Tade Thompson: The Murders of Molly Southbourne

I am really not sure what to say about Tade Thompson’s novella The Murders of Molly Southborne. It’s an amazing piece of work with an emotional kick at the end that doesn’t let you go for quite some time.

Molly Southborne is different. Whenever she is injured, whenever she bleeds, her blood spawns copies of her, other Mollies, murderous Mollies, most of whom are intent on killing her, and sometimes other people too.

She grows up on a farm with only her parents for company. When she’s young, they kill the mollies for her. As she gets older, they teach her how to be as careful as she can be not to injure herself, how to neutralise the blood she can’t avoid shedding with bleach and fire. But there’s always something you can’t avoid, so they also teach her how to fight and kill the mollies, how to dispose of the bodies.

So many bodies, so many copies of herself.

Eventually she grows up, and goes away to university, and makes contacts that give her the chance to learn more about herself and the mollies. After her parents die - killed by mollies themselves - she learns, maybe, why she is the way she is. But none of this knowledge brings comfort, and there seems to be no way out of the cycle of creating and killing mollies.

Until she thinks of a way.

This story walks the line between science fiction and horror, rather like such stories as The Thing and The Body Snatchers, both of which are also stores about identity and infection and threat. It’s probably no accident that, as we discover at one point, Molly’s mother was a sleeper agent, a source of infection hidden in the body of the state, or that Molly spreads a slow and hidden infection as well as creating the mollies that can pass as human. This is about the visceral horror of something horribly wrong within the self, and in the ways that the self reproduces. And like the tropes it plays on, it gets inside of you and doesn’t let go.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Dina Gilio-Whitaker: All the Real Indians Died Off

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s book “All the Real Indians Died Off” is a methodical deconstruction of 21 common myths about Indigenous people in America. While it is informed by US culture and history, there’s certainly some overlap, some myths that I’ve encountered as part of the white settler view of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Both authors are Indigenous women, who have lived the experience of being characterised by these myths and are thus best suited to expose and explode them.

“...knowing and being able to articulate clearly what all the most prevalent myths and stereotypes about Native Americans are comes at least as much from the lived experience of being Native, in its infinite manifestations. As we discuss throughout these pages, this knowledge inevitably includes processes of inclusion and exclusion and personal histories of profound cultural loss, things neither of us are strangers to. To know personally the myths and stereotypes about Indians is to grow up hearing the narratives behind those myths, knowing that they were lies being told about you and your family and that you were expected to explain yourself at the demands of others.”

As Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker point out, many of these myths about Indigenous Americans arise from the American master narratives of exceptionalism, of settling a new and empty land through the exercise of rugged individualism, of being “a place of exceptional righteousness, democracy, and divine guidance (manifest destiny).”

The first myth they examine is that of the “vanishing Indian” which says “all the real Indians died off.” This myth has been used to justify both the seizure of land and policies of assimilation. Other myths they unpack and examine include the beliefs that Columbus discovered America, that Indians were savage and warlike, that Europeans civilized the backward natives, that the US government did not have a policy of genocide, that Indigenous culture belongs to all Americans, that most Indians are on welfare, that they are predisposed to alcoholism, and other perceptions that ignore the truths about Indigenous life within a racist settler society.

Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker offer important lessons in the history of white treatment of Indigenous peoples, from the exploitation and extermination of the Arawak by Columbus, to the enslavement and cultural genocide practised in the California missions under the now canonised Junipiero, to the tragedy of the Trail of Tears enforced under Andrew Jackson, to the widespread and commercialised appropriation of Indigenous art, dress, spiritual symbols and ceremonies, and other cultural elements.

It’s not a long book, but it is packed with detail about how Indigenous peoples and their cultures and histories have been perceived, and misperceived, by white American society. The book ends with a brief timeline of key events in the colonisation of the North American continent and the oppression of its original inhabitants. A solid introduction to Indigenous issues.

JY Yang: Two Tensorate Novellas

JY Yang’s two linked novellas, The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune, are theoretically stand alone works; either can be read first. Being a cranky sort, I read enough reviews to determine that one does occur, chronologically speaking, before the other, and so I decided to begin with The Black Tides of Heaven.

The Protector of the Tensorate owes Head Abbot Sung a boon. He has asked that one of her children be given to the monastery. Since only one of the Protector’s offspring is still a child, the Abbot feels sure that this will bring the gifted Sonami to the monastery, something they both wish for greatly. But a year after the bargain is struck, the abbot is summoned to an audience, and offered the fulfillment of his boon, and the disappointment of his plans. In the year that has passed, the Protector has given birth to twins, and she has decided to give them both into the abbot’s care, having her own plans for Sonami’s future.

When they are six, the twins, Mokoya and Akeha, are brought to the monastery to begin their training. Part of this training is in slackcraft, the ability to manipulate the Slack, the basic energy of the universe. It’s a gift that Akeha has in considerable strength. Mokoya’s gift is different. They (for children in the Tensorate are genderless, until they choose a gender) can dream the future.

When the Protector learns than one of the twins is a prophet, she demands their return. The abbot, knowing how devastating it would be to both children to be separated, gives them both up, and Mokoya and Akeha spend the rest if their youth growing up under the scrutiny of scientists studying Mokoya’s gift.

The Protectorate is a dictatorship, much like any dictatorship. There is a hierarchy, and corruption, and violence. Unequal access to the Slack-powered technology. Poverty. Harsh ‘justice’ that depends on the decisions of a person made inhumane by too much power. As they grow, Mokoya and Akeha, in their separate ways, set themselves against the power of their mother and the society she controls.

The Red Threads of Fortune follows The Black Tides of Heaven in chronological order (and having read both, I do recommend taking them in chronological order), but where Black Tides focused more on Akeha’s actions, the narrative of Red Threads centres Mokoya. Mokoya and Akeha are still part of the rebellion against their mother, the Tensorite Protector. The accident that killed Mokoya’s daughter and almost killed her has left scars in mind and body, and the prophetic visions no longer come to her. Embittered and estranged from both her lost child’s father, the current Head Abbot, and her brother Akeha, she is struggling for a reason to continue with her life.

While the Machinists’ rebellion continues in the background of the story, this is more about healing the bonds that have come apart under great stress and trauma, and learning to both grieve and to let go, themes that centre on Mokoya, her husband Thennjay, and Akeha, but are mirrored in the story of the Raja and his daughter, Wanbeng.

I love the society that Yang has created in The Tensorate. It’s complex, and multiethnic, and functionally queer. Children are raised gender-free, permitted to make their own choices (and a few, it seems, never choose, or rather, choose to remain gender-free). Relationships are about love, not gender or possession. We see a closely bonded couple, Akaha and Yeongchow, both men, and apparently monogamous. Mokoya and Thennjay, committed and polyamorous. Rider, a non-binary person, who has relationships with Mokoya and Wanbeng. The Protector, who is unpartnered but has many children. Family is fluid, and flexible.

I’m also fascinated by the Slack, and the different ways in which it is conceptuslised and used by the various traditions of slackcrafters.

And then there’s the ongoing political story of slow-building rebellion against an autocratic regime that privileges slackcrafters, and places limits on who is permitted to benefit the most from their abilities.

I hope Yang has more stories planned in this universe.