jemisin's apocalyptic imagination
Amazing trilogy that requires serious analysis. But the first claim is that our time is postapocalyptic, it has to be written in the future perfect tense: we will have lived. We already are in Jemisin's time. Everything we do in the present is defined and conditioned by an inevitable ecological catastrophe that capitalism has unleashed and is incapable to stop (and no amount of voluntarism or politics will fix). The most compelling aspect of the trilogy is time itself: the initial catastrophe unleashed by the Syl Anagist tens of thousands of years ago is followed by several new catastrophic periods, known as Seasons, which interrupt the normal cycle of life, and push many communities and civilizations to extreme survival and, many times, to the brink of extinction. The other interesting aspect of the novel is how literally the entropic scene is represented. Most geological aspects of the planet are controlled by characters known as Origins. They are born by genetic mutation randomly. However, the power to control the geology of the planet is feared by the rest of the population and, so, the Origins are enslaved. Therefore, Jameson's representation of slavery, not by biological difference but by random genetic mutation, makes slavery a universal category. Slavery can happen to anyone. Therefore, in the novel, there is a very unprecedented combination of slavery, secrecy, non-biological randomness, and power. Although humans created the first catastrophe in their pursuit for an endless source of energy, their attempt triggers the subsequent Seasons or ecological apocalypses. The origins do not have the power to fix these catastrophes; they can only prevent them from happening more often. Only Nassan can. She loses three (step) fathers along the way, and finally her mother. In short, it is this seamless combination of slavery, literal Anthropocene, and post-apocalypse spanning close to 40,000 years, which makes the novel such an interesting and informative piece of literature. What is the most disappointing part of the trilogy is the end. After so many cataclysms, the hero, a little girl known as Nassun, manages to restore the Earth to its pre-apocalyptic balance. I know the end is utopian, but it undoes the temporal richness of the trilogy. At the end of the third novel, we are back to a restored Earth where humans can restart from scratch, as if nothing had happened. The true apocalypse of this trilogy, the true catastrophe of the imagination, is precisely this disappointing restoration, so that we can ignore global warming, the Anthropocene, and the incoming apocalypse: we will be alright¡ capitalism's ecological damage will be fixed¡ In this sense, the end of the trilogy is very "American" in its most ideological sense: it is the melodrama of manifest destiny in a post-apocalyptic version. America will fix the world. Comments are closed.
|
Details
AuthorJoseba Gabilondo. Publications Archives
April 2023
|