When the Oppressed Erupt
The Fifth Season was a personal earthquake. If you’ve read the first novel in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, there’s a groan-worthy pun in that sentence. But this book hit me. Hard. It has been ages since I’ve devoured a work of fiction that so deftly blends a fantastic setting with painfully sharp characters while prodding the bleeding wounds of our own injured society. As I rolled through the trilogy, I uncovered countless connections between the book’s myriad conflicts with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and not simply because of the earth motif. At their heart, both works examine power, particularly as both a coercive and liberating force. Who has power? How is power used to control others? How might a colonial subject accumulate power and what would they do with it? Before addressing any of those questions, a summary of Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel is in order. Spoilers ahead.
The Fifth Season begins with the end of the world. An orogene--a magic user that can create, direct, or dispel earthquakes--uses his power to rip apart the supercontinent known as the Stillness. Hundreds of thousands die in the cataclysm. More perish later when ash from a string of angry volcanos blots out the sun and threatens all life on the planet.
The bulk of the story follows three characters. From youngest to oldest, there’s Damaya, Syenite, and Essun. Damaya is a young girl we meet locked away in the attic of her parents’ stable. Her nascent orogenic powers nearly killed one of her classmates. Damaya’s family imprisons her--for her safety as well as theirs--until they surrender her to a Schaffa, a Guardian. Guardians exist as a parallel social caste tasked with the training and supervision of orogenes, as well as their execution should their powers run wild. Schaffa begins Damaya’s education as an orogene in service to the Stillness.
Next is Syenite, a young woman and a skilled orogene coming into her own at the Fulcrum, a Guardian-run training facility. She’s attained a level of control that allows her freedom of movement outside of the Fulcrum under the supervision of another, more powerful orogene named Alabaster. Their dislike for each other is tangible, made all the more complicated by the Fulcrum’s oblique insistence that Syenite and Alabaster mate, increasing the likelihood they’ll produce powerful orogenic offspring to be exploited in any number of horrible ways. The two are tasked to a port city where they use their earth-moving powers to clear a reef impeding harbor traffic.
Despite the pain evident in the lives of the other two characters--sold into bondage by family, servitude, forced breeding--I struggle to relate the beginning of Essun’s story. It’s rough; it’s a punch to the gut. A middle-aged mother, Essun, returns home to find the bloodied corpse of her dead son. Essun is an orogene, and passed her abilities onto both of her children. For years, she hid her powers from her partner, careful to train her son and daughter only in what they needed to know to pretend to be normal. But children speak without thinking and her son accidently betrayed his abilities. Essun’s husband, Jija, beat him to death and vanished from their village with their other child, a daughter named Nassun. After a period of insensible mourning, Essun sets out to kill Jija and rescue her daughter, if she still lives.
There is a lot worth discussing in Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy: climate change, class and castes, gender roles, fluid sexual orientations, race as an explicitly discriminatory construct. But there’s one word that comes up again and again: rogga. If a two syllable word split by double Gs and ending on a soft A raises your eyebrows, well-spotted; rogga is a slur for orogene. It is the word that follows them in whispers, that dehumanizes them, that makes them targets of harassment and violence because of--in spite of--their tremendous powers. Its application is familiar to me and many other Americans.
Rogga = the N-word [which, for personal reasons, I will never write in text or say in speech].
Let’s set that stinging equation aside for a moment and turn to Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique in the 1920s. Aimé Césaire, poet and founder of the négritude movement, taught at Fanon’s prestigious high school. In 1943, at the age of 18, Fanon joined the Free French army that fought to liberate France from Nazi control. He served in the African theater until eventually crossing the Mediterranean where he saw combat on French soil.
Throughout the war, Fanon and other Black soldiers faced racially-driven harassment and discrimination from their white comrades and even from Europeans they helped liberate from German occupation.
After the war, Fanon returned to Martinique to work in politics and finish his undergraduate degree. Completing graduate work in France, he studied medicine with an emphasis in psychiatry. His profession took him to Algeria where Fanon worked in a psychiatric hospital. In Fanon’s era, Algeria was in the midst of an uprising against French colonial rule. Though he worked in a French hospital, Fanon sympathized with the Algerian independence movement, eventually joining the National Liberation Front.
Fanon died from leukemia at the age of 36, but he produced two important works that are particularly relevant to The Fifth Season: Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). I will absolutely write about the former in relation to Jemisin’s work, but it is the novel’s ties to the later that spoke to me, that shook me like an earthquake.
As one could guess from this brief biography, Fanon was deeply interested in the inequities produced by colonialism. Both at home and abroad, he witnessed the cost of this horrendous practice. But this wasn’t simply a red-inked ledger that balanced the extractive policies dominating a colony’s resource and labor economies. Fanon was a psychiatrist; he peered into people’s minds to understand colonialism as one would identify a mental illness.
On page 194 of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon describes treating, “A European police officer suffering from depression,” who bumps into one of the Algerian locals (perhaps a member of the Algerian liberation movement) that he’s tortured who’s also in the hospital for psychiatric care. The police officer laments his plight, saying, “Sometimes you feel like telling them that if [the rebels] had any consideration for us, they’d cough up and not force us to spend hours on end squeezing the information out of them word by word” (p. 195).
The police officer details several methods of torture, including beatings and electricity, and describes his ability to determine an individual’s guilt or innocence through their screams. But these pained cries followed him home. At night, the police officer shuts the doors and windows, stuffs cotton in his ears, and turns on the radio to escape the phantom wailing (p. 195). He sought out Fanon to silence the screams in his mind.
The moment of meeting between the torturer and tortured is a jolt for both parties. The police officer suffers a panic attack while the Algerian slips into a stupor before fleeing from the hospital staff. They eventually found him in the bathroom trying to kill himself, believing the police officer had returned to collect him. The doctors and nurses convinced the Algerian that he’d been mistaken, that the police officer was never there (p. 196).
It is this two sided view that Fanon affords us. He looks into the minds of the torturer and the tortured and offers us a particular perspective on the human cost of colonization.
I watched this dynamic playout between the youngest character, Damaya, and her guardian, Schaffa. Early on, with all appearances of tenderness and love, Schaffa breaks Damaya’s hand to see if she is capable of controlling her powers. A lesser orogene might fight back, try to kill the guardian, funneling their pain into the ground and summoning an earthquake to instinctively defend themselves. But not Damaya. She keeps still and quiet. This is the first brick in Schaffa’s prison, a prison of corporeal pain, yes, but--more importantly--a prison of the mind.
Fanon and others tell us colonization works because the colonized native is convinced that the colonist’s economic and military might cannot be challenged, that their culture is stronger, and that the colonizers are a superior people; colonization works because it spreads the lie that the colonizer has already won. Yes, the mechanized tools of warfare and industry matter, but these are inefficient; an invading army can’t be everywhere, all the time.
What is truly effective then is deceiving the colonized subject into accepting and internalizing the master/slave dynamic. Orogenes like Damaya are powerful--just one threatened all life on the planet--yet the orogenes living under the auspices of the Guardians willingly wear shackles placed on them by their own society. They internalized centuries of rhetoric that convinces them beyond all doubt they are beasts, dangerous monsters, only useful when under the direction of the state.
Orogenes are an enslaved people. They are the colonized native. They are the powerful deluded into surrendering control of not just their land or labor, but their very thoughts. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series speaks to me because I recognize the colonized mentality within myself as a member of a discriminated group. Were I to believe the old lies, I am a “dangerous criminal,” only fit to toil in society’s dirtiest, most menial tasks, out of sight, in my place in the back of the bus or a colored restroom. Or I’m not fit to live at all, deserving of murder in the streets, choked to death by an assassin with a badge and a pension.
So, what is the colonized to do when they finally recognize the lies that form the bars of their cage? The psychiatrist, in conversation with the author, offers challenging answers.
Fanon says, “The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality” (p. 15). He goes on to say, “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despair attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence” (p. 51).
Fanon says that the colonized should, indeed must, use violence to free themselves from their shackles. And I think Syenite’s arc speaks to this approach. Without going into great detail, she rejects the nightmarish control of the Guardians, of society itself, and earns her freedom--or a form of it--through destruction.
It bears repeating that the physical dimension is just one aspect of this process, and perhaps the least important. Fanon argues that violence--the directed struggle for freedom--can supplant the degrading national culture of colonization and synthesize a new national identity.
This is not dissimilar from the quasi civil religion practiced here in the US that narrativizes the American Revolution as a war of freedom against a tyrant. The American Revolution was the nation’s baptism, a conflict that shaped the incipient national identity for centuries to come. Evidence of this can be seen in every “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. Even the wars we fight, Afghanistan and Iraq, are coded as wars of democratic liberation, despite the fact that they’ve turned into everything but.
Fanon tells us that the oppressed must use violence to free themselves from that which binds them, whether those shackles are physical, mental, moral, or emotional; decolonization is an eruption. And the characters in The Fifth Season, particularly Essun and Syenite, use deadly force without hesitation to effect and maintain their freedom.
But implicit in both Jemisin’s work as well as Fanon’s thinking is that violence of this kind can not be indiscriminate. Violence toward the colonizer must serve some end, lest it be simple revenge. A national identity (or a personal one) borne solely of vengeance is a terrifying thought. James Baldwin, in his essay Down at the Cross, says, “The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another--or others--always has been and always will be a recipe for murder” (p. 82). The struggle for freedom, whether violent or not, must have a conscious direction not driven by anger but hope and justice. Orogenes create, redirect, or still earthquakes. The lesson there is that there is a time for peace and there is a time to shake the pillars of the planet until nothing is left standing. Wisdom and compassion must point the way, to serve as guideposts toward liberation.
The orogene that destroyed the world at the start of The Fifth Season had a purpose. Yes, he considered the violence done to him and his people, but that was not the why of his apocalypse.
The question of the application of violence for a political end is one more complicated than I can tackle here. But Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, as a work of fiction, offers the reader an opportunity to look inward and consider the internal violence that chips away at the bars caging our minds, hearts, and actions. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough, particularly for those who look at modern society and see more of a prison than a technocratic, neoliberal paradise. It offers a chance for the reader to ask themselves how far they would go, how large an earthquake they’d summon, to create a new, just world.
