Threedom! (#7) M L Clark's Monthly Miscellanies
THREEDOM! (#7) M L Clark’s Monthly Miscellanies
Preamble
There might be some new eyes on this newsletter simply to read my commentary on essays from a new collection, Bridging Worlds: Global Conversations on Creating Pan-African Speculative Literature in a Pandemic. Welcome, folks. I jump between different topics throughout my newsletters, but it’s super-easy to skip to the sections that will interest you most. I use a little code next to each item in the Table of Contents, so simply hot-key search E1, E2, and E3 to get to the good stuff.
In general, I should note that this newsletter was shaped by thoughts pertaining to the stories we elevate, and the stories we don’t. Obviously, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is on our minds, but I resonate with a great many marginalized people who have been heartbroken, if not driven to fury, by the blatant differences in media response to this crisis and many other war-zones come before. When mainstream Western media “says the quiet part loudly” by expressing shock that a land war could have happened in a “civilized” country, or to blond, blue-eyed people; and when it shows the world how easily borders can come down, and visa requirements can be waived, to help people in need… well, I want everyone who lives with legal security and ease-of-mobility to take a moment to imagine the added message being conveyed:
Namely, that some trauma matters. Some people’s trauma is worthier than others. And some displaced people aren’t seen as vermin whose presence in another country will only tip the balance, destabilize its social systems, and otherwise ruin the view.
A lot of my work as a global humanist at OnlySky is about pushing for a more inclusive way of looking at the world. I’ve written on oil imperialism, a crisis in Nigeria, and the humanitarian nightmare in Palestine, and I’m hoping that pieces on illegal mining in Venezuela and civil conflict in Tigray will be accepted for features soon. And I’m going to keep using that forum to talk about critical current events in that way.
But here? Here’s where I get to blend more of my creative-writing life into my humanism. In another newsletter, I talked about The Wrong End of the Telescope, Rabih Alameddine’s excellent exploration of many different subject positions that intersect around migration crises. What I especially loved about that novel, though, was how it addressed the tension between The Person Who Lives Through Something and The Person Who Writes About It. Because there is almost always a divide between the two when we tell stories about the world; and how we reckon with the obligations of that divide says a lot about who we are as writers.
For me, I am firmly of the belief that we have an obligation to write the world, and that means not being afraid to write about other communities, but also a) doing due diligence to write them well, b) accepting that we will make mistakes, which we should own up to with gratitude when pointed out, and c) elevating those communities’ own writers in all that we do—never building a platform solely for ourselves.
With that obligation in mind, then, let’s dive into this month’s reflections on where the world is and is not fully represented, and how to approach our storytelling so that maybe, in the future, more will be. If anything intrigues or pleases, and you’ve the means and mind to support the work, I have a Patreon (with mid-monthly treats), ko-fi (we can pretend we shared a coffee or tea!), and direct PayPal link. A little goes a long way in my home in Colombia, but I also have a huge financial goal to secure my future here, so every bit counts. Many thanks to all who have supported where they can, however they can—financially or with emotional support and/or readership and signal-boosting—and may your own communities find you well-supported, too.
Oh, and if you support UNHCR or another NGO doing critical work in our hurting world? Well that’s just splendid. Thank you for your efforts. Here’s historian Timothy Snyder’s list of places to donate to support Ukrainian citizens, too.
Table of Contents
Three articles of note
“The Confused Ideology of Schitt’s Creek,” by Eric Rosenfield (A1)
“Migrant Lives, Global Stories,” by Jeremy Adelman and Caitlin Zaloom (A2)
“Debt Demands a Body,” by Kristin Collier (A3)
Three essays from Bridging Worlds: Global Conversations on Creating Pan-African Speculative Literature in a Pandemic
“Ghost Girls,” by Nikhil Singh (E1)
“If You Haven’t Noticed, the Dystopia Is Already Here,” by Edwin Okolo (E2)
“On African Speculative Fiction,” by Geoff Ryman and Wole Talabi (E3)
Three films
The Worst Person in the World (F1)
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (F2)
The Monopoly of Violence (F3)
Three moments in the making of a story
The seed takes hold (MS1)
The world deepens (MS2)
The “real” crisis unfolds (MS3)
Three miscellaneous items
A quotation (M1)
A photo (M2)
A flash fiction (the sum of writing talk from MS1 to MS3)
M1. A quotation
“I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit—a language to use against these sparkling insects, these jets.”
—Mahmoud Darwish, from Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982
F1. The Worst Person in the World
I went into the last piece in Joachim Trier’s Oslo Trilogy, The Worst Person in the World (2021), knowing very little about the story. Only that it was about a human being trying to figure herself out, and who ends up confronting difficult truths in the process. Considering the noise-to-signal ratio in my life at the start of the year, when I was still struggling to let go of a sense of self that was crushing me, it seemed a good mirror to hold up to myself. And isn’t that what art is often best at providing?
What I found in the piece was a bit different; and, in contrast to many of the other pieces I talk about in this newsletter, it was also the most afflicted by affluenza—but no less potent for that common complaint. (Maybe more.) Our protagonist, Julie, is so well supported in her attempts to find herself that the film even provides background narration to gentle her every careless stumble from narrative grace into something endearing for all its faults. Hers is a story shaped in “chapters”: the tale of someone who wanted to be a doctor, then a psychologist, then a photographer, then maybe a writer while working at a bookshop—but mostly, a person what wanted to be seen by others, which is perhaps why she lights up most in response to the men in her life: falling in with two who stir something different but insufficient in her, while still nursing wounds from her father’s lazy abandonment.
One of these men is a famous author of underground comics, which contain a shock-value misogyny that comes unpleasantly to the fore when his work gets adapted for the big screen. She chafes in their relationship against how much he wants to rationalize all her hazy feelings, but the man she admires next—all feeling, all spontaneous potential—leaves her differently stultified. The film’s narrative arc does grant Julie a kind of inner core at the end of what transpires between the three of them, but whether this emotional resting place solves the bigger question—whether she’s “found herself,” or ever really will—is uncertain. It’s more that these specific episodes of such seeming urgency in her young life have simply played themselves out.
The meaning of one’s life is given, then, to be whatever persists when the theatre of each “chapter’s” interactions eventually runs its course.
However, there’s also a larger sense of tragedy to a film that focusses on the struggle of a character to “find themself” in a world that affords them so many opportunities. Not exactly present on screen, but impossible for me to avoid while watching, was the sense that the background to this story—the “Oslo” in this trilogy—is a place that doesn’t provide much moral clarity about what we owe to ourselves and to others. It’s a dreamlike world of privilege and comfort, with even Julie’s bookstore work given a clean and upscale gloss, such that her struggle to find herself seems directly connected to how low the stakes of that self-discovery really are. Will she commit to a future with this one man whose words overshadow her quiet puzzlement with herself? Or will she commit to this other man, who charms her with his simpler, warmer, goofier interactions? And either way, will she ever be enough for herself, when she was never enough for her father?
It’s a common enough filmic move to dig deep into a self-involved character to discover something universal, but I find myself imagining a version of Julie who, upon leaving medical school for psychology, or psychology for photography, or photography for writing, was at some point—any point—exposed to the bigger world. I think she would have risen to an immediate challenge, a direct ask from one hurting human to another, if her circumstances had placed that moral jolt in her way. But the sheer comfort of her context, and the relentless shelter it provided, instead meant that the sum total of her journey was shaped fairly incuriously, around a smaller set of questions about how to be present for two men, and ultimately for herself.
And that, for me, was the biggest takeaway: that if we don’t know who we are, the fault often lies less with us as individuals, and more with the systems we inhabit. To learn who one is in the world, one must broaden their understanding of the world.
And I’m trying, of course. I am.
But in watching this film, I also realized how easy it is to mistake cave-shadows for reality. We could all use a good dragging out, sometimes, into the light of a fuller day.
E1. “Ghost Girls,” Nikhil Singh
February saw the launch of a collection of interviews and essays that I read right away—had to, really, after taking a peek at the opening selection. Bridging Worlds: Global Conversations on Creating Pan-African Speculative Literature in a Pandemic (Jembefola Press, 2022) brings together African and African diaspora perspectives on how the last two years have been experienced by this geopolitical network of writers. There are solid insights here on the state and struggle of Black writers in the U.S., including from prominent creators like Sheree Renée Thomas and Zelda Knight, but today I’m going to talk about three essays on the African side of the Pan-African equation.
Good curation is not easy, but this collection’s editor, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, won me over from the start with his placement of Nikhil Singh’s “Ghost Girls” above and before all else. As noted in my preamble, we have an obligation to raise up those around us as we ourselves rise—and so, what better way to start a collection that gives voice to so many lesser-heard writers, than with an essay that pays homage to the people who, for many unjust reasons, we might never otherwise meet on the page.
Nikhil Singh wanders South Africa in shabby shoes and the same coat to blend in, to deter “normal” interactions, and sometimes—if lucky—to be welcomed into communities of street people, including many who long to be known as writers, too. Many who are already storytellers, carrying in them visions and traumas and slices of the human condition that most will never know. But what a mess of a literary world ours is! Even when affecting social-justice concern, it often prides itself on celebrating those who know how to play the game “properly,” and gatekeeping (tacitly, or explicitly) people writing from other sociopolitical positions. Or, as Singh observes,
I had met other homeless writers. Once, I had been invited to speak at South Arican Book Week. All the ‘politicals’ were out, preening their peacock blades. Comparing flags, designer outfits and lunch vouchers. I found myself veering clear of their deafening academic psychobabble. Haunting alleyways and the undersides of bridges were preferable. The event was in Newtown, Central Joburg. Formerly a no-man’s land. Gentrification had sunk its candy-coloured teeth in, eating up street-corners with franchise chicken takeout, sneaker retail and trendy beer halls. I met a man in rags who showed me another battered notebook. Pages and pages of ballpoint, detailing his migration through hell. I struggled in vain to get him past the door. Complaining to the armed guard that he had more of a right to attend the event than most of the so-called writers, shrieking about their latest identity-meltdown at the complimentary bar.
The opening essay of any collection often sets its standard and tone, but this one also makes a statement. Singh is not alone in recognizing that there are different flavours of activism in the world, and that some play right into the core elitism of the whole enterprise. I’ve spoken about “affluent activisms” before (with a lot of empathy, mind you, for why so many of us get caught up in them, while trying to maintain our own, precarious positions in an unjust world), but here in Bridging Worlds, under Singh’s capable hand and brilliant eye for situational detail, the argument has teeth.
Who is served by the work we do?
When we seek to tear down existing systems, is it just for ourselves, or others, too?
And if the latter, how are we signalling to others that we’re doing this for more than ourselves? How do we live our commitment to communal uplift? How do we act to newcomers and people not “in the know” about existing systems and implicit rules? How do we serve as mentors or allies with greater integrity than what’s come before?
Put another way: Whom among us is silenced, for fear that if we don’t crush variation in the “ranks” of lived experience, none of us will get through the gates at all?
Nikhil Singh shares with us the stories of people who will probably never otherwise get to be “in the room.” But I can feel in every page of this account an author who truly advocates for fewer such exclusions, going forward. Who wants, one day, for all the writers and dreamers that she meets on the streets to be able to tell you their stories without her or anyone else’s mediation.
May Singh, in this struggle among all storytellers, never find herself alone.
A1. “The Confused Ideology of Schitt’s Creek,” by Eric Rosenfield
Sometimes when I’m reading an article, I realize all at once that it’s put perfectly into words what had been churning quietly, amorphously, in the back of my mind. Eric Rosenfield’s latest essay for the excellent Literate Machine was one such piece.
In “The Confused Ideology of Schitt’s Creek,” Rosenfield outlines a core facet of the production that rubbed me the wrong way over its run-through, despite my being charmed by various performances therein. (This is a bit of a Canadian thing, I should add: We’re generally surprised when homegrown TV comes together well, and overly fond of passable Canadian productions when we should know a whole lot better.)
Schitt’s Creek follows a self-absorbed and out-of-touch rich family that suddenly loses its fortune, and has to move to a rural town it bought once on a lark. There, the feel-good fantasy of small-town living gradually works its magic on each family-member’s distinct brand of narcissism, and after years of gentle healing among Good Small-Town Folk, each member is able to rise from the ashes and make a new life for him- or herself. A new life, that is, which for all but one family member involves… returning to big-city life, and its promises of fame and fortune. So much for supposedly learning about the vapidity of such lifestyles during their time away, no?
But Rosenfield aptly points to why this mediocre narrative conclusion should come as no surprise. As he writes,
For a show about poverty, after all, Schitt’s Creek can never bear to show us what actual poverty looks like. There’s no opioid epidemic here. No Walmart destroying local businesses and paying poverty wages. Nobody blaming immigrants and liberals for their problems and spiraling into mires of insane conspiracy theories. The closest glimpse we get of small town financial struggle is an early episode focusing on the very real epidemic of Multilevel Marketing scams in small communities. The Rose family buys into an MLM and tries to sell the poor quality cosmetics they receive to the townspeople, only to discover they’ve all already bought into it themselves in years past. But there’s no sense here that the MLMs prey on small towns precisely because they tend to have so much desperate poverty, and there’s no sense of anyone being financially ruined by their involvement in them. Further, there’s no one finding refuge from their troubles in the Church, despite that institution being central to the cultural life of most North American small towns. There are no Bible thumpers here, none of the zealots who would occasionally corner me to talk about my immortal soul even when I lived in towns in Liberal states like Connecticut and Vermont. We don’t see pregnant teenagers and shotgun weddings because people don’t believe in using or distributing information about contraception and have made it nearly impossible to get abortions.
And we don’t see the worsening urban/rural divide that’s caused white, rural and suburban Americans to rail against the phantom of “Critical Race Theory” and bash immigrants, poisonous distractions that allow the politicians they support to continue executing the very lassez faire capitalism that’s destroying their communities.
Rosenfield’s piece illustrates other obvious disconnects between the writers’ depiction of small-town life and its actual, harsh realities, but I won’t spoil such a rich read in full. This excerpted section is enough to highlight a key point that should give writers pause as they consider how best to bring the world into their work. Technically, this is a story of “rich” and “poor”… but is it? Or is it fantasy, a play at richness and poverty that is also hardly value-neutral when it comes to the impression it leaves on viewers?
Now, some might argue “Oh, but you can’t make a real show about poverty and still have it be funny!” To which I’d agree, at least if we’re talking about the sitcom aesthetic and audience-share that shows like Schitt’s Creek target.
But… that’s kind of the bigger point. When the aim of our work is simply to appease a given demographic, it’s always going to be at risk of representative failings—always at risk of presenting the world in a way that feeds into dangerous status-quo beliefs about other demographics. Rosenfield describes Schitt’s Creek as “a show that makes overtures to culturally liberal values … while giving us yet another economically conservative, neoliberal worldview.” Could it have been done differently, though?
Well, sort of. We’ve certainly done so in the past, if with mixed results. In the 1970s, there was All in the Family, a sitcom that more bluntly gave us difficult portraits of working-class white North America. In the late ’80s to late ’90s, we then had Married… with Children and Roseanne. Between the three, Archie Bunker and Al Bundy were neither kind nor bright—just barely holding on to their little slices of the working-class white American dream—while Roseanne was the female equivalent: a touch more progressive on some issues, but every bit as working-class conservative in others. And yet, did these more honest portraits help people interrogate their own social positions any better? Or did seeing Archie, Al, and Roseanne hold the line in self-assured ignorance only empower more such behaviour among viewers, just as Mad Men later inspired a few seasons’ worth of imitative Western consumerism?
More recently, we’ve had Shameless, but its depiction of a poor family struggling with abuse and addiction is… a hard-won sort of humorous, at best: deeply twisted and difficult at times to watch. Malcolm in the Middle, in the early ’00s, fared far better at mixing family dysfunction with class commentary (with another matriarch carrying the brunt of lower-class behaviours into some difficult-to-watch parenting choices).
A better conclusion to draw, perhaps, is that no one sitcom can be expected to turn the tide entirely on the social work needed to improve communities in precarity.
But what we can ask for is more honesty from creators. Schitt’s Creek did not at all represent the myriad of hardships actually facing small-town North America. But it could have used the platform provided by the fantasy’s popularity to select even a couple of real-life issues of note—the opioid crisis, maybe, or the need for retraining and infrastructural investment as small towns face the obsolescence of core industries—and advocate for them in surrounding entertainment media.
And… well, on that level, Schitt’s Creek did actually come close. Dan Levy called for donations to the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. Dustin Milligan called for donations to three organizations in Yellowknife, NWT. The whole cast set up a GoFundMe for food banks during COVID-19.
Steps in the right direction, at least.
Let’s keep calling attention, then, to where “realist” TV fails the sniff-test—and keep inviting more socially responsible action to emerge in lockstep with the growing popularity of any venture we take on. However we creators gain the platforms that we do, it’s what we choose to do with them that really counts.
MS1. The seed takes hold
This past month, a rustic sci-fi scene captured the imagination of many writers and general Twitter layabouts. James Geary invited folks to use the following image, by @phase_runner, as a story prompt, and post what their opening lines would be.
Here’s the piece. In these three sections, I’m going to talk about the creation of a story from the prompt, and then you can read the final product in M3, but first—why not try the exercise yourself? What kind of story does this bring to mind for you?
A lot of folks on Twitter went for spoof. That’s to be expected, because the original image has an elegant, serene naturalism to it. It feels epic. Larger than life. So, why not go for the contrapuntal beat? Do something unexpected. Make a two-hander joke with the man and the goat—or maybe a three-hander, with a sentient spaceship, too!
It’s important to remember that we all have storytelling impulses in us. We know to leap for opposites, for instance, because there’s delight in the unexpected.
But that leap to contrarian humour, so common in responses to this prompt on Twitter, also reminded me of a major psychological rift that keeps many people from being able to tell fuller stories on the page. An off-the-cuff bit of comedy can hold for a few lines, after all, when propped up against the stateliness of the original image. But if even those funny few opening lines were to become the basis of a longer, fuller story… at some point the storyteller would have to commit to the world created by their initial flash of comedy. They would have to become consistent in it, and sincere.
And sincerity is tough. It requires that we risk vulnerability—and not just with any future readers, but with ourselves. It requires that we risk disappointing ourselves, too, the moment we read back our first attempts to put an idea into words upon the page.
Here was my answer to the prompt:
As you can see, I chose to write it as if I were actually starting a fuller story. What makes the difference? A few things. For one, I established clear environmental details—something that many of the other responses didn’t do, because they were relying on the visual reference. But for an actual story, the reader has only what you give them.
You have to make it count, though. You don’t want to give them everything, because a deluge of data points offers the reader no sense of context and priority. You give them, instead, what stands out to the POV for a given scene. Medi and Babu, for instance, have probably traversed this land many times before together, so we don’t even need to say that Babu is a goat. What Medi would be attentive to, as a shepherd, are the sensory details from Babu that tell him all is well.
For another, I make my characters distinct. That doesn’t always require naming them, but even if they are simply “man” and “goat,” they still need personality, a sense of relationship to each other or to the setting.
And most importantly, I establish the idea of a richer world beyond these lines, which in turn promises the reader some reward for reading on.
Now, some people confuse this last part with the need to create a good “hook,” but the opening doesn’t need to be “loud” to invite further reading. Here, for instance, it’s the use of an unusual noun phrase, “The entombed ship’s silence,” that does the lion’s share of that intrigue-work. How often does “silence” sit in the subject position, as a thing doing work on something else? And how often do we come across an entombed ship? There’s no action yet—but already, a universe of questions.
And yet, a few opening lines aren’t everything. So, how do we go from a seed of a tale to something bigger? Something with legs? Stick with me. In MS2, we’ll find out.
F2. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021) wasn’t my first Georgian film, but they’re rare enough in my experience that I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this urban fairy tale. And yet, it wasn’t long before I recognized an aesthetic deeply familiar to Eastern European literature and cinema in general.
The film’s conceit is simple enough. A young woman and a young man run into each other, and being so turned around by this first encounter, they propose meeting again. Unfortunately, someone with ill-intent has seen them fall in love at first glance, and puts a curse on them. A rain gutter, a security camera, a roadside shrub, and the wind are Lisa’s folkloric familiars; they tell her what has happened, and what will.
The curse is this: the next morning, Lisa will wake up with a new face, and all her old aptitudes as a pharmacist will be lost. Elsewhere in town, Giorgi, too, will wake up with a new face, and all his old aptitudes as a soccer player will be lost. Even if they go to their planned meeting-place at the right hour, they will not recognize each other. Offhand, we learn that Lisa’s sister was cursed once, too. Such things do not surprise people in this remote town, even if they drastically whole lives.
And our loving narrator, the director, explains all of this and much more, as he carries us through the quotidian that nevertheless surrounds even the most extraordinary internal crises. As it is for so many people in our world whose inner realms have been shattered—by the loss of a loved one, or a job that was their whole identity; by displacement pressures, and violence, and war—our environments owe us nothing in the way of pathetic fallacy. Private devastations do not preclude us from everyday scenes and conversations, and the everyday tasks we still need to do to get by. The World Cup, say, will still play on, and people (and dogs) will still gather to experience it—even if our personal narratives seem aimless, without hope of any greater end.
The director also confesses that he debated his choice to prioritize the quotidian—because it was indeed a choice to script and shoot a gentle romance of a drama while, just beyond the limits of his film, there are clear and pressing traumas in the state of Georgia. The little town that serves as his setting is not sedate without a backdrop; people within it pursue their quiet lives as best they can, rather, with the knowledge of immense civil unrest just at the periphery of their calm.
But even though Koberidze is aware of the kind of film he’s made, and the kind of film he could have made, this piece is not expressly arguing with the narrative direction of ever-so-much Western cinema. It’s not an overt repudiation of a storytelling style in which a curse upon two lovers would consume everything around them. Rather, the film simply presents, calmly and with careful effortlessness, that in the real world fairy tales are both quotidian and no less tender for it. That there is magic simply in existing, even when we lose so much of “who we are” along the way.
I resonate with this sentiment… oh, so deeply.
Yet rare is the narrative frame that invites us not just to resonate, but also to enact. To choose a way of looking, and living, that allows the quotidian to be enough.
M2. A photo
I posted the above photo to Twitter this month, after an unexpectedly derailed morning left me wandering the city square bright and early, able to appreciate the “little things” all around me. In this case, the downtown core around Bello’s main cathedral was just waking up on a Saturday morning. The pedestrian-centric streets were filled with birdsong and cumbia and vallenato (the last, a kind of folk ballad filled with the ache of love), and the warm waft of baked goods had been answered by a range of locals out for a coffee and a bite before church or standing in the bankline.
I share this piece now, with its array of flower-bouquets in buckets in front of a celebratory modern statue at the intersection between two acute-angled streets, because it’s a good example of the “quotidian” in my life. Or, more specifically, because it reminds me of how much work and history have gone into my ability to appreciate the value of the “little things” at all.
Sure, maybe I always did to some extent, but I do know that my life has also found me in “fight-or-flight” anxiety patterns more often than I’d have liked, and that living with bipolar depressions has meant living with routine collapses of sensory breadth and depth to a narrow band of behavioural responses—all highly emotional, all tediously life and death in register—after which I would break into giddily intense relief to have survived at all. A veritable rollercoaster of extremes.
But when I’m on a more even keel (which I like to think has happened more often as of late, despite the many upsets in recent years), even my way of looking at the little things seems to change. There’s less of a tethering of everyday joy to any bigger narrative or emotional plot, and more of a simple, meditative presence with my environment. Everything just is, and has the capacity to continue to be… even if my role in the world, and to myself, has not yet finished transforming into something else.
E2. “If you haven’t noticed, the dystopia is already here,” by Edwin Okolo
In a collection of essays and interviews informed by COVID-19, Edwin Okolo’s “If you haven’t noticed, the dystopia is already here” spoke most pressingly to me of all the other life stories disrupted by this pandemic. Okolo’s essay begins in February 2020, after all, when he travelled outside of Nigeria for the first time. This trip to South Africa was supposed to be a kind of awakening, an opening into strange new terrain. Or, as he puts it,
I was leaving the only universe I had known, to experience a different culture, see a different slice of life. I was an intrepid explorer in a SF/F novel, leaving home for an adventure in another world.
And that would have been adventure enough, no? But then COVID-19 hit, and he was sent home early from his whirlwind week in another realm—at which point a double-whammy of estrangement ensued, because
I’d always known I lived in a dystopia, but that trip to South Africa helped me contextualize just how strange the life I had lived up until that point was. It didn’t help that the Lagos I returned to was different from the Lagos I left. At the airport, I was mandated to wear a face mask, for the very first time in my adult life … I was a contagion risk, having returned from a country with a rapidly spreading pandemic.
Okolo’s piece goes on to explore quite a few potent themes relevant to his writing life, which I won’t spoil in full—but I will leap ahead to a comment about the Nigerians who “get out.” Okolo writes stories from a body of disorienting but also naturalized trauma, whereas those who’ve left seem to him different on the page. Specifically,
[t]heir writing often has the emotional topography of a war memoir, relief mixed with guilt, served on a platter of righteous indignation over the injustices they escaped. The white people lap it up, because you are not supposed to get used to this virulent strain of injustice and chaos, and even worse, you are not supposed to feel proud of it.
This part, I’d like to unpack for fellow white-Western readers. Our literary markets do trade significantly on the expectation that “outsiders” can bring us violent, exotic or “lush” contexts in which a confessional narrative might play out. These books are often written or otherwise curated to acknowledge and anticipate our culture-shock, and to lead us gently through it by reassuring us that a moral sentiment much like our own is in fact shared by the narrator, too. It’s not quite “Noble Savage” mythology for the 20th- and 21st-century, this common literary archetype of the enlightened person whose escape from stark non-Western circumstances is itself an affirmation of his or her distinct moral superiority, but… it’s also not far removed from that idea.
Thankfully, there are other veins of literature that reach us, too. Usually, it’s care of an award-winner, like Orhan Pamuk, Marlon James, or Viet Thanh Nguyen, but in recent years Nigerian literature—if from diaspora, mainly—has wedged open enough of the Western publishing sphere that a range of voices, styles, and subject-matter has finally been able to flesh out more of a spectrum. This shift is still a work in progress, though—and as Okolo’s essay wisely notes, it’s a transformation that now compels African writers to operate and publish in tension with people who have never seen the same traumas firsthand, yet are so sure they know how the trauma should be written.
What could we create, what could we achieve, if we trusted and invested more in storytellers right where they are—even and especially when it’s on dystopic ground?
A2. “Migrant Lives, Global Stories,” by Jeremy Adelman and Caitlin Zaloom
The big-tent humanist in me was very happy to see a collaboration between Public Books and the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at NYU, in the form of “Migrant Lives, Global Stories,” a five-part series on the global migrant crisis. This topic absolutely resonates with the group’s stated goal of “the study of Jewish history in the broadest context”—because if we’re not using our cultural traditions and experiential heritage to broaden our empathy, then what good are they?
And although the opening editorial explores a wide range of migrant crises, along with the ways in which migrants are used as pawns instead of being allowed to speak for themselves, it does bear noting how firmly this opening piece by Jeremy Adelman and Caitlin Zaloom speaks about the Palestinian crisis in particular, because
[n]o people captures this agonizing purgatory more than the Palestinians, whose calamity could be considered the painful precedent, a kind of legal petri dish, for today’s model. Driven from their land in order to resolve a refugee crisis among European Jews, who were themselves unwanted in the now-victorious West, they were excluded from membership in neighboring political communities. For generations they have made homes without a homeland.
That broader legal model for oppression, though, indicts Western civilization in a much more holistic way than this passage alone suggests. As the authors note, when deconstructing self-congratulatory Western universalism,
The right of individuals to seek asylum, however, did not obligate nation-states to give it to them. States reserved the power to grant or to deny sanctuary; they never signed away their sovereign capacity to determine who gains entry. This regime, touted in the name of humanity, produced inhuman consequences. Ever since, asylum-seekers have lived, in the millions, in a legal no man’s land.
This is not an accident. The system is designed to laud the West’s universalism without sacrificing the nation’s power to anoint members of their political communities.
…
[But t]he source of the crisis is not “out there,” beyond the world of Western jurisprudence where only lawlessness prevails, waiting to spill into the West. An alternative, global narrative of the migrant crisis treats the fabrication of the divide as part of the problem. It challenges the default that locates moral and legal authority to exclude or include with Western actors and their nation-states.
And this mythology, the idea that the West has largely granted itself the right to act either as “protectors” of state homogeneity or else as bestowers of patronizing charity, is what the series seeks to help dismantle. How? By offering different ways of telling humanity’s migrant story, and a multitude of reasons for the urgency of such work.
The pieces that this opening editorial introduce are as follows:
First, we’re given Gerawork Teferra and Kate Reed’s “‘No Words’: Refugee Camps and Empathy’s Limits,” a collaboration between a resident of the Kakuma Refugee Camp and a resident of Oxford in the UK. This piece explores the inescapable power differentials and narrative impositions on writing “from” a refugee camp, or “about” a refugee, and argues that
[a]s long as such restrictive policies on refuge and asylum persist, so, too, will this narrative economy in which refugees are always compelled to justify their presence, to constantly make their experiences legible to those with power over their lives in our grossly unequal, unevenly bordered world.
Next, Joey O’Loughlin’s photo essay, “Where We Live Now,” offers snapshots of a few families at different points in their immigrant journeys. This series struck me in elegance; you won’t find the usual trauma narrative of families in abject suffering before being settled somewhere new. Instead, participants are invited to be their fullest selves in each stage of their journey. There is no “before” and “after”—just “then and there” and “here and now.” And what a humanizing difference that makes.
Jeremy Adelman’s “Portrait of the Global Migrant Crisis” then uses Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow (2017) as a fulcrum for exploration of Western nation-states’ rights-hoarding both before and well into pandemic. Weiwei’s documentary of interviews with migrants illustrates some of the backroom dealing that Western Europe did to divert the flow of displaced people (with the consequence of exacerbating many hardships). To this history, Adelman adds an analysis of how Western nation-states have leveraged pandemic to bolster toxic views about migration. And in consequence?
As the world emerges, unevenly and unfairly, from the shutdowns of COVID-19, all signs point to a resumption of the human flow. It is estimated that in 2021, almost 2 million people will have been detained at the border separating the US from Mexico alone. As the full extent of the pandemic’s social deprivation and climate change sinks in, the numbers are expected to soar worldwide. Not for the first or last time will states use public health measures and justifications to contain the human flow and redirect people to countries and regions with fewer defenses and resources—and thereby create a cascade.
Next, Malkit Shoshan’s “Gaza: Landscapes of Exclusion and Violence” uses her experience and training as an architect to illustrate how
architecture and spatial design can manipulate the relations between territory and rights. These disciplines do so by demarcating new boundaries, and by providing justification to grab land, shift ownership, block access, fortify, and give form to new living conditions.
Design can lift some communities. But it can also force others to live precariously, often at the same time.
And although the series closer, Patrick Weil’s analysis of “ultraright French presidential candidate Éric Zemmour,” wasn’t up in time for this newsletter, it certainly promises to speak to a common rhetoric in political life that’s of great relevance to many of us in the West, as we deal with the rise of similarly emboldened anti-immigration speech among people in or actively running for public office.
It would be lovely to see a shift in our narrative priorities, and an elevation of the most marginalized in our global economies. But we still have much to do to turn the tide.
MS2. The world deepens
So, now we have our seed of a story. We have two characters, Medi and Babu, whose familiarity and relationship have been hinted at with sensory details. And we have the setting of that image-prompt, that beautiful mountain-valley vista in which a giant, ancient disk of a spaceship has been gently nestled for some time. We also have a sense of narrative momentum in Medi’s observations. The landscape itself offers no crisis, but for Medi, one exists because he does not have the words he wants to use, to wish peace upon a scene that seems to him so sad, so tragic, so mournful.
Why is that? What it is about Medi that makes him think this way? This is where cultural and character backdrop next unfurl. Is he drawn to this desire to grieve the ancient relic because of something in his personal life, or in his culture, or maybe—more accurately—in a confluence of both?
The action in this story could absolutely stay within the original frame provided. We could easily follow Medi and Babu as they decide to venture closer to the disc, and explore what the ship contains. But even then—and this is a mistake that many novice writers easily make—the world of our story would not just live in that mountain-valley vista. Medi and Babu, rather, will still carry their past with them into all the story’s immediate interactions. Medi’s home, Medi’s childhood, Medi’s preceding losses… all of these contexts will inform how he interacts with whatever he finds in the world.
Sometimes writing groups go pretty wild with this concept, I’ll admit—and then you have novice writers who think that they need to draw up whole character backstory sheets, page upon page of notes pertaining to a whole mess of details that won’t make it into the final piece. This approach can be a useful creative-writing exercise, especially for people first learning how to look and listen and draw from the world around them, but I personally find that such an exercise runs into the same problem posed by people who tell writers to just write a “good hook” for their opening line.
After all, as noted in MS1, what people are gesturing at when they advocate for the “hook” is really a lot more nuanced—but hey, the “hook” is an easy shorthand that kind-of-sort-of gets the job done, right? (Except that it doesn’t. It just teaches writers to think of their readers as easily distracted magpies who need to be shown something shiny to care about your work.) Similarly, when a creative-writing instructor encourages a novice to write up long character backstories, they don’t really mean to suggest that all those details are actually critical to the writing process. It’s just another industry shorthand to get around teaching the much trickier lesson:
Namely, that if you’re going to write a convincing character (human or otherwise), you need to understand the complexity of real sentient beings.
And… a lot of writers don’t. Which is fine, as a starting point! It’s why I strongly advocate for writing what you want to know—because this matter of writing convincingly is the primary quest for all of us, and it takes a lot of work to master. How do we create people who carry multitudes within them, and how do we write them into stories where their multitudinous nature is self-evident, without having to spell it out? How do we graft realistic worlds onto even the wildest SFF page?
The answer is honestly pretty easy, but I’d encourage the writers among my readers to take a moment to really think about it. Go on, now! What comes first to mind for you?In MS3, we’ll see if it matches what the obvious answer is for me.
E3. “On African Speculative Fiction,” by Geoff Ryman and Wole Talabi (E3)
Words cannot fully express how delighted I am to share an article filled with hard-won pragmatic optimism about literary publishing, but I’ll try. In Geoff Ryman and Wole Talabi’s discussion, “On African Speculative Fiction,” Talabi shines in the unenviable position of having mitigate the sort of infectious optimism that can easily arise when any given demographic suddenly shoots into the spotlight for a moment.
The real work for African writers in the global SFF community, this chapter of Bridging Worlds clearly outlines, is not yet done. Not even close! Yes, right from the outset, Ryman celebrates recent successes for African- and African-diaspora writers in Western SFF—award winners, sales to prominent publications—but Talabi notes a difficult yet critical consequence of this uptick: a potential loss of support for and interest in publications closer to home.
Ryman then notes that there might be serious stylistic consequences, too, for African writers who’d rather modify their language to stand a better chance in more lucrative Western markets, than strive to excel on local ground, with choices that feel truest to the stories they wish to tell. Talabi has more faith in African writers to find a balance, though. He’s certainly not suggesting that African writers aren’t entirely unchanged by Western markets, but he also thinks that the local industry and its strongest players are by no means spineless. He finds it more likely that they’ll sometimes influence Western editors to reframe their ideas of “good” English and “proper” narrative pacing instead. And then, who knows what work just might break through?
From Talabi’s solid list of recent writers with resilient voices, we move to Ryman’s celebration of emerging work in the comic scene. Talabi has less familiarity with this slice of creative practice, but is relieved by any business model that fosters ongoing growth on the continent, instead of contributing to a regional brain drain. The pair’s discussion about cycles of flight from and loyalty to a given region reveal differing experiences, and Talabi zeroes in on Nigeria having problems in this regard that Kenya and Ghana, for instance, don’t seem to experience on the same level.
But there are still overlaps between the two—and not just in general agreement about the potential rise of further African “superstars,” but also around how the pandemic has reshaped enough of the work economy to allow more continental Africans to partake in the critical networking that comes with industry conferences. Granted, there are still some stark technological impediments, in places where wifi depends on reliable electricity, but these still remain promising gateways for the work ahead.
Talabi’s core concern remains, though—as potent at the end of the interview as it was throughout. As he concludes,
I think I agree that the immediate future of African SFF is mostly outside Africa. But I think African authors like myself need to keep at least one eye back on the continent. We cannot expect allies to help us build a sustainable African SFF publishing scene. We need to keep engaging with our own local readers and editors and publishers despite the operational difficulties, because in the end, there may be a few personal successes, but without a homegrown or at least home-centred scene, we may never get enough of an ecosystem to really get the wave of future African SFF writers, reviewers, editors, and fans we dream of.
Now, folks who know me know that I’ve waxed on a few times about the need for a de-centralized publishing community, a world of hyper-regional literary hubs with a solid enough set of local financial infrastructures to sustain local voices and to make others vie for the prestige of entry into their own top-tier venues. Some folks have misunderstood me to mean that I’m discouraging them from submitting to our current power-broker, the West—but no, not at all. I simply look forward to the day when Western publishing is rightly seen as “regional,” too. Because it is.
And yet, because it’s also built on imperialist holdings in a profoundly unequal global economy, Western publishing is also currently flush with all the unjustly accrued wealth of other world regions that could and should have been allowed to sustain their own creative industries all this time as well.
Still, Talabi’s outlook gives me hope. So long as there are such watchful regionalists in other corners of global SFF, maybe we will live long enough to see the dream of multiple international sites of financially robust literary industries come to pass.
This whole collection, as a sweeping array of vantage points about the work in progress and the challenges ahead is certainly one heck of a start—and I encourage all fellow creators in SFF, if not the literary world in general, to read the piece in full.
F3. The Monopoly of Violence
France is a storied country, with many histories of resistance and revolution that have served as templates for discussion and action in other parts of the world. I think this is what drew me to Daniel Dufresne’s The Monopoly of Violence (2020), a documentary that gave average citizens—witnesses, participants—academics, lawyers, and security staff an opportunity to dialogue with themselves and each other about the ideology underpinning protests against the policies of Emmanuel Macron in 2018.
(Be careful not to mistake this film for The Monopoly on Violence, a documentary on U.S. anarchist thought that came out the same year. The original French title, Un pays qui se tient sage, translates to “A country that behaves gently,” with full irony.)
The whole structure of this conversation is meditative and dialectic, even though the subject matter is often painfully personal. Some participants were injured in these protests; one lost a loved one to struggle in general. Shown footage of his injury, one interviewee marvels at how different the filmic record is from what he remembers of that fateful day. At other junctures, the trauma replayed on screen only agitates interviewees further, as if giving them to relive the fullness of the terrible moment.
Mostly, though, these interviews play out against a sedate backdrop of protest footage, while participants and philosophers, protestors and police, work out their thoughts on related authority claims. The theory behind protest, and behind the state’s response to protest, lives in this film in direct conversation with the praxis of both.
And what emerges? Quite a few salient observations. I’ll share three:
The prefect in Amiens said that if no emergency housing is available, it's because asylum seekers are in the area. That's violent. It's violent hearing that. It's violent to see people who've always worked scrounging in bins. It's violent to come to Paris where people sleep in the street beside merrymakers having drinks. That's violent. The French state is violent. Their words and reforms are violent. The response is violent. They think we're violent?
And,
The paradox is that, in democracy, we more willingly employ repression than prevention. We let people assemble. Sometimes we let them get out of hand, and commit abuses. And we repress. Or else the situation gets out of control.
A preventive regime is one in which everything is done to avoid the risk of the slightest abuse. It's the Russian regime. To avoid demonstrations, everyone is arrested before they get off the subway, and the streets are left open to traffic. No one sees a thing, people are arrested at home, and they are jailed preventively. Preventively, their means of communication are cut off, and there is no public disorder. And you can see that Vladimir Putin plays on that opposition, saying: “I use less force than you do.” Without mentioning that if he uses less force, it's because he has kept demonstrators off the street. And you get Emmanuel Macro trying to defend himself for using force because he can't keep the demonstration from happening.
And,
Democracy isn't consensus but dissensus! If there is no dissensus, there is no democracy. If we all agree, something's wrong. Our freedoms have somehow been infringed. We can't all agree. It's a very old idea in political philosophy. Machiavelli wrote of the “tumult” in Florence. What he called tumult was the life of the democracy. It was the disagreement between the elites and the people. We have to accept disagreement and give it life in democracy, not reduce it or stifle it.
Collectively, these observations advance the idea that there are many forms of violence, made visible to us in different ways, and that the fixation on protest as a singularly contestable site of democratic action is already framing the question too narrowly.
During the protest, there is the possibility of harm from state and protestors alike—violence.
And before the protest, there is also the possibility of the state’s refusal of it—another kind of violence.
Meanwhile, underpinning the protest in the first place, there is also the state action that inspired it—a perceived violence, again.
So, what is the solution? Or is there any clear, definitive response to be had, even after sitting with all the struggle and the trauma outlined in this film? Should states follow the preventive model, or the reactive model, or another model entirely?
I’d argue that leaping to conclusions isn’t the point, exactly. A documentary like this instead asks us to question the premises we carry with us into discussions about the state of our democracies, the nature of our policing forces within those democracies, and our understanding of how “violence” manifests in the world around us.
Are there ways to address the violence that long precedes the protest? Is all protest violent, or does some instead strike at the heart of what it means to be democratic?
And to whom should we ever give the authority to decide such messy things?
A3. “Debt Demands a Body,” by Kristin Collier
One of the most vicious ways that our society separates us from our ability to deepen in empathy is depicted by the last article I want to share this month, Kristin Collier’s excruciating story of victimization to a predatory U.S. lending system that doesn’t give a hoot about how a name and a debt have come across their desk. In “Debt Demands a Body,” Collier outlines how her life was shaped by decisions her mother made for her—through identity theft, taking out loans to support a gambling addiction—at a young age, and how she remains trapped by manipulative finance systems even today.
Thirty-five now, I recall the day I first learned of my debt in foggy, tender detail. I was 21 years old and graduating from college in two weeks. I was just applying for my first credit card, and then an hour later, I was learning that I was a victim of ongoing identity theft by my mother. Debt decides the future for you: At 26, I would be paying $600 a month in loan payments to barely cover the mounting interest. At 30: telling someone I loved that to be with me would mean entering into a life of economic peril. The future that debt chose for me — indeed the future it chooses for many people — included a lot of shame, confusion, and pain.
Collier is pretty much my age, and caught up in a nightmare that acutely reminds me of how often I lived with the recognition that I was worth more dead than alive. (I had a line of credit that paid into life insurance—not that it would have paid out if I’d taken my life to avoid the pain of debt and its grinding precarities. But still.)
I had… a month of bliss, myself, between when I’d paid off my student loan in September 2020 and when, in October 2020, I was tossed into a migratory legal limbo. I remember the euphoria of that month without debt—that bewildering sense of freedom to set new goals for myself, invest in new projects, and imagine deepening in my commitment to raising others up as well. As a humanist, I was over the moon. No more giving to the loan agency what I could instead be using to help people in need directly! I could support the people around me!
And that’s the problem—because I’m nowhere near alone in that sentiment. A lot of people would probably love to be collaborating more on building a better world. But how can we, when so many of us are driven into entirely reactive, defensive ways of being? As Collier explains, skyrocketing inflation, predatory lending practices, and sweeping corporate indifference to legal due diligence mean that
people are paying off their student debts into old age. People are dying with this debt based on decisions they or their families made when they were 18. Sometimes these decisions were made with counsel from for-profit colleges that promised salaries and degrees they couldn’t produce. Sometimes these decisions were made with counsel from private lenders, who offer predatory interest rates that make it nearly impossible to pay loans down. Other times, racial or structural inequality or bad luck forced students out of school, funneling them into jobs that would never yield the salaries necessary to pay off even relatively small amounts of debt. In other instances, students graduated and found employment, but because the cost of tuition has ballooned and wages have flattened, they are still stuck with this debt sentence, even after falling on the right side of luck, the right side of privilege, even after they did everything right.
This isn’t an “either/or” situation, of course—but it’s important to keep in mind that a large part of the reason that average Westerners are not fully attuned to the urgency of people living and dying in refugee camps or on migration voyages, and why word of violent air and ground assaults on other civilian populations washes over them as a wave, and why the critical importance of combatting climate change hasn’t stirred them all to action yet is… the system isn’t conducive to letting people think proactively.
When everyone’s consigned to reacting to corporate terrorism, driven to be afraid first and foremost about what will happen if they can’t pay their spiralling debts… clear thinking and conscientious, expansive global policy advocacy become pipe dreams.
Yes, the answer is simple: we should all refuse this horrific game.
But the execution of this answer? Now that’s the challenge.
When will enough of us realize that we’ve all reached a breaking point?
What will it take for enough of us to risk refusing a broken system together, and to strike out for something better?
MS3. The “real” crisis unfolds
In MS2, I ended with a question—mostly directed at the writers who read this, but others were more than welcome to have mulled it over, too. The gist was simply this: How do we write convincing characters?
And the answer, to me, is just as simple:
Think of them as individuals who aren’t new to you at all.
Shockingly, this is not an obvious answer—least of all, when writers are trying to tick off a vague checklist of inclusivity. I have had far too many people ask me “how to write women” or “how to write queer people,” and I know plenty of BIPOC who’ve endured similar questions with respect to writing “the Chinese experience” or “the Black experience”—like we’re all living in secret demographic hiveminds, always checking in with the rest of our respective clans when no one else is around!
*cough* I mean… of course not.
I’d like more novice writers to realize that creative-writing classes sometimes give background-detail exercises not because they’re key steps in the writing process, but because they’re an empathy pump. They challenge the eager writer, especially one who thinks that they already have All The Brilliant Things To Say, to think about someone other than themself for once. To spend time in another’s shoes. To imagine making different choices, from different starting conditions and premises, and to arrive at conclusions and bodies of action that the author would not make or play out themself.
But if you’ve already made a more consistent habit of that kind of thinking? If that’s already how you navigate life with your friends and family and classmates and coworkers and nemeses and people you hear about on the news or from history and literature come before? Or even if you’ve simply practised estranging yourself from yourself, and thought about how others might see you (and why)? If you already do any of the above, then you’ve already got the knack. You really, really do!
Now you just need to focus on this one familiar individual within your story’s context, and to imagine what would constitute a challenge for your old acquaintance there.
As I outlined in my initial response to the story prompt, for instance, my old acquaintance Medi is a shepherd who draws comfort from ritual language, and who wishes he had the words to reconcile how he feels when he looks at an ancient ship entombed in a mountain-valley near his home. He’s attentive to his surroundings, and on the empathetic side himself, though he sometimes falters for words to explain that, too. Babu is closest to him, though he’s no more likely to call him “friend” than he would “goat.” Words are sacred to Medi in part because he feels good when he finds the right one—but it’s rare that he finds it. And as such, it’s rare that he speaks at all.
Now, I could thrust external variables upon my old acquaintance. I could have the ship suddenly turn on, or some other activity near its base that stirs him into action. But for an added challenge, I’m going to end with a flash-fiction story of Medi and Babu that moves solely through what my old acquaintance has experienced, to bring him to this point. It’s a story I only learned from him in pieces, but I don’t think he’d mind me sharing it. I only hope I do his story justice—because, again, you know how much Medi considers sacred the act of using the right words for a given context, after all.
M3. A flash fiction (the sum of writing talk in MS1, MS2, and MS3)
—
Call Sacred All What’s Set in Stone
The entombed ship’s silence held Medi at the valley ridge a moment longer. Beyond hoof-clop on loose gravel, the dull clink of Babu’s bell, and distant birdsong on the wind, there it lingered: a stillness that called for grief, all along the yawning, stone-grey disc nestled in the mountain-keep.
If only the shepherd knew what names to speak, to give this sorrow peace.
Rain clouds gathered at the horizon. Storm-taste carried on the wind. Medi turned on a heel, whistle-clicked at Babu, and headed on. Out of the lush-green valley, down a mountain-side cast in shadow, into a sparser world filled with monuments that the shepherd knew far better how to mark.
Medi’s death-stone, a smooth white orb on a pile of soot-grey rocks, stood vigil at the town’s periphery. Kith and kin were not far off: a string of large, pale beads on their own posts, stretching out as far as Medi looked along the scrubby hillside. A field of waiting, some in town still called it—though for what, none of them recalled.
Babu took Medi’s pause before the orb as an excuse to nibble at his cloak folds for a treat. Medi obliged with a chunk of sweet-root, then scratched all along Babu’s long, soft bridge of nose. Babu didn’t know that his ashes lay here as well, and Medi didn’t know that it mattered. Medi had made a habit of singing the good grief-songs for them both, since the orb always answered to both their bodies’ signatures.
(Not so for all the others. Most only carried the tune of one.)
But there was an art, Medi supposed, to making sacred all what was and would one day again be stone. Granted, all Babu seemed to know was how to scatter rocks with his hooves: in spite, when spooked, or in play. Still, the death-stone took no offense—or if it did, spoke nothing of it, because it always returned Babu to Medi whole. Did the added grief-songs help in Babu’s defense? Well, they probably did no harm.
Babu dipped his horn toward Medi’s hand: enough petting. Then he shook out his coat—not so shaggy, but also not so clean—and trotted a triumphant step or two away.
Medi smiled to watch the self-assertion. Independence, to a point. Babu would go along ahead of him again, though not for many years yet. Or—well, maybe not. Medi had given up on certitude many lifetimes past. Maybe Medi would fall again, the way he had three times ago, and maybe someone in town would have to tend to Babu for a while. (Hopefully this time without hastening him along for a bit of meat.)
Did Babu notice the transformation, whenever it came upon him? Whenever his stiff old legs and wearied coat suddenly felt spry and fresh again? Did age feel like a dream to him, a dread nightmare like a valley storm or flood?
Whenever Medi woke him, Babu seemed to remember the grazing route exactly. And he still kicked up his hooves in anticipation around a burrow that hadn’t housed a brood for many cycles now—but which had once startled him routinely, with all its squeaky critters suddenly underfoot. He remembered all of Medi’s secret hiding places, too: all the crooks and crannies in their hut where the shepherd always stored the sweetest cuts of whatever their scavenge could afford.
How far back did Babu’s memory take him? Medi considered the limits of his own. Twelve journeys through the death-stone, more or less remembered. But the first life to come before it? No… of that one, only snatches yet remained.
He knew, for instance, that no one in the village had questioned his choice of vocation upon arrival. Some had even been a little cruel. Sure, who knows? Maybe you’ll have better luck leading sheep. Though “cruel” hadn’t seemed the right word for it, after getting to know the first-formed flocks. Maybe he would have better luck with the livestock, he’d thought. They asked for so little, after all.
But sheep and goats died, too, Medi learned.
And sometimes awfully, from a fool’s mistakes.
Yes, a fool. That was he. Medi knew that much to the core—though the town said less and less of it, and him, as the years and cycles carried on. Maybe they’d forgotten, too.
A light drizzle speckled the sand-brown earth, but only on this side of the ridge. When Medi looked up, he could see the fullness of the valley storm now obscuring even the highest peak of the entombed, stone-grey ship. Rainfall so intense that the sound reached him as an urgent rattle. The valley was a deceptive oasis for half the year—a lake for all the rest. Better the land, then, of scrub-brush and shadow. Better the death-stones, set up on high, in case this side ever flooded, too.
Babu bleated and wandered ahead. There was no complaint to the sound—just an utterance to make an utterance. Perhaps to defy the rain-roar he’d also heard.
Medi finished the last of his own around the death-stone, and over the soil that had received so many of his remnants come before. He touched his callused fingers to the orb, and a word flared along its surface. He barely recognized the letters, but so be it.
The only other snatch of first-life that came easily to Medi these days was less a memory that he could put to words, and more a feeling about how he felt about words. The sound of them. Their weight. And how important it was to choose the right ones.
A vague sense, too, that once, a long, long time ago, he had chosen poorly—and that everyone around him had been made irrevocably the worse for it.
Maybe there was some kindness, then, in letting some things fall to ash and stone.
As the shepherd let go and moved on, the lit-up markings faded—first C, then A, then P and T and all the rest. No matter. Even under an overcast and ever-darkening sky, the dull clink of Babu’s bell was all that Medi ever needed, to lead his old bones home.
Have a good month, folks. May the stories you create, and the stories you carry with you, always open you to a deeper understanding of our shared world—and all the strange new places that yet await us in it.
Be kind to yourselves, and seek justice where you can.
M