The Weapons of Empire
It’s a wonderful feeling when a fantastic book falls into your lap and captures your imagination. A friend from France visited Madrid and stayed in our apartment. As thanks, she brought an English copy of a book she’d read: Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, published in 2019. Given that its title contains two words that I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about--memory and empire--I couldn’t help but dissect it.
Before we get to these intensely intertwined themes, a spoiler-free synopsis. The book follows Mahit Dzmare, a citizen of Lsel Station, a mining colony at the edge of known space. The station retains a tenuous level of independence as it exists under suzerain control of the galaxy-spanning Teixcalaan Empire, an ostentatious, flowery society that quite literally speaks in poetry. Our perspective character was selected by Lsel Station’s governing council as the next ambassador to Teixcalaan. Mahit must solve the mystery behind her predecessor’s death or risk becoming ensnared in a web of deadly plots spun by aristocrats vying for control of the empire.
I really can’t recommend this book enough. Martine’s empire is complex, ornate, beautiful, stifling, and deadly. The novel’s worldbuilding is on par with Dune, though I’d argue Martine’s prose is superior. There’s always a learning curve in science fiction and fantasy. The reader must acclimate to new worlds, cultures, languages, and rules. That’s what fans of the genre know and expect. But some authors are more adept at easing the reader into their imaginary universe. So, while Dune’s learning curve is a steep X^12, Martine’s novel feels closer to X^2. Pleasantly challenging.
Now, I need to edge a little closer to a spoiler, if indeed we could call it that. I was able to read the book jackets of both the French and English versions, and this plot point is explicitly described in the French copy, but only obliquely alluded to in English. Our main character Mahit, like most citizens of Lsel Station, receives an imago. This is a small chip surgically implanted into a citizen’s spinal column that provides them with the thoughts and memories of their professional predecessor. A space pilot might be carrying an imago with fifteen lifetimes of other pilots in their neck, immediate access to generations of wisdom and experience.
But these imagos have to be updated regularly, and it’d been years since the previous ambassador was able to sit for a brain scan. Mahit arrives on the Teixcalaan homeworld with an exceedingly out-of-date imago, the biomechanical ghost of the man she finds dead within hours of arriving in the empire’s capital.
Narratively speaking, the imago works like a dialog. Mahit converses with Yskandr, the late ambassador. The duo debates, argues, and consoles one another; there are moments when Yskandr assumes direct control of Mahit’s body. It usually takes a year and a lot of psychotherapy for a citizen to successfully integrate with their imago, but Mahit is given only a few months, something that proves disastrous in the early stages of her adventure.
That is about as far as I’ll go regarding the plot of A Memory Called Empire. It’s a must-read and I won't describe any more of its delicious twists and turns. But I would like to elaborate on the setting.
The far distant future is ruled by the Teixcalaan Empire, a political leviathan that reigns over hundreds of star systems, brutally crushing dissent with its unparalleled war machine. But like any decent empire, Teixcalaan does not rule through strength alone. As I described in another essay, When the Oppressed Erupt, Frantz Fanon notes that one of the colonizer’s most effective tactics is convincing the colonized subjects that the empire has already won; the ruling empire is superior: militarily, intellectually, and--crucially--morally. This dynamic is certainly present as our “barbarian” Mahit enters the empire’s capital. She is constantly reminded, even by her supposed allies, that she is an outsider, boorish and uncivilized. And while this sometimes plays to her favor, in that she is constantly underestimated or entirely overlooked, it still tears at her sense of self-worth. As an ambassador to the empire, she was chosen for her post precisely because of her affinity, even affection, for her nominal oppressors. To love a thing that wants to crush you is a difficult position.
Here’s a quote that demonstrates my point: “Teixcalaan was made to instill the longing, not to resolve it” (p. 161). The empire’s colonial subjects are taught to love and fear their overlords. And that love, naturally, would lead some to want to join the empire, even as it terrifies them, even as it oppresses their own people. This is a cruel logic, a deliberate tension to keep the oppressed suspended in a particular subjectivity.
More telling is an exchange between Mahit and a Teixcalaan lover: “I do like aliens. Barbarians. Anything new, anything different. But also . . . if you were one of us, I’d have wanted to [kiss you] just the same” (p. 431). Mahit quickly realizes that this is the true threat of empire: “If you were one of us.” It’s seductive . . . Unless you think about it for too long.
Despite that these two lovers are ostensibly human, there is always a difference, a distance that inherently--even if tacitly--implies hierarchy. This hierarchy is a matter of fortunate birth; despite it being arbitrary, it is fixed and permanent, a boundary that can never be crossed no matter how perfect someone’s poetry might be. Mahit, confused, doesn’t know whether to love or loathe her new partner who sees her as just a step above the other “savages.” Mahit’s played by the rules and been accepted into the club, as it were, but finds herself wondering why she should crave the affections of an imperial zealot.
I’d like to veer back into the real world to consider how empire has functioned historically. There’s a book making the rounds here in Spain called Imperiofobia and the Black Legend: Rome, Russia, the United States, and the Spanish Empire. It was written by María Elvira Roca Barea. While I always want to support authors, I fundamentally disagree with some core tenets of this work and won’t be providing any links. There might be some good scholarship there but I don’t think it's worth reading.
To start, we need to understand the term “Black Legend”. Starting in the 16th century, many of Europe’s colonial powers initiated a campaign of anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic propaganda. It was a tactic, early information warfare, to demoralize the Spanish Empire, a competitor on the world stage. And on its face, it’s utterly ridiculous. There is no way that the British, French, or Portuguese empires could, in any way, consider themselves morally superior to the Spanish. Every empire sucks.
But that is the whole point of Imperiofobia! Roca Barea uses the unfair labeling known as the Black Legend to try and demonstrate that the Spanish empire wasn’t all that bad. Yes, the Spanish Empire received an undue level of scorn from the other European powers who were equally culpable in the worldwide spread of misery. Agreed and conceded. But the point should decidedly not be to rehabilitate the idea of empire. The Spanish Empire was a malevolent force, only benefiting those occupying the highest seats of power. At its most benign, the empire seduces; it may knock on the door with roses in hand, but it is exploitative, degrading, violent. Empire destroys. Empire kills. Always. Inevitably. Why Roca Barea wants to resuscitate it in the 21st century is beyond me. Good intentions or not, it can only be part of a right-wing fascist project.
Still, we see the duality of attraction and destruction represented in Martine’s work: “Empire was empire--the part that seduced and the part that clamped down, jaws like a vise, and shook a planet until its neck was broken and it died” (p. 395). Empire is awe-inspiring and imposing; there is grandeur in the aesthetics of empire. Empire becomes synonymous with power, so of course, it can cast a beguiling spell even on those it threatens to destroy. Mahit spends the story drawn to its beauty while trying to remember that much of Teixcalaan is trying to assassinate her and bring Lsel Station to heel. That dynamic, the tension of push and pull, is how empire works. It’s how it tricks members of the local colonized population to participate in their own people’s oppression and join a burgeoning petit-bourgeois class. Small rewards. Pats on the head. Like her lover implies, “You’re not like those other barbarians. You are special.” Martine does an excellent job of describing this phenomenon, both at the macropolitical level through plots and intrigue, but also at the interpersonal level with would-be allies and friends; the dangers of the colonial mindset are felt at an individual emotional level.
I’d like to move away from empire briefly and tackle the topic of memory. I explored memory and trauma as it relates to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer, as well as memory’s cousin, nostalgia, in The Lord of the Rings series. But in A Memory Called Empire, memory has been thoroughly weaponized, as it often is, when it's brought to bear by empire.
At the individual level, Mahit’s imago raises interesting questions about the relationship between memory and identity. Philosophers going back millennia have wondered about the source of our sense of self. The Greek philosophers, in the Platonist tradition, created the thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus to challenge the notion that we are simply a material substance. I feel like this paradox is so heavily explored in modern fiction--in everything from Star Trek to WandaVision to Ghost in the Shell--that I’ll refrain from describing it in detail. But it is important to note that our “self” is likely, in important ways, disconnected from our bodies. We are not merely our cells.
A more recent (as in 400 years ago) philosopher who tackled issues of self and consciousness was René Descartes and his work on mind-body dualism. A human being, to Descartes, is effectively the relationship between the body, which receives external stimuli, and the mind, which processes said stimuli, the combination of which produces thought. Continuing with the theme of boats, Descartes in Meditations says, “Nature also teaches me, by the sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a pilot in his ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit. If this were not so, I, who am nothing but a thinking thing, would not feel pain when the body was hurt, but would perceive the damage purely by the intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight if anything in his ship is broken.” Here, we see that “self” arises from the dynamic interplay between our bodies and our minds, neither being strictly or solely responsible for our discrete identities.
But given the imago device, and the way in which a pair--or generations of--consciousnesses might be intermingled into one body, John Locke provides the most interesting approach to the concept of self. Locke believed in what is often called continuity of consciousness. To give an example, I woke up this morning as Sterling. I remembered my name, my family, my wife, what I ate yesterday, and how I filed some visa paperwork two days ago. There is continuity, even if my memory isn’t flawless. But if, say, I had a stroke in the middle of the night, and all that information vanished when I woke up, would I still be Sterling? Same body. Same brain, if a bit damaged. Able to talk and act but remember nothing of my life. That continuity has been broken. As a legal entity, I would remain Sterling, but my family and friends, those that know me best, wouldn’t recognize the person I’d become. Broken continuity. Broken identity.
And this is why the imago is so engaging as a plot device. Mahit is constantly asking herself, given that she has a second voice living in her brain, who she is. And not just Mahit in relationship to empire as we discussed above, but Mahit to Mahit. It is certainly Mahit’s body, though her predecessor often provides her with useful memories, floods her with hormones to affect her emotions, and can even take control of her motor functions in times of danger. Is Mahit still Mahit if there are two consciousnesses living inside her mind and piloting her body? My guess is that she would say she is Mahit, but that Mahit has changed. “No one is dead who is remembered,” she says (p. 448). She certainly remembers her predecessor--literally accesses his memories--since he’s an active voice in her skull. And if he’s not dead, if he is alive within her, then Mahit must be something else, something more than just a station-born ambassador with a love for Teixcalaan poetry.
But stepping away from the idea of memory as an individual construct, I think it’s important to remember that this book is titled A Memory Called Empire. Memory here is not just about the individual's memories, but how empire uses memory. I recently read an article titled Capitalism, Slavery, and Bourgeois Historiography by Cedric J. Robinson, the acclaimed author of Black Marxism. In this article, Robinson explores the attacks leveled against Eric Williams’ groundbreaking work, Capitalism and Slavery. Williams was an important historical figure in the mid-20th century. He wrote the bulk of Capitalism and Slavery as his PhD dissertation at Oxford. And as its first prime minister, he led Trinidad and Tobago to independence from British royal rule. But what Robinson explores is not so much Williams’ work itself, but the many attacks detractors leveled at it over the course of the 20th century.
Robinson suggests that, at the time, British scholars were committed to the dangerous lie that the British Empire, in the early 1800s, had been completely and fully committed to ending slavery on moral grounds; however, Williams eviscerates this assertion. He notes that while there were humanitarian leanings among the British parliament and people, there were many in power that wished to retain the vile practice. The key, Williams found, was that slavery reached a tipping point where it was no longer profitable for the British Empire, or no longer necessary as a key component of the British economy. Even after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, outlawed the practice in most (but, notably, not all) corners of the British Empire, there were still plenty of businesses--like shipbuilders or financial speculators--that could profit from the slave trade still active in other colonial economies. Williams argues that the UK didn’t end slavery because it was the right thing to do, but because it was the economically savvy choice. Like Spain and the Black Legend, it was an attack--cloaked in highfalutin moral language--aimed at national competitors.
And since the mid-1800s, the British Empire has (re)written its own history regarding the crown’s relationship to slavery. To this very day, the royals use the abolition act as a moral shield. While visiting Ghana in 2018, Prince Charles said, “While Britain can be proud that it later led the way in the abolition of this shameful trade, we have a shared responsibility to ensure that the abject horror of slavery is never forgotten.”
First and foremost, fuck off. If we’re talking about “leading the way” toward abolition, formerly enslaved peoples initiated the Haitian Revolution and defeated the French, Spanish, and British armies to end slavery about four decades before the abolition act in 1833. And, again, it allowed slavery to continue in certain corners of the empire. Leading my ass.
Second, only partial credit for recognizing that the British crown played a role in the slave trade and that it was “shameful,” and an “abject horror.” I appreciate they’re not trying to sweep anything under the rug, but my present concern is how the nation--any nation--uses its power, wealth, and resources to participate in the exploitative neoliberal world order. Saying, “Our bad. We cool?” is not nearly enough to make up for the horrors of colonialism nor does it redistribute the ill-gotten wealth accumulated through this vile practice. The scales aren’t balanced. Not by a long shot.
And third, as Williams’ work describes, it was not a brave moral decision to end slavery, but an economically-practical one. After profiting from slavery for centuries, something that contributed to the growth of the Industrial Revolution, the British tried to whitewash their own history. And it did that not to warm the nation’s heart, but for quite sinister ends.
Robinson, arguing for Williams, notes that “the British industrial bourgeoisie could only be seen to have taken an ethically, spiritually, and ideologically superior direction by historical suppression. This suppression required that the historical record not reflect on the failure to extend Christian or even paternalistic benevolence to the working classes of the metropole . . . which [was] conditioned by the slave system” (p. 136). Slavery wasn’t just bad for the enslaved, but for all workers worldwide. By obfuscating the crown’s role in the slave trade, they were attempting to erase their own complicity in the development of a corrupt system that polluted everything it touched and persists to this day.
Moving beyond the UK’s borders, Robinson states, “The historical fiction of the industrial bourgeoisie also functioned as an entirely different warrant with respect to non-Western peoples. It clothes the bourgeoisie in the ideological role of the transcendent social consciousness. The African slaves had played no part in their own liberation . . . Now freed, they like other Third World peoples were seen as apprentice-Westerners subject to an incontestably superior authority, the conceptualization of social and cultural history commanded by the European and Euro-American ruling classes” (p. 136). With a whitewashed history (and overwhelming financial and military might), the European/American powers were able to claim the more high ground in international affairs and use that to maintain hegemonic, neocolonial control of their former colonies. Any deviation from the Western liberal democratic order can and would be punished, as we have seen time and again in transnational corporate raids, fomented coups, and military misadventures in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
This is exactly how the Teixcalaan wields memory at the macro level. They are the center, Mahit and other colonized subjects are the uneducated barbarians that will be elevated to civilized status only through proximity to the empire, though never (allowed to be) fully integrated; the “barbarians” are a marked class. By molding the galaxy-spanning empire’s memories, Teixcalaan controls the historical and political narratives. They conquered, they won, they’re brilliant, they’re unbeatable. A Memory Called Empire is such a good title because empire is memory. Empire cannot function without also controlling the memories (i.e. stories and narratives) of its own subjects and those of the oppressed.
Returning to Fanon from The Wretched of the Earth: “The colonist makes history and he knows it. And because he refers to the history of his metropolis, he plainly indicates that [in the colony] he is the extension of this metropolis. The history he writes is therefore not the history of the country he is despoiling, but the history of his own nation’s looting, raping, and starving to death. The immobility to which the colonized subject is condemned can be challenged only if he decides to put an end to the history of colonization and the history of the despoilation in order to bring to life the history of the nation, the history of decolonization” (p. 15).
The only way--perhaps the first step--to gain independence from empire is for oppressed people to recognize and (re)write their own history, to wrest control of the narrative away from the seductive poetry of the colonial powers. One of the reasons Mahit and her station might be so successful in resisting Teixcalaan hegemony is because they carry their own history, the literal memories of their ancestors, in their minds, generations of ideas and thoughts and stories and skills, passed down from citizen to citizen through the imago lines. I’m not sure if I can say that having an imago would be pleasant (because from what Mahit describes, it sounds awfully taxing), but there’s something marvelous there, being intimately connected with your forebearers. It’s beautiful and inspiring, and Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire is well worth a read to explore these compelling ideas.
