Stand on the Sky, by Erin Bow

[sophia_sol]

Set in the modern-day amongst the Kazakh people who live in Mongolia, this is a middle-grade novel about a preteen girl named Aisulu who becomes an eagle hunter.

A beautifully written book with a lot of heart. I particularly loved the themes of being chosen as family, and what you will do for the people you love, and being accepted for who you are. The relationship between Aisulu and her brother, and Aisulu and her uncle and aunt, are particularly wonderful.

It's also the sort of book where questions of whether or not something is appropriation come up, as this is a book written by a white person about a culture not her own. It seems to me that Erin Bow did her due diligence, between her research, her summer living with a Kazakh family in Mongolia, and her multiple Kazakh sensitivity readers. But when I googled for other opinions, I found that the review in Kirkus at least dismisses the book as pure appropriation, based on the fact that the book presents Aisulu's community as being biased against girls being eagle hunters.

Which meant that then I felt I needed to do a bunch more research.

But the only resources I can find online discussing the subject in English are written by non-Kazakhs as well. I did manage to find brief quotes from two real life modern female Kazakh eagle hunters, Makpal Abdrazakova and Aisholpan Nurgaiv. Makpal said that she largely experienced encouragement in her desire to be an eagle hunter, and Aisholpan said that at first she faced opposition because of her gender but then was accepted. (Note that the movie about Aisholpan apparently makes exaggerated statements about the uniqueness of Aisholpan's being an eagle hunter, and the degree of opposition she faced, so I'm only drawing on what Aisholpan herself has said in interviews.)

So it seems from what little evidence I can find that the experiences Aisulu has in this book are plausible, as she finds opposition but also support from various people.

I am not Kazakh so I don't get the final say on whether this book is appropriation or not. But Erin Bow got a lot of direct Kazakh input into her book, so I think I'll trust to those people's input over that of an anonymous Kirkus reviewer.

And this truly is an excellently written book, definitely worth the read.

Comments

[carmarthen]

Hummmmm the Kirkus Review is unsigned and brief, so I'd like to know more about the perspective and reasoning. I think there are a couple tendencies that make me suspicious: 1) the tendency to assume that members of non-Western and/or nonindustrialized cultures have less variation in cultural beliefs and interpretations than Western/industrialized people, which is...kind of a prejudice in itself, like this idea that there must be A Kazakh Opinion on girls hunting with eagles, rather than a plethora of Kazakh opinions.* 2) The assumption that if a book deals with a negative (by modern Western liberal standards) aspect of a nonwestern culture that it is therefore biased or appropriative. One, writing about negative things is not the definition of cultural appropriation! Two, all cultures DO have negative aspects, and sure, outsiders have to be careful writing about them, but they also have to be careful about glamorizing cultures as "exotic" and flawless and full of Noble Savages and so on, so it's basically the same Do Your Research issue as anything else.**

*I was looking through a study of what Arctic people thought about walruses recently for some story research and both spiritually and practically/ecologically, the people interviewed - from the same villages, even the same families - had a lot of different perceptions of walruses. Which shouldn't be surprising! If you interview a bunch of white Americans from a town near Yellowstone about wolves, they're going to have wildly varying different opinions on the topic. But the quest for authenticity and accurate representation can lead to flattening of diverse opinions within a culture into one viewpoint (usually that of older straight men in that culture). This is even something own-voices writers get from within their communities, and it's unfair then, too - no single writer will ever represent an entire culture, and it's fucked up that anyone expects that of writers from underrepresented groups.

**I've been reading a lesbian romance novel that's fairly autobiographical, Can't Think Straight, about a Muslim British Indian woman and a Christian-turned-atheist Jordanian from a wealthy family, and there is SO MUCH criticism of patriarchy in Jordan in particular, and of anti-Semitic attitudes, and a bunch of other things, and as I'm reading I'm thinking "a white author would get absolutely strung up for some of this this."

It's heavily, heavily based on how the author met her wife. And while she's writing about her own experience from one perspective, I'm guessing the frustration with Jordanian men and anti-Semitism among some Christian communities in the Middle East came secondhand from her wife. It's less the author's culture than the UK is. It's not the most smoothly written book - it's very first novel-y - but it tackles a lot for a romance novel, in a lot more detail than the movie based on it (also directed by the author, Shamim Sarif), which itself had a fair number of criticisms of the cultures involved and their effects on women in particular (although, oddly, it's the fathers who react less harshly to their daughters coming out - it'll be interesting to see if the book goes into that more, as the Indian mum is definitely more sympathetic from inside her incredibly anxious head than onscreen from the outside).

And I'm fully prepared to accept that a white author is not going to be able to write a book like this and probably shouldn't try...but I don't think the answer should be to carefully only write positive fluff. Especially when it comes to patriarchy, which permeates the vast majority of cultures in different ways - I'm very suspicious of usually-white liberals who seem to think people of color are magically immune to patriarchy and misogyny. It just manifests in different ways in different cultures! The fact that they apparently don't see it suggests to me that they haven't really talked to many women outside their own culture.

[sophia_sol]

I keep on wanting to make an equally thoughtful response to your thoughtful comment and failing so here's the best I can do right now I guess: I appreciate the things you say here!

[carmarthen]

I've been thinking about this stuff a lot lately! I mean, the macro answer is probably more own-voices books, so there are more viewpoints out there, more dialogue between them, and shitty books can become just shitty books like they are for books about white Westerners. But on a micro level as a writer...I don't know.

[sophia_sol]

Yes, that was absolutely one of my unformed thoughts I was have trouble wording! It's like any problem with representation, where is your have just one character/book/show/thing to represent something, it must stand for all, but if you have enough then there's more room for true variation. Lots of ownvoices books about all kinds of different marginalised populations!!