Written by Intisar Khanani, Writer-in-Residence
When I talk about my writing, I say that I write mighty girls in diverse worlds. Today, I wanted to chat what it means to shape diverse worlds specifically.
The stories we read, the people we see on the news and in the media, the people in our neighborhoods and in our communities, all build a reality where we recognize the diversity of our world, and we value it. Being able to see each other allows us to care about each other. Simply put, when we learn to see the people around us, and in our world, we learn to value their humanity. The flip side of this is when people don’t exist on the page, or the screen, or on our radar at all.
Reflecting Back Our World
I’ve grown up with both of these things. In middle school, I attended an international school in Saudi Arabia that had over 70 different nationalities represented—it was incredibly culturally and religiously diverse and included children with different levels of abilities and mental health needs, as well. While there, I discovered the early works of Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley in my school library. These were the first fantasy stories I’d ever read featuring girls having adventures, and they changed my life – but not a single person on the page looked like me, or, indeed, the vast majority of my classmates.
It was mind-boggling how I could read whole fantasy worlds that were only peopled by vaguely medieval European white characters. Where in the world was I? Where were my friends? Where were my classmates and the literal world they represented? Where was the incredibly beautiful experience of the world that I was growing up with? We, and it, didn’t exist.
Breaking Out of the Bubble
What we had, instead of the world, was a strange, homogenous bubble that didn’t even reflect accurately the varied and rich history of medieval Europe, in which only one group of people lived, all speaking the same language and looking the same.
This became so deeply ingrained in me that, when I wrote stories through high school and college, I wrote white characters in a vaguely white land. It took me years to learn how to allow myself, and people like me, a chance to exist in the stories I told—and thus to exist in the collective imagination, being able to take up space and hold value.
Shaping diverse worlds—and consuming diverse stories of all kinds—is about bursting that homogenous bubble, so that we can see beyond the warped curves of our own “world” to a wider picture, people with cultures and religions and ways of being that we can still find ways to relate to. It’s allowing each of us to be a hero, and it’s also allowing each of us to know what it is to be “othered” – because if we have grown up always being the center, being able to access stories that don’t revolve around us is critical to our own humanity.
The Human Experience
Diversity is an integral part of human experience—from the diversity of the physical world we live in to the vast multitude of realities represented within the social world. But so often, these incredible and beautiful variations in where and how we live aren’t portrayed in our stories. And that can only hurt us.
Check out this link for a whole slew of book lists to help you find your next read! If you’re a writer and are interested in learning more, please join me on Thursday, Feb. 26, at 6 p.m. at the Deer Park Branch for a workshop on Building Diverse Worlds.
Thank you!
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