, “With great power comes great responsibility”.

But responsibility does not have to feel like an albatross around your neck. It is not a punishment for crimes not yet committed. It is an opportunity to invite others into new experiences, new understandings, all the while sharing your unique interpretation with the world.

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Originally published in The Writing Cooperative in March 2021