People of colour in Life on Mars?

[chamekke]

I wanted to suggest a theme for recs week 2011 on the lifein1973 comm, then realised that the subject deserves a closer look.

My theme suggestion: any fics (or other fanworks) that focus on a character of colour in Life on Mars. Then I thought, who exactly would that be? We all know Maya and Nelson, Glen and Eve; but just how many others are there?

Here's my effort at putting together an all-inclusive list. If you can think of anyone I've missed out, please comment, and I'll update the list.

• Maya Roy. (1.01, 2.06)


• Raimes's psychiatrist in 2006. The character himself is unnamed; the actor's name is Parvez Qadir. (1.01)


• Nelson. (1.02, 1.03, 1.04, 1.05, 1.06, 1.07, 1.08, 2.01, 2.03, 2.08)


• The cyclist (with impressive Afro) riding on the pavement ... the one that Sam tells to ride on the road or else he'll come 'round and stomp on his toys à la Gene (1.03)


• Unnamed Sikh mill worker (wearing a dark green turban) at Crester's Textiles ("Miller 2" in the transcript). One of the "sheik" workers, as Gene calls them. There are at least four other Asian mill workers visible in other scenes -- all male, two also wearing turbans, the other two not. (1.03)


• Saeed Taufeeq, the young man at the Indian restaurant that Gene pays for the "curry date" meal. This character is mentioned in the credits of 1.07, which suggests that the actor (Sagar Arya) originally had dialogue that was later cut. (1.07)


• Eve Olawi Crane. (2.01)


• Detective Constable/Deputy Chief Constable Glen Fletcher. Or even "Cool Cat Glyn Fincher", top blues guitarist, as seen in the Manchester Evening News. (2.02)


• Suki. Guessing at the spelling here; it could be Sukey, a diminutive form of Susan. (Suki is Japanese for 'like' or 'love', but it is not normally a woman's name.) The actress is uncredited even though she had lines! (2.04)


• Ravi Gandhi ... or Dipak, or any of the non-speaking filmgoers at the Asian community centre, for that matter. (2.06)


• "Officer 1", the woman in 2006 who takes Sam's tape to Psych Evaluation, or any of the (non-speaking) characters of colour present at the "48-hour custodial" meeting. (2.08)

Comments

[loz]

That is such a tiny list, really. For a show of 16 episodes? Coupled with the fact that Nelson, a supporting character, is incredibly problematic as "the magic Jamaican" (which, sure, has a lantern hung on it at one point, but then is never mentioned again.) Badness, LoM. Badness.

P.S. Thanks for this list. :D

[chamekke.livejournal.com]

I decided not to editorialise, because the pitiful brevity of the list speaks for itself, but: yes. I was appalled.

Yeah, a scant handful of characters, tertiary at best, and most with little or no dialogue. And what's more, you'll be hard-pressed to spot any extras who aren't white (outside the 'ethnic neighbourhood' scenes in 1.07 and 2.06). For God's sake, the series portrays Manchester in 1973, not 1943.

There are maybe 3 fics I can think of that would fit the rec, in terms of showcasing one of these characters; but frankly, they're thin on the ground. (Can't think of any artwork OOTOMH. No need to even mention vids.) So I'll confess, I hesitated to suggest this for recs week, purely because it'll be a challenge to find completed fics that meet the requirement.

Might make a lovely challenge for 1973flashfic, though.

[chamekke.livejournal.com]

P.S. ITA about the "magic Jamaican". Sigh.

[chamekke.livejournal.com]

I very much fear that my 5 recs for "Characters of colour" are not going to be added to.

TBH, it was a struggle coming up with those. There are lots of fics featuring Nelson and Maya in particular, but usually these characters are off to the side, so to speak. Or the fic's POV Nelson, but it's really about him observing Sam and Gene's relationship, or something.

I think I'm going to have to write a Suki fic one of these days.

[loz]

Well, you recced the fics I was going to, so yes. Hopefully it'll be a call to arm. (It probably won't.)

[chamekke.livejournal.com]

Mmm yes, I was wondering if I was guilty of jumping the gun by over-reccing. OTOH I didn't want the thread to look too pitiful at the outset, you know?

But I may have overcompensated :-(

Damn. I'd love to think there are some other fics out there that might qualify. *crosses fingers that someone will propose one* *will not bet actual money on it*

[lovelet2010.livejournal.com]

That's a very small amount of non-white characters/actors, I wonder whether A2A was similar?

Thanks for doing this.

[margo-kim.livejournal.com]

*winces* Ouch. That is shameful, show. Even if I'm generous and say that it's supposed to be a reflection of how marginalized people of color were during that time (which I doubt is what the writers were going for), that's still a pitiful showing.

What really rubs me wrong about this, though, is how didactic most of the plots the most prominent characters are involved in. 2x06 is about hate crimes and Glen gets that whole speech of how he's supposed to deal with his blackness. Nelson gets the (thank you, Loz, for putting it so perfectly) magic Jamaican label. Eve is probably handled the best. The exclusive focus of her character isn't her race, but it does come up in an organic way (when she tells Sam that guys like him can't stand to see a black woman get even a little bit of power).

But it bugs me that the rest of them, while I like them, seem to be there more for the moral. It's like the writers (hope Matthew Graham won't find this post on denounce me on Twitter for that)couldn't have a character of color just be a character first.

And apparently I have more feelings on the matter then I thought.

[chamekke.livejournal.com]

This is from a PM that puts this in a more forgiving light:

"It's true that taken on its own, the list you've drawn up of people of colour in LoM is pitifully short, but when I think about the alternatives I'm honestly left grasping at straws. Sixteen episodes of a show set in a racially repressive era really doesn't make for that many opportunities in a show that follows Sam's own story as closely as LoM does. His life revolves around a police station where Glen in himself illustrates the extreme rarity of people of colour in the force. So clearly little opportunity to fill the lack in that arena. That really only leaves witnesses, suspects and figures from Sam's past to fill out the remainder and your list shows that there is a scattered representation of sometimes silent, sometimes significant characters of colour, to the point that it seems the only way to have added more would have been to include more villains of colour - and I can see why the writers would have cringed from that approach given the racism already being explored in the time period as depicted.

"I don't know, this probably sounds like I'm making excuses, but I can't help but think that LoM is such a small world already (how long, I wonder, would the list of ALL characters be if you only included characters as significant as Nelson and Maya?) and depicting a period where people of colour had socially limited interactions with the predominantly white sphere in which Sam travels (and we never see past Sam's optic, mind), and I'm not sure if throwing in more speaking roles for people of colour would have supported that world-building or come across as tokenism."

There's truth to this. Sam is white, from a white family. 1973's CID is, realistically, all-Caucasian. However, the two people that we're told mean the most to Sam in 2006, aside from family - namely, his girlfriend and his mentor/friend - are Anglo-Indian and black respectively. And yes, they're used in part as didactic devices in the eps about race, but not exclusively. Maya in particular is so essential to 1.01 (in which her race is incidental) that the use of her Anglo-Indian background in 2.06 has always struck me as an afterthought.

I tried imagining where people of colour might have appeared in Sam's 1976 world in a more than passing fashion. Support staff at the station, perhaps? Was there any reason Gwen or June had to be white? (Aside from the painful optics of seeing women of colour serving/cleaning up after white men, that is.) I do think the show might have included more victims and suspects outside the context of race narratives.

But it's a tricky question, particularly as we never see Sam socialise with anyone outside police circles. This explains Nelson to me, to some degree. He 'serves' his customers, but he's also the owner of the pub, and runs it on his terms. He has autonomy. The 'magic Jamaican' thing - well, that's unjustifiable, but I have to admit that Nelson's treatment in A2A has badly affected how I see him in retrospect in LoM. To quote the PM:

"But if we're talking LoM in itself without the WTF-ery that A2A threw into the mix, I can appreciate the winking uncertainty around Nelson - the reveal of the fake accent undermines his 'magic' and the fact that he's as likely to be impatient with Sam's rantings as he is to respond in kind (best Nelson moment ever: 'I just want to go home.'/'Me too, Sam. Shut the door on your way out.' Hee, snap!). If you're looking at LoM as a show that spirals itself out of 70s television stereotypes (and it really, really does) then Nelson is very much a part of that formula - a nod to black representations of the time that is gently subverted by some great writing/acting, just as Gene acknowledges and subverts the formula of the bombastic, sexist/racist/homophobic 70s cop."

My issue with the use of minority characters in LoM (including the 'Irish' episode 2.03, which makes me cringe) is that they're mainly employed as didactic devices rather than fully rounded characters. When they're allowed to go beyond that, they come alive in our imagination and in our affections. The example of Eve shows us what could be done, in the hands of a sympathetic writer. It makes me sigh for what might have been.

[basaltgrrl.livejournal.com]

I also appreciate that you put this together, and it's worth having as a potential rec topic if only to possibly spur further creative endeavors. I think fic or art involving Ravi (or Dipak) could be terribly interesting. Given Gene's great love of curries, he could absolutely have ongoing relationships with employees at his favorite curry houses. The possibilities are there!