Category: McCoy 101/431 Jemisin Fall 2018

A year and a half ago I was a teacher-counselor for a summer camp that SUNY Geneseo hosts for Rochester City School District. That iteration of the camp was themed around Mars colonization and asked students to take up the cause of saving the human race or, at the very least, preserving it. The body that funded the camp required that the children partake in a STEM based curriculum, but I was pleased to find that we were able to work different aspects of social justice and art into the material we taught. Since our course title is getting at social justice in a mostly scientific context, I was reminded of the teachers at this STEM camp that were intent on getting students to understand community as much as they were understanding rudimentary rocket propulsion.

How Jemisin organized comms in the world of the Stillness was something that immediately reminded me of how my students had talked about organizing their Mars colonies. Continue reading “What children learn from colonizing Mars is the same thing we learn from comm organization”

From the very first chapter in the Broken Earth series it is made clear that our narrator is funny. The speaker, who 400 pages later we will find out is Hoa (The Fifth Season 443), tells us, after describing the catastrophic Rifting, that he must “keep things grounded, ha ha” (9). I believe there is significance to the placement of this line. Sandwiched between an account of a disaster which killed millions, and Essun’s grappling with the reality of her son Uche’s brutal murder, we find an extremely incongruous, casually-delivered pun. With such lofty goals as appeasing Father Earth’s wrath in order to save humanity, why does Hoa take the time to crack jokes? And why in the midst of such bleak circumstances? The evolutionary approach to humor analysis taken by Glenn E. Weisfield in his 1993 article “The Adaptive Value of Humor and Laughter” may hold some answers.

Continue reading “Hoa’s Humor — Why Jemisin Jokes”

So, after going back through The Stone Sky a bit, I noticed that the people of Castrima’s trek through the desert was a familiar scene and in a part of the story that reminded me of another story, that of Moses freeing his people from Egypt. The more I thought about the connection, the more similarities between the tales began occurring to me, at first more obvious things like how orogenes are an oppressed people who have recently been freed from servitude to tyrants but then more minute details like how Rennanis, as an equitorial city comprised mostly of Sanzed can easily represent the Egyptians, coming to reclaim their slaves and take back the freedom the orogenes of Castrima now had. Continue reading “Castrima as “The Chosen People””

In class, earlier in the semester, we discussed Corundum’s death in The Fifth Season (447). Essun, Innon, and Alabaster were parents to Corundum and swore to protect him from the hands of the Fulcrum. The Fulcrum was the foundation of the systematic slavery the orogenes had to face, which Essun and Alabaster experienced firsthand. But with the arrival of the Guardians on the island, Essun was forced to make the difficult decision of killing Corundum in order to spare him from the future pain he would have had to face in the Fulcrum. Corundum had no voice in his death as he was a young child, but nevertheless, it was nonconsensual. Personally, I think Essun made the correct decision, but that’s neither here nor there. But with the idea that childhood is mostly a nonconsensual experience in mind, I couldn’t help be reminded of the fascinating murder case of Dee Dee and her daughter Gypsy.

Continue reading “The Nonconsensual Aspect of Childhood”

As the semester continued, I began drawing more connections between Jemisin’s work and real-world events. One hit home, pretty hard. Jemisin writes, on page 123, “You hate the way we live. The way the world makes us live… we have to hide and be hunted down like dogs if we’re ever discovered.” As I read this, I automatically thought of two things: my family and the families of those who immigrate here as well. My mother immigrated to the United States in 1986 in search of the “American Dream”. After sending more than 30 years in the states she realized that her American Dream would be me. My mom was able to earn the opportunity to apply for her residency and I received the privilege of being a United States citizen because of her. The life we live today wouldn’t have been possible if she did not take the decision to leave her hometown in Mexico all those years ago. A year ago, I was assigned to write a report on a recent event in my U.S. Government class. As I scrolled down the New York Times’ website, I came across a headline that caught my eye and not in a good way. It read “Trump Administration Considers Separating Families to Combat Illegal Immigration.” I was in disbelief.

Continue reading “The American Dream”

You would think that the end of the world would constitute a very well-needed social change in society. Well, think again! In N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, she introduces and explores the concept of systematic oppression through world-building. Jemisin does this best through the creation and development of the Orogene “race” (race is socially constructed). These individuals have the ability to sense and manipulate the energy of the Earth. In its official capacity, Orogeny is used to do things like suppress earthquakes and minor shakes (since the Stillness is experiencing its recent and more dangerous season) to keep the Stillness stable and so that seasons can be avoided for as long as possible. However, there is one concern that drives the people of the Stillness to treat and control Orogenes the way they do. Orogeny is also connected to an Orogene’s emotions so it can cause a disruption in the Earth’s movement activity as well as the destruction of Earth. As a result, Orogenes are viewed as extremely dangerous, undesirable, and in need of control which is why so many people look down on them. Because of this, Orogenes are not able to reveal their true powers in fear of being discovered, tracked down by Guardians and taken to The Fulcrum against their will. At the Fulcrum, the Guardians teach young Orogenes “discipline” and “control” so that they can use their Orogeny safely but more importantly so that the Stillness can use their abilities to their advantage. Essentially, everything in this society is aimed towards keeping Orogenes oppressed (“in control”). Sounds horrible, right? Well, it’s not at all different from the world we live in today. It’s the reality that those who have power are the ones who shaped history to fit whatever ideal society they envision. We have seen it all throughout history and even in very recent times. This blog will touch upon those instances.

Continue reading “Systematic Oppression At Its Finest”

Wow. I’m finally here, it took long enough. During the first week of September, I was delighted to see that most of the content we were about to learn was mainly surrounding two areas of study: Literature and Geology. Conveniently, the hardest of my two courses this semester. As I began to read The Fifth Season and the other linked articles, my brain began to do this weird thing where it fills up with different thoughts, all leading me in different directions, but somehow leaving me at the same conclusion: not everything is written in stone. The first thing that went through my mind was, how could the eruption of the Kīlauea Volcano possibly connect to N.K. Jemisin’s book? So, there I was opening up about 6 tabs, one after the other. I viewed all of them at a time and then it hit me, my first connection between the book and the Kīlauea Volcano. It was as clear as daylight, I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it before. In @Buitengebieden’s “The Earth is Breathing…” Twitter post, I listened to and saw the Aa (coarse) lava flow which is most commonly found in Hawaiian-type Volcanoes. It made me think of all the benefits and hazards of a natural calamity such as this one.

Continue reading “Can Earth Really Heal Itself?”

After ending her trilogy, Jemison tells the reader of her mother’s death, by explaining, “mom had a difficult last few years” (416). This revelation made me think of the distant but protective relationship between Nassun and Essun throughout the book.

The first thing that came to my mind was how, no matter how far away they are from each other, they can still identify one another’s orogeny. They spend the whole duration of The Stone Sky living separate lives. Shortly after Essun wakes from her coma, or what Hoa would call “periods of half waking and half sleeping” (11), she begins to remember locating Nassun while opening the gate. She confides in Tonkee, “‘Nassun. I know where she is” (22), and exclaims, “‘I have to go find her”‘ (23). Continue reading “Last Wishes”

N. K. Jemisin first introduced us to the horror of the node-maintainers’ existence in The Fifth Season with their presence serving as a representation of institutional oppression and a public dependency on that oppression. Mistreatment of children is always an emotional subject but the rendering of the node-maintainers into coma states and selling their bodies is closer to a Dr. Mengele experiment than it is to being simply upsetting. As an educator, the welfare of children is my business and so I was deeply disturbed by the Fulcrum’s solution to quelling shakes. The existence and perpetuation of the node-maintainer network was something that we looked at in class as a reference to earthquake and tsunami monitoring stations that form nets over seismically active areas. This certainly captured the preventative aspect of the node-maintainers use but separated them from the obvious injustice of making the humanity of a person inert. I’d like to offer a different reading of the node maintainers in the Stillness as conscripts of the Fulcrum and something similar to modern day child soldiers. Continue reading “Young orogenes as child soldiers”

“Every villain is a hero of his or her own story” Christopher Vogler, The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3rd Edition

Throughout Jemisin’s work readers are often left in the dark of the finer details of things.  There is no clear good side or bad side. You don’t really know people’s intention. In the first novel, we assume that Essun is good and the Fulcrum/the guardians are bad.  By the second novel the Fulcrum doesn’t exist anymore so who can you shift the role of the bad guy too, because we all instinctively label people as good or bad. By the third, I’m questioning who really is the “good” guy.  It’s really hard to tell which side is which. Continue reading “Hero or Villain”