Uncanny Magazine Issue 39

by Lynne M. Thomas

  […]

  “Mother,” Baru said, her heart breaking within her (how formal the old Urunoki sounded now, when set next to fluid simple Aphalone) …

  Later in The Traitor, when talking to someone from another land that is in the process of being colonized by the Masquerade:

  “There will come a time,” Ake said softly, “when this city will not remember a time before the Masquerade. They will be in our language, and our homes, and our blood.”

  Baru’s ears rang with a strange memory: the sound of Aphalone spoken at the Iriad market, like a new verse in an old song.

  It’s not what the Masquerade does to you that you should fear, she wanted to tell Ake. It’s what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.”

  Picture me in my dusty classroom in Modern School, Barakhamba Road in New Delhi, enclosed by red brick walls constructed in the late afternoon of British India.

  I was one of the seventeen percent of Indian school students who studied in an English-medium school, which meant that every subject barring Hindi was taught in English. From elementary to middle school, I got straight As in everything except Hindi and Sanskrit, where I’d always get a B.

  Back then, my mastery over the English language was a running joke, a point of pride even. The signs of my becoming a writer were visible even then. I was convinced that my English proficiency and my clipped, precise, urbane accent were markers of sophistication. I needn’t worry about doing well in Hindi. Where would I use it? Everything that I cared about: History, Science, and Mathematics, were taught in English. Hindi sounded needlessly formal, rustic, uncivilized compared to “fluid simple” English. And Sanskrit? Who had use for that dead language besides saffron-robed holy men?

  Now my memories grow an edge limned with shame. I realize my disdain towards Hindi and Sanskrit mirrored Macaulay’s views on Sanskrit, which he deemed “a language barren of useful knowledge.” He proclaimed in his Minute:

  It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit (sic) language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England…

  “Macaulay’s children” is the pejorative used for Indians like me: someone who read more Tolkein than Tagore, prefers Pink Floyd to Pankaj Udhas. Someone like Baru, who has so thoroughly learned the colonizer’s tongue that she forgot which language she wrote her mother in. Someone who likes to learn their language, learns to like what knowing that language unlocks.

  Shame washes over a colonized culture in layers: first the shame Indian students were made to feel towards their vernacular in the 19th century, then the shame for their poor English. Finally, the shame we force upon ourselves after becoming too Anglicized. Like with the worst of all colonial exercises: it’s not what it does to you that you should fear, but what it convinces you to do to yourself.

  Only after reading about Baru’s school, did I begin to decolonize my mind of what I had been taught, where I had been taught it, and the history behind it. Dickinson’s Masquerade series expertly tackles so many aspects of the British colonial project—from the mandated English education, the Indian elites collaborating with the British aristocracy, the forced primitivization of Indian culture, and all the dividing-and-conquering historian-politician-adventurers like Macaulay inflicted upon India.

  Watching Baru decolonize herself was especially moving. In The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, she finally begins to break free of the mental hold Farrier has placed on her. It is an exceptionally painful process.

  First, she relives decades later a memory of her first encounter with Cairdine Farrier’s influence as a child, finally seeing it for what it was. Baru here is remembering Shir, who was Farrier’s protégé before Baru:

  Little lark, I know what it means to see strange sails in the harbor. My name’s Shir and I’m from Aurdwynn. When I was a child, the Masquerade harbored in Treatymont, our great city. They fought with the Duke Lachta, and I was scared, too. But it all ended well, and my aunt even got to kill the awful duke. Here – take a coin. Go buy a mango and bring it back to me, and I’ll cut you a piece.

  Here’s a coin

  Go buy a mango.

  I’ll cut you a piece.

  She had given the child a Masquerade coin, so that the child could buy her own island’s fruit, to be cut and apportioned to the child by a Masquerade agent.

  Then, as the pieces of the decades-long emotional abuse finally begin to break, Baru is confronted with the truth of whose stories she had been taught to believe:

  “Fine, yes, but turn flank on that idea, Baru. Who told you all your work had been prelude to war? Who insisted on that framing? Who have you recently realized is a master at manipulating you by forcing his stories into your life?”

  “Farrier…” Baru breathed.

  She must decolonize her mind of his presence, of the need for his approval—a feeling that made me recognize what I had fallen prey to. The need to please the white gaze, of being ashamed of my own culture, to the point of not learning, or learning badly my mother tongues.

  This is how Baru was captured in spirit: her curiosity was weaponized against her. Farrier encouraged her relentless drive for learning and made her his political tool. She was taught in the Masquerade tradition, their stories, their histories, their philosophies, his methods, and his aims. Spun up like a dynamo, she was sent to subdue a colonized land as an extension of himself. An agent of his will.

  This was what Macaulay envisioned to be the outcome of his education project as well. In a minute to the English Parliament, he said:

  We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.

  To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

  Here’s a coin.

  Go buy a mango3.

  Every year on Diwali, we’d bring out small pink booklets of Jain hymns my grandmother had collected as our family’s essential songbook of devotion. They’d be passed around as we sit on the floor, on vibrant bedsheets, in front of a motley of idols from Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. I avoided learning any of the hymns, not least because they were written in Sanskrit.

  This year, as I celebrated Diwali in lockdown with my American wife, we made our own Diwali setup, complete with idols that traveled with me to the US seven years prior. My mother had transliterated the syllables of the hymns to English so my wife could sing along. I forced myself to read the songs in the original Devanagari script, a skill rusty from disuse, and not look over her shoulder at the fluid simple English letters.

  I find it frustrating, trying to reconcile my conflicted feelings about my education and the context in which it was envisioned by first Macaulay and then the founders of Modern School.

  Is not what I’m doing here an act of interpretation in the style Macaulay envisioned? In the same breath I cast him out as a racist imperialist and actively declare a need to expunge his presence from my mind, am I not still abiding by the original design of the British plan?

  By speaking their language better than them, conducting my science in their language, and constructing these arguments in this language better than I ever could in Hindi, is there any hope for me to turn flank and rebel?

  Maybe.

  My brain is hardwired to construct stories in English.

  But—

  It does not mean I need to construct their stories.

  I love English; the language and its literature. I am grateful for my robust education that has allowed me to prosper. I am ashamed at my poor Hindi language skills, at my initial disdain and now mournful ignorance of Indi
an literature and my family’s religion. All complicated further by the origins of my colonial-sympathetic but desperately nationalistic, secular but aristocratic, arrogant but inspiring school.

  Shame is unhelpful. Learning is helpful. What I do with the education and the voice it gave me matters. This is part of what I find ironic about the genesis of this essay. Dickinson, while not writing from a colonized perspective, still told this powerful story from an accurate anti-colonial perspective, managing to get the conflicted feelings of a post-colonial youth so right. I imagine it took a lot of learning, curiosity, and humility.

  The purpose of an education is to unlock potential. The only tool a child needs—whether it’s a girl counting the sails of colonial ships on the horizon, or a boy memorizing facts about dinosaurs over a summer—is curiosity.

  An education as envisioned by imperialists like Macaulay or Farrier only seeks to direct the pupil’s curiosity in their chosen direction. Often, away from the pupil’s own culture. The best antidote I’ve found to counteract this, is to return with a childlike curiosity to the literature, arts, and music that have been ignored—that I have ignored—for so long.

  1 Although the most proximate historical basis for the series is British adventurism during the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the parallels between the depiction of colonization are just as relevant to the Indian context.

  2 There is an earlier period of British interest in Indian culture that is more curious and respectful, as exemplified by Sir William Jones, an Indophile and founder of the Royal Asiatic Society. Falcresti arrogance and imperialism is closer to British attitudes from the Macaulay era and onwards.

  3 Although Baru herself was sent impose Falcresti will on a different country, there is textual presence of colonized agents like Aminata and Muire Lo, who grew up in Imperial institutions and learned to behave like Macaulay’s Indians of British spirit, supporting Falcresti rule over their own people.

  © 2021 Sid Jain

  Sid Jain is a biotech engineer and writer based in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park. He has composed music for stories written by his friends and hopes to score the soundtrack to an adaptation of his own work someday. When not making medicine or writing, he’s testing recipes for a five-course vegetarian dinner, practicing martial arts, or listening to progressive rock. He can be found at sidjain.info.

  Protector of Small Steps

  by Marieke Nijkamp

  I’m wearing a t-shirt that says Lioness & Wildmage & Protector & Trickster & Terrier and I’m holding on to my beat-up copy of Squire when I settle on my exercise bike for my five-minute workout. The t-shirt is an accident. It’s the first thing I pulled out of the closet this morning. The book isn’t. Truth this, I reread the Protector of the Small series several times this year.

  I discovered Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books when I was in my early twenties. It was the classic sequence of reader meets book in a charity shop, reader takes book home, and reader realizes this is book two in a series so they should probably order the other three books—and the other three series.1

  Because I knew, without a shred of doubt, I was going to like the books. Pages and squires and knights? I devoured stories like that. My favorite duology in the whole wide world was and is Tonke Dragt’s Letter for the King and Secrets of the Wild Wood, a Dutch series about a young squire and his first adventures as a knight. 2 Those were the books that inspired me to become a writer.

  I got a master’s degree in medieval history, because I—secretly—also wanted to become a knight.

  So when I stumbled across the Tortall books—featuring girls who wanted to become knights and spies and wildmages—I knew I was going to like these books too. What I didn’t anticipate was just how much the Tortall books would come to mean to me.

  Or how much they would help when I started recovering from Covid.

  Five minutes on an exercise bike on the lowest setting shouldn’t be hard, but it is. The first bike test I did this year lasted six minutes. I was ill for two days after.

  Still, that was seven months ago. During that time, I’ve also gone from barely being able to walk around the block to comfortably walking 10-15 minutes a day.

  There’s a line in First Test, the first book of the Protector of the Small series, where the main character Kel starts doing pushups to gain strength in her arms. The first time, she can manage three pushups.

  “Eda promised her that if she kept exercising, she would do better soon.”

  Rationally, I know it’s not as simple as that. I have lived with chronic fatigue before. I live with chronic pain. For those of us with complicated bodies, it’s not always a matter of just keeping at it. But for me, right now, it’s good to keep in mind. It makes it easier to keep going. And it makes the minutes tick by faster, to be reading.

  When I dove into the Tortall series, I fell head over heels in love with the books from the very first page.3 Now, I know the various series are not perfect. Sometimes, they’re painfully imperfect.4 But I found so many parts of myself in these books—and in their heroines.

  At first, it was Alanna who mattered most to me. The stubborn young girl who disguises herself as a boy to win her shield. She’s the quintessential hero. She rises to become the King’s Champion—and she has a mythical status as a book character too.

  She resonated with me for an obvious reason: when I picked up the Song of the Lioness books, I didn’t have a word for nonbinary yet. At some level, I understood that my wanting to become a knight was wrapped up in gender feelings, but I didn’t know yet how to quantify that. After all, it’s hard to put a name to your feelings when you don’t know the words exist. But that first time I read about Alanna, I recognized myself in her discomfort with gender. I envied her for being able to convincingly present as a boy. And when Alanna finally dropped her disguise, I felt bereft because the idea—the possibility—of her challenging gender meant so much to me.

  Still, I read her when I needed to read her. When I started asking questions. When I began to figure out the puzzle pieces of who I was.

  (I read those scenes differently, now that I’m more comfortable with who I am.)

  Next, it was Aly, Alanna’s youngest daughter, who becomes a spy in a strange land. Aly, with her blue hair, her schemes, and her stories. So unlike Alanna. So much like me in other ways.

  I loved Aly in the same way I love politics. I loved her for asking question upon question upon question. I loved her for reading body language encyclopedically and being flawed and headstrong. I loved her notes and plots and schematics, and when I look at my own whiteboard full of questions and checkmarks and my drawers full of endless sets of notecards and plot points, I like to think our desks wouldn’t look too dissimilar.

  Obvious gender differences aside, she’s probably more like me than any other Tortall heroine.

  But in 2020, it’s Kel who matters to me most.

  Kel helps me ride my bike.

  I got Covid back in March, a week and a bit after The Oracle Code came out. I got lucky. Despite being high risk, my experience was considered mild. I didn’t have to go to hospital. I didn’t end up on oxygen. I spent three weeks in bed, where I coughed until my head and chest hurt. I couldn’t finish a sentence without gasping for air. Taking a breath felt like inhaling small shards of glass.

  After three weeks, my fever broke. I wasn’t coughing so much anymore. And my physician stopped checking in with me daily, because I’d passed the danger zone.

  I should have recovered. I didn’t. At least, not fully.

  Weeks passed, and while I could write while lying down, I’d also done that while I was still sick. I gave answers to interview questions. I wrote the first issue of a comic series. I tinkered with a script and a manuscript. I’ve learned, over the years, to do a lot of things in spite of health or lack thereof.

  But I didn’t bounce back to where I was before Covid. I couldn’t go on longer or even shorter walks to clear my head, not even with my trusted cane as supp
ort. I couldn’t return to work at my desk. I still couldn’t breathe properly.

  I could lie down. Write, read, sleep, repeat.

  Because reading took effort and energy I barely had, I found myself rereading a lot. I found myself reaching for old favorites and comfort reads. I reached for books that I knew would make me happy, and it’s continuously a skill I admire in other writers.

  Somewhere during those first months of recovery and therapy, I picked up Kel’s books again.

  Now, if Aly is most like me in many ways, Kel is always my other choice. I love that she’s the type of person who forgets to eat when she’s busy. I love that she’s ace. I love that she’s conscientious and determined. I love that she’s constantly learning.

  I’d like to think that I’m as level-headed as Kel is, but let’s be honest, that’s not how my brain works. Does it work that way for any writer? I can think of a thousand and one things to worry about, and a thousand and one ways to make it worse. Still, Kel isn’t without her fears either. She learns to act in spite of them. She rationalizes. She hides.5 For better and for worse, that felt familiar too.

  And Kel, like Alanna says, bless her, she’s real. She isn’t a hero right from the start. She is just like other girls. When she falls, she gets back up again. She’s on a mission and she works hard to get where she wants to be. She even makes exercise seem fun and meaningful.

  That particular aspect of Kel—those muscle strengthening exercises and pattern dances—always nagged at me to be better about my own physical exercise. I’ve had enough physical therapy in my life to know how important it is for me, and I’ve always had the best intentions to Keep It Up. Over the years, I’d pick up the books again and plan to add longer walks to my daily schedule—or sword dances, perhaps.6

  But I never really made it past those first few days of good intentions, before the weather would turn or a deadline would pop up and I would figure I’d catch up tomorrow. Then the next day. And then the next.