Gods who learn to speak
Reading Ann Leckie and thinking about cultural geography's 'more-than-human' concerns
I started writing these newsletters with a vague intention of ‘writing about memory.’ In the way that writers take on topics like disease and curiosity and climate change and parenting in a pandemic and epidemiology, I thought, Oh, maybe there’s a way to do something about memory.
The writing hasn’t gone in that direction, needless to say.
But what’s emerged in this iterative practice is an interest in storytelling: How do we tell stories to make sense of the world? How do we tell stories to make the world? And so part of that project is the very basic act of telling a story; but then a part of the project - and this is the meta-question that I seem to keep coming back to - is exploring how we tell stories.
Because the how isn’t just a question of technique or craft but also a question of imagination - the shape of stories is entangled with how different people imagine their worlds. So: Kurt Vonnegut and Lauren Michele Jackson and Djinn-eography. And as I’ve been working through these posts, the question I’m interested in is slowly sharpening: How can fiction - and speculative fiction or fantasy in particular - help us think about the world in ways that are different than the standard academic or non-fiction book? That question has come up again because I started reading Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower a few days ago.
I’m only a third of the way into the book, but there are a couple of things that immediately stand out:
Our narrator - the ‘I’ - starts out unnamed and unlocated, but it’s clear that they’re able to follow the ‘action’ of the story. The ‘you’ they follow is a man named Eolo, who is an aide to one of the main characters of the book (and around whom the political struggle of the book seems to turn). Pretty early on, we come to realize that the ‘I’ is a god.
And what also emerges is that there’s a whole world of gods - gods of forests and specific hills and meteorites. And some gods exert themselves to inhabit animals and roam around the world, while other gods stay powerfully inert in the landscape.
And their power waxes and wanes as groups of humans learn to speak to them, offer them trinkets and blood sacrifice and devotion; and as they exert themselves to reshape the world to fulfill the wishes of the people who pray to them.
So on the one hand, we have a pretty typical fantasy story (but also a story of human history): There are gods; humans pray to the gods; gods do things; humans respond.
But what I really love about Leckie’s book is the way that we come to inhabit the strangeness of this god. Because the god speaks as an ‘I,’ we’re asked to put ourselves in their head, to feel and see and experience the world as they do. So Leckie describes how this god - rooted in the earth of a particular hill somewhere in the far north of this world - responds to the growth and retreat of glaciers:
Ice had overtaken everything, for as far as I could see, for so long that I began to wonder if the world would only ever be ice henceforth. But eventually the ice had begun to withdraw. My old hillside, and the shattered hill across the valley, had been pressed and ground flat by the immense weight of the ice, but as it retreated it left behind new hills; mounds of gravel, boulders, and silt.
I live in a land of hills - drumlins left by the glaciers that once gouged their way from north to south, narrow valleys that splay out like fingers across the land. There’s something so rich and suggestive to think of each of these hills and valleys as little gods in themselves, actors we have yet to learn to speak to. And in another smart part of Leckie’s world, gods can’t communicate to humans directly or immediately. The relationship has to be learned - there is something discrepant in their way of relating to each other. They depend on intermediaries. And - as far as I can tell - the question of who can speak for the gods, who can be trusted to speak for the gods becomes a key motive for the book. So Leckie writes about how this god and humans learn to communicate:
Yes, they trained me as though I were a dog, with attention and treats and constant praise. But I trained them as well. They quickly learned that, while I would take blood or milk or even water, what I preferred was fish from the nearby river, or shells from the now-distant sea. Speech was not a simple matter for me, and so over generations between us we devised a set of tokens—bits of wood, cut and polished into silhouettes of fish, inset with shell, each marked…
We could say: OK, but this is a book of fiction, fantasy fiction at that. What could it teach us otherwise? In cultural geography over the past two decades (and other disciplines too), there’s been this steady interest in ‘culture’ that takes the ‘non-human,’ the ‘more-than-human,’ or the ‘post-human’ seriously. Although diverse in its questions and approach, this work tries to capture that the cultural worlds in which we live aren’t simply products of human imagination but involve all sorts of vital lives that exist outside, beyond, across, and other to human worlds. [And this happens well beyond cultural geography - a quick Google search for ‘how forests speak’ pulls up a lot of good examples, and then there’s Hugh Raffles’ book In Amazonia as well.]
So what Leckie is able to do is provide a way to give the ‘more-than-human’ (in this case, a god) a voice, a way to be understood as a part of the everyday human worlds of which we were a part. I’m excited to see where the rest of the book goes.