I have offered a lot of critique surrounding the way many of us engage with literature. In particular, I have questioned the way that white authors produce speculative fiction (dystopian novels especially) that ask us to engage in conversations about widescale injustice and systemic oppression without being honest about the way those systems and injustices actually impact the societies they are attempting to point an introspective finger at.

In our last few articles, we discussed the stark differences between the Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Namely that Handmaid’s Tale attempts to explore the very worst possible expressions of the Patriarchy while ignoring the reality that Black and brown women are the most directly targeted under that system of oppression, wheras Parable of the Sower focuses on a Black woman actually deconstructing the ideologies that have built that, and other, systems of oppression.

Now I want to take the conversation further, because there is far more to discuss.

Everything I said before matters. Our exploration of oppression will always be less effective if we are using a dishonest lens. But also, it is important that, in our exploration, we do not lose sight of the human experience.

Let’s talk about the Broken Earth Series by N.K. Jemisin. This trilogy is set on the pangea-type continent called The Stillness, and it follows the seperate-but-connected stories of three individual women as they navigate what appears to be the end of the world:

***TW: Child death. Skip the next paragraph if you need to.***

• Essun comes home one day to find her son has been killed by her husband, who has left town with her daughter. While grieving, she senses a massive earthquake coming and uses her Orogeny (her magic) to spare her town. Her story centers her search for her husband, who she plans to confront for the death of her son, and hopes to be able to save her daughter from him.
• Damaya has just discovered that she is an Orogene—a sub-human classification that is reserved for anyone who is discovered with a certain set of magical abilities. In response to finding out, her family wants her gone. Which is made clear when a man shows up and identifies himself as a guardian, whose job it is to protect the world from the Orogene’s power. Damaya is forced to leave with him, so that she can begin her training under her guardian—Schaffa.
• Syenite is an emerging talent among the Orogene who has been tasked with two jobs: to travel to a coastal town and clear the harbor, and to get pregnant by Alabastar, the most powerful Orogene currently alive.

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I bring up this series because NK Jemisin does something in The Broken Earth series that truly takes her work from being good books to being a masterclass in writing about change. She takes a story that explores terrifying systemic issues—climate change, racism, Patriarchy, classism, etc—and she manages to keep our focus on these three women, even as we watch them suffer under horrifying circumstances.

Throughout this series, we are learning about centuries of apocalytpic destruction all accross the continent and watching as humanity prepares for what everyone sees as the final end of the world, and yet she keeps us focused on the humanity of these three women. We never lose sight of the ways they suffer because of their identies, but somehow, they are also never reduced to those identities. And as a result, we are provided context for their decisions--the good ones and the bad--and are able to stay in their corner regardless of what they experience or do.

AND THAT MATTERS.

Earlier today, I was reading James Baldwin’s Everybody’s Protest Novel, and he said it like this:

The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.

As I have stated before, one of the biggest mistakes writer’s make is telling important stories through dishonest lenses. It is not that they should not tell the story, but that they do not approach it through an appropriate and accurate lens. And while I hold to that truth, another mistake that often happens is that authors approach conversations about oppression without any focus on the humanity of the characters telling the story. And that largely boils down to authors approaching these stories with unhelpful motivation. Another thing that Baldwin said in this book was that a devotion to the human being should not be confused with a devotion to Humanity, which is “easily equated with a devotion to a Cause; and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty.”

That is what I want to talk about here.

If there is anything I have learned from engaging with white Leftists (and actually… not just white leftists, if I’m being honest) over this last election cycle, it is that there is a massive difference between people who address injustice as an advocate for a cause, and people who address injustice as an advocate for human beings. And that is something we need to be very conscious of as we are writing stories about the global fight for liberation. We have a responsibility to center the human experience in every conversation we have about suffering.

Let me leave you with one more quote, because James Balwin addresses this subject far more elequently than I’ll ever be able to. While critiquing the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he says:

What constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality-unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.

I loved stories like Divergent and Mazerunner when they came out. I thought they were creative, intense, and horrifyingly direct. But while they addressed some very big systems, they also failed to address these systems through the lens of the human experience. They failed to give us honest perspectives that we could not only relate to ethically, but that we could see clearly. Because while they gave us great characters, they were characters that simply existed to contextualize the violence that was actually at the center of the story. I can’t speak for the author(s) intentions, but I can tell you my experience with their stories. And from my perspective, those series’—and many others—were written to talk about the violence of the empire, and their main characters are nothing more than a face for the author’s imagined resistence. Whereas authors like NK Jemisin, Octavia Butler (Parable of the Sower, Fledgling, etc) and Augastina Bazterrica (Tender is the Flesh) asked us to step into the perspective of a character or a group of characters, and to see them as entire people as they navigate their experience within the empire.

It may feel like semantics, but it’s not. Because in one of these scenarios, the story is driven by the author’s need to resist. And in the other, the story is driven by the reader’s need to exist. In one, every character has to be moralized, and must do whatever it takes to fulfill their role, because the author’s priority is to take down the enemy. Wheras in the other, our characters—and our world—can be nuanced and complicated and terrifyingly contradictory, because the author is prioritizing what it means to be a human being.

In the same way that we cannot tell an honest story without considering how the systems of oppression we are talking about target and impact society, we also cannot tell an honest story from character’s who have no agency. Who are not, in fact, human.

If we’re going to write speculative fiction that helps our readers navigate the world, we need to resist the urge to center the fight, and to instead center the humanity of the people engaged in it.

And lowkey… I think maybe there’s a good lesson in there for how we engage in advocacy in the real world too.

Let me know what you think down below, and as always, I strongly encourage you to head over to discord so that we can talk more indepth! Here is a direct link: https://discord.gg/deFttaXVtx

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