0 CommentsLast Thursday, seven Columbia departments, committees, and institutes came together to facilitate a reading, conversation, and Q&A with renowned speculative fiction author N.K. Jemisin and Jayna Brown, a Pratt professor whose work pertains to Black expressive cultures and Black utopias.
Just after 6 pm on Thursday, February 10th, Professor Jack Halberstam, Director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Columbia English Department, opened a Zoom seminar and welcomed the evening’s attendees into the otherworldly worlds of N.K. Jemisin.
The virtual event, open to all, was co-presented by an impressive line-up of no fewer than seven Columbia academic groups and institutes, which attests to the wide-ranging relevance of the themes and explorations within Jemisin’s fiction. Co-presenters were the Columbia University Arts & Sciences Committee on Equity and Diversity; Division of the Humanities; Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement; Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life; African American and African Diaspora Studies Department; Institute for Research in African-American Studies; and Department of English & Comparative Literature.
What Is Unworlding?
In the first minutes of the Zoom, Professor Halberstam introduced audience members to the Unworlding lecture series. The concept of “world” has been used historically to describe the “totality” of human hierarchies and experiences––while primarily centering white, Eurocentric philosophy. These totalizing concepts were often predicated on anti-Blackness and held humans above all else.
In this lecture series, participants will be considering the idea that world-making can only proceed through deliberate unworlding––the disordering of established hierarchies that exist in both the social and natural worlds––which is exactly what author N.K. Jemisin does in her Broken Earth trilogy.
The Speakers
Bios provided by the event co-presenters:
N.K. Jemisin: Named one of TIME100 Most Influential People of 2021 and hailed by the New York Times as “the most celebrated science fiction and fantasy writer of her generation,” N.K. Jemisin is a record-setting three-time consecutive Best Novel Hugo Award winner, a three-time Locus Award winner, a Nebula Award winner, a 2020 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and a fan favorite bestselling author.
Raised in Mobile, Alabama, and New York City, Jemisin’s love of reading and writing fiction was forged in childhood, but she only seriously started pursuing a writing career in her thirties after attending the Viable Paradise writing workshop. Her 2015 novel and fourth publication, The Fifth Season, the start of The Broken Earth trilogy, set her on an award-winning streak, making her the first Black person to win the category of Hugo Award for Best Novel. She won again in 2017 for The Obelisk Gate and a third time in 2018 for The Stone Sky. Her latest book, the first in her new Great Cities trilogy, The City We Became, is a New York Times bestseller, winner of two Audie Awards, and nominated for numerous awards.
She has been a champion of the science fiction and fantasy genre as a tool for political resistance during her work as a reviewer for the New York Times, an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops, and most recently, leader of a MasterClass on world-building. Loved by her fans and lauded by reviewers, booksellers, and media, Jemisin’s work explores themes of power and subjugation, the in severability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. In June 2021, Sony’s TriStar Pictures announced they had acquired the adaptation rights to Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy in a major deal, with Jemisin herself adapting the books for the big screen.
Jayna Brown: Brown’s areas of knowledge and interest include Black expressive cultures, film, queer of color critique, anarchism, materialism, and science fiction. Her first book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern, won Best Book awards from both the American Society for Theatre Research and the Theater Library Association. She has also published on African American race film and popular performance in various journals. Her forthcoming book, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds, traces Black radical utopian practice and performance, from the psychic travels of Sojourner Truth to the cosmic transmissions of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra.
As N.K. Jemisin appeared on screen, Professor Halberstam concluded the lecture introduction with the opening line of the first novel in the Broken Earth trilogy, The Fifth Season: “Let’s start with the end of the world.”
According to Halberstam, Jemisin’s work presents a fragmenting of characters, systems, and worlds. As Jemisin has said, she aims to take apart the “white dude” genre of fantasy and then put it back together again.
I first listened to Jemisin speak at the 2018 Brooklyn Book Festival and then through her virtual MasterClass on world-building in fiction. Here, she seemed as poised, masterful, and aptly fantastical as ever; electric green northern lights shimmered and wavered in her animated Zoom background.
After introductions, the evening began with a forty-minute reading by Jemisin herself, which she selected from the eighth chapter of The Fifth Season and tagged with content warnings of child abuse, death, and implicit child sexual abuse.
How Jemisin Imagines Race In Her Work
N.K. Jemisin finishes reading, and Professor Jayna Brown comments on how the text is brought alive in a totally new way. Jemisin enthusiastically recommends the audiobook.
Brown asks how Jemisin images race in her work, since the races within the trilogy are not the same as those existing in our world.
Jemisin emphasizes that Orogenes [a group of people with the power to control energy] are racialized because they’re needed as an underclass, which is what societies do. She recommends How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev, which explains the process of racialization.
In the world of the trilogy, race developed in a biological way like it did on our planet––primarily UV exposure. Seismic ability also developed in some individuals as a result of postapocalyptic events that occur time and time again over decades. Additional physical and physiological characteristics developed in some races as a result of these natural disasters as well, like hair that filters ash.
The Science In Science Fiction
Brown points out that Jemisin explicitly uses the term magic in the trilogy’s second book. She asks whether that’s a deliberate “F*** you” to the “white science fiction guys” and also wants to know about the vehicle of earth science versus technology in Jemisin’s science fiction.
Jemisin laughs and notes that Brown is “100% right” about the word magic, which she uses “to mess with” those rigid science fiction fans who keep rigid genre boundaries.
Jemisin is also excited to discuss the question of earth science versus tech in her work. She wants to emphasize the nonlinear historic development of technology generally. Western culture suggests that specific types of science are necessities in industrial development. In the world of the trilogy, it was a necessity for society to become much more advanced in earth and chemical science. In our world’s history, many societies blended these sciences with “magic” in a way that Western societies deemed weird or wrong.
Jemisin also emphasized that “science” is not equivalent to “technology.” Much of today’s speculative fiction is concerned with robotics, artificial intelligence, computers, or similar tech. Jemisin muses, “Earth science is not as sexy as astronomy, I guess.”
The third of Clarke’s three laws was also a huge inspiration for Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Ambivalence About The End Of The World
Brown notes that a major tension within Jemisin’s trilogy is that which exists around the end of the world; people may die, but the planet will survive. Regarding Black Utopias, she says that two urges exist: one to save humanity, and the other to save the planet––at the possible expense of humanity. She asks Jemisin how we resolve this ambivalence in the modern world.
Jemisin says that, in her work, she’s asking, “Is this a society that deserves to survive? Because the planet will be fine.” She talks about having joined a number of “Preppers” forums on the internet, thinking she’d learn about preparing for the end of the world, but instead, she learned that weird fantasies exist and overlap between the white supremacist and prepper worlds.
In her work, Jemisin aims to focus not on the problem that the climate is changing but that society is refusing to adapt. Obvious metaphors exist there, she admits, having come from a society that maintains an underclass at all costs, deeming it more important even than a climate apocalypse.
The main question of the trilogy: Is oblivion better than this cycle of violence and destruction?
On Anarchist And Stateless Societies
Brown describes a prominent pirate society from the trilogy and wants to know more about Jemisin’s vision of social regimes. Is this society in the books stateless? Anarchist? Jemisin says yes, though this pirate society isn’t explicitly labeled. She explains that it’s a society that doesn’t map the islands upon which it lives because it knows they won’t be there long [as a result of the world’s recurring natural disasters and tectonic shifts]. Their society becomes a space to be safe, communal, and healthy without outside policing.
Jemisin explores the idea that different societies come up with different solutions to issues; there is no one answer.
Another question of the trilogy: Is the current way the only way that people can exist? Is oppression necessary?
Still, readers occasionally come away from her trilogy thinking yes, oppression is necessary, that the Orogenes are clearly dangerous and must be controlled. Jemisin wonders aloud whether this is a result of her failure as a writer, or perhaps because the idea of change in society is so immensely ego-threatening.
Here, the conversation between Professor Jayna Brown and N.K. Jemisin concluded. Professor Jack Halberstam reappeared onscreen to moderate the Q&A portion of the event.
Current Events And Jemisin’s Perspective On The End Of The World
The first student question asks whether current events since The Fifth Season‘s publication in 2015, like shootings, police brutality, natural disasters, protests, and the pandemic, have changed Jemisin’s perspective on the end of the world.
Jemisin is quick to make a clarification about the end of the world: “The end of the world is not what we’re experiencing; we’re experiencing the end of a way of life. The world is going to be fine. The planet is going to be fine, even if it’s the end of our species.”
The author insists she doesn’t want to be nihilistic, just that the facts of the situation are that we changed our environment, and now we have to learn to adapt. While this might be a time of traumatic, horrific change for us, these events are too minor to be world-ending. They’re infinitesimal on a geological scale.
Still, the 2014 unrest in Ferguson did play a major role in Jemisin’s writing of The Fifth Season––specifically, images and footage she saw of the use of tanks against peaceful protests. She realized that our nation went so far as to become militarized when it needed to preserve its racial hierarchies. She remembers thinking, This is how many people fear us when we’re simply asking to live, and she tried to convey the horror of that revelation when writing the trilogy’s first book.
Parent/Child Relationships In The Broken Earth Trilogy
An audience member asks about the parallels between the beginning and end of The Fifth Season: a parent kills their own child at the novel’s opening and conclusion.
Jemisin found inspiration initially through the Margaret Garner murders. In the 1850s, Margaret Garner was an enslaved woman who escaped alongside her husband and children. When caught, she killed her children rather than let them go back into slavery, and she later killed herself. Garner’s story galvanized abolitionist movements at the time.
In her trilogy, Jemisin wanted to explore motherhood under oppression and the way oppression twists love––especially motherly love, which doesn’t always look good, safe, healthy. She notes that we don’t talk about the fact that infanticide was rampant during slavery, and we’re still dealing with the fallout of what it means to parent through trauma.
Professor Halberstam adds that Toni Morrison’s Beloved was also inspired by, even based on, Margaret Garner’s story.
On Representation of Transgender Characters and Polyamorous Relationships
Professor Halberstam asks whether Jemisin could speak on a prominent transgender character and polyamorous relationship that are present in her work.
Jemisin says that she wanted to show that the world of the trilogy is a world occupied by other things. There is no vested societal need to preserve a gender binary. She explains that, in the trilogy’s world, as long as you survive and help others survive, gender and sexuality aren’t integral social factors. If there’s no need for cis-hetero patriarchy, then there’s no need for oppression. She wanted to build a society where––like race, regime type, and social hierarchy––gender and sexuality are “differently explored.”
In this world, if sexuality and gender help you to survive, then they are inherently “right.” Non-survival, for these characters, is a moral wrong (which is still a problematic ideology as a guiding principle). Jemisin emphasizes that this devotion to survival is not the same as our society’s devotion to cis-hetero patriarchy.
Jemisin And Gaming
An audience member comments that they’ve heard Jemisin is an avid gamer, and they want to know more about her participation in the gaming world. Does she have any favorites?
Jemisin smiles and starts describing a new favorite indie game called The Eternal Cylinder, which coincidently explores unworlding. You play a cute creature who wants to escape just before an apocalyptic rolling pin flattens their planet. The game explores communal anarchic living: Small creatures against an unstoppable, externally imposed evil.
How Can Speculative Fiction Imagine Better Futures?
Jemisin’s response is immediate; this is a question it’s clear she has faced many times. She says, “Fiction’s job is not to fix the future. It doesn’t have a job. Fiction is fiction.”
Historically, science fiction has focused on technological ways of fixing, not humanistic. Examples of this are the many predictions we’d have flying cars by now. Jemisin strongly believes that science fiction should propose more ways of showing how human beings can change, not just new tech we can use.
Speculative fiction often predicts that tech leads and humanity figures out how to follow, but in reality, things are the other way around. Jemisin recommends reading Octavia Butler, whose Parable of the Sower world is, unfortunately, a more accurate humanistic prediction of the approaching future than many tech-based predictions.
Silence As A Metaphor For Trauma
The event’s final question––we were running about twenty minutes over the 6 to 7:30 pm window––wondered about the recurring uses of silence and the failure of language in Jemisin’s work.
Jemisin seems genuinely puzzled and delighted in response to the comment. She observes that she uses silence as a metaphor for trauma throughout all of her writing, but it’s not something she’s ever thought deeply about. Before she was a full-time writer, Jemisin was a counselor, so she was trained to deal with silence and overcome the instinct to talk. She insists she’s going to think lots more about this mind-blowing moment!
Professor Jack Halberstam concluded the event by noting that he is looking forward to inviting N.K. Jemisin back to Columbia in the future––hopefully in person––with whatever new book she might have then!
Image via Columbia University Dept. of English and Comparative Literature
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