The Wild Girls & thoughts about passion
Passion is so refreshing.
I have waded through my share of arguments in favour of misogyny and the generally appalling treatment of women in works of fantasy that – I can’t say they’re based on medieval Europe, because judging by their remarks the authors have either never picked up a history book or never got further than the Horrible Histories. Jesse Bullington’s books are based on medieval Europe and he has the bibliographies to prove it. The generic fantasyland popularised by every Tolkien rip-off ever – including the supposedly “subversive” works of Abercrombie & co – is about as close to medieval Europe as my piss is to wine, and this includes the apparently widespread attitude that women’s historical narratives were 24-hour suffering and also BORING and why would we talk about them? Men men men raped women men, ad eternum. I have waded through these arguments and come out of them so fucking tired and then -
Oh, hello, Ursula K Le Guin’s The Wild Girls. It is about young women who are enslaved, forcibly married and generally treated appallingly. And it’s amazing. Here’s why: Le Guin cares. And not just cares. Le Guin is pissed off. Le Guin is passionate about the mistreatment of women and people of less privileged races.
The Wild Girls is a short piece, reprinted in a beautiful little chapbook by PM Press as part of their Outspoken Authors series (and having also read Eleanor Arnason’s Mammoths of the Great Plains, it is looking to be a damn fine series). It is about two captive “Dirt” girls, brought to a more “advanced” city in order to marry men who are considered gods – who can only marry Dirt women – and bear their god-children. The men claim them and name them, and that is to be that.
The whole narrative puts these women in a position of less privilege – and normally that’d make me angry, except that Le Guin knows exactly what she’s doing. For example:
But Modh did not know of any other system, any possibility of another system, which would have allowed her to say “But.” Neither did Nata know of that alternative, that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice, in which the word “But” can be spoken and have meaning.
YES. YES FOREVER AND EVER.
It is so plainly stated, but this sort of thing can never be too plainly stated. Anyone who has ever been in a position of non-privilege knows what it is like to say “But” and to be utterly ignored. There is no “But” for sexist jokes, there is no “But” for an unwanted hand on your thigh, that will have any effect whatsover on the person harming you – and it is nigh impossible to get certain privileged people to understand this. (I remember trying to explain it to my brother, who is a straight white cis middle-class able male – there is no way I can think of in which he is not privileged. He really struggled to wrap his head around the idea that sexist jokes are different to non-ist based jokes, and he is a rare case in that he genuinely did try.)
I cannot stress enough how much I love Le Guin for putting that in such beautiful, plain words.
The two girls, named Modh and Mal, are brought up comfortably in a rich household, but they are haunted by the ghost of a baby callously tossed aside and left for dead during their capture. Because their captors named the baby – not understanding the ways of the nomadic peoples (who of course have all sorts of names for themselves, and not one of them is “Dirt”) – it can follow them to the city. And as an especially unpleasant man bargains to have young Mal as his wife, and Modh, who has already married one man to protect her, cannot help again, events turn inexorably worse.
I want to highlight this:
“If he does lie with her it won’t kill her,” Bela said. “It might do her good. She’s been spoiled here. You spoil her, Modh. A man in her bed may be what she needs.”
“But – that man – ” Modh said, her mouth dry, her ears ringing.
This does several things.
This is a narrative focused entirely on the people faced with systematic rape. Rape is not a source of queue-frustration or manpain; it is horror, to which Modh physically reacts. Rape is also not sexy. (I’d say “Duh!”, but when things like The Windup Girl with rape that reads like it’s someone’s fap-material gets so many awards, I fucking wonder about my fellow SFF fans.) This is angry and helpless and so achingly real.
Also:
“Neither of you has ever been mistreated,” Bela said, resentfully, as if answering an accusation. His mother frowned at him and clicked her tongue.
His mother is a Dirt woman too, and she is not having any of his “but it’s not soooo bad how we forcibly marry you” bullshit. <3
This is the sort of thing The Wild Girls is laced with: the expression of privilege and the clear message that this is fucked up shit, but there’s nothing much that can be done about it. Well, nothing that will change life in the long-term. In the short-term, Mal has her revenge: an act of strength and helplessness, all at once, one of the only recourses left to a girl faced with a life of rape. (In case you couldn’t tell, this story does. not. flinch.)
And then, in the end, the final lines of story make plain what the people of privilege care about:
Bela ten Belen buried his wife and unborn son with the Belen dead in the holy grounds of the Temple, for though she was only a Dirt woman, she had a dead gob in her womb.
Am I the only one who can feel the anger seething out of every word in that sentence? See it, even?
This is not the only way to write anger (I am also a big fan of the angry person striking back narrative), but damn, it is effective. It is so real. This story is gutting and harsh and it burns bright with its anger: there is no attempt to forgive the men, there is no attempt to shame the women for their inability to change the system. There is also an examination of why captive people aid in their captivity. Plus, separate from all this, there is gorgeous worldbuilding that I want to roll around in like a cat in freshly turned soil. The Wild Girls is a richer, cleverer work than most novels.
Taking this back to my comments at the beginning, about shittily treated female narratives for the sake of historicity – fuck, they’re worlds apart from Le Guin. Galaxies. There are the authors who care about that (typically oh-so-inaccurate) historicity and make vague remarks about how sexism is bad, mm’kay; then there’s Le Guin. Le Guin who takes trodden-upon women and writes a stunning, beautiful story brimming with anger at the injustice of it.
(Incidentally, Jesse Bullington? His The Enterprise of Death, set in REAL historical Europe? Lots o’ women. Main character is a lesbian black woman. The book has some squicky stuff, I should warn you, but it also has some marvellous, wonderful stuff.
Protip, dudebros: FEMALE. MERCENARIES. Faaar from the only interesting female narrative – cf: the whole issue of how domestic narratives are considered boring; queens; Joan d’Arc; anchorites; & more – but if blood ‘n’ guts is your thing, FEMALE. MERCENARIES. There really is no fucking excuse, broturds.)
I think Le Guin succeeds because of one important thing: passion.
I see someone like R Scott Bakker clutch his pearls because people think acrackedmoon of Requires Hate (who, incidentally, is also passionate) has worthwhile things to say about sexism, racism, homphobia and other fails – coincidentally, she’s criticised his works – and he says: “My books are meant to problematize gender, to ask the hard questions that have to be asked if we are to have any hope of getting a handle on social problems like racism or sexism … But that’s the thing when you take risks. Sometimes you lose.”
Yes. Yes you do lose.
I don’t doubt that Bakker thinks sexism and racism are bad (mm’kay), but when he tries to ask the hard questions there is something he lacks: passion. He does not give me the impression of being angry about racism and sexism. Have his hands ever shook while he’s typing because he’s trying to write about these issues but he’s so upset he can’t type properly? (Mine have, re: sexism and rape culture.) Has he ever spent entire gym sessions chewing over these issues in his head, even though they’re upsetting him? Has he ever lain awake at night with the same? Has he ever been made suddenly angry by a music video or an offhand remark on QI or a friend’s unthinking comment, but there’s no “But” he could use to mke that person understand why they’re being horrible?
I’m not saying that you can’t intellectually understand a problem without being personally upset by it. There is empathy, too.
But I would argue that the people who protest about historical accuracy and how they just tried to ask the hard questions are not angry, are not passionate – and the work that speaks to me on these issues tends to come from an obvious place of anger and passion. It feels so good to find these works. It feels so refreshing. It feels like coming to a place where everyone understands – to a home.
The rest – I wish they’d blow away on the wind like old leaves. Sadly, a lot of them land on award ballots instead. Thankfully, The Wild Girls won a Nebula Award when it was originally published. That gives me hope, though there’s a very long way to go.
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Le Guin is amazing. I seem to be finding with so many of her books that they take a well known and normally poorly handled idea (e.g. Avatar) and she then explores in depth ideas with such emotion while still recognizing the complexity. Then you realise she wrote the book 20 years before the latest shallow interpretation and get all sad.
I haven’t read The Wild Girls though, I have been in a huge Le Guin (and Russ) reading phase. Will have to dig it up from somewhere.
This is the first ever Le Guin I read, last summer/autumn. How to Create an Insta-Fan in 1 Easy Step. (It is, by the by, available on Book Depository if you have trouble finding it via other means.)
I just love how she puts emotion and thought at the heart of her work.
Are passion and anger only criteria when you are judging works that attempt to tackle issue related to gender? For a work to be considered a success, does the level of passion and anger need to meet or exceed yours? Can a work be considered a success if there is some passion and anger but may not reach your level of passion and anger? I am a Buddhist and believe that excessive passion and anger are both things that lead to attachment and suffering and therefore are things to be avoided. Does this mean that my views in regards to gender are wrong?
I guess I am posting this because I find passion and anger are realy odd criteria with which to judge a book/author.
For a work to be considered a success, does the level of passion and anger need to meet or exceed yours? Can a work be considered a success if there is some passion and anger but may not reach your level of passion and anger
These are the easy questions: no.
Your other questions are trickier for me to answer because passion is very much at the heart of how I interact with these issues. Personally, in my dealings with sexism, I can’t not be passionate. I know there are people who deal with sexism (and racism, and other issues, but I’ll keep to sexism because it’s one I experience) who don’t get passionate, and no, I don’t want to invalidate their resposnes – I guess part of it comes down to what speaks to me. Passion speaks to me, whether it’s anger or joy or any other form.
At the same time, there’s something that sets apart the work of less/non-passionate people who care from the people who write rape scenes because it’s “gritty” or “realistic”. The people who probe gender issues because they deeply, sincerely care about those issues vs the people who do it for intellectual kicks and then complain that they’re being labelled a misogynist as a result (eg Bakker). Caring is, perhaps, the core criteria, which can or cannot manifest as passion.
What do you think?
Great post, thank you. I’m interested because if you asked me cold to name examples of recent sf that is passionate about injustice, The Windup Girl would very likely be on my list. That’s not to say that I think it’s an entirely successful novel — absolutely the depiction of, say, Emiko is problematic — but one thing I never doubted was that Bacigalupi was ragingly angry about the injustices he was depicting. I could easily believe that his hands shook with anger as he was writing parts of that novel.
And yet he’s clearly not doing the same thing as Le Guin, as you point out. I wonder if the difference is the target of the anger. From the Le Guin I’ve read, her anger is directed at the system, but almost always with a grain of hope. The steel of the last line you quote is for me laced with regret: humanity can do better than this. In The Windup Girl, the anger is more nihilistic, it’s couched as a general failing of humanity: we should be able to do better than this, but we won’t, we will keep reiterating the same old shit. There will always be people unable to say “But.” Maybe the problem with that as a position is that it’s too easy, it neatly wraps into the belief in limited historical narratives that you mention.
I think one corollary to the need for passion (or, as I expand in my reply to dharmakitri above, caring) is the need for getting it right, which is much more difficult. I do agree with you that Bacigalupi clearly feels strongly about certain things – what happens to Anderson Lake in the ending of The Windup Girl makes it quite apparent what he thinks of Western interferers, for instance. Anderson Lake is set up as The White Guy, typically the hero in even shittier narratives, and, well. He’s not the hero and he doesn’t get to see the end credits. While I don’t entirely agree with him getting so much narrative focus, I can see what Bacigalupi’s tried to do there.
The problem with The Windup Girl is that it exotifies Thailand, depicts inter-Asian tensions poorly, treats Emiko as a victim whose rape is pornographically depicted while her moment of triumph is not even shown – for all that Bacigalupi tried, he failed in a lot of really important ways that for some reason have been overlooked by most of the people who love the book.
I don’t think it’s about regret/hope versus nihilism – I don’t see that particular clear-cut division between Le Guin and Bacigalupi’s work as you do, although they are definitely different in a lot of ways – but rather about taking that passion and using it well.
I don’t think it’s about regret/hope versus nihilism – I don’t see that particular clear-cut division between Le Guin and Bacigalupi’s work as you do
You’re right, I’m generalising about them both. Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker isn’t nihilistic, for instance. I can’t think of Le Guin that is — but I haven’t read everything she’s written. That said, I think I was suggesting that nihilism could be taken as axiomatically a bad use of passion.
That said, I think I was suggesting that nihilism could be taken as axiomatically a bad use of passion.
It’s an interesting question, and not one I’ve thought about before. My immediate reaction is two-fold:
1) It’s a very understandable response. Being faced with systems of oppression and prejudice does not exactly fill most people with optimism; the feeling that people “will keep reiterating the same old shit” is certainly felt by many people, to varying degrees.
2) Looking at literature as a tool of change, what does nihilism do? It doesn’t present alternatives or, necessarily, deconstruct the situation. Does that mean it doesn’t help progress our arguments?
It does, however, shine a light on the situation – but perhaps there’s the danger (and I think this applies to The Windup Girl) that readers won’t even see half of it: they’re so used to patterns of racism, sexism, etc that they don’t realise they’re meant to dislike this, especially when it gets even remotely subtle. Apparently some readers don’t realise Anderson Lake is not a good guy? That’s just to take a non-subtle example; the various ways in which the book holds up a tourist’s view of Thailand are almost never commented upon because, I suspect, the vast majority of readers don’t know it’s so problematic. And that’s dangerous.
Then, coming back to my first point, literature is also a tool of expression, and I believe that every reaction to oppression and prejudice is valid, including despair and pessimism and nihilism.
So I think it’s very complicated and I’m sure further thought on the matter would only reveal more ways in which it’s complicated – but then I think all uses of passion relating to sexism, racism and other problems are necessarily so, because of the complex nature of those problems.
Passion is a starting point, not the only required tool – and it must be used well.
Complexity, yes. The way you frame the dangers is pretty close to what I was thinking of, although laying it out like that makes the importance of reader education, as well as writer education, more obvious.
And I wonder whether Tiptree is a useful name to throw into the mix; some of her most powerful stories were, I’d argue, nihilistic, and they certainly raise useful questions about sexual and gender politics, if not so much about race.
There’s one problem with that, Niall.
I’m a Thai native. Born and bred. I rarely find a book more insulting to my culture, my ethnicity, and my country than The Wind-Up Girl: within the genre it’s possibly the singular most insulting one. It gets things factually wrong–so thoroughly wrong that it’s obvious to me that Bacigalupi never talked to an actual Thai person or asked one to look at so much as the first pages of his manuscript–and it handles Asian relations in some of the most awful, sensationalized and thoughtless way possible. It’s written with an outsider’s view, an outsider who doesn’t think “yes, this is what I see but what about asking an insider?” It damages my culture precisely because you and people like you believe it is an authoritative, “authentic” picture of Thailand. It erases voices like mine, and replaces them with that of a white man from the west. The Wind-Up Girl is nothing more than exploitative, tourist trash, and that it’s regarded as highly as it is by the SFF fandom/genre is starkly telling and suggests that despite the pretenses and failing attempts to be enlightened said genre/fandom remains a seething cesspit where intelligent thought and perspective go to die.
“Passion” doesn’t excuse ignorance. “Passion” doesn’t mean you don’t need to do research. “Passion” doesn’t mean you get to appropriate someone else’s culture.
you and people like you believe it is an authoritative, “authentic” picture of Thailand.
I do not, and have said so publicly in so many words. And in fact the thrust of my comment here was that ultimately I do not think passion alone is sufficient.
Apologies, I hadn’t read your review. You likely have noticed however that the SFF fandom at large creamed its collective pants over this novel, with more than a few reviewers–white, western reviewers generally–wanking themselves into a coma over the “authenticity” and “textured” depiction of Thailand. Generally the only criticism leveled at it is the creepy sexual exploitative nature of Emiko and the rape scene.
I should say that I don’t at all agree that Bacigalupi’s work shows his passion, because do you know what I see when I read it? Intellectual cowardice. He wants to get at the rotten bits of humanity, he wants to get at racism, at sexual exploitation: ah, what better way to do that than externalize all those and make it all Asian (because Emiko’s story could never have happened in the mighty west! Oh wait)? It’s orientalist. One might even say–and in fact I do say–that it is deeply, hideously racist. It becomes even more so when you think that the Asian-vs-Asian racism he depicted with such ignorance (mistaken by SFF fandom at large for insight) is something from which he, as a white westerner, directly benefits from: not only is it not his place to criticize it, it’s unbelievably presumptuous of him to do so.
If he’s so passionate about all that, perhaps Bacigalupi would be better served to write about a place he does know, a culture to which he belongs. Not shit all over mine like a rabid monkey slinging feces.
It reminds me, as well, sharply of Heart of Darkness. You know, like this:
It’s not quite as bad, but it’s as near there as you can get in the twenty-first century–amusingly, Achebe called Conrad out for his bleeding-heart liberalism, and the more contemporary version of that oozes through every pore of The Wind-Up Girl. I suspect you’re mistaking a white western man’s desire to look enlightened and sensitive for “actual feelings” or “empathy.” If the man actually gave a shit about these things, maybe he’d have consulted a living Thai person instead of resting on his laurels, content that a bit of tourism was all he needed to know to write Thailand.
Thanks. I should say that I don’t necessarily stand by everything in that review; but it was the best I could do at the time at trying to articulate why the book got under my skin, without ignoring its problems. If I was writing about the book now at the very least I’d cite your critique, and Jaymee Goh’s, for reference and comparison.
Part of me wants to say more, but I’m very conscious that I’ve turned Alex’s thread about Ursula Le Guin into a thread about Paolo Bacigalupi, so perhaps best leave it here. Except to agree about the absence of Thai names (other than writers) in the acknowledgements. He gets feedback from a Malaysian about Hock Seng but doesn’t bother to consult a Thai about any of the rest of it? Baffling and disappointing.
[...] recent post about passion and The Wild Girls was inspired by R Scott Bakker’s recent idiocy (Nick Mamatas [...]