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what I wish people would understand about fundraising for gaza is that while everyone is desperate and I would never say not to fundraise for or donate to individual families-- I currently fundraise to support multiple friends' families-- the overwhelming narrative I see on Tumblr that the best and most ethical thing you can do is send money to individuals and there is no option for anything else is so so incredibly damaging and inadvertently lends support to the marginalization and distrust of any remaining communal social infrastructure. the sameer project, which you should donate to, talks about this in a recent video they put out. the situation in gaza is unimaginable and everyone is in need of a huge level of support, and yet this fundraising discourse by well-meaning people in the west that donating money to individuals is the only moral way reproduces societal divides wherein resources are directed to people who speak English, who have relationships with people outside of gaza, and who have internet access while hundreds of thousands are left behind.

there ARE non-ngo locally based grassroots initiatives working to meet those needs however they can, and your small donation goes a lot further with them because they are able to buy food/water/supplies in bulk at a reduced price and reach more people with less money. again I'm not saying people shouldn't fundraise for individuals because these initiatives are so limited and many people cannot access them -- but as an example, the group I fundraise with is currently serving people fleeing north gaza who are starving and have nothing, and when we fundraise enough to do cash aid distribution there's so much need that our partners can only distribute 100-200 per large family. and then I go online and see people who have absolutely no understanding of this context at all exclusively working towards raising tens of thousands for just a few people when evacuations haven't been possible for months. it's good to do whatever you can but please consider how this narrative being reproduced among westerners trying to help that there are no other options has the potential to damage groups working towards equity and wider reach however is still possible

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Activism is not cold-calling.

Activism is not cold-calling, and this is critically important to understand.

I'm seeing a lot of posts on here about 'building bridges' and 'finding community,' and then (extremely valid) response posts saying "BUT HOW??" And I'm going to explain something that can be very counter-intuitive: there is strategy involved in community.

As a longtime volunteer labour organizer, I’ve taken and taught many trainings on the strategy of talking. Something that surprises a lot of people is the very first thing you do in a union campaign. You sit down with your organizing committee, take out pen and paper, and literally map it out. You draw a physical map of the workplace: where are the entrances, exits, break rooms, supervisor offices. Essentially, ‘where is it safe to have a union conversation.’ Then you draw another physical chart of your coworkers. You sort out who is union-friendly, openly hostile to unions, or somewhere in the middle, and then you plan out very deliberately and carefully who talks to whom and in what order.

Consider: If Vocally Leftist Jane walks up to Conservative David and says "hey what do you think about unions," David is going to shut down immediately. He's not inclined to listen to Jane. But if Jane talks to Moderate Jason and brings him into the fold, then Jason is a far more effective strategic choice to talk to David, and David may actually hear him out without an instant reaction.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: If Conservative David turns out to be Alt-Right David, and could be dangerous to follow organizers, we write him off. We are not trying to reach Alt-Right David. We are trying to reach Conservative David, who may actually be persuaded to find solidarity with other employees as fellow workers. Jason is a safe scout to find out which one he is. It does no one any good if Leftist Jane (or even Moderate Jane who is a visible minority) talks to Alt-Right David and puts herself on his radar. Not only has she done nothing to convince Alt-Right David to join a union - she's probably actively turned him against the idea - but now she's also in danger and the entire campaign is at risk. NOBODY WANTS THIS. Jane was NOT a hero for doing this. The organizing committee was foolish and enacted a terrible strategy to everyone's detriment.

Where you can make a difference is with people who will listen to you. You having a conversation with your well-meaning but clueless Centrist Democrat Auntie, and maybe gently helping her understand some things the media has been glossing over, is way more strategically useful than you marching up to MAGA Neighbour You've Met Once and trying to "build community" or "understand" them. They don't care. They're impervious, dangerous, and cruel. But maybe your beloved auntie will think about what you said, and then talk to her friend Anna who IDs as "fiscally conservative" but didn't vote because she can't bring herself to get on board with Trump. Then perhaps Anna talks to her brother Nic who has MAGA leanings but isn't all the way there yet. Proto-MAGA Nic would not have listened to you, nor would he have listened to Centrist Democrat Auntie, but he might absorb some of what his sister is saying.

This is not a cop-out or an echo chamber. This is you spending your time and energy strategically and safely. You are not a useful activist to anyone if you’re dead. Anyone who is telling you to hurl yourself directly at MAGA assholes like cannon fodder has no understanding of the strategy behind community building, and you should feel comfortable writing them off.

Last point: If you are tired, emotionally devastated, and/or in danger: take a break. This post is for people who would feel better jumping into action, not for people who are too overwhelmed to even think about it right now. You are worth so much even if you’re not actively Doing Activism, and your rest is worth more than “a break period so you can recharge and Do More Activism.” We all deserve the individual dignity of being worthy of comfort, rest & safety just on the basis of being human, outside of whatever we're doing for others' benefit. To deny ourselves that dignity is to devalue ourselves, and that’s the absolute last thing any of us should be doing right now.

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every time I see someone from outside australia (or inside australia tbh) say “everything in australia wants to kill you lol” I want to scream. you are buying into colonial narratives! you are reinforcing the construction of the “aussie battler”! you are ignoring the way first nations people have lived with the land for centuries! you are participating in the homogenisation of australia in your belief that this is a land that needs to be tamed! shut up shut up shut up

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Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

April 20, 2024 Gary K. Wolfe

Generation starship stories tend to come in a few distinct flavors, with distinct character types. There are the refugees, trying to keep humanity alive while escaping a dying or overpopulated Earth (the sort of wishful fantasy that Kim Stanley Robinson set out to demolish in Aurora a few years ago). There are the colonizers, out to find and take over new planets just because that’s just what humans do, and there are the hopelessly confused who have forgotten they’re on a star­ship at all, whose history is lost or corrupted or mythologized, and who are inevitably in for a rude awakening as soon as someone finds a window. But perhaps the most interesting variety are those tales in which the characters are recognizable figures from our own institutions and history – not stylized enough to be allegories, but which can hold up a mirror in the way allegory does – except with real characters.

Rivers Solomon used the setting to effectively model racism and slavery in An Unkindness of Ghosts, and much of that rigid segregation is also reflected in Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain. But Samatar has far more on her mind than generation starships, and the novella has as much in common with a kind of narrative much rarer in SFF: the academic novel. In addition to presenting a brutally dehumanizing social struc­ture, Samatar’s characteristically gorgeous prose also carries the undertone of someone who has sat through plenty of frustrating committee meetings, tried to introduce change to an entrenched system, or grappled with issues of equity, opportunity, and intellectual freedom in the face of corporate interference and senior faculty sinecures – all presented with a sense of realpolitik that makes it surprisingly resonant with some very real current anxieties. In fact, the key words in her tripartite title can be all read as metaphors of the promises and challenges facing educators.

The initial point of view is that of a nameless boy who labors in the bowels of a giant starship, one of a fleet operated by the powerful United Min­ing corporation, which maintains a rigid separa­tion between ‘‘the Hold’’ and the elite ‘‘upstairs.’’ Despite the backbreaking work and appalling conditions – he’s even chained to the wall, like other workers – the boy develops a talent for draw­ing by using sharp objects and even his chain to make pictures on the walls of his cell. This draws the attention of a professor, who selects him for a chance to study at the University, much as her own father had been chosen. But she’s facing her own challenges in the University, where even the textbooks must be approved by the corporation, and which divides the curriculum into the Newer Knowledge and the Older Knowledge – which will look familiar to anyone who’s been near a university in the last several decades – and she reveals her own sympathies by noting that ‘‘My father taught the skills we need to survive in the vastness of space… I teach the skills we need to humanize space.’’ Shades of humanities depart­ment budget defenses (or is it just the former academic in me having flashbacks?).

If all this begins to sound a bit like a treatise, the vivid poetry of Samatar’s descriptions and the passion of her characters turns it into a moving human drama. The boy’s utter terror at being removed from his familiar surroundings, grim as they were, is palpable, and the professor’s sometimes testy interactions with her colleagues and a seemingly intractable system are all too credible. As they begin to form an unlikely al­liance, the boy shares what he has learned from the prophet, his longtime mentor in the Hold. The practice, he said, was ‘‘the longing for un­derstanding’’, and the horizon was a feature on ancient Earth which invited you ‘‘to look neither up nor down.’’ As these ideas begin to inform the professor’s central question about her profession – ‘‘Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?’’ – the two of them set in motion what might be the beginning of revolu­tionary change, or might backfire entirely. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain takes on a number of heavy issues for a relatively modest novella, but never loses focus on the dreams of its two memorable central characters, or on the power of its distinctive setting.

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vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

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know your history.

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what a week huh?

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About the entanglement of "science" and Empire. About geographic imaginaries. About how Empire appeals to and encourages children to participate in these scripts.

Was checking out this recent thing, from scavengedluxury's beloved series of posts looking at the archive of the Budapest Municipal Photography Company.

The caption reads: "Toys and board games, 1940."

And I think the text on the game-box in the back says something like "the whole world is yours", maybe?

(The use of appeals to science/progress in imperial narratives probably already well-known to many, especially for those familiar with Victorian era, Edwardian era, Gilded Age, early twentieth century, etc., in US and Europe.)

And was struck, because I had also recently gone looking through nemfrog's posts about the often-strange imagery of children's material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US/Europe. And was disturbed/intrigued by this thing:

Caption here reads: "Game Board. Walter Mittelholzer's flight over Africa. [...] 1931. Commemorative game board map of Africa for a promotional game published for the N*stle Company, for tracking the trip of Walter Mittelholzer across Africa, the first pilot to fly a north-south route."

Hmm.

"Africa is for your consumption and pleasure! A special game celebrating German achievement, brought to you by the N*stle Company!"

1930s-era German national aspirations in Africa. A company which, in the preceding decade, had shifted focus to expand its cacao production (which would be dependent on tropical plantations). Adventure, excitement, knowledge, science, engineering prowess, etc. For kids!

Another, from a couple decades earlier, this time British.

Caption reads: "The "World's globe circler." A game board based on Nellie Bly's travels. 1890." At center, a trumpet, and a proclamation: "ALL RECORDS BROKEN".

Same year that the United States "closed the frontier" and conquered "the Wild West" (the massacre at Wounded Knee happened in December 1890). A couple years later, the US annexed Hawai'i; by decade's end, the US military was in both Cuba and the Philippines. The Scramble for Africa was taking place. At the time, Britain especially already had a culture of "travel writing" or "travel fiction" or whatever we want to call it, wherein domestic residents of the metropole back home could read about travel, tourism, expeditions, adventures, etc. on the peripheries of the Empire. Concurrent with the advent of popular novels, magazines, mass-market print media, etc. Intrepid explorers rescuing Indigenous peoples from their own backwardness. Many tales of exotic allure set in South Asia. Heroic white hunters taking down scary tigers. Elegant Englishwomen sipping tea in the shade of an umbrella, giggling at the elephants, the local customs, the strange sights. Orientalism, tropicality, othering.

I'd lately been looking at a lot of work on race/racism and imperative-of-empire in British scientific and pop-sci literature, especially involving South and Southeast Asia. (From scholars like Varun Sharma, Rohan Deb Roy, Ezra Rashkow, Jonathan Saha, Pratik Chakrabarti.) But I'd also lately been looking at Mashid Mayar's work, which I think closely suits this kinda thing with the board games. Some of her publications:

"From Tools to Toys: American Dissected Maps and Geographic Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century". In: Knowledge Landscapes North America, edited by Kloeckner et al., 2016.

"What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy". European Journal of American Studies 16, number 3, Summer 2020.

Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, 2022.

Discussing her book, Mayar was interviewed by LA Review of Books in 2022. She says:

[Quote.] Growing up at the turn of the 20th century, for many American children, also meant learning to view the world through the lens of "home geography." [...] [T]hey inevitably responded to the transnational whims of an empire that had stretched its dominion across the globe [recent forays into Panama, Cuba, Hawai'i, the Philippines] [...]. [W]hite, well-to-do, literate American children [...] learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. [...] [T]he cognitive maps children developed, to which we have access through the scant archival records they left behind (i.e., geographical puzzles they designed and printed in juvenile periodicals) [...] mixed nativism and the logic of colonization with playful, appropriative scalar confusion, and an intimate, often unquestioned sense of belonging to the global expanse of an empire [...]. Dissected maps - that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together - are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy [...] found its place outside formal education, in children's lives outside the classroom. [...] [W]ell before having been adopted as playthings in the United States, dissected maps had been designed to entertain and teach the children of King George III about the global spatial affairs of the British Empire. […] [J]uvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles [...]. [I]t was their assumption that "(un)charted," non-American spaces (both inside and outside the national borders) sought legibility as potential homes, [...] and that, if they did not do so, they were bound to recede into ruin/"savagery," meaning that it would become the colonizers' responsibility/burden to "restore" them [...]. [E]mpires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations [...]. [These] "multigenerational power constellations" [...] survived, by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed [...]. [End quote.] Source: Words of Mashid Mayar, as transcribed in an interviewed conducted and published by M. Buna. "Children's Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mashid Mayar". LA Review of Books. 11 July 2022.

Some other stuff I was recently looking at, specifically about European (especially German) geographic imaginaries of globe-as-playground:

The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (Patricia Anne Simpson, 2020) /// "19th-Century Board Game Offers a Tour of the German Colonies" (Sarah Zabrodski, 2016) /// Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (David Ciarlo, 2011) /// Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Erik Grimmer-Solem, 2019) /// “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath” (Andrew Zimmerman. In: German Colonialism in a Global Age, 2014) /// "Exotic Education: Writing Empire for German Boys and Girls, 1884-1914". (Jeffrey Bowersox. In: German Colonialism and National Identity, 2017) /// Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Jeff Bowersox, 2013) /// "[Translation:] (Educating Modernism: A Trade-Specific Portrait of the German Toy Industry in the Developing Mass-Market Society)" (Heike Hoffmann, PhD dissertation, Tubingen, 2000) /// Home and Harem: Nature, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Inderpal Grewal, 1996) /// "'Le rix d'Indochine' at the French Table: Representation of Food, Race and the Vietnamese in a Colonial-Era Board Game" (Elizabeth Collins, 2021) /// "The Beast in a Box: Playing with Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Romita Ray, 2006) /// Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, 2023)

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i was talking about the most recent racism against palestinians on tumblr but you'll repeatedly notice that these people genuinely interpret the world through a terminal case of anonymised people global south. i'm certainly not a standpoint epistemologist or anything but you'll never see these bloggers even cite the palestinian activists, intellectuals and journalists that are recognised in the west at this point – not edward said or mahmoud darwish, not steven salaita or rashid khalidi, not mohammed el kurd not emmy winning journalists on the ground like bisan al-owda. and the effect of that is to make it easy to intellectually dismiss any palestinian you see, because they are not real in your mental landscape, not agents of history, history is merely done to them.

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Link to the article I mentioned if anyone is interested. Also link to one of Robin Bernstein's articles about how books as physical objects script certain behaviours because I think it's a very good article. (It's paywalled but I'm happy to pass a PDF in a DM.)

so. i understand where the sentiment "listening to an audiobook is the same thing as reading the book" is coming from - i mean, yes, the bottom line is you are taking in the same words in what is possibly a more accessible (or maybe just more enjoyable) format for you! and i'm 100% in agreement that "book snobs" who say "no you didn't really read it" if you listened to the audiobook are full of shit. ofc you should engage with stories in whatever way works for you, there is no moral or intellectual superiority to reading words off a page vs. listening to them

but it also is different? an audiobook is a performance. choices a narrator makes about line readings can drastically influence the meaning of the lines. even just different voices, accents, etc. - there are creative choices being made by the person delivering the words to you, and that affects your experience of the story in a different way than if you were making those choices in your own head. it might even change the way you visualize what's going on!

this isn't a bad thing it's just An Actual Thing & i think it's worth talking about. it rubs me the wrong way when people act like accommodations (and for many people audiobooks are an accommodation) always result in a completely identical experience, or even that they should, & if you suggest that people accessing media in different ways are having different experiences it's somehow ableist

anyway on rare occasions i really enjoy audiobooks but mostly they are much less accessible to me than words on a page (i need to be able to reread, flip back and forth, go at my own pace) & i also just really strongly prefer to encounter a text on my own before hearing someone else's performance of it, if possible! again i don't think it's "better" to read a physical book i just think it is a Distinct form of experiencing a story & acting like the two things are entirely the same is sort of doing a disservice to both

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I agree that different mediums encourage (or, to use Robin Bernstein's framing, "script") different kinds of interactions with a text--and I think there's lots of interesting ideas to draw out of audiobooks as "sanctioned" interpretations or performances of a text, compared to, say, an oral tradition where stories are told aloud but there are many different versions and interpretations rather than a single authoritative one. (This is especially interesting in the context of production pressures that may mean an audiobook narrator isn't familiar with the minute details of a text--although I read an interesting article about how audiobook producers try and match not just a narrator's voice but their mind and interpretive practice to a text that they're reading. Tumblr gets weird with links for me, but I'll put it in a separate reblog.)

One thing that sometimes causes a sticking point in these discussions, I think, is the assumption that the written version of a text is neutral or unmarked, while the audiobook is marked, a version with an "extra" layer of interpretation. Even people who say they're not layering a value judgment onto the question of written vs audio version will often assume that audiobook readers are engaging with almost a non-canonical version of the text, an interpretation by an actor rather than "the original". (And then this can develop into value judgments and snobbery--with the further assumption that the original is *better*, a purer way of engaging with the text, a method that requires more "effort" and is therefore more beneficial, etc.) (To be clear, I'm not implying that you're doing this, OP! Just thinking about a pattern I've seen in some of these discussions.)

I think one of the more interesting questions that the rising prominence of audiobooks can raise is whether we can and should consider the written text to be the original, the neutral or unmarked method of engaging with a story. Because the reader of a written text is not encountering the platonic form of that story in a vacuum either; they're not having a "pure" encounter between self and text divorced from any external influence. Written text absolutely has features that script how a reader should interact with it--the cover; the font (eg how big it is, how "fancy" it is); the physical presentation of the book (eg whether it's paperback or hardback; whether it has, like, spayed edges or deckle edges); paragraph breaks and the way the text is set out on the page (eg whether there are lots of single lines set off by themselves); punctuation.

I don't really have fully developed thoughts on this, but I think it goes to a shifting understanding in literary studies of a text not being a single, authoritative, settled channel of communication, but the centre of a network of different interpretive practices and forms of engagement. Different mediums rising and falling in prominence is part of a whole suite of ideas about a book's paratexts and their effects on interpretation, about the way genre is cued, about how dominant readings become accepted and other readings become marginalised, about different groups of readers contesting the use of a text.

so. i understand where the sentiment "listening to an audiobook is the same thing as reading the book" is coming from - i mean, yes, the bottom line is you are taking in the same words in what is possibly a more accessible (or maybe just more enjoyable) format for you! and i'm 100% in agreement that "book snobs" who say "no you didn't really read it" if you listened to the audiobook are full of shit. ofc you should engage with stories in whatever way works for you, there is no moral or intellectual superiority to reading words off a page vs. listening to them

but it also is different? an audiobook is a performance. choices a narrator makes about line readings can drastically influence the meaning of the lines. even just different voices, accents, etc. - there are creative choices being made by the person delivering the words to you, and that affects your experience of the story in a different way than if you were making those choices in your own head. it might even change the way you visualize what's going on!

this isn't a bad thing it's just An Actual Thing & i think it's worth talking about. it rubs me the wrong way when people act like accommodations (and for many people audiobooks are an accommodation) always result in a completely identical experience, or even that they should, & if you suggest that people accessing media in different ways are having different experiences it's somehow ableist

anyway on rare occasions i really enjoy audiobooks but mostly they are much less accessible to me than words on a page (i need to be able to reread, flip back and forth, go at my own pace) & i also just really strongly prefer to encounter a text on my own before hearing someone else's performance of it, if possible! again i don't think it's "better" to read a physical book i just think it is a Distinct form of experiencing a story & acting like the two things are entirely the same is sort of doing a disservice to both

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(Sofia Samatar)

Academics of color experience an enervating visibility, but it’s not simply that we’re part of a very small minority. We are also a desired minority, at least for appearance’s sake. University life demands that academics of color commodify themselves as symbols of diversity—in fact, as diversity itself, since diversity, in this context, is located entirely in the realm of the symbolic. There’s a wound in the rupture between the diversity manifested in the body of the professor of color and the realities affecting that person’s community or communities. I, for example, am a black professor in the era of mass incarceration of black people through the War on Drugs; I am a Somali American professor in the era of surveillance and drone strikes perpetuated through the War on Terror. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander taps into that wound: “Highly visible examples of black success are critical to the maintenance of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness.” It’s not that we’re too few, nor is it that we suffer survivor guilt for having escaped the fate of so many in our communities. It’s that our visibility is consumed in a way that legitimizes the structures of exclusion. Skin feeling: to be encountered as a surface. This has everything to do with reading. As a graduate student in a seminar on world literature, I remember arguing that no one who took representation as a goal could ever come up with an adequate model for creating anthologies. The classics of Western literature are admitted to these anthologies based on their perceived artistic or philosophical merit; meanwhile works from Kenya, from India, from Jordan, from Vietnam, will be admitted to make the anthology “representative.” David Damrosch discusses these different logics: works of world literature may be chosen for stature and influence, he writes, or as “windows on the world.” I hate this. Homer is our epic artist, Dickens our realist artist, Ngũgĩ our Kenyan—or worse, our African—artist. The other students and the professor argue that we ought to concentrate on representation “for now,” as anthologies of world literature are still so often skewed toward white male authors. I refuse to be satisfied with this. Although I can’t articulate it at the time, I’m beginning to sense the mechanics of visibility. The one who makes it into the anthology stands for all the others, rendering them unnecessary, redundant. The chosen work is a “window on the world,” transparent, impermeable, a barrier masquerading as a door. CAN YOU SEE ME?

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Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man is a roller coaster of a book. it’s set in the island country of Chynchin, modeled after the anglophone Caribbean, where a successful slave uprising two hundred years ago used magic to defeat the enslaving power, Ymisen, and has lived a seemingly-charmed ever existence since. now, however, Ymisen is back, seeking to reassert its hegemony over the island.

against this backdrop, the novel follows a man named Veycosi, a student at the “Colloquium of Fellows”. Veycosi is engaged — to a woman and another man, the standard arrangement in Chynchin — and determined to prove to his betrothed that he is capable of following through on a task. unfortunately, he kind of isn’t, and the novel’s narrative emerges from Veycosi’s experiments, failures, irresponsibility, and generally ill-conceived schemes as he attempts to navigate Chynchin’s precarious political situation.

but strange things are afoot: an army has been excavated from the island’s piche/pitch, and they may be moving. pickens/children are disappearing and reappearing in an unshakable trance. the oral narratives Veycosi is tasked with collecting contradict each other — and observable facts about the island. and bad luck seems to be following his every move.

the narrative itself feels strangely scattered, I think intentionally so, mirroring Veycosi’s self-absorbed disconnect from his surroundings and the surreality-unreality of Chynchin as it hurtles towards a collision with the real world. the bulk of the narration is a close third-person view through Veycosi, but this is interspersed with excerpts from the oral narratives he’s collecting, divine interludes, an Ymisen spy, the piche army’s leader, and occasionally others.

in a very different way from Le Guin’s The Beginning Place, this might be called an “anti-fantasy”, in that its climax is a demystification as Chynchin emerges from the gap in history it entered two hundred years before. much of the novel is, indeed, concerned with the distance between the stories Chynchin tells itself and the realities of its society, with its own forms of oppressive hierarchy and its continued reliance on race as an organizing principle. conversely, I was glad to see Hopkinson acknowledge the continued presence of Indigenous people in the Caribbean — Chynchin is a mixed society with a shared, common culture, but which still retains a sense of the diverse cultures that created it, including the Indigenous Cibonn’. (I’m comparing it for example to the complete folding of Indigeneity into Blackness in Kacen Callender’s Islands of Blood and Storm.)

in this respect, I think one might look at the novel as an exploration of the hopes and realities of postcolonial states in the Caribbean. if I was skeptical of Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky as “Indigenous epic fantasy” as such, I think Blackheart Man is much more successful at creating a narrative that feels grounded in Caribbean histories and cultures, rather than simply offering an aesthetic that takes up signifiers of Caribbeanness.

it’s also, though, a book about a person: Veycosi. he’s a lovable, bisexual rascal (there is very much an explicit gay sex scene, and it is the only sex scene in the book!), and also he is desperate for the attention he feels he deserves. this leads him to make mistakes, to hurt people, to destroy things and places he cares about. this aspect of the novel asks, how do we come to terms with our flaws and our capacity to cause harm in spite of our best intentions? what do we do when our best intentions aren’t good enough? this aspect of the novel was one of the things that brought to mind Laurie Marks’s Elemental Logic series, which is also very much about whether and how it is possible to make reparations. I don’t know that Hopkinson intended to invite that particular comparison, but certainly there are other aspects of the novel that I think point intentionally to “classics” of the fantasy genre — Le Guin in particular, but also McKillip.

the narration makes extensive use of anglo-Caribbean creole words, though grammatically it is in mostly standard English. the dialogue, however, is like the much more heavily creole-marked narration of Midnight Robber, except for the Mirmeki — clearly modeled on the Polish Haitians — who speak an archaized English. it’s not quite as infectious as Midnight Robber, which I found invited me to read it aloud, but it’s stylistically engaging nonetheless.

I have two main hesitations, both of which are mainly about the very end of the book (spoilers follow).

at the end of the book, a child previously identified as a girl is revealed to be a) intersex and b) undergoing “male” puberty, and so transitions to male. hopefully obviously, I don’t object to this in principle, and I don’t think it was bad here, as such, but I do think it was clunkily handled, particularly the intersex aspect. there’s some other Gender Stuff going on in the way the third gender — which seems to also exist in Ymisen, unexpectedly — is handled that made me go. hmmmm. in light of some recent writing on third-gendering as a core mechanism of transmisogyny. I think that Hopkinson mainly intended it to be genuinely a third gender, but also there’s a passing reference to, for example, the fact that only women and members of the third gender can be ship captains, which...

in this respect, then, I don’t think it was as thoroughgoingly successful as it meant to be, though I would still definitely recommend it.

secondarily, the very end of the book: Veycosi, now disgraced and missing part of a leg, takes up the mantle of community trickster that his would-have-been stepchild was meant to bear (but never wanted to). I don’t hate this in and of itself, but the way it was narrated felt strangely childish — the book ends, for example, with an exclamation point, in a way that just felt like it had suddenly swerved into being a children’s book. very odd and honestly a bit jarring.

nevertheless, despite these flaws, I think it’s a really good book and very much worth a read. I would love to see Hopkinson return to this setting in the future — certainly the end of the book seems open to a sequel tracing the changes in this new Chynchin. hopefully we’ll get to see it someday.

moods: adventurous, hopeful, mysterious

[adirectorprepares]

“Maybe I shouldn’t push my luck,” he said. “I wish you wouldn’t,” Costis said faintly. “Your god might be offended.” ― Megan Whalen Turner, The King of Attolia

I had this scene kicking around in my head for a while so glad to finally have an excuse to get it out!!