#lmk if this is readable and if there are more questions cause i'm happy to talk more about any and all of this

[pocketsizedquasar]

If you’re willing to share, what sorts of changes are you going to be making to Fedallah and the other Asian crew members? (I’m reading Moby Dick for class right now, and Melville’s racism blindspots are really interesting)

hello! this is an excellent question, and one which i’m constantly in the process of wondering how to address.

melville’s racism is rampant in moby dick. even as he tries to write consciously abt race & capitalism, he still perpetuates racist, orientalist, etc stereotypes and beliefs, with all his characters of color. queequeg hardly ever gets to speak for himself, and instead is spoken over by the white narrator. the three officers, all white men, get introduced with backstories and personalities and nuance, while the harpooners, all nonwhite, are introduced via reductive stereotypes and descriptions that center almost exclusively on their “exotic” bodies. the officers all get last words, final soliloquies, as they die, and the harpooners get no such respect. ahab & fedallah’s filipino crew are regularly described as demonic and referred to with pejorative anti-asian language. pip’s suffering as a Black character at the hands of a white supremacist is treated as some divine revelation, & pretty much exclusively is used to further the (ostensibly) white ahab’s anguish.

and fedallah himself — a textbook orientalist caricature of a ~spooky exotic persian man~, whose prophecies and ~satanic~ tendencies plague and doom the narrative.

(putting under a cut bc this got long)

i’ve tried to deal with much of melville’s racism through my comic by expanding on the gaps — like you said, the blind spots — that melville left. queequeg, tashtego, and daggoo all get to speak for themselves and to each other; they exist beyond their relationship to the white characters; i’ve tried my best to deliberately ensure the cast of the pequod is diverse and full of characters of color as whole & non caricatured & authentic as i can. this includes the filipino stowaways who we later discover are ahab & fedallah’s oarsmen.

i’ve mentioned this a bit in the past, but i’m trying to draw a line between moby dick’s watsonian or in-universe racism (stubb being a racist dickhead to, well, everyone, but especially pip & fedallah), vs it’s doylist or out-of-universe or authorial racism (melville calling queequeg a s*vage and referring to pip as “bright” in the way “blacks” are bright). so while i’ll keep the fact that stubb is a racist asshole, i’m not going to treat queequeg and pip the way melville did. characters in moby dick: or, the webcomic (henceforth MDOTW) are racist, but hopefully, if i’ve done my job right, the narrative itself is not. 

i’m not going to get this right every time, but i’m hoping i’m doing an okay job.

fedallah specifically is...difficult. he is also deeply personal to me as a persian person & someone w zoroastrian roots in my family. the stereotypes to which melville reduces him are ones that i’ve directly dealt with in my life.

some things i can do to fix fedallah are simple: design choices such as getting rid of melville’s stupid matted hair thing & giving him a proper & period-accurate hair covering, etc. some are more difficult — the things that make fedallah a racist caricature (ie the mysticism and prophetic bullshit) are also the things that mark his role in the plot: his prophecies are important foreshadowing, and they do come true.

some of the things i have done to mitigate this:

-- the design choices i mentioned earlier . no more fucken weird visual orientalist caricature. he is a person and will look like one jfc

-- fedallah is not the only middle eastern character in MDOTW. i have made a very deliberate and conscious choice to cast ahab as nonwhite, particularly a middle eastern man. (i’ve waffled back & forth abt the specific ethnicity, but). i read an essay ages back called ‘the question of race in moby dick’ by fred v. bernard which made the case for reading ahab (and ishmael, tho that’s not the point of this post) as mixed Black, and since then i’ve had trouble reading ahab as white. i’ve talked a lot about how the take of ahab as just “privileged dude leading everyone to their doom” is sort of the most boring one for me; it’s certainly a valid reading of the text, but not particularly interesting. what’s more interesting to me is how the world in which ahab lives is legitimately an awful one — violent and colonialist and capitalist — and how ahab tries in his own deeply flawed ways to fight that world. in what ways is ahab’s rally against the white whale a rally against whiteness itself, and capitalism and colonialism and all these systems that have caused his trauma etc etc? but i digress — my point here is that i personally get even more from this narrative by casting ahab as nonwhite. i’ve made him swana as a persian person myself — i don’t feel equipped as a nonBlack person to tell this specific story about ahab if he were Black — but also because there are a lot of things about ahab where him being arab or persian makes a lot of sense. one of them being his relationship with fedallah, certainly, but also the way he describes religion, his relationship with fire (slash the worship of fire) etc etc lend to this. this also means, back to the original point, that fedallah no longer has to bear the burden of sole representative for this group of people. it allows the two of them to feed off each other. it also allows another dimension to their relationship — how does ahab know fedallah? why does ahab trust fedallah so much? well, the solidarity of being two persian or two swana people in this hellscape of USian whaling certainly is a compelling reason

-- and along those lines, making fedallah more of a person than just a vessel for spooky cryptic nonsense. sure, stubb and flask might not-so-jokingly speculate on how he’s the devil in disguise and keeps his tail tucked into his pants, and sure he might make a weird comment about how ahab can only die by rope on a ship full of hempen rigging, but what else is he? does he care for ahab? are they friends? what does he think about the white whale (bc we know what starbuck and ahab and stubb and etc etc think about it)? what is he gaining or losing from this? can i put him up as a foil against starbuck — the voice of reason, begging ahab to turn back — vs him seemingly egging ahab on? almost baiting him to continue? who is fedallah beyond his prophecies? does he believe his own prophecies? is there a way i can depart from those prophecies even further, and not have to rely on them so much to push the narrative forward?

tl;dr to answer your question, what am i changing about fedallah? oh god. hopefully lots of things. hopefully enough.

#moby dick #melville #herman melville #whale weekly #captain ahab #ahab #fedallah #racism #mobydick #quasartalks #quasarwrites #ask #i-think-strange-things #long post #unsurprisingly this got very long #i like ishmelville do not know how to shut up #also the bolding is mostly just to make the readability easier since ik that can be an accessibility issue for some #when large blocks of text aren't broken up by any differentiation #lmk if this is readable and if there are more questions cause i'm happy to talk more about any and all of this