The first time I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness years ago, I focused on the way in which gender, sex, and sexuality were portrayed in the novel and how they affected the ways in which the off-world envoy, Genly Ai, interacted with the people of Gethen.

This time around, I was primed to read the novel with a view to politics.  The Left Hand of Darkness is a novel about gender, but it’s also an exploration of governments and their machinations, and how those involved in politics can destroy one another for personal gain.

As I noted in an an earlier post, Estraven’s view of patriotism is a dark one.  Later in the novel, Ai meditates on the views of this former prime minister of Karhide:

And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, and how that yearning loyalty the had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry.  Where does it go wrong? p. 300

Though Estraven is proclaimed a traitor by his political enemies, we see that he is far from it.  Rather, his attempts to prevent war between Karhide and Orgoreyn– as well as his belief in Ai’s mission–that appear to work against the sovereignty and strength of Karhide are acts of loyalty to the nation.

But even this exploration of patriotism wasn’t the most poignant and politically relevant section in my reading.  Instead, it’s when Ai is jailed, and he is languishing after interrogations near a dying fellow prisoner in Pulefen Farm in the bureaucratic nation of Orgoreyn.   For days, Ai and Asra share tales from their respective homelands.  Ai reveals the differences between the genders and sexual expressions of the people of his planet and those of Gethen:

A night or two after that, he went into a coma, and presently died.  I had not learned what he had been sent to the Voluntary Farm for, what crime or fault or irregularity in his identification papers […..] p. 197

It’s easy to read the second line in light of Texas Senate Bill 6, the “Bathroom Bill,” which, if passed, would legislate use of bathrooms based on biological sex, which the bill defines as follows:

“Biological sex” means the physical condition of being male or female, which is stated on a person’s birth certificate.

Are we facing a time when birth certificates becomes identity papers of a sort?  Ones that are not only descriptive, but that help legislate a type of patriotic ideal?  What unnerves me about politics in the US at present and the supposed “greatness” national and in some cases, state, governments aim for is that this “greatness” implies a homogeneity within the population.  To be patriotic, to love and serve this great nation, implies that one must look like, must act like a patriot.  Any deviation from this “norm” is not merely a personal matter; rather, it’s an affront to the nation.  It’s criminal.  And this is where the purported love of country turns into “so foolish and vile a bigotry.”

As LeGuin asserts in her 1976 introduction to the novel, “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”  That is, SF functions as a way to for the author to present a critique of the world as it is through the lens of speculation and metaphor.  So too the reader brings their present to the imagined future.

Though I’ve been writing quite a bit lately, the bulk of what I’ve written has been to my elected officials regarding the confirmation hearings and the Affordable Care Act, among other things.  The same for reading: it’s all been about proposed bills and potentially disastrous nominees.

That said, I am trying to read more poems, especially political poems.  There’s something energizing about political poems that manage to capture both the urgency of the situation as well as the personal, even if the speaker of the poem isn’t the author.  So it was with this morning’s poem from Rattle, Abby E. Murray’s “Poem for My Daughter Before the March.”

Which brings me to the first of the Open Book posts, in which I ask, “What are you reading?”

A few links of interest from around the web, plus an update on the reading group:

• I wondered if this would happen: “John Lewis’s clash with Donald Trump sends the civil rights hero’s book to No 1“.  Yes, it happened.  After hearing about the initial exchange, I reminded myself that I had planned to get a copy of March myself some time ago, but hadn’t yet.  So I’ll be adding to the sales….
• So much is happening right now in US national, state, and local politics that events can be difficult to follow.  Here’s a useful article from The Texas Tribune on how to narrow your focus: “Analysis: When watching lawmakers, think of the high school cafeteria“: “Here’s a trick for observers who want to keep up with at least some of what’s going on: Figure out which group you want to follow, and then watch what they’re watching. Think of your high school cafeteria: cool kids, nerds, band kids, tough kids, jocks, cheerleaders.”
• Reading Group: I will have this month’s reading group post up on the 21st for The Left Hand of Darkness.  And as a reminder, the book for February will be Monteverde: Memoirs of an Interstellar Linguist, by Lola Robles and translated by Lawrence Schimel.

The Future Fire, a speculative fiction journal and press, is raising funds for their next anthology, Problem Daughters, to be edited by Nicolette Barischoff, Rivqa Rafael and Djibril al-Ayad. This intersectional feminist anthology  will contain speculative stories and poems focusing on marginalized women.  Djibril al-Ayad answered a few of my questions about the anthology, and the Q&A is below.  Chip in if you can–it’s a much-needed project in a time when the voices of the authors need to be amplified all the more.

Freethinking Ahead: I’m curious about the title, “Problem Daughters,” as it’s been noted that the “you should care about this woman because she’s someone’s daughter/mother/sister/wife/etc.” argument obscures the personhood of the subject of this argument (as opposed to “you should care about this woman because she’s a person”). How do you see daughterhood functioning in the anthology?

Djibril al-Ayad: That is an interesting question: we hadn’t thought (well I hadn’t, anyway) of the title in terms of the word “daughter” humanizing women, which as you say is a distraction from considering all people human in the first place. Nor do we necessarily expect stories to focus on daughters in a family context (we’re just as interested in featuring mothers and grandmothers, for that matter!) or to take the title literally in any other way. For us, the title started with the word “problem,” both because we were highlighting issues with exclusive feminisms (most obviously the kinds that focus on white woman, or that exclude trans women or sex workers or any other “problematic” category), and because we wanted to problematize feminist conceptions and speculative genres by including stories and voices that are marginalized and excluded by some gatekeepers in one or the other world. We wanted to highlight women, yes, as humans in all their complexity and relation to each other. The word “daughters” came later to our working title, partly I suppose because it has a nice ring to it, echoing “daughters of the revolution” and with connotations such as heiresses, receivers of the baton. Daughters are not always listened to, are often expected to be seen and not heard (and ideally not seen either), but they are the future, they are stronger than their families think, and when they’re willing to make trouble, they can turn everything upside down. (And we need that, don’t we?)

FTA: In light of the current US/UK political climate, some who would have not previously voiced bigoted opinions publicly are doing so, and others who have are feeling more empowered. How might fiction, and in particular speculative fiction, work against this trend?

DA: Yeah, in this dangerous political climate all over the world we need a hell of a lot more than art to fight for progressive values! But I think you’re right that there is a place for fiction in helping to encourage and empower people who push back against bigotry, who believe in inclusiveness and diversity and tolerance. Just as hearing people in a position of power (whether political or in art/media/Hollywood) normalizing fascism is giving courage and voice to an ugly undercurrent of society that has never really gone away, so hearing people speak up loudly and successfully from a variety of platforms in publishing and other arts with a more liberal, feminist, intersectional and social message can help to remind those of us that are terrified by world events that we’re not alone, that there are others who want to hear our voices, that we are also here and strong. In Ursula Le Guin’s words: “If we don’t keep preaching to the choir, the choir will stop singing.” (In this case, of course, it’s not we who are preaching at all—rather we’re inviting the choir up into the public to let the world hear what they have to say.)

FTA: What would you like readers to take away from this anthology? What can they expect?

DA: I hope the first thing every reader who consumed this anthology thinks is, Wow! That isn’t what I expected. I hope the stories blow them away, fill them with fear and wonder, confound them, shatter preconceptions and open horizons. I’m sure every reader will fall in love with some stories and be left shaken (or even cold) by others. I would love readers to come out thinking, This is a story I’ll never forget! For good or for ill. I hope we will all (editors included) learn about experiences and marginalizations and intersections that we hadn’t considered before, as well as recognize problems and personalities and emotions that we thought we were alone in feeling. But we also won’t forget that we’re reading an anthology of excellent science fiction and fantasy—and related genres—and we’ll be carried away by escapist adventure, thrilled by magic and gods and monsters, dazzled by astrophysical and xenobiological mysteries, oppressed by dystopias and apocalypses, terrified by nightmares and tyrants, caught up in struggles of good against evil. Or y’know, maybe even less cliché than that!

FTA: In turn, what do you hope writers—including those whose work is accepted and those whose work isn’t—take away from writing stories aimed at this anthology?

DA: There are a few different ways to look at this question. For one, authors of “own voices” stories—who are writing about marginalizations and intersections of discrimination that they live—already know the issues they face, and have probably written and talked about them before, and don’t need our invitation to work through issues, dreams, utopias, healing, or whatever in fiction. That said, sometimes the opportunity to write something for a particular call can open the floodgates, be cathartic, or lead to new ideas that you might never have written otherwise. I hope it will also be encouraging to have a publication ready to pay 6¢ per word (which is not a living wage, by any means, but it is the SFWA qualifying professional rate) to hear voices that are sometimes actively sidelined and excluded even from feminist venues. For writers who are filling their stories with marginalizations and intersections different from their own (as well as travel to planets they’ve never visited, dragons they’ve never fought, laws of physics they’ve never broken…), I think every time we try to write the other, to walk in differently shaped shoes/look through different colored lenses, we learn to use our primordially evolved empathy that much better.

While rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness for this month’s reading group post, I found a quote that seems all too appropriate for the current political climate here in the US.  Estraven, the king’s adviser, asks Genly Ai, an envoy from off planet, if he knows what patriotism is.  When Ai answers that he doesn’t know, aside from love of one’s country, Estraven explains:

“No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism.  I mean fear.  The fear of the other.  And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.  It grows in us, that fear.  It grows in us year by year.  We’ve followed our road too far.”

I’ll have the reading group post up later this month, but I wanted to note this passage before then.  How do we keep ourselves as a nation from following our own patriotic road too far?

A few links of interest from around the web:

• Roxane Gay has a wonderful essay in Poetry Magazine regarding her appreciation of poetry: “Reading poetry is such a thrill that I often feel like I am getting away with something.”
• Greta Christina’s post, “Depression and Novelty,” explores the importance of new experiences to those of us who get caught in the loop of harmful moods: “As long as it’s reasonably pleasant (or at least not actively unpleasant), novelty of almost any kind knocks me out of my self-perpetuating spirals, fairly reliably, at least for a while.”
• In this week’s letter to an elected official, I wrote to my state senator to express my opposition to Senate Bill 6, the so-called “Privacy Protection Act.”  Here’s an article from the Texas Tribune on the bill: “With bathroom bill, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick plows into ‘tough fight’“.  I’ll post more on this in the FREETHOUGHT RESISTANCE blog.

On the topic of writing to elected folks, I may start posting the content of my letters if that would be useful–let me know.  Caveat here is that I’m writing to my Texas state representative and senator, so the content may not always be relevant to everyone who’s writing letters.