Link Love – PoC in SciFi Carnival #9 – What I Heard About You and What it Meant For Me
by Latoya Peterson
I am really starting to become a fan of these Live Journal carnivals. The PoC in SciFi Carnival 9 is out and here are my two favorite pieces.
Untrue-Accounts provides a ridiculously great analysis of race, sex, and gender in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And it comes with a video!
1. The story of the coat
I had the line “It’s Nikki Wood’s fucking coat” long before I had a song or a vidder or a title.
Spike wears the long black duster from his first appearance on Buffy, but we only find out its history in S5’s “Fool for Love.” Spike relates his history to Buffy (in, it’s strongly implied, somewhat unreliable terms) and the viewers see how he came to adopt his Johnny Rotten persona in a series of flashbacks. Spike starts out as a young aesthete in Victorian London; after his romantic overture is rejected by the woman he’s in love with, he accepts vamping by Drusilla. Once turned, he adopts a tough, lower-class persona, which reaches full expression once he kills a Slayer during the Boxer Rebellion and literally consummates his triumph by sex with Dru over the Slayer’s corpse. Two of Spike’s physical identifiers — the scar through one eyebrow and the coat he wears — are souvenirs of the Slayers he’s fought and killed: the Chinese Slayer slashes his face during their final battle and he steals the coat off the body of a black Slayer in the ’70s subways of New York after he kills her. Spike responds, ultimately, to rejection by a woman by the murder of other women and by stealing their identifiers–their identities, their stories–for his own.
Even in “Fool for Love,” it’s clear that Spike misunderstands the Slayers he’s fought as he misunderstands Buffy: he thinks that the Slayers’ lives and thoughts center on him, that they are as obsessed with his Romantic conflation of sex and death as he is. He argues that they died because they didn’t want to live enough; he argues that Slayers are as in love with death as he is. The Chinese Slayer tells him in Chinese, “Tell my mother I died well,” before she dies, but Spike’s only response is: “Sorry, love, I don’t speak Chinee.” Her mother is unimaginable to him, as the son of the black Slayer–Nikki Wood–is also unimaginable. Spike subordinates the stories of these women of color to his own story; he literally cannot understand the Chinese Slayer when she speaks in her own language of her own concerns.
When Robin Wood confronts Spike in S7’s “Lies My Parents Told Me,” fighting him in revenge for Nikki’s death, Spike responds that Nikki never cared as much for her child as she did for fighting, or she wouldn’t have died: he is incapable of seeing Nikki as having an emotional existence outside the fated and fatal love affair between vampire and vampire slayer. In Spike’s revised and expanded version of his origins and his fight with Nikki, he adds an additional layer of justification: Once vamped, William’s mother, who is defined solely by her affection for her son, expresses her “evil nature” by revealing her desire to travel the world and making incestuous advances on her son. Spike frames a mother’s desires independent of her child as a betrayal of that child, equating his mother’s wish for independence with her incestuous advances and with Nikki Wood’s obligation to fight as a Slayer. Again, he rewrites his confrontation with Nikki into a choice that she made, rather than a duty she had to fulfill, obscuring the limitations of her life and his own responsibility for her death. His denial that Nikki’s maternal feelings were as important as her role as Slayer once again erases her personhood–and it’s notable that the only personal aspect of Nikki Wood we ever see is another relational role defining her, that of mother.
Robin strips his mother’s coat off Spike before beginning the fight, but Spike wins and reclaims Nikki’s coat as his own, as a symbol of his defeat of Robin and of his triumph over his own unpleasant memories. Spike dies in the Buffy finale but appears on Angel, initially as a discorporate ghost tormented by another ghost at Wolfram & Hart. The other ghost demonstrates his power over Spike by stripping him naked–and of course Spike establishes his regained self-mastery by imagining his coat back on.
Spike eventually regains a corporeal body, complete with long black coat. In the episode “Damage,” he finally acknowledges the harm he did other people as a vampire when faced with Dana, a young Slayer who’s been driven insane by a combination of childhood trauma and the memories of previous Slayers, including the ones Spike killed. Dana refutes Spike’s claims from “Lies My Parents Told Me,” speaking in Nikki’s voice of her longing to see her young son; she strips Nikki’s coat off Spike’s back before torturing him. But Dana is captured by the Angel-headed Wolfram & Hart and despite Spike’s new self-realization, in the next episode he’s wearing the coat again.
There’s a moment near the end of the series, in the antepenultimate episode “The Girl in Question,” when it seems like Spike will really learn better, like he will really acknowledge and accept the self-centeredness of his conception of the world, women, and Slayers; there’s a moment when he loses his leather coat. But no: there’s an admiring fangirl in the text who returns an exact copy of the coat to him.
If I’m charitable, I guess I can read the return of the coat by the head of the Italian office of Wolfram & Hart as an acknowledgement that wearing the coat represents the evil Spike’s done: but most of the time I just feel like the show is fucking taunting me, holding justice just out of my reach. And this is the problem, this is where I can’t speak in the detached academic tone anymore, this is not where the understanding of the character breaks down but where the understanding of the text does. Because ultimately the text argues what Spike does: that it’s Spike’s story that counts.
And Spike goes out of the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer like he came in: wearing Nikki Wood’s fucking coat.
He might as well be wearing her flayed skin.
Saskaia writes about the uses of Quileute characters and ndnness:
I came to the Twilight novels after a friend pointed them out in the bookstore and I linked it to the casting drama that showed up at ndnz (but was then deleted by the poster or commenter). I came into the books interested in the Edward/Bella romance but was happily surprised to see that Jacob Black was a prominent character, in purpose and/or dialogue, through out the entire series. I liked that these were modern Indians, the pre-werewolf Jacob seemed real enough, or common enough, a good kid interested in auto-mechanics, strong relationship with his father and friends. He had a sense of humor that made me laugh out loud often. I applauded when Meyer was clever enough to make Charlie and Billy best friends so that Jacob taking Bella on as a friend so quickly made sense to me. Of all the scenes at La Push, the time in the garage building the bikes, the Spaghetti Party with the Blacks and Clearwaters, and Breakfast Muffins with Emily felt the most authentic to me. I didn’t mind the muffins over frybread because it was morning and it would have seemed heavy-handed to me to use frybread.
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Conversely, I wondered how every single Quileute was russet-colored (and if I never ever read “russet-colored” again it won’t be a moment too soon). I live in the Southeast and in my family alone we range from every shade of brown to quite pale (like me) to Black like many of my cousins and other extended family. I would be lying if I did not think we’re a good lookin’ bunch of folks but we’re not all insanely gorgeous like all of Meyer’s Indians, aside from Kim. The exotification of was heavy-handed, most likely in Meyer’s attempt to show that she thinks Indians are beautiful, strong, and we all but walk on water, *lol*, but, instead, it shoved me out of the story and reminded me that this was a non-Native writing Indian characters. For instance, Meyer loved Alexie’s new YA novel so I think she has a grip on what is an authentic young PNW Native boy’s voice and experience. Granted, things may be different in the West, but I still know more than a few Indians that don’t look like something out of Disney’s Pocahontas, even the Plains folks, although I can’t help but think she was reading a dime-store novel about Comanches or the Dakota when she was drafting Jacob’s description. While Jacob was written to be mostly age-appropriate, I think she did fall into uber-sexy warrior territory after his first phasing as a werewolf, but perhaps it paled in comparison to how dazzling Edward was in every scene? Bella is a dubious narrator when it came to the physical descriptions of Edward and Jacob, but the subtext ran to the Hot!Indian to me.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Buffy and Race « Reading While Black on 05 May 2008 at 6:28 am
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