World-builders, World-killers and other World-changers
Who doesn’t want to change the world? Why else do we do anything we do? We create products, launch businesses, write books, march in protests, battle climate change, donate to charities, and do a whole lot of other things that will shape the world for the better (whatever we define better to be).
And there (in the parentheses) lies the problem. Because not everyone defines better the same way.
Over the last few weeks I read two short books on the same theme–colonization and its consequences. But they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was Ursula K. Le Guin’s The word for world is forest, written in 1968 as a critique of American involvement in Vietnam. I read it on the anniversary of the My Lai massacre.
(Yes, I’m aware of the irony of reading a paperback novel about the ills of deforestation on a wooden table)
In the introduction, Le Guin writes, “The lies and hypocrisies redoubled; so did the killing. Moreover, it was becoming clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and grainlands and the murder of non-combatants in the name of ‘peace’ was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit… The victory of the ethic of exploitation, in all societies, seemed as inevitable as it was disastrous.”
The novel is a short, easy read about people from earth colonizing a fertile, faraway world and destroying its creatures and resources. To call it an easy read is intentional. The characters aren’t complex. The native Athsheans of the planet are peace-loving dreamers who did not commit murder until humans taught them to. We are often reading the story through the point of view of the colonizers. A savior-type academic who is now “going native” and a soldier, Captain Davidson, who is, in LeGuin’s own words, “purely evil.” The native Athsheans are supposedly alien, but beyond their tendency to live in the world of dreams, their motivations are easy to understand. They want the intruder gone. In that regard, they are very human. We understand and empathize with them more than we understand the colonizer’s instinct to fire on civilians.
Le Guin is doing the same thing so many are doing on Twitter/X today, attempting to humanize those under fire in Gaza, as if that will change the minds of those killing them. But the Captain Davidsons of the real world would say, as he does, “Earth was a tamed planet and New Tahiti wasn’t. That’s what he was here for: to tame it.”
I read this story and felt… dissatisfied. It won a Hugo. It’s well-written. It was an easy read. It’s still relevant today. But I didn’t feel as if I’d learned something deeper about how to make the world better or how to allow modernity and ancient culture to coexist. The closest was the introduction, which talks about the Senoi culture of Malaysia as being one where “adults deliberately go into their dreams to solve problems of interpersonal and intercultural conflict. They come out of their dreams with a new song, tool, dance, idea.”
But Le Guin is not Senoi. She doesn’t understand dream culture, and so cannot invite us in. She’s an outsider, exoticizing the native culture, even if her intentions are good.
Contrast that with the African-Australian Eugen Bacon’s equally short novel, “Ivory’s story,” which touches on exactly the same themes, but from the perspective of the insider. A modern-day investigator in Sydney seeks the help of a shaman to solve a crime.
Bacon doesn’t have to tell you that the word for world is forest. She just puts you in it. Her first paragraph begins with “Pearly stars mottled a black sky in Gorge precinct,” and ends with, “Sporadic coolabah trees, so twisted they resembled phantom snakes, coiled along the jagged cliff with spikes of spinifex in between.”
Apparently coolabah and spinifex are real plants (spellcheck be damned). Plants that can coexist with a police precinct. And Australia can at once be a human colony with its own native life and feel more alien than Le Guin’s “New Tahiti” galaxies away.
There’s another contrast that appears in how Le Guin and Bacon talk about “first contact” – how do the native people of a land see the outsiders?
Le Guin:
“Coro Mena felt unreasoning fear press upon him, and slipped into dream to find the reason for the fear; for he was an old man, and long adept. In the dream the giants walked, heavy and dire. Their dry scaly limbs were swathed in cloths; their eyes were little and light, like tin beads. Behind them crawled huge moving things made of polished iron. The trees fell down in front of them.”
Bacon:
“He lived in the land of the Great Chief Goanna who studied the white man’s language and took to wearing his hair in a bob cut. The same Chief Goanna who paid for his education by working in overalls as a cleaner in the big city infirmary of the white man, who was best renowned for returning to his people and bringing greatness to their land. There, in native land, Chief Goanna shaved his head, discarded his overalls, wore bark loin and lifted a club to go to Parliament and save his country with eloquence from the greed of a white settler who wanted to put a mall, a restaurant and a spa in the burial grounds of the forefathers inside the Valley of Dreams.”
Don’t get me wrong. Bacon is not an easy read. I gave up three times before getting to the end, and even then it was because of the reviews on the back that said things like “If the reader is adventurous enough, Ivory’s Story will both startle and seduce.” Like, how dare you question my adventurousness?
Ivory’s story is that of a second-generation child who has to discover her heritage and heal ancestral wounds to avoid perpetuating them. This isn’t easy to do, so of course the book isn’t easy either. Most writers look for easy outs and unearned happy endings and end up writing colonizer romances and apologia.
It’s always easier to criticize how others are changing the world than change it ourselves. Easier for me to write this critique of others’ books than think deeply about what I’m attempting to do in my own fantasy series, where every aspect of word-choice, dress, distance, time and spiritual belief has to be carefully built to match my intentions–which is hard to do in the language of the colonizer, which nevertheless feels native to me. I am more at home in English than in any other language, and English is a language of binaries: ancient vs. modern, man vs. nature, colonizer vs. colonized, active vs. passive, subject vs. object. Twisting it to suit my ends can leave readers in the lurch, as Bacon frequently does.
I mean, this line. *chefs kiss*
“Yous cheeta boys of age now but still running about tomfoolering. Make one more mischief and I make example of yous as they did that poor man that done Chief Mezzanine’s daughter, they do him true.”
I want more like this–more that shows integration, rather than opposition. Less of “good triumphing over evil” and more about how to actually live in a world that is both, and. Then, maybe we’ll stop trying to “improve” the world and change it for the “better,” but learn to harmonize with it instead.