If you don't have people's authentic voice then other people will come in to fill the gap, and if that that is all you have to see yourself with or if that is the majority of what you are going to get, then you will never feel fully realized and seen in the larger culture. You will always be a caricature of some kind pass through the lens of someone different and maybe someone who can't even help but feel better than you, and you know that that is consequently how others will perceive you as well. When you look outside of your small world there will always be people looking back at you, but to be beholden to what they think they see (or what they want to see) instead of being able to speak for yourself is a terrible price for just having less.
I was so dumbfounded by the quality of this lecture by author Kate Beaton that I watched it almost immediately again the next day.
Beaton is the author of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, a book I highly highly recommend reading. Not only was it my favorite book of 2022, it might be my favorite book of all time. It's up there.
You can watch the lecture and read the book in any order. What I love about the lecture is how it isn't a summary of the book at all, rather it's an extension of the ideas, themes, places, and history present in Ducks. Beaton does not talk down to her audience, and a lot of the examples and experiences she speaks of hit very close to home for me.
Class has always been a reality in Canada, but not a reality whose influence and power we have always acknowledged in the Canadian Arts scene. A working class person or a poor person is much less likely to become an artist than a middle class person or a wealthy person. They are less likely to be able to tell their own stories to a wider audience, and thus create the culture that we share—what becomes our national culture, the way we see ourselves, or the way we see each other. Yet, in demographic surveys of Arts, Publishing or Culture in Canada, you will rarely see economic background accounted for. In this and other ways, class remains an outlier. One thing is certain though—if working class and poor people do not write themselves into stories, other people certainly will.
Years ago I remember a conversation with a friend. I can't remember the subject of our discussion exactly, but I remember them explicitly saying something along the lines of:
. . . and then I'll be stuck working at a gas station for the rest of my life.
Note the emphasis, which was spoken with slightly exaggerated disdain. At the time (and still part-time to this day), my mother actually worked at a gas (petrol) station. She has never worked less than three jobs at any point in her life, and this happened to be one of them back then. I mentioned this to them and, to their credit, they were immediately regretful and apologized. We're still friends, but it really hurt to hear, and it really stuck with me.
You see, it is very common to hear this kind of statement or sentiment echoed in games, tech, and software. Not just from nasty, unkind people, but also from my kind, supportive, and astoundingly creative peers. I don't think people are really aware that they do it at all, and Beaton's talk explores why this kind of thing happens (albeit in writing/art more than games/tech, but it still rings true) with great empathy and analysis.
Beaton writes, of an author who visited her hometown and after an initial immediate revulsion of it, learned to love it.
I think that Edna Stabler came and she saw something she loved and wrote about it as she saw fit. She wrote as she understood how to write about what she was seeing. She had a knowledge of things like poor people, fishing village, and rural places from everything that she had gathered in her life, and when she arrived in a village she had never seen before she processed that information accordingly. I think in some ways she wrote the only book that she could ever write.
How could my friend have thought any different of working in a gas station. Their image, their knowledge, of people who work in gas stations is (maybe) dire and sad and pathetic. They don't see my mother picking up and driving the local homeless autistic kid deliver the bottles he collected to the depot, hosting weddings in her yard by the river for free, taking care of her friend's horses when they are away for work. They don't see her letting my friend in high school stay at our house for a week after his father beat him, tending to her garden and snuggling up to her three beautiful dogs for warmth every night, phoning me crying because she had a dream I was hurt and wanted to hear my voice, talking for hours about how she still had to raise 4 kids after one of her babies died in the crib. They don't see her supporting me relentlessly and nourishing my creativity as a child, teaching me what it means to be kind and giving and sympathetic and how it is more important than anything in the world to always be those things.
But I did see it. I was there. And when I see a movie or TV series or game with a gas station and the cartoonish, one-dimensional dead-beat guy who works there, I now know why it feels so wrong: because one of the most beautiful, complex souls I have ever known in my life works in a gas station.
We are all guilty of this in some way or another, and Beaton goes to great lengths to explore how and why this is so, and I appreciated both Ducks and this supplementary lecture for helping me understand my own mind a little more.
