Master’s Thesis

Cooperative Apocalypse: Hostile Geological Forces in N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy

Author: Felicia Stenberg Supervisor: Johan Höglund Examiner: Niklas Salmose Term: Spring Semester 2020 Subject: English Literature

Level: Advanced, 30 credits

Course code: 5EN01E

Abstract

In this thesis I explore the place of the human in the Anthropocene, and our relationship to the Earth through an analysis of N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy. As the trilogy depicts an apocalyptic landscape where the Earth has sentience and humanity is divided into three subspecies, this work of speculative fiction lends itself well to be interrogated and examined as an allegory for our current climate crisis. The analysis is anchored in posthumanism and employs a variety of concepts, such as Bruno Latour’s work on agency and deanimation, Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, and Amitav Ghosh’s work on speculative fiction among others. I argue that The Broken Earth trilogy illustrates that the Earth is an agentive network that can no longer be ignored and contend that the trilogy complicates both anthropocentrism and individualism by depicting amplified versions of human beings, and in doing so highlights the arbitrary boundaries between both nature and society, and human and nonhuman. Thus, The Broken Earth trilogy can be read as a warning call for a future to be avoided at all costs, while concurrently be used to make sense of the incomprehensibility of our contemporary era.

Key words

The Broken Earth trilogy, N. K. Jemisin, Bruno Latour, Agency, ANT, Geostory, Donna

Haraway, Chthulucene, Sympoeisis, Become-with, Response-Ability, Anthropocene,

Anthropocentrism, Posthumanism, Climate Fiction, Collectivism, Gaia Theory, Amitav

Ghosh.

1. Introduction ...... 1

2.State of the Art: The Broken Earth Trilogy ...... 4

3. Posthuman Theory in The Anthropocene ...... 9

3.1 Gaia Theory According to Margulis and Lovelock ...... 10

3.2 Latourian Moderns and (Non)humans, Divided...... 11

3.3 Agency of the Nonhuman and Geostories ...... 13

3.4 (De)Animation ...... 14

3.5 Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene ...... 16

3.6 What Stories Tell Stories—The Potential of Speculative Literature ...... 19

4. “Let’s Start with the End of The World”—an Introduction to The Broken Earth...... 21

4.1 Nonhuman Agents—Earth as a Broken Synergistic Network in Need ...... 26

4.2 Embracing The Subhuman—Orogenes in Need of Sympoiesis in The Anthropocene ...... 34

4.3 Failed Posthumans—Stone Eaters and Orogenes in Relation to Each Other...... 46

4.4 The Issue With Living and Temporarily Dying on a Broken Earth ...... 51

5.Reanimation—What Speculative Literature Can Do ...... 56

6. Conclusion ...... 60

Works Cited ...... 64

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1. Introduction

The times we live in now are, as they say, interesting. Whether it is viruses that threaten the lives of millions while politicians worry about economic collapse or the constant threat of the destruction of an environment that humans are both part of and dependent on, it is clear that the world and its inhabitants are in a constant state of vulnerability. Humanity’s role as the centre of importance in the world is now more than ever put into question, as the anthropocentric worldview that has reigned for centuries has been shown as harmful in the current epoch, today sometimes referred to by scholars as the Anthropocene. Thus, change is of the essence, and time is clearly running out.

People have always turned to stories to make sense of the present moment, while literature often reflect that present in turn.1Today, this includes climate change, and the view of humanity as a geological force. Consequently, the instability of our place on this planet is something that permeates much of recent speculative fiction. In this thesis, I analyse one such work, The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin, which comprises; The Fifth Season (TFS), published in 2015; The Obelisk Gate (TOG), published in 2016; and The Stone Sky (TSS), published in 2017. All three instalments won the Hugo Award for best novel the year after their publication, making it not only the first trilogy in which all parts have received this honour, but also made author N. K. Jemisin the first African American woman to win in that category.

The Broken Earth trilogy begins with the Earth literally breaking apart, via an earthquake that splits the continent known as the Stillness in half. Taking place thousands of

1An interesting historical example to note here is that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the Summer of what is known as The Year Without Summer, allegedly caused by a volcanic eruption filling the atmosphere with ash in 1816 (“1816, The Year Without a Summer”). Whether this truly was the inspiration for Shelley remains in doubt, however, but the way history has put the two together is nevertheless of significance here.

Stenberg 2 years into the future, the Earth in the trilogy—referred to as “Father Earth”—is one constantly plagued with earthquakes that cause “Fifth Seasons,” extended “winters” in which ash fills the atmosphere. These Seasons often last hundreds of years, nearly eradicating humanity every time they occur. Furthermore, it is revealed that the Earth has sentience, and is hellbent on vengeance against humanity. Therefore, the dystopian world presented in the novels exists in a constant state of environmental crisis, and perpetual peri-apocalypse.

The metaphorical and allegorical parallels that can be drawn to our current environmental crisis are evident. A current example is that during the lockdown surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, pollution levels quickly decreased, clearly illustrating the correlation between humanity and the climate crisis. However, despite these measures, reduction of worldwide emission of greenhouse gases might not reach the goal scientists say is needed to stop global temperatures from rising too much, painting a dark picture of just how much we affect the Earth (Storrow). Interestingly, and of importance to this thesis, is that in April 2020 it was reported that due to the lockdown, so-called ambient seismic activity has decreased, showing that humanity is affecting the Earth’s vibration as well (Kaur). The thought of humanity literally affecting the Earth’s movement, then, is not as farfetched as previously believed.

This concept of humanity as a geological force that is affecting the Earth is brought to the extreme in The Broken Earth trilogy. In the novels, humanity has through millennia been separated into three species with different abilities, who all live in a contentious and unstable state in relation to one another. Besides stills—the closest to humans as we know them today—there are those known as orogenes, people that can both cause and stop earthquakes.

The third subspecies, the elusive stone eaters, look like stone statues and can travel through the Earth. Thus, the trilogy introduces people who are connected to the Earth in several different ways, both metaphorical and literal.

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The story in the trilogy is a complex one, and as such it is difficult to define with regards to genre. Jemisin’s works have, for instance, been labelled as both fantasy and science fiction as the trilogy moves freely and unapologetically between both genres. Additionally,

The Broken Earth trilogy has also been labelled as both climate fiction—that is, fiction that in some way deal with climate change—and as belonging to the Afrofuturist tradition. In

Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, Ytasha Womack argues that at its core, Afrofuturism is about the power of imagination to envision possible futures “through a black cultural lens” (loc 140) and “to reinvigorate culture and transcend social limitations”

(loc 350). Womack writes that “Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs” (loc 140). Accordingly, Jemisin writes within a tradition that lays claim to the possibility of literature to transcend obstacles and create change. Of note, however, is that in the trilogy, while the protagonists are people of colour, it is in a futuristic form, with features that often have no equivalent in our reality. Jemisin therefore complicates the notion of race by both highlighting and subverting it in the narrative. 2

The Broken Earth trilogy shows an Earth that has taken back its agency and is actively considering humankind to be its adversary. In this thesis I use a combination of different scholars’ works to examine how the narrative can force us to face the incomprehensible that is the climate crisis. Basing my research in posthumanism and Gaia theory, I employ Bruno

Latour, Donna Haraway, and Amitav Ghosh to explore humanity’s role and place in the occurrence of being on the continuous brink of ecological extinction. My thesis explores the effect of this forcible decentring of humanity’s importance and what happens when the Earth seeks vengeance in a world where apocalypse has become quotidian. The concept of Fifth

2 It is further important to note here that Jemisin is outspoken about the fact that The Broken Earth trilogy was inspired by responses to oppression such as the Ferguson Riots in 2014 and the Black Lives Matter Movement (Hanifin). She emphasises, however, that she does not write about movements as such, but about individuals first and foremost (Hurley).

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Seasons becomes an allegory for humanity’s powerlessness in the face of what James

Lovelock described in The Revenge of Gaia as a vengeful Earth that is now fighting back. I argue that on this Earth, by this Earth, the absurdity inherent in the belief that humanity has ever truly been in charge of anything is made evident, thus illustrating the fallibility of an anthropocentric and individualistic worldview, as humanity cannot be and has never been separate from nature. Consequently, Jemisin’s trilogy depicts not only the folly of an essentialist mindset in a world where what constitutes humanity is constantly in flux, but that in doing so, questions the very notion of humanity as a category in itself. I further contend that by giving the Earth sentience, the trilogy reanimates the deanimated Earth, and by literally blurring the lines between what is Earth and what is life shows the inseparability of human and nature.

The structure of this thesis is as follows: First, I account for the previous scholarship on The Broken Earth trilogy. Then, I present my theoretical framework, focused on the agency of the nonhuman, and humanity’s place in existence. This is followed by the analysis, which is initially divided into four sections, all focusing on the Earth to different extents.

Diverting slightly, the fifth and final analysis section discusses not the narrative of The

Broken Earth trilogy, but its function as a device in restoring symbiosis with the Earth, and the importance of these types of stories.

2. State of the Art: The Broken Earth Trilogy

Since the trilogy is recently published, the scholarly work is not plentiful. The trilogy is filled with such diversity that study has been done in areas including, but not limited to: race, gender, and class, often through an ecocritical lens. To situate my own claims, what follows in this section therefore accounts for the most important scholarship on the trilogy to date.

In “‘Ourworld’: A Feminist Approach to Global Constitutionalism,” Ruth Houghton and Aoife O’Donoghue use Jemisin’s trilogy among other works to problematize the notion of

Stenberg 5 global constitutionalism, that is, “the process of constitutionalising international law and governance” (2). By asking who it would benefit—as global constitutionalism is “inherently gendered” (3)—Houghton and O’Donoghue argue that feminist science fiction can help reimagine what global constitutionalism could be, as it “provides feminists with a testing ground” akin to Thomas More’s fictional island Utopia (3). They state that the trilogy demonstrates that before any sort of solution can be possible “intersectional questions of race, of social status, of economic power, of religion, of abuse all must be tackled, to be fought”

(10). They also raise the issue of how Jemisin complicates the idea of motherhood, something that can arguably be extended, as I will show in this thesis, to parenthood overall in the trilogy, both in the literal and metaphorical sense.

MaryKate Eileen Messimer, in her doctoral dissertation “Gender in Apocalyptic

California: The Ecological Frontier,” argues instead that Jemisin’s work depicts and moves beyond the gender binaries that often plague ecofeminism even while purportedly criticizing them. Messimer writes that binary categories are “central to upholding individualism” (13), a belief which permeates this analysis as well. She claims that with the power of orogeneity, the trilogy expands “human empathy into nonliving matter” as Jemisin imagines “extreme empathy as a solution to the American isolationism that has caused social inequality and environmental destruction” (20). I will expand on this idea of upending binaries in the trilogy, while incorporating symbiosis and agency.

Moving away from foregrounding gender in analysing Jemisin’s work, Misha Grifka-

Wander and Kathleen Murphey both highlight Jemisin’s depiction of oppression as an allegory to slavery, but in different ways. In “Moving Forward: Gender, Genre, and Why

There’s No Hard Fantasy,” Grifka-Wander uses Jemisin’s works, among others’, to argue

Stenberg 6 against Darko Suvin’s now famous dismissal of fantasy literature in favour of science fiction.3

She contends that both “hard science fiction” and “high fantasy” have a gendered bias, as scholarly work has historically associated these genres with masculinity: science fiction with forward gazing and progress on the one hand; fantasy with a conservative and traditionalist outlook on the other, missing the diverse possibilities of fantasy as a genre in the process (65).

Grifka-Wander therefore proposes a new definition, “forward fantasy.” To Grifka-Wander,

“forward fantasy” avoids the backwards gaze common to the genre in “high fantasy” and therefore achieves the same “rigorous realism, the political relevance” (65) that is usually attributed to science fiction alone, albeit not in the same way. The way “forward fantasy” achieves this contemporary relevance—and this is of utmost importance to this thesis—is through rigorous worldbuilding, as such worldbuilding “must reflect the real world enough to make the linkages clear, while also changing the world enough to estrange it” (76). Realism itself having an air of instability and what this means for literature is something that is explicated on in the final part of the theory section.

Grifka-Wander acknowledges the climate change parallels evident in the trilogy, but focuses her argument on the orogenes and shows how the trilogy draws parallels between the treatment of orogenes and historical American slavery. She states that Jemisin complicates the issue of enslavement and “troubles the readers’ conception of freedom,” as the orogenes are capable of lethal force (78). According to Grifka-Wander, The Broken Earth “directly responds to the contemporary moment . . . A simple metaphor is no longer sufficiently estranging or radical, and so Jemisin pushes farther, providing new subjectivities (that of the orogenes and their oppressors) for the reader to inhabit and learn from” (78). Grifka-Wander’s

3 In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, published in 1979, Darko Suvin famously argued that science fiction as a genre is a cognitive exercise that often causes its readers to engage and draw parallels to their real life, while fantasy is mere wish fulfilment and escapism.

Stenberg 7 analysis heavily informs this thesis, and will be built upon and expanded to climate change in this analysis.

Kathleen Murphey takes a different approach in her analysis of how Jemisin depicts slavery in “Science Fiction/Fantasy Takes on Slavery: NK Jemisin and Tomi Adeyemi," as she claims that slavery in the trilogy is not based on race. She writes that “[l]ight and dark skinned people are enslavers and enslaved, so racism falls away from the dynamic or rationale for the enslavers [sic] treatment of the enslaved, highlighting its inhumanity even further”

(110). That is to say, Jemisin shows the elaborate machinery at work to deem some humans as lesser than others. This is part of the fabric of the trilogy’s worldbuilding and will be analysed thoroughly in this thesis.

Homing in on research that is more clearly aligned with this thesis’ own, scholars such as Marvin John Walter, Alastair Iles and Moritz Ingwersen all focus on issues relating to anthropocentrism and the environment in the trilogy. Walter argues in “The Human and its

Others: A Posthumanist Reading of Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone and N.K.

Jemisin’s The Fifth Season,” that the first instalment in the trilogy “manages partly to break with anthropocentrism by de-centring the human from its allocated place of uniqueness” (3).

Interestingly, he also discusses binaries to press the instability of humanity, something that I will return to in the analysis and expand to the rest of the trilogy.

In “Repairing the Broken Earth: NK Jemisin on Race and Environment in

Transitions,” Alastair Iles uses Jemisin’s work as a foundation and draws on several ideas mentioned above to question the role that racial and social subordination play in destroying the environment. Just as this thesis, Iles uses the term Anthropocene and focuses on the Earth as an agent. While he claims that “Earth must be an equal partner” he does so while stating that “Earth can be unbroken” (19). My argument, however, hinges on the assertion that the

Stenberg 8 idea of an unbroken Earth as it relates to the real Earth is too generous a view of our present moment.

Continuing with previous research done with regards to issues relating to the

Anthropocene, one final example is Moritz Ingwersen’s article “Geological Insurrections:

Politics of Planetary Weirding from China Miéville to N. K. Jemisin,” in which he discusses the New Weird and how closely it relates to the Anthropocene.4 He argues that in The Broken

Earth trilogy, “Jemisin’s metabolization of the Anthropocene” resonates because it foregrounds the history of imperialism as having been ending worlds since its conception, and that therefore, “these histories are inextricably interwoven with the onset of resource capitalism” (75). He makes use of Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, and writes that the trilogy literalizes her concept of becoming-with, something this thesis will delve deeper into and build on.

This survey shows the many lenses that the trilogy can be viewed through. The scholarship reviewed all have an anti-individualistic approach when analysing the source material. Important to mention, however, is that a majority of these articles analyse The

Broken Earth as only one example among others. Therefore, in this thesis I will both draw from them and add to the field. While many previous studies focus on topics that are very relevant to my own research, they do not look into the role of the Earth as an actor and its relationship with life in the trilogy to any great extent, which this thesis has as its main focal point. The concepts of gender and slavery have been broached and problematized thoroughly with regards to the trilogy already, and in this thesis, I therefore focus more on the human/nonhuman divide not elaborated on so far in the previous scholarship.

4 In The New Weird, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer define this genre as works that subvert the romanticized ideas about fantasy, often mixing science fiction with fantasy, while trying to unsettle the reader as opposed to genres such as horror.

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3. Posthuman Theory in The Anthropocene

This section delineates the theoretical framework used in my analysis. To situate my thesis, I begin with a discussion of the concepts the Anthropocene and posthuman theory. To that foundation, I add first Gaia theory as defined by Lovelock and Margulis, and then Bruno

Latour’s work on agency, nonhumanity and deanimation. As supplement, Donna Haraway’s

Chthulucene is explored, which includes her ideas of becoming-with, sympoiesis, and response-ability. I conclude the theory section by tying all these theorists’ concepts together in a discussion of what speculative fiction can do, further informed by Adam Trexler and

Amitav Ghosh.

In an Anthropocentric worldview, simply put, humans are at the centre, and thus the most important creature in existence. Anthropocentrism is the belief that humans are superior in value to everything else, and therefore everything that exists, exists to be used by humankind. This belief permeates much of historical thought, whether it is scientific or religious. Many scholars believe, and in ecocriticism especially, that this view of humanity is one of the main causes to the climate issues now raging the globe. The theorists employed in this analysis are all opposed to this mindset of the human at the centre of importance, and all go beyond merely rejecting it. Of the essence, therefore, are definitions of two concepts that are part of the groundwork on which the theoretical framework builds, namely, the

Anthropocene and critical posthumanism.

In a 2000 newsletter, Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer introduced the term

Anthropocene as a new name for the epoch in which we currently live, as climate research now shows that humanity’s use and abuse of the Earth are having clear ecological consequences (17). They proclaim that without any outside forces such as a major ecological

Stenberg 10 event or a pandemic,5 “mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come” (18). It is on this notion, I argue, that The Broken Earth trilogy builds.

The introduction of humanity as a geological force shows the necessity of rethinking the human as a fixed category, at the centre of importance. According to Pramod K. Nayar, critical posthumanism “is the radical decentering of the traditional sovereign” (2). In other words, humanity as the central subject is forced into the side-lines. Critical posthumanism, therefore, posits that there is no such thing as an inherent human essence, and that what makes up humans is a jumbled mixture which have always co-evolved with other species (8). Hence, posthumanism—for the purpose of this thesis—is defined as refusing any sort of essentialism with regards to the human, and by extension, any sort of higher value than any other entity.

To add to these concepts, below I outline Gaia theory, that is, the view of the Earth as a symbiotic system.

3.1 Gaia Theory According to Margulis and Lovelock

Gaia theory, or the Gaia Hypothesis, was developed in the 1970s by James E. Lovelock and

Lynn Margulis. Named after the goddess and personification of Earth in Greek mythology,

Gaia is the mother of all life. In Symbiotic Planet, Lynn Margulis explains Gaia theory as a concept that “postulates that the Earth is alive” (3). The Gaia hypothesis is defined as a process in which the planet and the life on it (and in it) co-evolve (Lovelock 29). Margulis describes Gaia as, “the physiologically regulated Earth” (142), while simultaneously rejecting the oft-repeated claim that the Gaia hypothesis states that the Earth is a single organism. Gaia transcends the notion of a single organism as it emerges from a multitude of living species that makes up the system which “form[s] its incessantly active body” (149). Put differently,

5 I note the timely irony of their usage of this word, in the spring of 2020, but presume that they were thinking of a scenario in which the death toll would include a greater part of humanity. As of this writing, this has fortunately not yet come to pass.

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Gaia is not a single organism because it is a system created by interaction among a multitude of organisms and species. Hence, what defines Gaia is “a physiology that we recognize as environmental regulation,” as Gaia is not an organism among many, but a sum of all the parts on and in it (149). This is a crucial thought that permeates this thesis, and, I argue, the trilogy as well.

Margulis further speaks of the ridiculous idea that humanity has any power, or any say, with regards to the Earth. She writes that “the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable – the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it” (143). This arguably has certain sinister connotations, in the current climate—both literally and metaphorically in this case—and especially when read with Jemisin’s trilogy in mind.

Both Margulis and Lovelock argue that there is a sense of self-regulating when it comes to the

Earth (Lovelock 29; Margulis 147). Through the Gaia Hypothesis, the biosphere is viewed “as an active, adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis” (Lovelock 29).

That is, the Earth keeps itself stable. This stability, however, is referred to as “‘metastable,’ stable in its reactive instability” (Margulis 153). In other words, all that is living on the planet affect the planet just as the planet affects all that is living on it, meaning that Gaia is not only a synergistic network, but also that it should be regarded as alive. With this foundational scientific perspective of symbiosis and inherent blurred binaries in mind, I now move on to discuss Bruno Latour’s work regarding nonhumans and agency.

3.2 Latourian Moderns and (Non)humans, Divided

In his seminal work We Have Never Been Modern, Latour speaks of a false dichotomy between society and nature that modernity created.6 This dualism between Nature/Society, or what Latour calls Nature/Culture, assumes that humanity is not an inherent part of nature, but

6 Bruno Latour does not use the term Anthropocene in this work, as it was published in 1991, 9 years before it was proposed by Crutzen and Stoermer, and our timeline is unfortunately linear in this regard.

Stenberg 12 separated because of certain qualities that defines humans as apart from nonhumans.

Therefore, one of his central concepts is that of “moderns,” as a word for how we view ourselves in the current era. According to Latour, this designates a perspective that alters how we see history, because “[w]hen the word ‘modern’, ‘modernization’, or ‘modernity’ appears, we are defining, by contrast, an archaic and stable past” (Modern loc 254). With modernity, then, came the categorization of what constitutes a person, and any being on the wrong side was automatically—and scientifically—considered lesser than human. As modernity defined itself in relation to the nonmodern, it overlooked this creation of what Latour calls

“nonhumanity.” Nonhumanity is defined as “things, or objects, or beasts” (Modern loc 303).

Ergo, inherent in defining something as modern is creating a power balance between what is human and what (is considered) not. For the moderns, only humankind can have agency, and be free agents (Modern loc 341).

Latour therefore sees the human/nonhuman dichotomy as a parallel to the

Nature/Culture divide. He explains this by exemplifying two thoughts that cannot, and should not, be considered separately, as that makes them both incomprehensible: that on the one hand, Nature has always existed; and on the other, human beings are the only beings that construct society (Modern loc 649). Latour argues that “[i]f Nature is not made by or for human beings, then it remains foreign, forever remote and hostile. Nature’s very transcendence overwhelms us, or renders it inaccessible.” By the same token, society, if considered symmetrically, “is made only by and for humans . . . Its very immanence destroys it at once in the war of every man against every man” (Modern loc 660). In other words, it is only humanity that divides Nature and (human) Society into separate opposing concepts, as to other lifeforms on Earth, Society and Nature already exists in symbiosis. Therefore, the two must be considered complementary to each other as they “were created together. They reinforce each other” otherwise, “the first assure[s] the nonhumanity of Nature and the second

Stenberg 13 the humanity of the social sphere” (Modern loc 660). In short: humans and society are not separate from nature, nor have they ever been. To further explicate what this means and how it relates to this thesis, Latour’s examination of nonhuman agency and his concept of geostory will now be explored and defined.

3.3 Agency of the Nonhuman and Geostories

It is important here to note that Latour is one of the founding scholars on Actor Network

Theory (ANT). Simplified, ANT is a theory which is against determinism and which proposes that actions and agency are not limited to inter-human relations but include nonhuman actants as well. While humans act on objects, objects also act on humans in return and ANT treats the acts as equal. All actants—human or nonhuman alike—are simultaneously a part of a network, that is, a sum total of all actants in a specific “thing,” while simultaneously being networks within themselves (Law 5). This reflects the concept of Gaia as a synergistic system and permeates all of Latour’s thought.

In his later work “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” Latour argues that the

Earth is now being recognized as an actant in the Anthropocene, and refers to it is an agent of history, or what he calls geostory (“Agency” 3). Geostories, to Latour, literally means stories of the Earth, and that history needs to include all of the planet. He claims that “the Earth has now taken back all the characteristics of a full-fledged actor” (“Agency” 3). This, in turn, leads to the only hope left being an attempt to protect us against the Lovelockian concept of

“‘the revenge of Gaia’” as truce is no longer an option (5). In other words, that the planet is now fighting back against humanity is something we have to make peace with. Latour writes that “Gaia is another subject altogether—maybe also a different sovereign” (6). This arguably brings the posthumanist notion which decentres the human as the natural sovereign of Earth to its apex, by inverting it completely. In other words, the thought that the Earth is not inanimate, inactive, or nonacting, and may therefore have power that has gone

Stenberg 14 unacknowledged, which in the context of this thesis is highly relevant, as the Earth in the trilogy is life giver, or taker, and deity, simultaneously. Latour quotes Michel Serres as proclaiming that the Earth now, “depends so much on us that it is shaking and that we too are worried by this deviation from expected equilibria. We are disturbing the Earth and making it quake! Now it has a subject once again. (Serres qtd. in “Agency” 4). That is, by considering the Earth as something stable and without agency, and in doing so removing humanity from the equation, humanity as a geological force in the Anthropocene went undetected. Latour writes that this bifurcation between subject and object is incongruous in a reality where the

Earth cannot remain an inanimate object as “it cannot be . . . emptied of all Its humans” (5).

This reflects Margulis’ concept of Gaia as a system made up by the interactive organisms within it, which combined with Latour shows how symbiotic all actants in the network that is

Gaia truly are. The intertwining of life is ever-present, and the lines between human/nonhuman as well as Nature/Culture is not only already blurred, but needs to be blurred. To explain how this came about, I now turn to Latour’s concept of deanimation.

3.4 (De)Animation

Latour further complicates the notion of “moderns” refusing to see the agency inherent in

Nature by exploring how the Earth has been what he terms “deanimated” by humanity. In modernity, the world sans humans was considered to offer “a solid ground for a sort of undisputed jus naturalism—if not for religion and morality, at least for science and law”

(“Agency” 5). Simply put, the incorrect belief that the foundation on which both science and law based their reasoning was stable led to false conclusions. According to Latour, this belief in the stability of the foundation from which science and law emerge only reaches its

“objective” conclusions because of all the subjective work that has taken place “behind the force” of scientific fact (“Agency” 7). As mentioned, people have always turned to stories, beliefs and myths to make sense of their present reality, and according to Latour, science is

Stenberg 15 not exempt from this practice. The praxis, then, of first animating the world with its inherent narrativity, that is, the immanent existence of stories in nature, or geostory, to only deanimate it when the desired results have been achieved, shows the flaws in the logic of assumed stability in viewing the Earth and other nonhuman actants as lacking agency in themselves

Latour writes that:

animation is the essential phenomenon; deanimation a superficial, ancillary,

polemical, and more often than not vindicatory one. One of the main puzzles of

Western history is not that ‘there are people who still believe in animism,’ but the

rather naive belief that many still have in a deanimated world of mere stuff; just at the

moment when they themselves multiply the agencies with which they are more deeply

entangled every day. The more we move in geostory, the more this belief seems

difficult to understand (“Agency” 7).

In other words, it is because of humanity’s deanimation of the Earth into an object that we fail to see the effects we have had upon it, and the agency it is reclaiming now. An inanimate object has no agency, but a deanimated object has falsely had its agency removed, or bypassed. By essentially ignoring the animation and agency within actants that is inherent within Nature, the whole story, as it were, does not get told.

Latour later expands on this concept of deanimation in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime, in which he argues that “the idea of a deanimated world is only a way of linking animations as if nothing were happening there. But agency is always there, whatever we may do” (Facing Gaia 68). This means that deanimating an actant does not mean its agency is removed, only wrongfully concealed. Therefore, the idea of having clear distinctions between Nature/Culture or human/nonhuman “is nothing like a great philosophical concept, a profound ontology; it is a secondary stylistic effect” used to simplify the notion of agency by prescribing some beings as animate and others as inanimate. This

Stenberg 16 divide, however, succeeds only in deanimating certain subjects into objects “called ‘material,’ by depriving them of their activity, and in overanimating certain others, called ‘human,’ by crediting them with admirable capacities for action – freedom, consciousness, reflexivity, a moral sense, and so on” (68). Humanity’s practice of under- and overanimating things, and in doing so reducing actants to mere matter, is of utmost importance to this thesis, as the nature of the narrative also extends this to certain types of humans as well.

Latour argues that the point of living in the Anthropocene is to not fall back on the old ways of doing things and of viewing the world and its agents: “[f]ar from trying to ‘reconcile’ or ‘combine’ nature and society, the task . . . is on the contrary to distribute agency as far and in as differentiated a way as possible—until, that is, we have thoroughly lost any relation between those two concepts of object and subject” (“Agency” 15). In other words, the solution between the Nature/Society divide is not to attempt to combine the two, but to realize that all actants have agency, and that to view them through the archaic lens of object and subject is impossible. The concept of blurred binaries is present here as well. Ergo, it is crucial not to deanimate the Earth, but instead to reanimate it and realize that humanity is only one actor among many.

3.5 Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene

Donna Haraway builds on Latour’s thought in many ways, but takes issue with the term

Anthropocene, preferring her own coined Chthulucene. In Staying with the Trouble: Making

Kin in the Chthulucene, Haraway claims the Anthropocene lends itself too easily “to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions” (56). For Haraway, an alternative to the Anthropocene is the Chthulucene, an interwoven symbiotic mode of living together with all species—human and nonhuman alike. Haraway suggests that “the

Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky

Stenberg 17 has not fallen—yet. We are at stake to each other … The order is reknitted: human beings are with and of the earth” (55). Put differently, we are entangled with the Earth, no matter how we look at it, and its future is therefore also ours. The Chthulucene is thus in many ways a remedy from the individualistic thought process that is suggested by a term such as the

Anthropocene. In Haraway’s Chthulucene, then, mankind is not the pro and/or antagonist of the Earth, but simply one of the players among many others, which relates to Latour’s argument that all entities are actants with their own agency. This thinking with regards to existence is paramount when analysing both Earth and humanity in the trilogy.

An important note here is that both Latour and Haraway are considered posthumanist scholars and important names within New Materialism. As it rejects dualism, New

Materialism is inherently posthumanist and postanthropocentric (Fox & Alldred 2). It is a term used to describe many different fields’ “theoretical and practical ‘turn to matter’. This turn emphasizes the materiality of the world and everything – social and natural – within it”

(1). This ties in further with Latour’s ANT, as well. However, in a 2006 interview, Haraway distanced herself from the term posthumanism, as she thought that it was too easily appropriated by those who seek techno enhancement often associated with transhumanism, and she considers posthumanism as “way too restrictive” (Gane 140). Haraway, instead, humorously points out that in the Chthulucene “we are all compost, not posthuman” because of the symbiotic nature of existence in and with Nature (Haraway 55). Hence, death is simply a process of becoming-with for Haraway.

“Becoming-with” is central to Haraway’s argument. In the Chtuhulucene, the focus is not on the cause to the current crisis, but instead on how to exist in symbiosis and “become- with” because “[o]ntologically heterogeneous partners become who and what they are in relational material-semiotic worlding. Natures, cultures, subjects, and objects do not preexist their intertwined worldings” (12-13). In other words, no human is an island, nor is any other

Stenberg 18 actor, and everything has agency. This echoes ANT as well, in that if nothing pre-exists its entanglement with other actants, then everything is part of a whole, and in that whole, everything acts on everything else.

Haraway further references Isabelle Stengers’ work on an updated version of the Gaia hypothesis. Haraway writes that “Earth/Gaia is maker and destroyer, not resource to be exploited or ward to be protected or nursing mother promising nourishment. Gaia is not a person but complex systemic phenomena that compose a living planet” (43). Consequently, the agency of the Earth is made clear, and the need for symbiosis is evident. For Haraway, then, humanity needs to “stay with the trouble,” by which she means, “living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth” (2). Response-ability, to Haraway, “is about both absence and presence, killing and nurturing, living and dying—and remembering who lives and who dies” (28). She expands on her definition in an interview, saying that response- ability is “that cultivation through which we render each other capable, that cultivation of the capacity to respond . . . response-ability [is] irreducibly collective and to-be-made. In some really deep ways, that which is not yet, but may yet be. It is a kind of luring, desiring, making- with” (Kenney 256-57). In other words, response-ability is not solely about taking responsibility, but about bettering humanity’s capacity of seeing our place in the system, and not the leaders of it.

Sympoiesis, for Haraway, further signifies this notion of togetherness. As opposed to autopoesis—self-making—sympoiesis shows that the world humanity creates is not one they create alone. Just as humans become-with the rest of the Earth, sympoiesis signifies that we are also made-with the Earth. Haraway argues that if the concept of independent organisms in environments is no longer supported by either biology or philosophy, “then sympoiesis is the name of the game in spades. Bounded (or neoliberal) individualism amended by autopoiesis is not good enough figurally or scientifically; it misleads us down deadly paths” (33). After all,

Stenberg 19 to be any living thing is to be made-with and “to become-with bacteria” (65). This idea of nonindependent organisms ring true in the trilogy for both humanity and Earth alike.

3.6 What Stories Tell Stories—The Potential of Speculative Literature

To situate this theoretical framework and tie all concepts presented here together, I press on the importance of literature as a tool, and will now discuss what fiction can be capable of.

Latour argues that one way of understanding the incomprehensible situation we now face, is through literature. He writes that “[g]reat novels disseminate the sources of actions in a way that the official philosophy available at their time is unable to follow” (“Agency” 8). This is because the “moderns” are blinded by the need to attribute objectivity or subjectivity in a reality in which this categorization is not so simple, as traits of both are often intertwined.

Latour proclaims that “existence and meaning are synonymous. As long as they act, agents have meaning” (“Agency” 12). In other words, acting in itself means that agents have meaning. This meaning can also evolve and change, which means that “[s]torytelling is not just a property of human language, but one of the many consequences of being thrown in a world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active” (13). Put differently, if we admit that the planet is animate and has agency, the “geostory” that can be told will not run the risk of deanimating Earth.

What literature can do, then—and I argue not only “great” novels—is to deal with this complexity, this simultaneity, by presenting a fictional reality that mirrors our own while being safely “distant.” This allows for problematizing the present, and reanimate what has been deanimated. As the moderns by Latour’s definition are unable to handle or face the threats they have themselves caused, fiction can bridge this gap, and help make sense of the incomprehensible—in this case, the threat of human extinction in an allegory for climate change.

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In Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, Adam Trexler examines how things such as climate change and the Anthropocene age alter and affect the possibilities of art and our cultural narrative. He claims that “[t]he Anthropocene challenges science fiction’s technological optimism, general antipathy toward life sciences, and patriotic individualism” (14). Climate fiction novels, he argues, have a diverse ability within their narratives, which makes them “a privileged form to explore what it means to live in the

Anthropocene moment” (27). In other words, climate fiction can interrogate our present moment through its intrinsic worldbuilding.

Furthermore, Amitav Ghosh points out in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, that climate change as a subject has rarely been broached in so-called serious literature, instead relegated to genres such as science fiction and fantasy. Ghosh writes that “[i]t is as though in the literary imagination climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel” (loc 79). That is, including the concept of climate change in a work of fiction would instantly relegate the work to the “lower” genres such as science fiction, fantasy and horror that make up speculative fiction. It could be argued, then, that speculative fiction is now the place where the reality of climate change is explored and highlighted, and becomes in a circumvent way the most realist of fictions.

Ghosh claims that this has occurred because climate change has an air of the uncanny, but not the uncanny of old. The uncanny of climate change is instead that of “non-human forces and beings” (loc 438). This leads to literature having a troubled relationship to what constitutes Nature, as it is now “too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical, or elegiac, or romantic vein.” Instead, climate change events “are instances, rather, of the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the non- human” (loc 447). Ghosh argues that one of the uncanny effects of climate change is that of inanimate things suddenly coming alive, and writes that this shows “renewed awareness of the

Stenberg 21 elements of agency and consciousness that humans share with many other beings, and even perhaps the planet itself” (loc 888; emphasis added). Consequently, what speculative fiction can do, and what I contend in this thesis that The Broken Earth trilogy does, is reanimate what has been deanimated.

Of further relevance here is that Haraway uses the acronym SF to emphasise the notion of inseparability. For her, SF means “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far,” concurrently and inseparably (2). What is one, goes into the others, and so on. She further argues that at heart of the myriad but symbiotic definitions of SF, is sympoiesis, making-with. Hence, Haraway stakes her claim on the need for symbiotic thinking with regards to matters of almost everything. As I will show,

Jemisin’s trilogy takes the concepts detailed above to the extreme both by giving the Earth itself personhood, awareness and goals, and personifying this geological force in the subspecies of humans that can control and manipulate the Earth’s energy.

4. “Let’s Start with the End of The World”—an Introduction to The Broken Earth

In the introduction to this thesis I mentioned that The Broken Earth trilogy arguably falls within the definition of climate fiction. In Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New

Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene, Gregers Andersen narrowly defines cli-fi as fiction that “use[s] the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic global warming in their world-making”

(5). This criterion certainly fit the trilogy, as it heavily relies on allegories to our present time, and puts a lot of emphasis on the vulnerable state that the Earth and life on it is in.

Of consequence to note, therefore, is that geological aspects permeate the narrative, and are used literally, metaphorically and allegorically throughout. The trilogy itself is therefore deeply connected to matters of the geological Earth. A lot of information regarding the worldbuilding is told through several small pieces of writing. These range from stonelore—archaic rules about how to live on the Stillness, a continent where earthquakes are

Stenberg 22 commonplace—to scientific historical reports regarding everything from orogenes and stone eaters, to obelisks, which are large stone pillars that are sources of tremendous energy which hover and drift high up in the sky.

As stated, the trilogy introduces different subspecies of humans on the Stillness. The first, stills, humans without extraordinary powers, are officially in charge. The second, orogenes, are closely connected to the Earth and can manipulate the Earth’s energy to various effects. They are feared and officially considered nonhuman, and are enslaved in every way but name. The third, mythical creatures known as stone eaters, look and act like statues, that is, they “are slow aboveground, except when they aren’t” (TFS loc 78). They are immortal, and equally a part of the Earth and apart from it.

The trilogy also introduces a sentient, vengeful Earth, able to communicate with orogenes and stone eaters. It is revealed that all the myths that permeate the novels surrounding “Father Earth” being alive are not only true, but extremely literal. Legend has it that he did not originally hate life, but that his hate was born when the orogenes destroyed his only child. This child, as it turns out, is the moon, which was flung out of orbit thousands of years ago, by the ancestors to the orogenes. As punishment, they were turned into the stone eaters by the Earth. Thus, humanity became the Earth’s “little enemies,” in the Earth’s own words (TSS loc 4337). Acting in hubris, the humanity of old was attempting to enslave the

Earth—and using slaves to do it, no less—by tapping into its core as an energy source. This energy is known as “magic” and “silver” interchangeably in the trilogy, and it permeates everything on the planet. In large enough amounts the magic causes sentient life to occur.

The narrative structure of The Broken Earth breaks from traditional storytelling in how it is structured. The narrative is complex and layered, containing first, second, and third person narration, as well as the mentioned historical excerpts ranging from semi-religious doctrine to scientific reports. The prologue introduces a yet unnamed narrator speaking in the

Stenberg 23 second person directly to one of the protagonists, Essun, a middle-aged woman and orogene.

This has the effect, according to Walter, of making Essun be perceived as the reader’s own self, leading to categorizing “Essun, and subsequently all orogenes, as human” (13). At the close of the first novel, it is revealed that the narrator is a stone eater named Hoa. As

Ingwersen notes, the narrative is “a type of frame tale through which Hoa recounts the world’s events to Essun” (86). As such, the trilogy is actively mythmaking while simultaneously telling the myths of this Earth.

The trilogy also plays fast and loose with the timeline, as The Fifth Season introduces two other protagonists who are orogenes as well. Both, however, are actually Essun at earlier points in her life, thus telling Essun’s backstory in a slightly unconventional way, as they are told in third person, but not in the past tense. The first is Damaya, Essun as a young girl.

Damaya is shunned by her family after her orogeneity is revealed. In the blink of an eye,

Damaya becomes something subhuman forced to live in a shed without shelter awaiting a pick-up from a Guardian, the people in charge of orogenes. Guardians have the power to negate orogeneity, as they get a corestone implanted at the base of their skulls in their childhood. A corestone is a piece of iron, that is, a literal piece of the Earth, which in turn means that Guardians are themselves of the Earth, at least mentally, as they do its bidding.

Damaya is taken to the Fulcrum, which is school, home, prison, and ghetto to the orogenes— by her Guardian Schaffa.7 He points out that Guardians are often too late, as “by the time a

Guardian arrives a mob has carried the child off and beaten her to death” (TFS loc 463).

Schaffa tells her to not be angry with her family, as they did the right thing in reporting her, as she is dangerous. Damaya remains furious, nevertheless.

The second is Syenite, Essun as a “successful” orogene in her twenties, still filled with rage but living in and working for the Fulcrum. She is instructed to breed with another

7 In an interview Jemisin describes the Fulcrum as “a kind of evil Hogwarts” because the orogenes “can't leave until they're fully trained and then they are let out only to do quick missions” (Paulson).

Stenberg 24 orogene, Alabaster, that she has never met, with the caveat that she will not have to raise or have anything to do with the eventual spawn. Syenite and Alabaster eventually manage to escape their servitude for a few years into an island comm (the name for community in the trilogy). Once Alabaster and Syenite are physically removed from the Stillness, the unnatural state of their previous lives is juxtaposed with that of the people on the Island Meov, where orogenes are in charge and appreciated for their powers. They are eventually caught with disastrous results. Syenite kills their son in an attempt to save him from a life of servitude not worth living, and Alabaster is kidnapped and dragged through the Earth by a stone eater.

13 years later, Alabaster harnesses the energy in the obelisks and causes the largest and final Fifth Season, killing millions in a first step to bring the moon back into Earth’s orbit, get the Stillness to stabilize, and to find a truce between humanity and the Earth. Meanwhile, as the earthquake rips the Stillness in two, Essun has just found her young son murdered by her husband in a racially motivated act after he found out that the boy was an orogene. She sets out to find her husband as he also kidnapped their daughter and kill him before the apocalypse gets a chance to. On her travels she encounters Hoa, in the shape of a strange looking human boy seemingly being born out of the Earth itself. Essun and Hoa eventually comes to join a comm during the Season, which openly accepts orogenes.

In addition, the first two instalments include several interludes that interrupt the narrative in which Hoa appear to speak directly to the reader. For instance, in the first interlude, Hoa says that “[t]here are things you should be noticing, here. Things that are missing, and conspicuous by their absence” (TFS loc 1922). This is followed by examples of the characters’ behaviour that the reader, but not Essun, would find odd. The narrative, then, plays with storytelling conventions by not adhering to any straightforward way of telling it, while also highlighting that this is what the novels are doing. This self-reflexivity makes the story have a distinct postmodern slant to it.

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In the second instalment, The Obelisk Gate, Essun’s preteen daughter Nassun is added to the roster of protagonists. Nassun becomes more and more isolated from society, as her powers grow. The parallels between Nassun and Essun’s own childhood are heighten and exacerbated when Nassun meet Schaffa, the Guardian who also guarded Essun as a child.

Essun, meanwhile, is reunited with a dying Alabaster, and starts to re-learn how to be a part of something larger in a community and what it means to belong and fight for something greater than yourself, and how futile rage is when it has no outlet. Nassun’s rage festers and grows in her relative solitude, as she only has Schaffa to rely on.

In the third instalment, The Stone Sky, Hoa tells Essun his backstory, and how he was the one who threw the moon out of orbit as an act of resistance. Alabaster dies, and it falls to

Essun to complete the mission of returning the moon to its orbit. Meanwhile, Nassun decides to use the same power in the obelisks to turn every type of human into stone eaters, to save

Schaffa’s life, despite knowing that this will kill her and most of the life on Earth. In the end,

Essun sacrifices herself by giving up the fight in order to save her daughter, and in doing so,

Nassun realises that truce is the only alternative, and restores the moon. In the trilogy’s coda,

Essun awakes as a stone eater, determined to make the world better.

The analysis is divided into five sections, informed by the theoretical framework of

Latour and Haraway, as well as Margulis and Ghosh. In the first section, I analyse the Earth as a network and all that that entails applying the Gaia Hypothesis, ANT, and sympoiesis. In the second, I analyse the orogenes and their displacement in society, as officially nonhuman, and their relationship with the Earth through Haraway’s becoming-with. In the third, I examine the stone eaters, and their mythic existence and what being human means. In the fourth, I problematize the trilogy’s depiction of living and dying on and with a broken Earth.

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4.1 Nonhuman Agents—Earth as a Broken Synergistic Network in Need

In the trilogy, the line between what is life and what is Earth, or Nature, is constantly blurred and put into question. As many of the lifeforms have capabilities that lets them manipulate and alter the fabric of the Earth, the interconnectedness of actants is heightened in the narrative. As mentioned, according to Lovelock’s and Margulis’ the Gaia Hypothesis, the

Earth is a synergistic network, and should be regarded as alive. In the trilogy, there is no question of the latter, but the former is in flux. Latour, in turn, argues that the Earth cannot be seen as apart from humanity, and according to ANT that all actants act on each other. As the

Earth is a network, nothing in that network can be viewed as an isolated object, as everything is irrevocably entangled. In this section, therefore, I examine the Earth as a shattered network, further complicated by the sentience and agency made explicit in the trilogy. The Broken

Earth trilogy shows the Earth as a network in which all actants are refusing to agree to be part of that network despite the impossibility of existing outside of it.

The trilogy introduces not only a sentient Earth, but one capable of communication, and thus, interrogation. Margulis notes that Gaia, or Earth, is a system created by the interaction within it (149). In the trilogy, this is shown in a literal form in the trilogy, as sentience is achieved when something has enough of Earth’s energy, also known as magic, within it. For instance, at one point a Guardian becomes seemingly possessed and starts speaking in another voice. There are multiple references to “It,” and the Guardian warns that:

It’s angry … Angry and… afraid. I hear both gathering, growing, the anger and the

fear. Readying, for the time of return … It did what it had to do, last time … It seeped

through the walls and tainted their pure creation, exploited them before they could

exploit it. When the arcane connections were made, it changed those who would

control it. Chained them, fate to fate … It made them a part of it … It hoped for

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communion. Compromise. Instead, the battle… escalated … It speaks only to warn,

now … There will be no compromise next time— (TFS loc 4194)

What is actually speaking here is the Guardian’s corestone. It alludes in its speech to not only the Earth’s wrath and the creation of the stone eaters, but also to the notion that the Earth is now seeking retribution, where there was once a chance to find a middle ground, so to speak.

Introduced and literalized here is the epitome of what Lovelock and Latour call a vengeful

Gaia, and it shows the dissonance and divide between the necessity of sympoiesis and the reluctance to adhere to it.

It is necessary to note here, however, that this communicative, vengeful Earth is not introduced until almost halfway through the trilogy. In this display, humanity being Earth’s

“little enemies” is illustrated for the first time. When Essun attempts to remove a corestone that has burrowed into a person’s flesh, Essun accidentally speaks to the Earth. Interestingly, it answers as if it just noticed she is listening to it, and Essun quickly realizes her mistake:

Oh

No

there is hate and

we all do what we have to do

there is anger and

ah; hello, little enemy (TOG loc 2986)

By being Earth’s designated little enemies, all of humanity is in a perpetual battle with the

Earth, who has a perverse sense of enjoyment in its own suffering and the suffering it can cause in return. Ergo, humanity and Earth are forces to be reckoned with, fighting not for unknown glory, but mutual destruction. The Earth knows, then, that humanity can hear it, and is listening.

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It is through rigorous worldbuilding via the introduction of magic in the narrative that the concept of the Earth as a network is made explicit. As the orogenes connect and align themselves more and more to the Earth, it is revealed that all things in the trilogy are sympoietic, as magic, or silver, courses through everything, animate or not: “you suddenly begin to see in silver. Insects, leaf litter, a spiderweb, even the rocks—all of it now flickers in wild, veined patterns, their cells and particulates etched out by the lattice that connects them”

(TSS loc 1517; emphasis added). Haraway’s notion of the Earth as “sympoietic,” as opposed to “autopoietic,” that is, the idea that the Earth does “not make [itself]” (33), is therefore of high relevance here. As Haraway points out, a sympoietic existence entails that nothing is made on its own. In short, there are no such things as independent organisms in the narrative.

Moreover, the network that is Earth is, just like the planet itself, broken. Many of the actants within the network are actively refusing to be part of and rejecting the idea of symbiosis, and this includes the sentient Earth. Alabaster begs not to be buried underground when he dies, as he knows that the Earth hoards souls at its core, thus rejecting the natural state of letting organisms fully die. As a form of reparation for the abuse and theft of its resources, the Earth “has dragged a million human remnants into its heart . . . and there within itself, the Earth eats everything they were. This is only fair, it reasons—coldly, with an anger that still shudders up from the depths to crack the world’s skin and touch off Season after

Season.” (TSS loc 3195). The Earth then, punishes humanity in death by becoming a literal hell in itself. In doing so, the Earth rejects the sympoiesis, to its very core.

The notion of the Earth as one network, however, has been both ignored and forgotten by humanity, and in the process, the Earth has been deanimated, in Latour’s sense of the word. As such, humanity is not aware of the consciousness of the unfathomable enemy they face. As they depend on the Earth for survival, it also means that it is impossible to fight it.

Part of the reason for this is shown throughout the trilogy in that Fulcrum trained orogenes are

Stenberg 29 hampered by their schooling, as they are taught incorrectly how to use their power. This is exemplified by Essun’s daughter Nassun, when she gains the ability to see in silver much earlier. As a non-Fulcrum trained orogene, Nassun has not been under-animated in Latourian terms in her capability as an orogene. As Alabaster explains to Essun, “[t]he Fulcrum’s methods are a kind of conditioning meant to steer you toward energy redistribution and away from magic . . . that’s how they teach you to direct your awareness down to perform orogeny, never up” (TOG loc 2637). Hence, while O’Donoghue and Houghton broach the topic that

Essun must unlearn, they do so in the context of unlearning only what she believes about herself and society (28). The need for unlearning and relearning, however, can be extended to all actants and the view of the Earth, including the Earth itself. When Essun realizes that magic courses through all things, she is in awe: “what you suddenly understand is this: Magic derives from life—that which is alive, or was alive, or even that which was alive so many ages ago that it has turned into something else” (TOG loc 4655). Thus, imperative for truce is remembering and relearning the symbiotic nature of existence.

The forgotten aspect of all actants being part of one network is further illustrated in how humanity speaks of the Earth. Throughout the trilogy, geological terms are used as curses, and the Earth is referred to as “evil.” This inherently shows that humanity considers the Earth as separate from them, while subconsciously using language that makes the Earth pervasive in all of life. Characters generally uses such phrases as “rusting Earth,” “fire-under-

Earth,” “Earth damn it,” “uncaring Earth” in an offhand way. Hence, in having considered

“Father Earth” as only lore and myth, humanity has been ignoring the truth that has been staring them in the face all along, and in doing so, rejecting sympoiesis in turn.

Important to note, however, is that it is mostly humans that are in discord with Earth.

Quietly, almost in the background throughout the trilogy, the nonhuman animals are shown to easily adapt to the Fifth Season. Animals known as khirkusas immediately go from habitual

Stenberg 30 domesticated pets to feral killing machines, while animals called boilbugs multiply exuberantly. Hence, it is only humanity that worries about extinction. In their hubris, mankind was so reluctant to naturally evolve that they instead took charge of their own progress by splitting into different subspecies in an effort to master the Earth, subspecies which must now evolve as best they can. Illustrated here, moreover, is also the connectedness to the Earth that permeates the narrative, as these animals are truly becoming-with the Earth, adapting joyfully to its new violent nature.

Additionally, the network of Earth is unstable by necessity, whether or not it is broken or repaired. Millennia ago, when Hoa flung the moon away and caused what is called the

Shattering, he did it as punishment for those who had enslaved him and were going to “put a leash on the rusting planet” (TSS loc 4032). He did not, however, actually destroy the world, even by his own admission. He simply changed it. Hoa points out that when “we say that ‘the world has ended,’ remember—it is usually a lie. The planet is just fine” (TSS loc 74), which is an interesting word choice. Fine, in this instance, is relative. The Earth, as its inhabitants, survive, but neither it nor life on it is in a good state. Fine, then, is an overstatement of epic proportions, as the Earth is anything but. A Fifth Season is simultaneously something unnatural on Earth—signified by the very name of them as additional to an established ecosystem, yet they are made by natural means by both Earth and people. The Shattering is not a destruction of the Earth, but a massive earthquake. Yet it is an earthquake, something natural, nevertheless. As Hoa puts it, ending the Seasons “does not mean complete stability.

Plate tectonics will be plate tectonics” (TSS loc 5088). This emphasises the entangled network that is the Earth, as well as the sympoietic nature of it. The instability of existence is necessary if it is to exist at all, as the “ongoingness” Haraway highlights needs to include becoming-with in its continual process. Literalized here, then, is the epitome of Lovelock’s metastable Gaia, stable in its intrinsic instability.

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Of importance to discuss, therefore, is the recurring motif of parasites in the narrative, as humanity and Earth alike are referred to as parasites throughout the narrative. This is a paradoxical state that few characters appear to realize in the trilogy, as no two beings can be mutually parasitic. Humanity is neither a parasite on the Earth, nor is the Earth a parasite to humans. Instead, the realization that the relationship is not commensal, but symbiotic, is a fact neither side can handle very well. While the Earth sees humanity as the enemy and wishes to kill them, it would also kill any chance of regaining the moon to its orbit in the process.

Interdependence is not something that comes naturally for humanity, or Earth, but it is the situation that life finds itself in in the novels, no matter how it is viewed. As an allegory to our present time, this thought is chilling, as our Earth does not seem to have an issue with interdependence yet. But, as previously mentioned, time is running out.

This notion of refused interdependence is depicted clearly in the trilogy. There exists a sort of mutualism that is continuously sabotaged, destroyed or ignored by all sides in the war.

The question then becomes not which side is the parasite, but how the sides will come to realize and admit that the situation has moved far beyond a state where any actant can claim superiority over any other, for better or worse. The Earth cannot get the moon back by himself, after all. The cooperation in the trilogy does not only extend to between the human subspecies, but to between Earth and life on it. the Earth is “fine,” as Hoa puts it, but it is not happy or content. At the close, happiness would be an overstatement, but perhaps satisfaction would apply.

Furthermore, it is shown through the geostory that permeates the narrative that there was once a people living in symbiosis with the planet, but their wisdom was ignored in the name of profit. Inverted here, is the concept of Latour’s moderns, as the trilogy takes place far into the future the moderns are a thing of the past. they are the ones who tried to enslave the

Earth and its energy and in doing so created the stone eaters in their conceit. Their abuse of

Stenberg 32 the Earth is described as “parasitic” in their pursuit of harvesting magic (TSS loc 4313).

Depicted in the trilogy, then, is the aftermath of what the moderns have wrought. It becomes a sombre allegory to what will be left if the Anthropocene is not challenged, or re-thought, as in the case of Haraway’s Chthulucene. Thus, Latour’s notion that the moderns are incapable of grasping this threat is brought to its extreme in the trilogy, as they committed suicide by hubris. The mankind in the trilogy’s present day is not afforded the luxury of ignoring the issue because they cannot grasp it, as the inevitability of their own demise is fast approaching.

It becomes, therefore, imperative that they realize the symbiosis necessary, and reach some form of truce. This functions as an allegory to our present, in a very sinister sense.

That is to say, that when Iles argues for repairing the Earth, and that the we can unbreak it (Iles 19), this is antithetical to what I claim the trilogy sets out to do. This idea of unbreaking the planet or repairing it, ignores the fundamental symbiosis at the heart of existence. In the trilogy, however, this does come to pass. This unbreaking is exemplified by humankind getting the moon back to appease the Earth and stop the Seasons. Although noticeably donut-shaped, the moon is returned, and balance is nonetheless restored. Ergo, when Iles correlates the fictional “Father Earth” of the trilogy with its real counterpart and claims that our Earth can be unbroken as well, I contend that this is a too hopeful message to take away from the trilogy.

As life on Earth has always co-evolved with the Earth itself, and everything is part of one network, the Earth cannot be unbroken, it can simply continue to change and evolve. To unbreak something—to heal something—intrinsically gives more agency to certain actants over others. Moving forward must involve looking forward as well. Consequently, it cannot be a matter of undoing anything, as that very concept of reversing a broken Earth continues to put humankind in the centre of responsibility and agency, and in doing so advocating

Stenberg 33 anthropocentrism, instead of finding a way to stay with the trouble, as Haraway puts it, and cultivate response-ability.

Therefore, while The Broken Earth trilogy clearly heals the Earth, this is not a hopeful message in itself, as it actually becomes an ominous message to our contemporary era. As it is established that orogenes are the only creatures on Earth with the power of restoring the moon, the Earth in the trilogy needs humanity. Orogeneity is seemingly a latent gene in humans, and not strictly hereditary from parent to child. However, in its haste to win and gain retribution, the Earth incorrectly saw humanity as a homogeneous mass, and named it enemy.

As Hoa explains, “[h]ere is some enemy psychology: The Earth sees no difference between any of us . . . to it, humanity is humanity” (TSS loc 4326). Thus, where humanity has deanimated the Earth, the Earth has in its blind rage created a false dichotomy between it and humanity. It becomes imperative to remember, then, as Hoa is quick to point out “that the

Earth does not fully understand us” (TSS loc 4400). Haraway writes that the Anthropocene could be viewed as an epoch that “is about the destruction of places and times of refuge for people and other critters” (100). She points out that “[t]he edge of extinction is not just a metaphor; system collapse is not a thriller. Ask any refugee of any species” (Haraway 102).

The threat is not an outside source, like an alien invasion, but part of what is necessary for all life, the planet. The threat is so sinister, so vast that it is impossible to grasp, yet at the same time it is completely entangled in survival and potential prosperity.

The trilogy, then, shows a planet were Earth is actually dependant in certain ways on humanity, while our real world counterpart is very much not, as we arguably do not really have anything to offer Gaia at this point, except more destruction. The Broken Earth trilogy, instead acts as a warning call, letting us know that we are dependants on a system that can survive without us, and not vice versa. All this is to say, that Iles’ reading of the trilogy as an allegory to the potential healing power if only people work together is missing the point. The

Stenberg 34 best we can hope for is to stay with the trouble, and try not to make things worse. The Earth as a network with all its inhabitants are in a constant state of becoming-with, and thus one that will never be complete, both in the trilogy and in our time. On the subject of becoming-with, I now turn to analyse the orogenes and their relationship to the Earth and themselves.

4.2 Embracing The Subhuman—Orogenes in Need of Sympoiesis in The Anthropocene

As established in the summary, the abuse and the separation between human and what society officially considers nonhuman permeates the orogenes’ lives from the moment their orogeneity manifests. The official belief is that orogenes are not human, but subhuman, according to the “Declaration on the Rights of the Orogenically Afflicted” (TFS loc 2995).

This shows the discrepancy of the view of different people and how that works against a symbiotic existence. This notion of their inferiority in value, together with their power, have displaced them in the eyes of society, and as a result made them closer to Nature. This, however, causes a dissonance within them and the network that is Earth that cannot be resolved if it is not faced. All this is to say that in this section I apply Haraway’s becoming- with to explore the orogenes in The Broken Earth trilogy, and their peculiar and singular relationship to the Earth.

As mentioned, geology permeates the narrative, which has the effect of the Earth, and geostory, always being entangled clearly with the narrative, and this is shown clearly in the orogenes. Not only are orogene children born with the capacity to still earthquakes instinctively, but orogeneity is described continuously as mentally “going into the earth” (TFS loc 1025; 1621; 2367; TOG loc 1518; TSS loc 2083). Orogenes do this when threatened, in self-defence, or simply to calm themselves. They are therefore inherently tied to the Earth, intrinsically entwined with it, continually in a state of becoming-with it. Furthermore, as mentioned, Guardians have the capability of “neutralizing” this power, and when it is done, it hurts orogenes and makes them feel less than themselves, as Syenite muses, “[i]s this what it’s

Stenberg 35 like for stills? Is this all they feel? She has envied their normalcy her whole life, until now”

(TFS loc 3332). The orogenes are in a more symbiotic relationship with the Earth than society, which has shunned them for the very ability that they abuse in them.

Consequently, in their connection with the Earth, orogenes are physically and supernaturally tied to its stories. Ingwersen notes that “[t]he Anthropocene is a story, a convenient narrative that comes with its own preconceptions, focalizations, and intertexts”

(79). This is also one of the main contentions that Haraway has against using the term to

“think with,” as it propagates a myth that “is a setup, and the stories end badly. More to the point, they end in double death; they are not about ongoingness. It is hard to tell a good story with such a bad actor” (Haraway 49). Actor here, of course, also refers to actant. She further argues that species Man does not make History, and that the concept of History “must give way to geostories, to Gaia stories” (49). Living and dying in sympoiesis with the planet is more geostory, then, in Latour’s and Haraway’s meaning of the term, than History. Ergo, we are all a part of the geostory, and the trilogy shows this metaphorically through the orogenes.

As an allegory for our present time, the motifs of shelter and the inability to hide from the consequences permeate the narrative. In the trilogy, when Alabaster sets the largest Fifth

Season in motion, the little refuge that humanity has gets wiped out completely. This again mirrors Haraway’s point in the previous section about how humanity is destroying its own refuge in the Anthropocene. Humanity in the trilogy has lived for millennia knowing that nothing is constant, as they live in and with impermanence, which means that they do not build for longevity, but for the short-term. The comms on the Stillness all know that they can be wiped out at any moment, and what little refuge their buildings offer is tenuous, yet it is refuge all the same.

This notion of complete despair and lack of shelter that permeates life on the Stillness is difficult to grasp, and there is a risk of falling back on traditional storytelling morals. In his

Stenberg 36 article, Iles claims that it is those who actively go against stonelore and do not focus on guarding the gates in the trilogy who survives, writing that “humans can only strive to survive fifth seasons through comm-building, rather than by competition and exploitation. Most of the people who live are the ones who can adapt the most flexibly and who cooperate with each other. They do not erect strong walls against each other” (7). This interpretation, however, is not only overly generous, as the opposite, in fact, frequently occur in the narrative, but erroneous, as stonelore never actually says anything about strong walls. Instead, what is depicted in the trilogy is a fierce competitiveness for survival, where there are no villains among people, only desperation. When Essun and Hoa joins a fairly secure comm that is underground, a neighbouring comm try to take it over, as death aboveground is imminent.

Essun and other orogenes annihilate most of the people, in often very inhumane ways. Thus, I argue, that Iles is looking for a moral in the story that is not to be found, as the incomprehensibility of existence in an apocalypse cannot lend itself to a simple good/bad dichotomy. What the trilogy does instead here, is why Grifka-Wander calls it forward fantasy.

As the trilogy refuses to offer any simple answers, rooting for the protagonists when the antagonist has such just cause problematizes our place in the system. The actions of characters acting in desperation shows the dissonance to and directly rejects what Haraway writes about living and dying well in the Chthulucene, namely “to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and recomposition, which must include mourning irreversible losses” (Haraway 101). As

Haraway is speaking of interspecies relations, and therefore against anthropocentrism, illustrated in the actions of orogenes is an ingrained anthropocentric worldview. Loss and grief, however, rings true as it permeates the trilogy.

Grief intensifies the shattered existence that ties the orogenes even further to Earth.

The oft-repeated idiom of how “everything changes during a Season” (TFS loc 2365) in the

Stenberg 37 trilogy signals the mental state of humanity and Earth, as the Earth is not the only thing broken in the trilogy. As life on it is an intrinsic part of Earth, the state of humanity and their interrelationships with all other actants are as well. Interestingly, Haraway notes that just as becoming-with involves living and dying, it is also necessary to grieve-with. She writes that grief, “is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing. Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think” (Haraway 39). Essun and the Earth are both in mourning. They are both in a long-outdrawn period of grief and despair. Not knowing what to do, but knowing that something must be done. Loss of children is paralleled in the Earth and the main character of Essun, who has lost three children, two to death, and one to circumstance. Essun must attempt to hide her children’s orogeneity to keep them safe, as the risk of discovery is shown when her firstborn child—bred on order, but born in freedom—is found and she kills him rather than let him be put into servitude, in doing so, she does the more compassionate thing by killing her son. In killing him, she grants him the status of person, and not tool to be abused.8 This, I contend, is echoed in the Earth and the moon, as well as the relationship between Earth and all life that live upon it. However, Earth and Essun are both going about dealing with grief the wrong way, by focusing on retribution, rather than reconciliation. What Essun should be focusing on is not to exact vengeance on her husband, but save and regain her daughter. Messimer points out that in the midst of all this death and killing, “rather than simply giving in to the death that surrounds her in her own family as everywhere in the Stillness, Essun must keep moving to find her daughter” (155). In other words, Essun, and by extension orogenes in general and the Earth must persevere.

8 This is of course a reference both to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in which the character Sethe kills her daughter rather than let her be a slave. Beloved was in turn inspired by the real historical event where Margaret Garner killed her child in 1856 for the same reason.

Stenberg 38

Grief is constant in all orogenes’ lives in the narrative, and highlights their plight as well as the need for hope. Alabaster, too has experienced unfathomable loss, and is even losing himself in sacrificing everything to restore the planet to a habitable place. When Essun argues with him if humanity is worth saving, she says that the comm they lived in many years ago “‘would’ve turned on us, too, one day. You know they would have.’” He replies by simply half-heartedly agreeing but the adding, “‘[t]here was a chance they wouldn’t … Any chance was worth trying’” (TOG loc 4120). This illustrates that hope is crucial for life to be worth living, and that an imperative for any sort of peaceful resolution is therefore the return of hope, both for orogenes and the Earth.

Grief in the trilogy, then, works as a unifier between actants, and hope is a key part of that in a step towards Haraway’s sympoiesis. At one point, Essun is discussing if there was any way they could have healed together after Essun killed their son, and Alabaster refuses her. This causes her to muse that “[t]here is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both—taken and taken and taken, until there’s nothing left but hope, and you’ve given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing” (TOG loc 1374). Essun is therefore in the same state of mind as the Earth itself, that is, hellbent on revenge, for most of the first half of the trilogy.

Much of the orogenes’ powers are tied to destruction. When Essun leaves her comm to find her daughter, she does not go quietly. She tries, but is confronted because the comm members have realised that she is an orogene. She kills many of the guards, including those that she could have spared. The narrator says then that “[y]ou just can’t help acknowledging the irony of the whole thing. Didn’t want to wait for death to come for you. Right. Stupid, stupid woman. Death was always here. Death is you” (TFS loc 764). As Nature is volatile and

Stenberg 39 destructive for humanity during the Seasons, the orogenes calamitous capabilities are a sign of their connection to the Earth, for better or worse.

Destruction is, therefore, an intrinsic part of orogenes, and parallels them to the Earth as makers and destroyers. This is exemplified clearly when the Earth notices Nassun, and she notices it right back: “Earth wants to kill her. But remember, too: Nassun wants it just as dead” (TSS loc 3166). Vengeance as a strategy is not feasible, however, as it is not productive in the narrative. As orogenes are part of the network, vengeance becomes synonymous with self-destruction. Nassun is driven by an individualistic need for someone or something to pay for the pain she has been through. Hence, despite being more connected and aware of the network she is a part of, she cannot bring herself to admit the need for sympoiesis, much like the Earth itself. This devastating parallel between orogenes and Earth is further shown in stonelore. An arctic proverb reads, “Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth, and master of all” (TFS loc 1920). That is, the cataclysm that is the Fifth Seasons is paralleled in the power of the orogenes. As the narrative progresses and the inconsistency of stonelore is revealed, however, this gets upended.

While the orogenes’ subhuman status is established officially, the degree of inhumane treatment they are subjected to is kept from them. During the start of their mission, Alabaster shows Syenite what the Fulcrum is capable of. He shows her the truth of the node maintainers, which are orogenes that are stationed at certain intervals to keep areas stable. In actuality, though, node maintainers are “lobotomized” children distilled only to their orogene instinct, strapped to wire chairs for their entire lives, while their bodies atrophies and they live in agony. This shows how the Stillness views orogenes, and the reason they are not all treated this way is only because, as Alabaster puts it, “we’re more versatile, more useful, if we control ourselves. But each of us is just another weapon, to them. Just a useful monster, just a bit of new blood to add to the breeding lines. Just another fucking rogga” (TFS loc 1836).

Stenberg 40

Murphey points out that “it is the elaborate dehumanization of the enslaved by the enslavers” that causes slavery to not only succeed, but exist in the first place (110). This elaborate dehumanisation is also shown in Syenite’s reaction to the idea of essentially becoming a broodmare for the Fulcrum. She convinces herself that it is worth it, as “this is what it means to be civilized—doing what her betters say she should, for the ostensible good of all. And it’s not like she gains no benefit from this . . . Better missions, longer leave, more say in her own life. That’s worth it. Earthfire yes, it’s worth it” (TFS loc 971). Thus, the subhumanity of the orogenes is both internalized and not, as it is justified as an act of survival.

Furthermore, for orogenes love is often tied together with abuse. Essun as a child learns to love her abuser, Schaffa, something her daughter Nassun does too. While Schaffa appears kind and loving, one of the first things he does is break Damaya’s hand. The abuse she experiences at the hands of Schaffa creates conflict in her, as he is the only one alive who loves her, despite her monstrosity: “[i]t isn’t right that she loves him, but many things in the world are not right” (TFS loc 4268). This emphasises the unstable position of orogenes that permeates their entire lives, as well as their nonhuman status in society. It is also eventually revealed that Essun also abused Nassun, by doing to her what Schaffa did to Essun as a child—break her hand. Thus, the cycle of abuse and the repetitiveness of it that chronicles humankind's relationship with the Earth, is also present in inter-human relations. Nothing is certain in the instability of life in the Stillness, as love as something positive is in part a luxury not afforded when survival is constantly threatened, and all love is not something inherently good, in the trilogy. This is shown when Schaffa makes clear that while he does love both

Essun and Nassun, he still hurts them. His reaction to watching Essun kill her own child rather than let him be enslaved, for example, shows that love can be toxic and deranged, as he references the child’s fate as a node maintainer: “Schaffa saw her hand on the child’s face, covering mouth and nose, pressing. Incomprehensible. Did she not know that Schaffa would

Stenberg 41 love her son as he loved her? He would lay the boy down gently, so gently, in the wire chair”

(TOG loc 502). As the Earth in its vengeance has literally infected the minds of the

Guardians, it has corrupted what love is in the trilogy, and in extension disrupted what is considered human.

While the divide between human and nonhuman becomes more and more blurred as the narrative progresses, it is important to note that it is already blurred at the start of the story. Everything changes during a Season; everything also gets twisted during a Season. For instance, when the Season hits, certain social faux pas are discarded as everyone knows that resorting to cannibalism is only a matter of time, and that it is a necessity, and therefore not taboo. Consequently, the line between human and food, that is, nonhuman, is already obliterated by not giving flesh any irreverent value in death. Surviving on a planet hellbent on destroying mankind shows the perseverance of humanity in the stills and orogenes, yet also its obtuseness, as mere survival has become the only goal, leading to humanity not searching for a solution to their current situation, but always trying to catch up. Latour argues that the meaning of “global warming” is that “through a surprising inversion of background and foreground, it is human history that has become frozen and natural history that is taking on a frenetic pace” (“Agency” 12). That is, humanity has become stagnant where nature is now anything but. In the trilogy, this can be seen to a heightened extent in the orogenes’ constant state of being reactive as opposed to active, or proactive, at the start of the trilogy. Hence, as humanity’s refusal to adapt as of yet shows in the history of the world in the trilogy, they are decentred and forced out of their own subjectivity, becoming only metaphorical vermin in the eyes of the Earth. By ignoring the agency of everything else, and how humanity is part of a network from which they cannot be extracted, they are in a state of ceaseless collapse. The instability constant in the trilogy extends to socially twisted need for survival by showing that

Stenberg 42 only stories and memory have value, not flesh. While stonelore cautions, “[p]ut no price on flesh” (TFS loc 4647), Essun knows that flesh becomes valuable during a Season.

It is also shown that stonelore is much more malleable than previously believed, further showing the blurred instability of boundaries and rules in the trilogy. This instability includes the past, as the recording of history has been corrupted. Stonelore is incomplete and shrouded in mystery, controlled and manipulated by the Fulcrum. Because of the unstable state in the trilogy, society ostensibly follows stonelore without hesitation. It is stonelore that dictates the hierarchies of society, that literally sets in stone the belief that orogenes are evil.

Alabaster and Syenite have the following exchange about stonelore:

‘We could try letting orogenes run things.’

She almost laughs. ‘That would last for about ten minutes before every Guardian in

the Stillness shows up to lynch us, with half the continent in tow to watch and cheer.’

‘They kill us because they’ve got stonelore telling them at every turn that we’re born

evil—some kind of agents of Father Earth, monsters that barely qualify as human.’

‘Yes, but you can’t change stonelore.’

‘Stonelore changes all the time, Syenite.’ (TFS loc 1585)

Stonelore continually changes, and there are indications that it has been frequently altered to fit whatever era and the beliefs of those in charge. Thus, the permutability of stone is present in the stonelore tablets as well. This is, furthermore, something that previous scholars have overlooked. O’Donoghue and Houghton, for instance, claim that the stonelore tablets and therefore rules of society are “stratified, glorified, [and] calcified” (15), and that “the laws are literally set in stone” (24). While this is certainly the belief at the outset of the narrative, the fact that this turns out to be a lie is of utmost importance to understanding the power structures in the trilogy. That something that is literally set in stone is not actually unchangeable, shows the instability of the situation, and the uncertainty of what is true.

Stenberg 43

Throughout the trilogy, then, it is established that most characters go against stonelore almost subconsciously, which becomes a stronger and more important motif as the events unfold. It signifies that they instinctively know that stonelore is wrong, yet they do not realize this for themselves. This creates a paradox within all characters, as they follow rules and hierarchies that they believe in, yet not. The orogenes know they are not human, yet know that they are human simultaneously.

Moving on from the theme of rules but staying on the topic of destruction, an additional motif is that of parenthood, and all its failings. In Jemisin’s trilogy, humanity is poignantly motherless. Further, they are not the apple of creations eye, but a thorn in its side. As the moon is the child of the Earth, in The Broken Earth trilogy, humanity is markedly not. Life itself, in the trilogy was mere “happenstance,” that the Earth “was pleased and fascinated by”

(TFS loc 4892). O’Donoghue and Houghton also write that Jemisin problematizes the idealization of motherhood, as in the trilogy, “motherhood is part of the dystopian narrative”

(31). This notion, I argue, can be extended not only to parenthood overall, but also to the concept of Earth as maker and destroyer.

When Alabaster tells Essun that the Earth is alive shortly after they have first met,

Essun replies and ponders:

‘’you’re speaking as if it, the planet, is real. Alive, I mean. Aware. All that stuff about

Father Earth, it’s just stories to explain what’s wrong with the world’ …

And the world is just shit. You understand this now, after two dead children and the

repeated destruction of your life. There’s no need to imagine the planet as some

malevolent force seeking vengeance. It’s a rock. This is just how life is supposed to

be: terrible and brief and ending in—if you’re lucky—oblivion (TOG loc 2150)

This shows again the forced passivity that the orogenes have internalized as to not know that they too are a force to be reckoned with, and the complacency in the belief that life is just

Stenberg 44 suffering until it is over. It also shows the complicity of humanity in being taught to deanimate the Earth without questioning it. This is referenced by O’Donoghue and Houghton as well, as they state that Essun “must unlearn what she has been taught is inevitable about herself and her society” (28). Thus, the agency and the reanimation that the Earth is regaining is not clear from the start, but makes perfect sense in retrospect. In the Latourian sense then,

Earth is now a force to be reckoned with in a different way than previously believed.

The trilogy shows an inversion of Margulis’ notion that the Earth takes care of life on it, as well as a confirmation to Stengers’ updated Gaia Hypothesis by making it literal that the

Earth is trying to kill humanity. In this, it shows that the rhetoric of parenthood is both insufficient and paradoxical with a symbiotic lens in mind. This is, then, another binary set that the trilogy disrupts. The parent/child relationship with which the relationship with the planet is often viewed, is just another way of deferring blame, and responsibility, and is thus anti-symbiotic. In Haraway’s response-ability and sympoiesis, all actants are wrapped up in each other and together in a network. Response-ability is something that is cultivated and inescapably collective. The Earth makes humanity, but humanity in turn also makes Earth. By viewing Gaia as mother—or in this case the Earth as father—humanity ignores its own agency and power, to detrimental results. Therefore, by being forcibly decentred by the life giver that is Earth, humanity is faltering. Not only is it in an unstable state of survival, but it lacks purpose and direction.

In the trilogy, orogenes are referred to as “tools,” “weapons,” and “monsters,” signifying their subhuman status to most characters. If the characters are to remain agents of their own lives, they need to find a way to simultaneously reject and embrace these notions, as the lines are blurred. As Essun is turning bit by bit to stone, sacrificing more of herself, she worries that she is beginning to feel less emotions and that this will lead to her “becoming

Stenberg 45 nothing but the weapon everyone keeps trying to make of [her]” (TSS loc 2885). Essun turning to stone limb by limb shows that she is truly and literally becoming-with the Earth.

Becoming-with in the trilogy has multiple levels, as it is at times literal, at times emotional, and other times metaphorical. At the beginning of The Obelisk Gate, Hoa muses that he is telling the story wrong, because “a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being. I am me, and you” (TOG loc 15). He goes on to explain that not only are we the other people we encounter, but also the places and events that shape us.

This is pointed out by Ingerwersen as a literalized version of Haraway’s becoming-with, and thus “a celebration of oddkinship among monstrous outcasts . . . uncontainable by myths of bounded personhood” (Ingwersen 83). Literalized in this version of subjectivity is also the antidote to individualism, as the boundaries are blurred between not only Nature/Society and

Human/Nonhuman but also object/subject. Ingwersen, however, continues to argue that Essun and Nassun “learn that survival is contingent on collaboration, trust, and reciprocal response- abilities” (83). I claim, instead, that for Essun, it is actually the opposite that she learns, as it is not survival that is the ultimate becoming-with for her, but her decision to sacrifice herself for her daughter, and in extension for something greater than herself.

It is therefore imperative for both orogenes and Earth to embrace that which makes them apart and reviled by society, and come to some form of armistice. Agency is near impossible, if all it means is to allow yourself to be used. This is what both Essun and Father

Earth has come to realise. An agent cannot be passive by its very definition. Thus, it is not a question of allowing anything, but one of choosing to act. By embracing her own status as nonhuman, Essun gains her own agency. To be apart from what categorizes the oppressors is not something negative. The Earth is evil in the eyes of humanity, but this opinion goes both ways, and it is evil for a good reason. In embracing its own power, the Earth is also great. By showing the life that lives upon its surface its true power, it regained that power, and became

Stenberg 46 a force to be reckoned with. Thus, truce is central to progress in the narrative. The war,

Alabaster explains, has three sides. The first wants people dead, the second wants people neutralized, that is, made into stone eaters. The third option, however, is to:

Give Father Earth back his lost child and perhaps his wrath will be appeased. That’s

the third faction, then: those who want a truce, people and Father Earth agreeing to

tolerate one another, even if it means creating the Rift and killing millions in the

process. Peaceful coexistence by any means necessary. (TOG loc 4335)

It is this notion of coexistence that becomes imperative, yet as noted by Essun, peace does not mean there will be an end to suffering, nor that suffering is not an intrinsic aspect of peace in the Stillness. Truce does not mean camaraderie, only the discontinuing of war. On the topic of endless suffering and necessary coexistence, I now turn to analyse the stone eaters, and their relationship to existence itself.

4.3 Failed Posthumans—Stone Eaters and Orogenes in Relation to Each Other

When it comes to the stone eaters, much of the references to geology that is metaphorical even within the narrative becomes abruptly literal. For instance, where orogenes mentally “go into the Earth,” for instance, stone eaters do so physically—and they can take people with them, thus blurring the lines of what constitutes flesh. The permutability of stone mentioned with regards to stonelore becomes physically manifested here as well. The stone eaters therefore work as an extreme metaphor for showing the absurdity of binary boundaries already introduced through the orogenes. Ingwersen notes that “[t]he permeability of this boundary is indicative of the modes of kinship and transcorporeality that ultimately serve to heal Jemisin’s wounded subjectivities. Characters are not stable but—like the planet— evolve in a process of perpetual transformation” (83). Ingwersen’s point here is that the mere existence of stone eaters in the trilogy shows the instability and uncertainty of the divide between humanity and nature, as their flesh is permutable, that is, transcorporeal. By creating

Stenberg 47 the stone eaters, the Earth forced them to become-with the Earth itself. It is in this integral instability that orogenes and stone eaters find not only strength, but a middle ground, as they begin to see the symbiosis of a sympoietic existence with each other. Accordingly, in this section I implement Latour’s work on agency and actant, as well as Haraway’s concepts that form her Chthulucene to examine the stone eaters, in their relationship to both orogenes and the Earth, and argue that they function as a metaphor for co-evolving while simultaneously illustrating the how ingrained anthropocentrism is in the narrative.

The possibility in a more collective existence is shown clearly but subtly in all more- than-human actants’ respective relationship between each other and to the other subspecies.

At the start of the trilogy, Alabaster feels a clear disgust at the sight of the stone eater

Antimony’s movement, as he “has grown used to it, but even so, he does not look at her. He does not want revulsion to spoil the moment” (TFS loc 80). However, to cause the Season, he has to align himself with the magic that permeates Earth. He has to become-with the Earth, and the steep price for mixing orogeneity and magic is that he begins to turn to stone limb by limb, stone which Antimony eats. Alabaster is slowly dying while being eaten alive. This, paradoxically, alters his relationship Antimony for the better. In realising what they can do for each other, and what they can gain from each other, Alabaster eventually finds solace in their relationship, as she sings to him, and supports him both emotionally and physically:

“Antimony has moved fully into the nest with him these days, and you rarely see her in any pose other than “living chair” for him—kneeling, legs spread, her hands braced on her thighs.

Alabaster rests against her” (TOG loc 4110). I claim that this shows that interspecies sympoietic existence, if embraced, can lead to belonging of a new sort.

Compare, for instance, Essun’s evolving relationship with a stone eater, Hoa. While she has had much less time to grow used to stone eaters than Alabaster has, she is quick to not only accept the oddness of their existence, but also never shows revulsion towards them.

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Alabaster has a contentious relationship Antimony based on her acts towards him, while

Essun has a compassionate one because of Hoa’s approach to her. When Hoa is in the shape of a young boy, Essun notices that there is something off about him, as he does not breathe or eat, but Essun has “a lot of experience with children who are secretly monsters” (TFS loc

2425). When Hoa returns to his actual form as an adult stone eater, Essun is unnerved by his presence and the way he moves and looks, but quickly comes to terms with it because Hoa is

“watching you the way he always used to, all eyes and hope. Should it really matter that the eyes are so strange now?” (TOG loc 3642). She also finds comfort with him, much like

Alabaster did with Antimony, even when the rest of the comm she is traveling with fear him and he spends most of his time in the Earth:

It’s impossible not to notice the mountain lurking within the stone just behind you.

You don’t call him out because the other people of Castrima are leery of Hoa. He’s the

only stone eater still around, and they remember that stone eaters are not neutral,

harmless parties. You do reach back and pat the wall with your one hand, however.

The mountain stirs a little, and you feel something—a hard nudge—against the small

of your back. Message received and returned (TSS loc 3490)

Essun’s relationship with Hoa begins on a much more common ground than Alabaster’s and

Antimony’s does. Thus, Essun is in a much more promising position to both accept beings she does not understand and show compassion towards them from the beginning. This shows what Messimer calls “radical empathy” (154), and I argue that while Alabaster shows empathy in spades, it does not have the time to reach the status of radical to the extent Essun’s empathy does, as his relationship with stone eaters had a much more contentious beginning.

The different reactions to stone eaters that Essun and Alabaster has, and their feelings towards them, highlights the fact that stone eaters are individuals just as orogenes are. When it is revealed that there is a war waging with more than two sides, the heterogeneity of the stone

Stenberg 49 eaters becomes clear. The commleader tries to lump them and their goals together, to which

Hoa replies, “‘[n]ot ‘stone eaters.’ Not all of us want the same thing. Some like things as they are. Some even want to make the world better… though not all agree on what that means.’

Instantly his posture changes—hands out, palms up, shoulders lifted in a What can you do? gesture. ‘We’re people’” (TOG loc 3774). This shows not only the need for cooperation between subspecies, but also the complexity and agency within every actant involved.

When Hoa transforms to his real actual stone eater body, it further foregrounds how unstable the definition of human is in the narrative. Stone eaters were human once, and according to Alabaster it is not what their flesh is made of that sets them apart from people, but that being alive for thousands of years messes with the mind: “‘I think it’s that no one can live that long and not become something entirely alien’” (TOG loc 2176). Essun then ponders,

“you can think of Hoa in that moment. Being fascinated by soap. Curling against you to sleep.

His sorrow, when you stopped treating him like a human being. He’d been trying so hard.

Doing his best. Failing in the end” (TOG loc 2176). Earlier, when Essun realizes that Hoa is protecting her, and has been for some time, her compassion also comes through: “[s]o few have ever tried to protect you, in your life. It’s impulse that makes you lift a hand and stroke it over his weird white hair. He blinks. Something comes into his eyes that is anything but inhuman” (TOG loc 481). This illustrates both that the boundaries are already blurred to what makes a human, and that the notion of humanity as a category to belong to in itself is arbitrary, in a posthuman sense. When Hoa finally shows his true nature as not an odd-looking child, but an adult stone eater—albeit “racially nonsensical” (TOG loc 3628)—he and Essun has the following exchange:

‘Ah, yes. Alabaster said all of you were human. Once, anyway.’

There is a moment of silence. ‘Are you human?’

At this, you cannot help but laugh once. ‘Officially? No.’

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‘Never mind what others think. What do you feel yourself to be?’

‘Human.’

‘Then so am I.’

He stands steaming between the halves of a giant rock from which he just hatched.

‘Uh, not anymore.’

‘Should I take your word for that? Or listen to what I feel myself to be?’ (TOG loc

3639)

This conversation between the two highlights two seemingly unintentional paradoxical notions. On the one hand, that the belief that humans are only human in the eye of the beholder is oversimplifying the concept of humanity. Consequently, it is very important here to note that Essun’s eventual reaction to all of this is to continue to treat Hoa as a person, while not shying away from what makes him different: “[s]o you sigh and also let go of the part of yourself that wants to treat him as something else, something frightening, something other. He’s Hoa. He wants to eat you, and he tried to help you find your daughter even though he failed. There’s an intimacy in these facts, however strange they are, that means something to you” (TOG loc 3652). This shows that Essun is capable of co-evolving and living symbiotically in much the same way as Alabaster was, albeit through a different journey. The weary showing of compassion even for beings she does not understand is one of the reasons that Essun manages to see the sympoiesis between species.

One the other hand, however, the exchange between Essun and Hoa shows the erroneous view they both have of worth as it relates to the concept of human. It is in this desire to be considered, and to consider themselves human, that both orogenes and stone eaters fail to consider why this matters. It shows that society in the Stillness still adhere to an anthropocentric worldview, as all subspecies of humanity desperately wants to be human above all else, never stopping to consider that that line of thinking is the very reason for the

Stenberg 51 oppression in the first place. To truly change the status quo, orogenes and stone eaters should instead embrace their nonhumanity, and look beyond such binary categories.

The transient properties of flesh that permeates the narrative is not just applicable to life and death. When Essun begins to turn to stone whenever she uses her powers, she soon accepts it, because her relationship with Hoa is not built on necessity, but mutual respect. The reach across party lines and the collectivism that Essun learns to defend and fight for, is what is necessary to succeed. This notion of the blurred lines between flesh and Earth act as another steppingstone to the ultimate goal of embracing the sympoiesis of existence in the trilogy, of being a part of a symbiotic system with Earth. Thus, it is through their shared more-than- human yet not officially human status that they learn this, and through which they are capable of seeing Earth as an equal actant, and by extension save humanity as a whole.

Highlighting the agency of all actants in the narrative further, Hoa confesses that he was once one of the stone eaters seeking vengeance against the Earth for turning them into stone eaters. He then explains, “but what it keeps coming back to is this: Life cannot exist without the Earth. Yet there is a not-insubstantial chance that life will win its war, and destroy the Earth. We’ve come close a few times. That can’t happen. We cannot be permitted to win” (TOG loc 1003). This shows the destructive status quo, and the incentive for a peaceful resolution, as well as the need for a realization of the symbiotic nature in the relationship between human and nonhuman. Furthermore, the thought that we cannot be permitted to win is chilling when seen as an allegory to our current real situation. On that cheerful note, I move to discuss the issues surrounding dying in the trilogy.

4.4 The Issue With Living and Temporarily Dying on a Broken Earth

Throughout the trilogy, there is a recurrent theme of mercy, and to which actants it pertains, and to which it does not. It is illustrated that the notion of being granted mercy needs to widen significantly, for any sort of peace to have an iota of chance to succeed. Essun’s belief about

Stenberg 52 her nonhuman status is therefore deeply ingrained in her. When discussing what to do with the node maintainers, abused in the name of keeping the Earth still, a person asks Essun if the doctors watching them will mercy kill them, at which point Hoa points out that “[y]ou resist the urge to say, Mercy is for people. That way of thinking needs to die, even if you’re thinking it in bitterness” (TSS loc 3439). Essun is changing into a more cooperative person, but this realization is hard-won.

In the end, by showing herself as an agent and actively surrendering, Essun embraces the trouble of living and dying in and on a broken Earth. Furthermore, Essun does not die reluctantly, but arguably the happiest she has ever been. Before she sets off on her final journey, she even notes this herself: “[w]hen have you ever left a place this way—openly, nonviolently, amid laughter? It feels … you don’t know how it feels. Good? You don’t know what to do with that” (TSS loc 4492). This means that it is the strength of a community, of realizing the need for working together and the strength and purpose this creates that is the key for humanity’s survival. Essun’s strength is further illustrated when she travels through the Earth on her way to restore the moon: “[y]ou keep [your eyes] open, though, as the world goes dark and strange. You feel no fear. You are not alone” (TSS loc 4536). Hence, it is in embracing the notion of collectivism that Essun is capable of seeing the bigger picture, of the importance of not only living, but dying, in response-ability on Earth.

Therefore, when Essun realizes that the right choice is to stop fighting, in an effort to save her daughter’s life, she also finally chooses death. She dies smiling, filled with love for her daughter: “more than anything else, you want this last child of yours to live … and so you make a choice. To keep fighting will kill you both. The only way to win, then, is not to fight anymore.” (TSS loc 4984). Hence, when Essun accepts death, it is in a spirit of collectivism, as she sacrifices herself in the hope that her daughter sees the bigger picture, and learns what

Stenberg 53 it means to show mercy as an active choice. Essun becomes-with death as her final show of power.

Unfortunately, however, in the final moments of the trilogy, Essun’s sacrifice to save life on Earth gets oddly negated, in two ways. First, Essun is transformed into a stone eater by

Hoa. Not only does this remove and repudiate her sacrifice, but in becoming immortal she does not actually die in response-ability, in Haraway’s meaning of the term. Secondly, Essun awakes not only as a stone eater, but with all her memories and identity retained, even in complete physical overhaul.

Hence, when Essun is transformed into a stone eater, she remains herself, despite the fact that this goes against what is established with regards to what becoming a stone eater entails in the narrative. It usually takes millennia for a new formed stone eater to remember who they once were, if they remember at all. The creation of the stone eaters was a punishment by the Earth, after all. As a stone eater explains, “‘[u]ntil the Earth dies, I live,

Nassun. That was its punishment for us: We became a part of it, chained fate to fate” (TSS loc

3984-85). Thus, becoming a stone eater is gaining immortality, but usually a death of a subjectivity all the same. This is made explicit in the narrative as Alabaster has gone through this transformation already. Messimer notes that “[h]umanity must live with and inside its environment, made intimate and no longer separate from humans” (140). This is shown in an allegorical way by both Essun and Alabaster becoming stone eaters in death, and how differently they take to it. When Essun glimpses what Alabaster has become now, he is not

Alabaster any longer: “its eyes are black . . . they watch you with only faint recognition, with a puzzled flicker of something that might be (but should not be) memory” (TOG loc 4860).

Hoa later confirms this by saying, “‘[t]he lattice doesn’t always form perfectly, Essun,’ he says. The tone is gentle. ‘Even when it does, there is always … loss of data … we are fragile at the beginning, like all new creatures. It takes centuries for us, the who of us, to … cool’

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(TSS loc 3639). Hence, Alabaster at least, it could be argued, is now reborn completely. That is, he must rebuild himself from scratch, with no guarantee if he will ever truly remember who he was. This lends some credence to the cost that the orogenes have symbolically had to bear to unbreak the Earth, but the narrative does not offer Essun the same weight in her journey, instead opting for a literal happily ever after.

Therefore, despite literally becoming of the Earth, Essun’s fate lacks sympoiesis.

While physically made-with, her fate metaphorically rejects the natural end needed to achieve it fully. As Haraway states, “generative flourishing cannot grow from myths of immortality or failure to become-with the dead and the extinct” (101). It does, however, erase the human/nonhuman divide that society has already considered her to be a part of in her former life as an orogene. When she finally dies, Hoa starts by saying that “YOU ARE DEAD. BUT

NOT you” (TSS loc 5012). Her body might have died, but flesh is transient and permutable, as established by the very existence of stone eaters, who were once mortal but transformed, and by the orogenes powers, which include turning people to crystals, as well as certain orogenes’ flesh turning to stone. Hoa realizes that Essun is still Essun when she proclaims that she wants to make the world better: “I have never regretted more my inability to leap into the air and whoop for joy …You look amused. It’s you. It’s truly you” (TSS loc 5138). What Hoa wants in turn is only to be with Essun:

‘Because that is how one survives eternity,’ I say, ‘or even a few years. Friends.

Family. Moving with them. Moving forward.’

…

‘Friends, family,’ you say. ‘Which am I, to you?’

‘Both and more. We are beyond such things.’ (TSS loc 5138)

Essun’s ability to hold on to her former identity, illustrates that immortality is no longer a punishment by the Earth, but an olive branch. For collectivism to work, it needs to not only

Stenberg 55 include all of humanity, or humanity and all other living “nonhuman” creatures on the Earth, but the Earth itself—signified by the fact that she and Hoa are now beyond such things. Being beyond such things further signify that they are beyond boundaries and binaries, becoming- with each other, literally in their permutable state as stone eaters, and metaphorically in that

Essun was made by Hoa. As such, they are both themselves, each other, and Earth, concurrently and inseparably.

Arguably, however, Hoa is selfish in his decision to remake Essun, and this decision reinforces an odd individualistic outlook in the narrative. When the moon is restored, the

Earth also releases the souls it has hoarded at its core. Hoa points out that he does not know what happens to souls after death, but that it must be better than the alternative. On an epic scale, then, the symbiosis of the network is restored, while on a personal one, it remains shattered. The Earth releases the souls it has accumulated in the name of peace, thus accepting sympoiesis. However, as mentioned, Hoa fails to accept this, as he in his selfishness remakes

Essun completely. Instead, Hoa has condemned Essun to share his fate.

On a more positive note, by becoming a stone eater, Essun accepts and includes the

Earth in the community, and the Earth itself accepts all life on it as no longer its enemies, but its allies. The network that is Earth is restored to its natural unstable equilibrium, and since the obelisks are thrown in as “a surety of good faith” (TSS loc 5065), the communal thought process at the core of the truce is clear. To borrow Lovelock’s phrase, the Earth in the trilogy regains its “metastable” state. Peace was not found peacefully, but by humanity, here represented by Essun and Nassun, who changes course based on her mother’s sacrifice, realizing that there is a need for symbiosis, and that showing humility is not an act of weakness, but agency in itself.

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5. Reanimation—What Speculative Literature Can Do

I now return to the possibility inherent in literature as discussed in the theory section. The

“moderns,” by Latour’s definition, are not equipped to deal with events on such a vast scale as climate change, as they lack the mental and emotional capacities needed to do so (“Agency”

1). Further, they separated humans from Nature to such an extent that it effectively deanimated a planet into a mere object, when it is anything but. This separability affected all part of society, and therefore naturally bled into literature as well. Thus, the Earth as something inanimate became truth in fiction, and especially realist fiction, and the climate crisis was deemed too incomprehensible to feature in it. Ghosh points out the irony of this exclusion within realist fiction: “the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real” (loc 313). That is, if a realist novel would deal with climate change, it would, “court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence” (loc 324). As previously mentioned, geostory is tied to storytelling as a consequence of the Earth being “fully articulated and active” (“Agency” 13). To situate these notions in relation to the trilogy, I analyse the concept of myth and worldbuilding, and how these work in synchronicity to elicit comparisons to our present day.

It is through worldbuilding that the trilogy achieves political relevance, as the motif of myth in the narrative is inherently allegorical. It is therefore not an accident that Hoa’s fall from the sky back to Earth, while being turned into stone—after committing the original sin, no less—is reminiscent of many legendary tales, not only the biblical fall of Lucifer, but also, for instance, Icarus of Greek mythology. This adds to the trilogy’s epic scale, which taken together with Ghosh’s point of realism shows the relevance of myth in the story. Ghosh points out that any sort of epic scale is not welcome in serious literature: “no one will speak of how the continents were created; nor will they refer to the passage of thousands of years: connections and events on this scale appear not just unlikely but also absurd within the

Stenberg 57 delimited horizon of a novel” (loc 858). We live in interesting times, yes, but that currently also means that our present times are historical, and thus epic, in a sense. Climate change is paradoxically concurrently quotidian and monumental. Consequently, the epic myths retold in the narrative has allegorical connotations aplenty.

The emphasis of myth in the narrative shows the closeness of geostory in our present day. As Grifka-Wander points out, myth was something inherently associated with fantasy to

Suvin, and therefore negative because in meant it was antithetical to progress. For Suvin, myth, and by association fantasy, was “culturally meaningful, perhaps, but containing little political content and almost no propulsion toward future change. It [was] mostly irrelevant to real life” (Grifka-Wander 71). This is, however, a very “modern” outlook on the concept of stories. Myths are an intrinsic part of worldmaking, both in this narrative, and in real life.

Myths are therefore both history, or geostory, and highly political, as the past always informs the present and the future. As shown, in the trilogy characters go from disregarding the myths of their world in a flippant manner, to realizing and acknowledging the truth that is being told through these stories. For instance, Walter points out that it is myth as it relates to

“Father Earth” in the narrative that causes the Earth to be treated similarly to a god: “self- conscious, motivated and planning; an active agent in the story with some human traits, but distinctly categorised as not-human by means of other, non-human traits” (Walter 16). This illustrates that myth in the narrative as well as in our present is inescapable, as myth informs much of our own reality as well.

It is therefore in this worldbuilding in the trilogy that the need for interrogation of our place in the network that is Earth is made clear. Haraway calls the Anthropocene a time “of unprecedented looking away” (35). In other words, in our reluctance to face the incomprehensible, we instead chose to ignore it, to our own detriment. She urges, as an antidote, the need for thinking, as the opposite of thinking is thoughtlessness, and in

Stenberg 58 thoughtlessness, nothing matters (36). Haraway points out that “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with” (12). That is, it is not enough to simply state the facts, but the form of delivery matters an equal amount. It becomes a matter of changing even the way we think about things, as thinking is a factor, not just an element. This means that for sense making to make sense of our current time, the medium in which the stories and issues are dealt with matter. Thus, it is striking that genres such as cli-fi are continuing to grow. Of note here is what Trexler claims: that climate fiction can interrogate what life entails in the Anthropocene

(27). As Ghosh’s argument makes clear, literature within the speculative genres is more adept at confronting the absurd reality of the current climate crisis, and is therefore, in fact, more realist than most so called realist novels today. He points to the notion of Nature now being

“too powerful” to not fear, and states that climate events are proof of the intrinsic and the

“uncanny intimacy” between human and nonhuman (loc 447).

It matters therefore, that Jemisin, through an allegory to real human oppression manages to draw these parallels to the Earth and the treatment of it as well. Grifka-Wander echoes this sentiment as well, when she writes that “fantasy stories are meaningful, and also draw attention to how we make meaning” (76). This suitability is exemplified in both the trilogy’s allegorical mode, and its speculative presentation. Because of the worldbuilding inherent in the genre, thoughtlessness is impossible, while it simultaneously becomes possible to face the inconceivable, as it is “fantasy,” first and foremost, in every sense of the word. It is in thinking allegorically that thinking even becomes possible. Hence, I contend, that The

Broken Earth trilogy is exceptionally suited for telling these stories, both as it pertains to genre, and subject matter.

Through using and adapting such well-trodden ground as the concept of “magic” and basing it in the inherently natural, that is, energy, the trilogy shows not only that the Earth is alive, but that it and all life on it is part of one system. When Grifka-Wander argues for

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“forward fantasy,” she emphasizes the need for complex worldbuilding as a tool to cause the reader to critically engage with their contemporary moment. Fantasy worldbuilding, she writes, “through social construction, explanation of the cultures, geography, resources, and so on, assumes the truth-quality of a hard science fiction story” (Grifka-Wander 74). She writes that by complicating the depictions of slavery and racism, Jemisin directly responds to today’s society “where racist forms of oppression persist even while most Americans agree that racism is unforgiveable” (78). To accomplish this, Jemisin pushes farther and provides “new subjectivities” (78) in the subspecies for the reader to learn from by muddling the ordinary simple metaphor of good versus bad as it is “no longer sufficiently estranging or radical” (78).

I claim that these new subjectivities extend to nonhuman agents as well in the Earth.

Furthermore, the trilogy does not simply give the Earth sentience, but drives home the inherent agency by making it emotional, and thus, highly subjective. When Latour writes that it is not simply a case of combining or reconciling nature with society but that the role of distributing agency until “we have thoroughly lost any relation between those two concepts of object and subject” (“Agency” 15), this is shown in the emotive Earth in the trilogy.

Interestingly, Jemisin uses the word “heart” when describing the Earth’s core, depicting it as the “wonder that is the world’s unfettered heart, it already blazes before her: a silver sun underground, so bright that she must squint” (TSS loc 3145). This signifies not only the

Earth’s subjectivity, but its agency in that it too is ruled not by rationality, but by emotion, and that this is not a bad thing, but in actuality, the only way towards progress. As mentioned,

Latour uses the term “collective” to designate the associations between human and nonhuman actants (Modern loc 144). “Father Earth” is an actant needing communion, longing for a collective, but believing it too late for any sort of cooperation to occur. The Earth needs life to sustain itself. For better or worse, much of that life is derived from humanity. Because what is at the heart of Earth is energy that turns to magic which in turn animates everything on the

Stenberg 60 planet, life is inescapable for “Father Earth.” He cannot abandon life, even if He wants to.

Life is thus intrinsically tied to the Earth’s purpose in the trilogy. Consequently, this is viewed as a parasitic relationship from both sides, as mutual nemeses, needs to change, to be realized as the symbiotic relationship it is, and act accordingly.

The Broken Earth trilogy, I proclaim, reanimates the Earth. Where realist literature can be accused of deanimating Nature, as it sees Nature only as object, as backdrop to the narrative, climate fiction does the opposite, by making Nature an actant in itself, and a force to be reckoned with. The Broken Earth takes this to the extreme by fully giving the Earth sentience, while still showing that it is not a single organism, but made up of all the life on— and in—it. By introducing an alive Earth slowly through myth and stonelore, and by having the main protagonists not believe in it, the trilogy shows the absurdity of ignoring the inherent animism of the planet. The concept of “Father Earth” is present from the beginning of the story, and grows from being a jarring sentiment for the reader—in that father has replaced mother—to eventually being accepted as true within the narrative. By both calling attention to this name for the Earth, and by using it to such an extent that it quickly becomes normalized, the work of reanimating the Earth is done surreptitiously from the very start.

6. Conclusion

Through a close analysis of N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy, my aim was to explore how the Earth as a genuine communicative actor with sentience disrupts and questions humanity’s place on the planet. With the events of the trilogy taking place during the apocalypse, the vulnerable and unstable state of life is at the forefront of the narrative. This means that everything is pushed to the extreme, as the choice to ignore what is occurring is impossible for all involved. The trilogy and reality unfortunately differ, in this regard.

Grounding my analysis in posthumanism and Gaia theory, I utilized Bruno Latour’s work on agency, nonhumanity and deanimation to examine displacement and vengeance in an

Stenberg 61 impossible situation. I argue for reading the trilogy as an explicit allegory that connects with our present in several different ways. First—and most obvious—is that the relationship between Earth and humanity is disrupted, and in desperate need of change. Secondly—and most chillingly—that humanity cannot be allowed to win this fight of superiority against

Nature. If we win, we will die. Simply put: The Broken Earth trilogy shows a fictional version of the apocalypse that might await us. The abuse of the Earth must cease if we are to have any sort of future on it.

I also employed Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, with its sympoietic becoming-with and response-ability, to illustrate how the trilogy shows the necessity of realizing that humanity is not apart from the Earth, and the need to show humility towards this fact. As death is ever present, and certainty nowhere to be found, I contend that it is high time humanity got used to the notion of our own mortality. As humans, we are all only future mulch for the planet, and should act accordingly.

As an allegory for our present climate crisis, I contend that the trilogy shows Earth concurrently as a system, and as actant seeking well deserved vengeance. In the first section, I illustrated that the trilogy shows the Earth as a network and as a communicative agent of geostory, literally becoming a manifestation of Lovelock’s vengeful Gaia. Furthermore, the trilogy depicts the updated Gaia hypothesis of Earth as both maker and destroyer to an unsettling degree. The Broken Earth trilogy illustrates not only the Earth as an agent, but that this inherently includes its inhabitants as an agentive network, therefore showing that humanity is not the protagonist of this geostory, but simply one actor—one actant—among many. In showing the blurred lines between life and Nature, I contend that the trilogy literalizes Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis. I further problematized viewing the healing of the Earth that is present in the narrative as a hopeful allegory to what can be done in our present, and emphasised the necessity of instability.

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In the second section, I discussed the orogenes and argued for the concept of embracing the subhuman status as active choice, thus showing agency where historically there was only passivity. Through analysing their destructive capacities, and the grief inherent in their position in society, I declared that they are closer to nature and therefore more capable of sympoiesis. Where Fifth Seasons are apocalypses for the average human in the narrative, the orogenes live their life constantly on the brink of annihilation, and are therefore, unfortunately, more suited for a life in refuge, and more prone to survive.

In the third section, I illustrated how burgeoning collectivism is a necessity for a sympoietic existence. In an analysis of the stone eaters, I examined the literalization of blurred lines between human and nonhuman. I also problematized how stone eaters and orogenes are stuck in an anthropocentric mindset, while still claiming that it is in their nonhumanity that they can see the Earth as an equal actant.

As the lines between flesh and dirt are already blurred, the characters’ corporeal forms are able to change and be changed. In the fourth section, I questioned the questionable ending of the trilogy, by arguing that in the end, it fails to be truly sympoietic, as immortality is antithetical to living and dying. However, I proclaim that the trilogy does succeed in moving beyond binary boundaries in accepting the Earth as part of the collective whole, and as an agent unto itself. This continuous blurring of binaries throughout the narrative becomes emblematic for the absurdity of not only an anthropocentric worldview, but fixed categories overall. Hence, I claim that the trilogy illustrates that being seen as human is of lesser importance than the idea of realizing that all actants in the network are equal, whether or not the characters themselves realize this.

In the final subsection, I argued that The Broken Earth trilogy reanimates the Earth.

By underscoring the importance of myth and worldbuilding, I wrote that the trilogy shows the folly of Latourian moderns, while making the case for the importance of fantasy with the help

Stenberg 63 of Ghosh and Grifka-Wander. I therefore emphasised, by employing Haraway’s assertion of the importance of what stories tell stories, that the allegorical qualities of the narrative have more weight than what might be assumed. Thus, inherent in the power of literature of this kind—and this trilogy specifically—is the realization and the growing conviction that the

Earth is so much more than mere object. Climate change in itself, as well as the current corona virus pandemic, shows the agency of the nonhuman and the inseparability of all actants. In so doing, the need for symbiosis and sympoiesis becomes evident.

Finally, by emphasising the importance of what literature can make possible, with a focus on speculative fiction specifically, I contend that this genre—through climate fiction— is a useful tool, as it changes how people view agency. I applied Ghosh work on the realism of speculative fiction in conjunction with Latour’s concept of deanimation to analyse how The

Broken Earth trilogy shifts the relationship humanity has with Earth by reanimating it. In making the Earth communicative, Jemisin’s trilogy depicts an attempt to reanimate the Earth, and seeing its agency. In doing so, it restores a symbiotic relationship between Earth and life itself. I argue that cooperation and peace always come with a price. The trilogy depicts a war that has no winners. It is through sacrifice that humanity must admit that the relationship we have with Earth is a sympoietic one, or we will die of extremely natural causes, caused by ourselves, but deployed by nonhuman actants.

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