ICYMI N K Jemisin Hates Lovecraft

This is a review of N K Jemisin’s book The City We Became. Needless to say, there will be SPOILERS.

First, a short synopsis. In the world of The City We Became, cities are living organisms that are constantly evolving until they’re ready to be born. Then, they choose someone to be their avatar, someone who best embodies their defining characteristics. This time, it’s New York’s turn. Its chosen avatar is a young, black, queer, homeless man. Guiding him is the avatar of the city of São Paulo. However, New York is injured while fighting a tentacled antagonist who wishes to prevent this city’s birth. So, now, it’s up to the avatars of the five boroughs – Manhattan (racially and sexually ambiguous Manny), Brooklyn (African American, former rapper and current councilwoman Brooklyn), Bronx (Native American lesbian artist Bronca), Queens (Indian immigrant university student Padmini), and Staten Island (white (Irish) Aislyn) – to find each other, evade the enemy, find the wounded avatar, and heal him so that New York can be born.

Around 90% of the book is about the first four avatars finding each other while the fifth is befriended by the enemy. Don’t expect any big, exciting fights – everything is either super quick or happens off page. The stakes are high – the enemy wants to destroy our universe! the five boroughs’ avatars will be assimilated by the city’s avatar and disappear/die! the birth of a city means the death of several parallel universes! if Staten Island doesn’t join them everything is doomed! –, but they never live up to the hype. Of course, that’s probably because this isn’t just some mindless, comic book-y SFF story about super-powered people teaming up to save the world from alien monsters – this tentacled menace is really a metaphor for every kind of white prejudice imaginable. Oh, and if you’re worried about missing the subtext, don’t. The City We Became doesn’t do subtlety. Like, at all. For instance, the mention that the Brazilian sweet brigadeiro is also popular in Portugal is followed by a reference to colonialism. Because of course. Never mind the fact that the brigadeiros were created in the 1940s, so more than a century after Brazil became independent. Moving on…

In like five seconds everyone agrees that obliterating a bunch of universes to let New York be born and that them dying to heal the wounded avatar is totally worth it. Padmini has second thoughts but quickly comes around. Many doesn’t like the idea of dying right after New York awakes, but that’s only because he’s madly in love with him so I don’t think that should count. Hmm, does this mean Jemisin wants us to root for mass murder? Basically, yes, but the enemy is a mass murderer, too! And white. Really, really white. Everyone calls her Woman in White or just White for short, in case you didn’t notice who’s the real enemy here. Sure, she says she wants to eliminate our universe so that many more can live, but since Jemisin helpfully (you know, so there’s no room for confusion) (we wouldn’t want people to think White is good, right?) makes White’s helpers racist, sexist, antisemitic, homophobic shits, we know she’s evil rather than someone with a legitimate cause. Oh, and in case you’re still not convinced of our heroes’ moral superiority, White states that cities are bad because they’re, you guessed it, diverse. This probably means those universes White wants to preserve are filled with racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, and every other form of bigotry, so it’s a good thing they and their billions of inhabitants are going to disappear.

Sadly, we’re never told the exact percentage of diversity required to make sure your world is the one to survive. As for (white) Staten Island’s refusal in joining them and what that might mean? Surprise! (Biracial) Veneza becomes Jersey’s avatar and replaces her! Oh, and that whole thing about the five having to die to heal New York? Never mind, everyone is fine in the end.

As for the threat posed by White? Gentrification! Starbucks! Bad art! Internet trolls! Making Black rappers homophobic! Alien parasites (who only affect those who are already bigots and are always visible so our heroes know who to avoid)! And, of course, Lovecraft. In her little speech about cities, the Woman in White (who, surprise! turns out to be none other than R’lyeh), makes sure to mention Lovecraft and how he was right about cities being awful because of their diversity. Oddly, she doesn’t say anything about him also being right about there being a city named R’lyeh filled with weird architecture and tentacled aliens.

This doesn’t seem subtle, does it? Well, that’s because the only thing less subtle than the White metaphor is Jemisin’s obvious hatred for Lovecraft. She hates him so much that we get not just one, but two speeches about Lovecraft’s racism. In the same chapter. One right after the other. When Bronca points out that the Alt Artistes’ creepy painting presents Lovecraft’s view of the world uncritically, it’s impossible not to wonder if that’s what Jemisin thinks of all the people who have ever used his creations in their own work without condemning his personal views.

Even Lovecraft’s use of non-Euclidean geometry to describe alien architecture gets mocked by Padmini, who gets to teleport using math. Only, unlike Walter Gilman from The Dreams in the Witch House, she uses equations. Because unlike Lovecraft she knows real math! Petty much? There are, however, some unintentionally funny moments, like when Jemisin has the Woman in White complain about people tasting each other’s cuisines. Lovecraft actually liked Italian food, let his friends convince him to try Spanish and Arabian food, and enjoyed traditional spicy Indian curry…

By the way, New York, São Paulo, and Hong Kong are all cities from former European colonies and it was that same colonization that made the meeting of different cultures possible. So, is Jemisin making a case for colonization? There’s mention of the difficult birth of London, too. Gee, wonder how the former capital of a massive empire reached the optimum diversity level… And how many of the other, older sentient cities will turn out to be from older empires built on mass murder and forced assimilation? Guess Veneza is right, it really is “yay, colonialism”! Awkward…

Oh, and the idea of New York being represented by an underdog outcast is just… Seriously?! The New York? The Big Apple? The City That Never Sleeps? Crasher of world economies? When the hell has anyone not taken New York seriously? Also, how the hell did São Paulo became sentient before New York? Hong Kong may have benefitted from thousands of years of Chinese culture (or not, after all, that’s not very diverse and according to The City We Became diversity is the be-all and end-all of any worthy culture), but Brazil? Was it the countless favelas? The military dictatorship? Does this mean that if New York had had more poor people and less freedom it would’ve been born sooner? Well, there is that whole undefined magical optimum diversity percentage, but it’s never explained (c’mon, there’s no excuse for that, after all, Padmini knows real math!).

Another bundle of awkwardness is the relationship between New York/São Paulo/Manhattan. New York basically offers sex to São Paulo in exchange for a place to stay. The Brazilian simply ignores him but after he protects New York from an attack by White, New York slips under his covers while he’s still sleeping. The fact that São Paulo doesn’t push him away when he wakes up is apparently incentive enough for New York to “give him a reason to let [him] back in later”. Apparently sentient cities don’t do enthusiastic consent. Meanwhile, Manny’s new role as the designated protector of New York makes it impossible to know if his infatuation with the avatar has any relation to the real person underneath. Basically, it’s as if Manny was roofied, but no one seems to care about the implications of his extreme feelings for New York. Bronca just thinks it’s appropriate for him to be a two-spirit person.

For those of you who don’t know, Two Spirit is a Native American concept that means someone with both masculine and feminine attributes and can be used as a way to say you’re not straight. Because sex with men is a feminine thing, apparently. Does this mean gay men aren’t men men? But wait! According to Google, Native Americans themselves say this term isn’t really about sexual attraction but rather about gender roles. So, wtf is Bronca, a Native American, talking about? And if she is saying that Manny being sexually attracted to another man means he has feminine attributes isn’t that kinda offensive? Then again, considering all the sensitivity readers Jemisin employed to make sure no one (at least no non-white person) would be offended, I’m probably just too white and straight to get it. We’re also told that Bronca was at Stonewall, but Jemisin doesn’t specify whether it was the real, sadly mostly white Stonewall, or the more recently approved PC version which was led by transgender women of colour whose contributions were scrubbed from history by, you guessed it, evil, white, cisgender people (though, in this case, gay ones) (or maybe straight people did that, too).

Jemisin’s hatred for Lovecraft is why, as soon as Aislyn says she liked The Horror at Red Hook, we know that she’s beyond redemption. Sure, there are reasons to be sympathetic to her, but she liked The Horror at Red Hook! Aislyn/Staten Island is the point where that hatred and the whole White metaphor intersect, and the end result is as shitty as you’d expect. Her decisions feel less influenced by character than by plot reasons: Staten Island just can’t break free from the Woman in White because that would fuck with the ending, which of course means that Jemisin really should’ve written things differently, should’ve made Aislyn less self-aware, or her life less shitty, R’lyeh less obvious, but this story, this metaphor, this Fuck You to Lovecraft isn’t subtle, was never going to be subtle, because Jemisin read The Horror at Red Hook (and probably The Street, too) and his letters and just won’t let go, and even if people agree he was racist it’s never going to be enough until everyone collectively rejects Cthulhu, the Old Ones, and Nyarlathotep (never! Nyarlathotep is too awesome!)!

So, after temporarily defeating the enemy and healing New York, this multicoloured rainbow of characters we’re meant to be rooting for immediately runs to the nearest library to read everything Lovecraft ever wrote and look for clues on how to deal with… Just kidding! Instead, they have a BBQ. In fact, none of them seems to make the connection between their tentacled alien R’lyeh and Lovecraft’s tentacled alien R’lyeh. Padmini appears to recognize the name when the Woman in White says it, but no one talks about what that means. Frankly, that puts them squarely in too-dumb-to-live territory. But hey, at least the final image is that of a racially (minus white) and sexually (minus straight men) diverse utopia. Somehow, R’Lyeh, in all its alien tentacled monstrosity, feels less threatening to this idyllic scenario than mere humans like Louis Farrakhan, Lauren Chen, Enrique Tarrio, Laura Loomer, Ian Miles Cheong, Milo Yiannopoulos, Michelle Malkin, or Joey Gibson. It would be funny to see Jemisin try to build her utopia in real life with that lot. Maybe throw in Caitlyn Jenner, a few Log Cabin Republicans, and some genocidal Burmese, too.

Oh, and there's also the fact that Manny was brainwashed into wanting to fuck New York’s barely legal, malnourished avatar (let’s face it, he’s homeless and always thinking of how hungry he is, which means those abs he was trying to seduce São Paulo with are nothing but wishful thinking), but apparently that should be celebrated, even if New York thinks about how he didn't want a light skinned Ivy League boyfriend (oh, yeah, class issues, there were those, too) (and they were every bit as heavy handed as everything else) (also, it's the end of the book, FFS, just stop!). Because, clearly that's what should keep them apart, not Manny's violent nature, or the fact that he's amnesiac and half brainwashed.

Okay, here’s the deal, this is the only book by N K Jemisin I have ever read. I have no idea if this is how she usually writes or if her hatred for Lovecraft overrode everything. If Jemisin’s goal was to make people stop reading Cthulhu for fun, she accomplished it. Anyone who isn’t already familiar with Lovecraft’s work will probably avoid it like the plague after reading this extremely boring, preachy take on cosmic eldritch horror.

By Danforth