#WARPED REALITY CTHULHU FULL#
Not his “disturbing notions.” Not his “peculiar thoughts.” Not his “racialisms.” His unabashed, full frontal, in-your-face racism. It’s always perplexing to watch the gymnastics of mental obfuscation that occur as fans of Lovecraft attempt to rationalize his racism. Lovecraft was just channeling his inner Mark Twain? He was isolated? His “notions” of race were “disturbing?” He really wasn’t trying to demean anyone? I guess this is what we mean by accidental racist. Seriously? That’s the argument we’re going with now? H.P. While acknowledging that Lovecraft had some “disturbing notions on race,” the post went on to state this was likely an unfortunate result of the author’s isolated upbringing. Feeling the need to explain after dropping the N-bomb, the post made it clear that quite likely Lovecraft was just using some politically incorrect colloquialism “of his times ,” and probably did not mean to demean anyone’s race. A few years back I was on a forum where someone was discussing Lovecraft’s story The Rats in the Walls, where one of the characters is a cat called “Nigger Man.” It so happens that Lovecraft owned a “beloved” feline by the same name. Yet many of Lovecraft’s modern-day fans seem unable, or perhaps unwilling, to deal with this ugly side of his life. Rather, these were expressions of his foremost thoughts, a key part of his personal beliefs, most notably his virulent xenophobia towards an increasingly diverse American society emerging outside of his Anglo-Saxon New England. This was no abstract part of Lovecraft’s creative process, where he was trying to imbue his work with some hint of realism. Lovecraft’s racial biases ran deep and strong, as evidenced by his stories–from exotic locales with tropic natives lacerating themselves before mad gods in acts of “negro fetishism” ( Call of Cthulhu), to descriptions of a black man as “gorilla-like” and one of the world’s “many ugly things” ( Herbert West-Reanimator). This was no one-off, some “misspeak” by the author. Okorafor had been unaware of the depths of Lovecraft’s “issues,” until a friend sent her his 1912 poem, On the Creation of Niggers, where blacks are fashioned by the gods as “a beast. I certainly thought so after the matter was thrust into the spotlight in December 2011, when author Nnedi Okorafor won the esteemed World Fantasy Award –whose statuette is none other than H.P. Arguing against such a thing should be absurd. Lovecraft, the celebrated author of horror and fantasy, was a settled matter–like declaring Wrath of Khan the best film in the Star Trek franchise. I had come to believe that by now the racism of H.P.
Lovecraft, On the Creation of Niggers (1912) H.P. Tåh’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.Ī beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,įilled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger. To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed In Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth. By Phenderson Djeli Clark Follow long ago, the gods created Earth
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