Sofia Samatar: Tender

Sofia Samatar’s collection of short fiction, Tender, is a feast. Some of these stories I had read before, but most were new to me. The interesting thing is that, in rereading the stories I had read before, such as “The Ogres of Africa,” I found new insights. These are stories that contain multitudes. They are about monsters and outsiders (which are often the same thing, at least in the minds of those who define what is inside and normal). Or about people who have placed themselves outside, beyond, alone. They are about stories within stories, and things which are not the things they seem to be.

Many of these stories can be seen as part of a conversation with literature or history, an examination of assumptions and premises, a twist on a genre. “The Ogres of Africa,” for example, is structured as a bestiary cum travelogue, with marginalia to rival anything that bored monastery scribes have incorporated into their endless recopying of classical texts. But though the beasts are as fabulous as anything in the medieval catalogue, the marginalia tell the truth, of colonialist arrogance and indigenous resistance.

“Selkie Stories Are for Losers” is again a conversation with a genre of folk tale, one which at the sane tine respects the hidden truth of the source material, that of the compelled woman, who takes her chance at freedom no matter the cost, but also examines the cost in intergenerational pain.

“Those” is in conversation with history, specifically the history of European colonialism in Africa, but also with the tropes used to dehumanise the colonised in descriptions if that history.

Included in this collection is a short novella, “Fallow,” set in a colony of pacifists who left earth, an earth seemingly suffering from ecological breakdown, to avoid persecution brought on by their refusal to fight in endless wars. The colony of Fallow is an intentional community, a religious community, one that values conformity, that imagines it has a manifest destiny that justifies all manner of things. A woman named Agar presents the narrative as a series of stories, drawn from memories of her youth, which slowly reveal the oppressive attitudes and policies of this “peaceable kingdom,” yet still holding a dream of more.

In these and other stories, Samatar seeks to open up new ways of seeing old narratives, master narratives that centre the perspectives of the dominant, the privileged, the ones who create those narratives. “An Account of the Land of Witches,” for example, offers a text, then a refutation of that text, then an account of academic study of text and countertext that unravels with the circumstances if the academic. In some stories, such as “A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals” and “The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle” Samatar subverts Western classical ideas about the firm and structure of narratives, asking us to consider linkages that are not temporal or causal, not based in any of the classical unities.

These are layered stories, stories that challenge on multiple axes, that use language and allusion with grace and precision and complexity and fluidity, and draw on history and traditions of multiple cultures, giving comparable narrative weight to African and Asian sources as to European ones. They are subtle things, whose meanings shift and deepen the more you look at them. Samatar is a craftsperson of the highest degree, and this collection contains some of her finest work to date.

Essays: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film

Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-Apocalyptic TV and Film, edited by Barbara Gurr, Assistant Professor in Residence in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Connecticut, is a fascinating collection of essays for anyone interested, as I am, in how these issues are presented in science fiction, and in the post-apocalyptic vision in particular.

I have always been rather a fan of the post-apocalyptic subgenre of speculative fiction, I think in part because it mirrors the worst fears of our society - how the world ends, which of the classical horsemen, or some other, newly imagined devastation, predominates our nightmares - and partly because it offers the opportunity to suggest what might follow if everything we know has been torn down. Will we recreate current social structures, classes, institutions, or will we strike out in new directions?

This is a collection of essays that look at our visual media and try to explore some of these questions. As Gurr says in her Introduction, “The writers in this volume are interested in the ways in which post-apocalyptic fictions interact with—produce, reflect, interrogate, accommodate, and resist—hegemonic notions of race, gender, and sexuality.”

Early post-apocalyptic imaginings tended to focus on the reconstruction of society after a devastating, often nuclear war, or as the result of science gone wrong; such narratives were heavily influenced by the experiences of WWII. The Cold War introduced the apocalypse brought about by stealthy invasion, the infection and spread of disease or mind control agents - The Invasion of the Body Snatchers being the classic film example. Infection of the body, and the body politic, and fears of immigration blend in both alien invasion and zombie narratives, which have become increasingly popular after the events of 9/11. All these scenarios and more are explored from various perspectives in these essays, which address works as varied as the Hunger Games films, Firefly, The Walking Dead, Falling Skies, Battlestar Galactica (the remake), True Blood, the Resident Evil films and others.

What many of these essays make clear is that despite the opportunities for change of all kinds inherent in the post-apocalyptic scenario, many of these works fail to really challenge contemporary gender, race and class relations. Even with the presence of major characters who are people of colour or white women, the societies being recreated remain patriarchal, male-centred, and white-dominated, and perpetuate existing stereotypes about race and gender. Through analysis of the social milieus in series such as Firefly and films such as Hunger Games, it becomes clear that simply having a female action hero does not necessarily imply a break with traditional gender roles - the presence of an exceptional woman serves merely to divert attention from the ways in which the status quo is maintained.

The post-apocalyptic narrative is, above all, a narrative of survival. Its tropes tell us what are the threats humanity fears will threaten its survival, and the parts of our culture that we believe are essential to our survival. It shows us what we fear and what we value, and lets us question whether our fears and values are indeed the ones that will affect whether we as a society will indeed survive.