The most famous black sf/fantasy writers, Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, are both on the high art end of the genre, leaning towards literary fiction, feminist utopia, and high art bona fides. Their peers are people like Joanna Russ, Urusla Le Guin, and Philip K. Dick, rather than, say, the solidly middle-brow Neil Gaiman or page turning sci-fi young adult fare like the Hunger Games.
N.K. Jemisin’s novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is more in the Gaiman/Hunger Games camp; there is plot, there is a heroine, there is little in the way of complicated semiotic play, body horror, or high concept. To the extent that there is genre drift, it’s not towards literary fiction, but towards romance. You don’t have to squint much to see that, Nahodeth, the Night Lord, the most powerful being in the universe, is a dead ringer for Edward, and Christian Grey, and all those other wounded, violent, seductive super-patriarchs who hold out the promise of apocalyptically violent, yet mystically safe, romps/relationships. There’s even a bed-breaking scene a la the one in the last volume of Twilight (Jemisin might even have been directly inspired by Twilight; the timing seems about right.)
This isn’t to denigrate Jemisin’s book; I like Twilight quite well, as regular readers know, and while this isn’t as weird as Meyer’s book, its substantally better prose makes up for that to a good degree. The bed-breaking scene is cute, and in general the novel does what it sets out to do—which is to say, it bounces along at a readable clip, providing an enjoyably imagined world and a suitably fleshed out and determined heroine.
The novel is also concerned, in various ways with race. As we’ve mentioned a time or two on the blog, race in some genres, like superheroes, can be an extremely thorny issue to navigate.Even black creators often have a very difficult time incorporating black heroes in a meaningful way into superhero comics, as James Lamb has argued. Category fantasy has been perhaps even more overwhelmingly white in terms of creators and protagonists than the superhero genre has been. Given that history, and given Jemisin’s determination to write a category fantasy, rather than (like Butler or Delany) a meditation and subversion of the genre, you might expect some strain. Black superheroes are a mess; why should black fantasy heroes be any different?
But, at least in Jemisin’s handling, they are. Fantasy allows you of course to build entirely new worlds and cosmologies, and Jemisin uses that freedom to create an a reality in which race functions differently than, but with meaningful parallels to, our globe. Yeine Darr, the heroine, is from a backwater; she’s the child of the heir to the throne who gave up her legacy to marry a barbarian. Since she’s from the periphery, and because of her mother’s betrayal, Yeine is stigmatized. She’s also black—and while being black doesn’t function exactly the way it does in the modern U.S., it is still part of why she’s marginalized among the ruling Arameri, who are pale-skinned. Without much fuss, then, Jemisin manages to do what has so often eluded X-Men writers; she metaphorically references a history of anti-blackness without whitewashing it.
So what about fantasy’s white supremacist take on good and evil. Creators like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis linked virtue to a white British identity, casting the enemy as dark-skinned and/or, in Lewis’ case, as Muslim in all but name. Defenders of order and light fight the chaos of the dark; that’s how fantasy works — much like, not coincidentally, superhero stories.
Superhero stories have an awful lot of trouble switching around that law and order logic. But Jemisin inverts it almost casually. In her world, the evil is the white god of order, Itempas, who has enslaved his dark sibling, Nahadoth, god of chaos, and therefore of creation. The link between whiteness and enslavers is certainly not accidental. Nor is Yeine’s rumination, upon witnessing a particularly painful piece of hypocrisy:
This was the sort of thing that made people hate the Arameri—truly hate them, not just resent their power or their willingness to use it. They found so many ways to lie about the things they did. It mocked the suffering of their victims.
That’s pretty obviously a quote not just about bone-white Arameri self-delusions, but about Anglo-white American-European self-delusions. And again, those self-delusions are not necessarily the same, but are parallel enough to resonate—and not to themselves mock the suffering of victims by, for example, making a fantasy in which the bone-white ones are the main victims of slavery.
Again, Jemisin makes this all seem easy; why not have a black protagonist? Why not have a fantasy world very different from ours in which black historical experience, rather than white supremacist fantasy, remains recognizable? Part of the deftness is certainly due to Jemisin’s skill. But I think the fantasy genre itself deserves at least a bit of the credit. Imagining another world gives you more flexibility in dealing with race than the demand to imagine heroes operating in a world similar to ours, which they are not allowed to change.
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Update: I actually talked to N.K. Jemisin for a separate interview, and she very kindly and gently told me I had misidentified the races here. The sun God is black; the god of darkness is white, and Yeine is half white and half Incan, or something close to Incan.
It doesn’t really change the thesis here very much I don’t think, but interesting for the way reader responses or visualizations can differ. Especially since a number of people who have read the books talked to me about this piece, but nobody else seems to have caught the errors either.
Yes, 100K Kingdoms is wonderful in this regard. And note also how the book differs from the commercially driven constraints on superhero universes: the plot is very much about change, about making sure that the future is not the same as the past–Yeine isn’t about to set up a brief, minor key resurgence of an ancient Golden Age at novel’s end. Instead, she’s going to upset the entire apple cart and risk a lot of horrible results in the interests of freeing up both the Arameri and their “darkling” subalterns to change history. (One of my students read the novel as Afrofuturist, and I think this is an accurate assessment: there’s something very skiffy in Yeine’s openness to the future.)
(One of my responses to James’s work is that it’s not super heroics per se that mitigates against believable black heroes but the commercial strictures that enforce the serial ‘World Outside Your Window’ standard of most superhero settings: I suspect you could tell a quite interesting black superhero story if you were willing to let the characters actually change the setting for good instead of just perpetuating the illusion of change.)
Personally I would want to look more to Rochester and Darcy for Nahadoth’s literary forebears than Edward and Christian Gray–the God of Night clearly has a much older pedigree than these latest, whitest pretenders to the title of “Brooding Dark Byronic Love Interest.”
Yes; good point. I was trying to suggest this at the end. Fantasy allows for real, revolutionary change, and Jemisin seems fairly realisitic about what this means in terms of the potential for great harm/evil/pain as a possibly necessary corollary to moving to a more just society.
As you say, superheroes aren’t allowed to transform the world—which means that the genre almost has to downplay institutional injustices, because if it acknowledges them the superpowered heroes would have to change the world, thus making the story no longer a superhero story.
Watchmen’s arguably an exception in some ways, and I’m sure there are others, but it’s definitely a problem for the genre overall.
It’s also worth noting at the ease with which Charles Saunders and many other writers of color have repurposed good ole racist Sword and Sorcery action into Sword and Soul.
Tolkien is well aware of the future in LOTR, something his more simplistic critics miss: he knows that Aragorn’s rule is going to be ultimately a grace note in an ongoing decline, an ongoing diminution and disenchantment of the world. But I think a great many of his literary followers have ended up keeping the Return of the King / Restoration structure while overlooking the horribly pessimistic Christianity beneath it.
Whereas Jemisin takes the future-oriented route–something the subsequent books in the series develop in greater detail, skipping ahead in sizable chunks of chronology to see how Yeine’s actions have indeed modified history.
This is interesting.
In retrospect, it’s an obvious process. Tolkien is about a superior world – specifically, early medieval England – degenerating into his own world (Beowulf to John Buchan). So all you have to do is delete Tolkien’s attachment to said early medieval England, and instead you can have a story about a superior world – more non-hierarchical racially diverse, more feminist, or whatever you want – toward which our own world is ascending (or has already, recently, ascended).
It’s particularly easy, because Tolkien and post-modern liberalism have the same enemy – modernism, of course – Tolkien acknowledging its victory, post-modernism celebrating its defeat. (Industrialism versus magic; the “white god of order” versus chaos.)
Have you read Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Graham? Interesting book; argues genius of sci fi is dialectical relationship between real and possible worlds.
I haven’t. Thank you for the recommendation!
I really thought this was going to go the other way.
There’s plenty of African History and African Folklore/Mythology to create a Game of Thrones set in Central/Western/Eastern/SubSaharan Africa or Caribbean/South America, and gasp North America.
The homey Ken Liu just dropped a bomb that retells the 3 Kingdoms (founding of the Haan Dynasty) using “silk punk”. There’s really nothing stopping any author of African/Af-Am descent to create a “Yam and Plantains”-Punk, resplendent with noble heroes, treacherous villains, and morally grey anti-heroes just trying to drink another cup of palm wine in peace.
Indeed, the great thing about Ken Liu and comrade Saladin Ahmed is that they can create worlds that are unique to themselves, and don’t need whiteness/colonialism as a touch stone.
You can draw from the Middle East without talking about Israel or Lawrence of Arabia. You can draw from the East, without talking about the Opium Wars or China’s coming economic and cultural hegemony.
There is blackness without having to reference whiteness. It’s most evident in Black America music, as it is in Caribbean and African musics.
I’m not sure why it has to be any different in fantasy, science fiction, or comic books.
Indeed, there are plenty of Black Americans, Caribbeans, Africans, and others of the Diaspora that live entirely within the context of their own community.
“There is blackness without having to reference whiteness. It’s most evident in Black America music”
I really don’t think this is true. Black music in America is an amazing achievement (or multiple achievements, really.) But to suggest it doesn’t reference and engage with a history of oppression? Or that it’s somehow disconnected from white sources? I really don’t think that’s true.
And again I don’t think it’s true that there are Black Americans who live entirely in the context of their own communities, whatever that would mean. Segregation is certainly a force…but even segregation is of course the result of a context of white supremacy.
Black and white people are in the world together, for better or worse.
> “…retells the 3 Kingdoms (founding of the Han Dynasty)”
Just to clarify – I don’t know what Liu’s The Grace of Kings is about but the Three Kingdoms era is set, at least initially, during the fall of the Han Dynasty. The myths surrounding the characters developed over several centuries with its most popular written form only emerging 1000 years after the fact.
A first-rate African fantasy novel is The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Amos Tutuola’s 1952 book. It contains no White people at all.
I’m prompted to think of Lloyd Alexander, who basically rewrote his Chronicles of Prydain five million times, but sometimes with a non-Western setting and cast (Iranian in The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha, Chinese in The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen, Indian in The Iron Ring – though I don’t think he ever got around to Africa).
But of course it’s one thing for a genre to be able to take a non-white perspective, with no white people present, and another for a genre to be able to show a conflict between white and non-white and take the latter point of view.
Lewis’s treatment of the Calormenes is a little more nuanced than you give him credit for. We see several virtuous Calormenes and one of them is a protagonist (in The Horse and his Boy).