Bishilol

powerful-genderwitch-nea asked: Is there a reason you don't often describe race in characters? when reading Anansi boys I had this weird conception of the characters of Charlie and Spider as white, when on future reads having context it was obvious they should not be.

neil-gaiman:

neil-gaiman:

I actually describe race a lot in Anansi Boys. You know who comes from where, after all, how they talk, what kind of foods they eat. But I only tend to tag the skin colour of the white characters in the book when they first show up.

For example:

 "Excuse me,“ said a small white woman with a clipboard, “are these people with you?”

or

He was a middle-aged white man with receding very fair hair. If you happened to see Grahame Coats and immediately found yourself thinking of an albino ferret in an expensive suit, you would not be the first.

or

They went inside: down wooden steps to a cellar where rubicund barristers drank side by side with pallid money market fund managers.

or

Grahame Coats had gone off-white – one of those colours that turn up in paint catalogues with names like Parchment or Magnolia. He said, “How did you get access to those accounts?”

or

Her flatmate, Carol, a thin-faced white woman from Preston, stuck her head around the bedroom door. She was towelling her hair vigorously.

or

She wore a white blouse, and a blue denim skirt, and over it, a grey coat. She had very long legs and extremely pale skin, and hair which remained, with only minimal chemical assistance, quite as blonde as it had been when Morris Livingstone had married her, twenty years earlier.

or

Fat Charlie squeezed in next to a large woman with a chicken on her lap. Behind them two white girls chattered about the parties they had attended the previous night and the shortcomings of the temporary boyfriends they had accumulated during their holiday.

(Those from a quick flip-through, and far from exhaustive.)

I hope people find on a careful reading that the race of the various characters is pretty obvious, and is often described (for example, Daisy’s father is from Hong Kong, her mother is Ethiopian). 

I’m sorry you read Fat Charlie and Spider and Mr Nancy and their families as white on first read, but that might have something to do with the way that people’s heads reading a book can default all characters to white, if other information is not immediately supplied, which is a very bad habit, and one I hope Anansi Boys might help people to shed.

And there is, after all, a huge pointer to the race of the title characters in the title…

I expanded the first paragraph of my reply, slightly. Because race isn’t just skin-colour. I remember, when Anansi Boys came out, getting an email telling me off for getting the post-funeral food in the beginning of the book “wrong” and “not doing my research”, because the old ladies weren’t eating Southern Funeral Food, they were eating the food that black people from the Caribbean would eat.

• 9 February 2016