K. Arsenault Rivera: The Tiger’s Daughter

The Tiger’s Daughter is K. Arsenault Rivera’s first novel, and it is both lovely and problematical. Which leaves me conflicted in talking about it.

It’s a love story between two warrior women who are destined to inherit the rulerships of their respective peoples. That’s what’s lovely about it. The childhood friendship that grows into love, the fact that we have two ‘chosen ones’ both with warrior mothers who pass on their skills, both with special abilities, both with extraordinary abilities and courage. Two women who will grow up to fight demons and to love each other, parted for a time by fate but never forgetting one another. That’s the wonderful part.

What is not so wonderful is that this is a secondary world which is based on actual Asian cultures, uncomfortably exoticised.

Shizuka is the daughter of a warrior and a poet, the niece of the childless Emperor, the Son of Heaven. Her homeland is Hokkaro, and there is a lot of talk about calligraphy and chrysanthemums and jade, and how important it is to use the correct honorific with a person’s name, and these are the things that define Hokkaran culture.

Shefali is the daughter of a Kharsa of the Qorin, a nomadic people who are masters at horsemanship and archery, live in felt tents called gers, and drink fermented sheep’s milk. These are the things that define Quorin culture.

Other than these blatant borrowings from Sino-Japanese and Mongolian traditions, we really don’t learn much more about either culture. Only the Gods of the Hokkaro seem to have ben developed originally, rather than taken from an existing Asian culture. And the gender equality.

And of course there is racism between these peoples, and colourism - Shefali and her brother are the children of a political marriage between their mother and a Hokkaran noble, of mixed race, taunted by other Qorin for their colour and their “rice-eater” ways. It can be argued that racism exists, colourism exists, they are things that humans do, and Rivera is only being realistic when she includes such behaviour in her story. And I would not dispute this if these were wholly invented cultures. But this is racism as the white people of this world have directed against the real peoples the Rivera has imported into her fantasy. And the relationship between Hokkaro and its client states replicate some of the most difficult parts of the history of relationships between Asian nations. This is neither a true secondary world fantasy, nor a historical fantasy. And that’s what makes this a problem.

There are other problems, too, structural ones. This is an epistolary novel in the extreme. The entire scope of the novel occurs within one extended scene, in which Shizuka, now the Empress Yui, receives a thick packet from Shefali, a letter in which Shefali recounts the entire history of their early lives together, their meetings and adventures as children, and her own adventures while they were apart. Shizuka, reading, occasionally pauses to recollect events that Shefali was not present for, to eat and drink and sleep before continuing to read Shefali’s letter.

It’s a very distancing device, although it does allow for some poetic language intended to underline the intensity of their ever-deepening relationship. But the implausibility of it all detracts more than it adds. Does Shefali really believe she has to rehearse every aspect of their past lives together, as if Shizuka will have forgotten these precious experiences?

So, there it lies. I loved the love story, the characters, their long struggle to be together, the twists of fate that kept them apart, the wonderful, heartwarming ending, the underlying story that still remains, of two strong warriors, wife and wife, who have a destiny to battle the demons that still infest their lans. But the worldbuilding is deeply flawed and appropriative. And that is not something that can be ignored.

Lesley Nneka Arimah: What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

Lesley Nneka Arimah Is one hell of a writer.

I first encountered her work through the short story “Who Will Greet You At Home” which was such a powerful piece of speculative fiction that I nominated it for a Hugo. It is included in her collection of short fiction, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, and it was irrefutably representative of the quality and power of Arimah’s work.

Arimah is a British-born Nigerian writer, and her work, which draws on both her experiences as a woman in modern Nigeria and an immigrant in colour in a white-centred country, is imbued with a deep consciousness of the realities of women’s lives in a world which can be violent and corrupt, in which they are rarely seen as they are and accorded their worth.

Her stories are primarily about people in relationships - how we are embedded in long chains of impact from the ways people interact, how they shape our lives. She writes with clarity and honesty about the ways people need, use, love and hurt each other. About the balance of desire and need, love and violence, sex and possession, in relationships between men and women. About the power and pain of the mother-daughter bond. About anger and grief and love and fear.

Arimah writes both realistic and speculation fiction, story and fable. Some of her stories have strong elements of the fantastic and the supernatural, others tell of events that are perfectly ordinary. Her themes are what remains constant, the elements varying to suit the specific story she wants to tell, the kind of experience she chooses to illuminate.

This is an amazing collection, full of depth, of truth, of inspiration, of pain, of hope, of life.