I’m white. Being white means I have a certain level of
privilege that people of colour are not afforded. I’ve never had to experience
racism, I’ve never been slurred based on the colour of my skin and I don’t have
to live with the extreme social and economic gap that people of colour do in
terms of employment, higher education, sexual assault, health issues, etc.
Sometimes when I’m looking at an issue, it can be very easy for me to look over
the experiences of others. This isn’t deliberate but it is a sign that my race
has levelled the playing field in a way that just isn’t open for people who
aren’t white. I make a conscious effort to see the bigger picture, take into
account the experiences of others and to check my privilege at every possible
turn. Frankly, every white person should do so.
I say all this now because I think it’s important for me to
put this disclaimer before my piece, wherein I discuss what I saw as the gross
ignorance and cultural appropriation present in the book “Tiger’s Curse” by
Colleen Houck, a white American YA author. The novel, which takes place
primarily in India, centres on a young white American woman called Kelsey who,
through a series of laughable and increasingly convoluted events, finds herself
looking after a cursed Indian prince who is stuck in the body of a tiger. She
accompanies him back to his homeland in order to accomplish several tasks to
break the curse, and through this process finds out that she is the chosen one
of the Hindu goddess Durga.
Before I can even tackle the cultural issues of this book, I
have to discuss just how terrible it is on a basic storytelling level. The
book, which was originally self-published on Amazon before being picked up by a
publisher and becoming a NYT best-seller, is abysmal. There’s no other word for
it. The prose is childish and juvenile, often reading like an essay by a
fourteen year old who has just learned how to speak English. Throughout the
extremely padded story, the irritating narrator Kelsey displays the emotional
and intellectual maturity of a tween, one who is far more concerned with
describing every single meal she eats or piece of clothing she wears over the
action packed tasks she is set to accomplish. We are subjected to list after
list of every single thing Kelsey does, from her morning routine to her
showering. Any potential for excitement in the more action packed scenes is
quickly shot down because of the stilted prose. I don’t ask for much realism in
my books with cursed tiger princes but when I’m rolling my eyes on page 4 (when
Kelsey literally walks into a job centre and is given a job helping to look
after a tiger in a travelling circus despite a total lack of qualifications),
that’s not good.
Supporting characters make no impact beyond their broad
offensive stereotypes (the Italian circus owner speaks like the pizza chef from
“The Simpsons” while most of the Indian characters speak in the broken English
style reserved for racist jokes – shockingly, people in India can speak
English, many of them very well. They’re not uneducated simpletons who need a
nice white lady to fix their problems). The romance is essentially insta-love
but Kelsey is at least smart enough to acknowledge that an Indian price
deprived of female contact for hundreds of years may just latch onto the first
one he sees. Overall, I was actually embarrassed by the quality of the novel.
There is basically no villain until the cheap cliff-hanger epilogue, and the
story really could have benefited from some actual antagonism beyond “Baww, Ren
is so hot and I want to kiss him!” I was dying for the opportunity to find a
paper copy and take big red pen to it. I easily could have removed 20% of that
padding and it wouldn’t have made an ounce of difference to the story.
Of course, the real issue with this novel is the portrayal
of India and its culture, particularly its religious mythos. The moments where
facts about India are shoehorned in feel like Houck just googled random Indian
facts and copy-pasted them into the document. People recite stale facts as part
of the dialogue and it sounds as though they’re just reading from Wikipedia. I
even googled several passages to make sure they weren’t plagiarised from
websites because I just couldn’t be sure otherwise. Whenever Kelsey stays in a
hotel in India, she stays in the lap of luxury, conveniently avoiding the
poorer areas of the country and even the more middle-class areas. This is
tourism for the spoiled White Kelsey. It’s like colonialism never happened.
Then again, these moments aren’t anywhere near as offensive
as when Houck just makes stuff up. For instance, a character mentions an
Islamic belief that Allah sends tiger’s down from heaven to protect his
devotees. That’s completely untrue. No such legend exists. While Islam is one
of the main religions in India, its origins lie to the Middle East, and there
aren’t a whole lot of tigers there. My
GoodReads friend Nessa covers this in
more detail, including Houck’s inability to keep the mythology of any country
straight (kappas?!). This
isn’t Hindi culture, this is Disney’s Hinduism for beginners, completely
stripped of all the complexities and less then PG rated aspects.
I really became angry when White Kelsey is declared the
chosen one of the goddess Durga. The population of India is over 1.2 billion
people, yet the chosen one of Durga is a white American girl. Even she
questions whether this is right! This brief moment of clarity only serves to
aggravate the sheer insulting nature of yet another appearance of the white
saviour. Remember in “Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom” how Indy, the
very obviously white guy, was the one the poor helpless villagers said was sent
by Shiva to save them? What about Kony 2012, a white saviour project so smug
and misinformed that it went from online sensation to public joke in about a
fortnight? Let’s not forget every single movie set in an American inner-city
high school where the nice white lady/man comes in to teach those
black/Hispanic kids how to improve their lives, then she gets down with their
urban dancing! And, of course, Bono. It is not the job of white people to swoop in on some moral
mission and save the poor unfortunate non-white souls. It’s depressing enough
that we’re still trying this shit in 2013, I don’t want to have to see it
deployed as a cheap exploitative plot device in order to make an irritating and
poorly developed Mary Sue be made even more special.
Two things came to mind while reading “Tiger’s Curse”. One
was “Temple of Doom”, since the action scenes and general narrative felt very
much like Indiana Jones fan-fiction, only without Short Round, and the other
was Selema Gomez. Lately, Gomez has been on the receiving end of a lot of
justified controversy for her repeated wearing of the bindi in her performances.
Gomez seems to be wearing the bindi for no other reason than it looks “cool”.
Iggy Azalea’s latest music video “Bounce” is set during an Indian wedding for
no apparent reason, with Azalea in traditional dress. Gwen Stefani wore the
bindi in the past, as have many other white pop-stars. They took something that
wasn’t their culture, stripped it of its cultural and historical context and
made it into a fashion accessory.
The Aerogram put it best here:
“The
political context in which cultural symbols exist is important. Cultural
appropriation happens — and the unquestioned sense of entitlement that white
Americans display towards the artifacts and rituals of people of color exists
too. All “appropriation” is not merely an example of cultural sharing, an
exchange between friends that takes place on a level playing field.”
“Tiger’s Curse” uses Indian
culture for no apparent reason other than it’s “cool”. The food is tasty, the
clothes are colourful, the gods and goddesses are interesting and it’s all
there for white people to cherry pick for cheap artistic purposes. Houck at
least doesn’t white-wash this version of India, although the two love interests
(yes, love triangle) are essentially blank slates who exist to push a plot
forward and fawn over the extremely irritating White Kelsey. This should be
their story and it’s not. It’s the story of the white girl. It’s yet another
tired narrative where the white people come in to save the day from those poor
locals with their non-white skin and lack of privilege. Keep in mind just how
few mainstream YA novels feature heroines of colour and then look at this book.
Why is the supposedly relatable heroine white and why is she so special to an
Indian goddess when she has absolutely no connection or understanding of said
culture besides the plot telling us she’s special? There are many reasons why
you should avoid “Tiger’s Curse”, but if you need to pick one then avoid it
because Hindi culture is not Houck’s to fetishize.
Some important links.