Spanish translation below the English is by Daniela Toulemonde.
There’s at least a half dozen reasons to encourage you to read The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, but this post is not a review because, well, I’m about a year late, and there are already great discussions about it here and here. Also, if you’ve read the novel, see Jemisin’s post on it here. This is just a meandering and exploratory post on one aspect of the novel that made me think. It’s the issue of violence.
Everything in this novel creaks and snaps with violence. On the geological front, the earth in The Fifth Season is always erupting, ripping, collapsing, swallowing itself. “Father” earth is not friendly but is interpreted as destructive, unreliable and even evil because the planet goes through repeated cataclysms, known as the fifth season, that crush civilization over and over again.
On a socio-political level, Jemisin’s portrayal of oppression of the orogenes is illustrated in the society at large through depictions of discrimination in the ruling institutions, the elites, and among the common people whose fraught existence in this ever-changing world does not predispose them to kindness toward anything unpredictable, and the orogenes are all that. The novel is full of people of various ethnicities but the orogenes are found across all groups, making this an interesting depiction of oppression that is not confined to the racial framing we generally see. The physical diversity of the oppressed does nothing to diffuse the violence directed against them. Continue reading
In honor of Mother’s Day, I am celebrating writing about mothers in fiction. Be they amoral, good, reckless, calculating, tender or steel—are there any more fascinating characters to bring to life in a story than mothers?
Imagined Worlds | L.A. Barnitz 