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Hah! What a tease... And those of us reading on kindles can't look it up
I’m really sorry about flaking out the last few weeks of The Fifth Season. Quite frankly, I’ve been a bit depressed at the social distancing and haven’t been reading much. I’ve tried to turn that around this week.
I just finished the novel tonight, and I think it is a very good book, but not for the inverse reasons of those who don’t think it’s very good. I just haven’t been thinking of those things.
Someone at the very beginning of our read said they had an article they would share when we finished this book, an article about the themes of the book that I might find interesting. I definitely would find that interesting, if you don’t mind sharing.
I think the themes of absence/presence, control (and here I agree that the story was sometimes way too heavy handed in reminding us that this is about control), underground connections / fractures are all very interesting, and now that I see the connections to womanist literature, I’m wondering what other literary connections there might be.
OK, here's the article: https://tolkienaboutscifi.wordpress.com/2017/09/20/layered-themes-in-the-broken-earth/
It does warn about 'spoilers if you haven't read the books' plural, so be warned it might spoil some things in the later books, too. Maybe Neil can confirm this.
BTW, that piece of art decorating the article makes we wish eve more that this was a graphic novel. It gives a funky vibe to the setting that the prose itself isn't delivering.
I’m mulling things over a bit, thinking about Jemisin’s relationship to the African-American literary tradition. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folks wrote about a “double consciousness” experienced by oppressed peoples who have to live in the oppressor society (as opposed to oppressed people who largely live in their own societies but who have occupying forces among them). Oppressed people who live in the oppressor society develop a dichotomy between who they perceive themselves to be and who the oppressor society portrays them to be, a portrayal the internalization of which becomes hard to resist. Oppressed persons look at themselves as themselves while simultaneously looking at themselves as the oppressor society looks at them. We’ve seen this theme recently in Black-written and directed movies like Get Out and, from what I can tell from the trailers, Us. I see lots of double consciousness in _The Fifth Season. Our protagonist struggles to see herself as herself as she internalizes what her society says she is, even as she breaks free.
According to the narrator toward the end of the book, she still doesn’t recognize who she is. Of course, this has more to do with the three personas / names she has and not exactly the double consciousness of Du Bois.
Thanks for the link and for the warning. I think I’ll wait until I’ve read the whole trilogy. I felt hampered by the spoiler I inadvertently read about a quarter of the way into the book. It was about stuff we had been speculating about, and it rankled me that the person so cavalierly and without warning included the spoiler in a four-sentence summary of the book.
Hmm - great stuff. I'm starting to appreciate the merits of the book more.
I was wrong about the connection to Toni Morrison. I Googled it, and Jemisin says she had not read Beloved, but that Corundum’s death was patterned after a real person, Margaret Garner, who killed her daughter rather than let her be taken back into slavery. I wonder whether Morrison knew about that and used that in her own novel.
> OK, here's the article: https://tolkienaboutscifi.wordpress.com/2017/09/20/layered-themes-in-the-broken-earth/
>
> It does warn about 'spoilers if you haven't read the books' plural, so be warned it might spoil some things in the later books, too. Maybe Neil can confirm this.
Yes, it's one to read after finishing _The Stone Sky_ and not before.
Don't worry about it. In some ways, it's our own Season. That means look to survival first. But I'm glad you're back.
Anyone remember the RPG Steal Away Jordan? It was a game about slaves in the American South, and drew on many sources of slave-related literature. A lot of (US-based) folks liked it. I didn't really understand it, being from the UK and not having all the cultural background to draw on and a context to place Steal Away Jordan.
Is some of our struggle with The Fifth Season because of a similar mis-match of cultural/textual background?
Yes, that makes a lot of sense. If there are a lot of cultural allusions in The Fifth Season and its successors, they are going right past me. Which leaves me in a position simply trying to come to terms with it as a piece of writing, and getting confused/frustrated.
I've not heard that term, but it may relate to the Marxist idea of "false consciousness", where the oppressed proletariat have a false idea about their oppression, and so reject Marxists' attempts to overthrow the economic order and bring in a communist ideal. But I don't think that's having multiple identities; it's more a case of being blind to one's one oppression.
There is something very American about the Fifth Season. I think, concentrating on the oppression angle, racism takes different forms in the UK, and a lens that examines US racism doesn't necessarily work elsewhere. I recognise the US takes, but they don't always resonate.
That’s an interesting connection. Du Bois wrote in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. I would assume he was familiar with Marx. I don’t recall him making the association, but I’m certainly not a Du Bois scholar, and it’s been a few years since I’ve read him. I don’t think his double consciousness was being blind to one’s oppression but rather of being in a bind because of being oh so aware of the oppression.
I’m trying to do that postmodern parenthetical thing with b(l)ind, but I can’t get it to fit exactly right in a phrase.
Ooh, I’ll have to take a look at that. I use role playing games in some of my classes.
I see on RPG Geek that it took a couple of runner-up spots in the Indie RPG Awards.
.What do you teach, @WildCard ?
I am credentialed to teach philosophy (you all may have figured that out) and religion (critical academic approaches, not doctrinal stuff). My area in grad school was hermeneutics, and my field was phenomenology. My expertise is in German and French phenomenology, and I often apply that to philosophical issues related to religion.
I can also teach history in a pinch, although the college has to justify that in our reports to the accrediting agency, since I don’t have 18 graduate hours in a course with a History prefix. We argue, and the accrediting body accepts, that I have taken enough graduate courses with a sufficient historical basis to teach gen ed history classes to freshmen and sophomores. They are particularly easy on us when I teach History courses that we cross-list with Religion or Philosophy (for example History of Ancient Religions, Religion and Empire, Philosophy of History). I don’t teach any of the courses in History major (because that’s what the actual History professors want to teach) and probably wouldn’t be allowed to do so.
I’m at a small college where lots of us need to be generalists because the faculty is small. I don’t get to teach much phenomenology here. None, in fact.
@WildCard Very interesting, and a great fit of expertise for the club. I wonder if you'll find our Mythic Babylon book interesting when it comes out later this year, given it's survey and attempt at expression of Sumerian/Akkadian/Babylonian culture and religion.
Heck yeah! I sometimes have students write and act out scenes from Mesopotamian creation myths.