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N.K. Jemisin's latest, The City We Became, is very much a paean to New York City -- a city I love and have lived in and have a lot of feelings about, and also a city I did not grow up in, and no longer live in, which is also relevant, I think, in how complicated I'm feeling about The City We Became.
The premise: sometimes, very old, very lived-in cities undergo a complicated evolution in which they become sentient entities, born and avatar-ized in the personage of someone who both lives in the city and is powerfully representative of the city's character in some key way. New York is the second city in the Americas to undergo this process, assisted by its predecessor São Paulo (New Orleans and Port-au-Prince having both almost made it but died in the 'birthing', possibly as a result of interference by a sinister cosmic entity, on which more anon) but something is weird and different about New York: a.) in addition to the one Avatar of New York, there are also five separate avatars representing each borough, and b.) the sinister cosmic entity attempting to kill the city at birth has also personified itself and brought its A game to bear against New York in a way that none of the other personified cities have ever seen before.
With New York personified in hiding after a big battle at the beginning, the main characters of the book are largely the humans who have now found themselves as avatars of their boroughs, and they're great characters -- interesting, compelling and complicated. Even with all this, I still find myself stumbling at the level of generalization required to say, 'this person, because of these traits, represents a whole borough.' A whole borough! Cities and neighborhoods have unique characters, of course they do, but like -- there's a bit where Brooklyn and Manny (Manhattan) are trying to figure out how to find the people who have become Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, and a lot of that conversation is so true and fantastic about New York and then Manny boils it down to "So we're looking for a hardworking non-techie in Queens and somebody creative but with an attitude in the Bronx" and all of a sudden I come screeching to a halt once again at the idea that one pre-existing person can embody the most Queens, the most Bronx, more than everybody else who lives there too.
And I do think that Jemisin does as well as anybody could do at writing people and characters who embody the level of contradiction required to make this work -- I especially love Brooklyn, former rapper turned city councilwoman, and the Bronx, queer Lenape artist and arts administrator with ferociously stompy boots and a grandchild on the way -- and I love some of the ways this plays out in the way the tensions and dynamics between the boroughs become mapped onto the tensions between the humans representing them, how Manhattan is the one most weirdly invested in the concept of New York As City, how the boroughs all set each other's teeth on edge even as they have to work together. But because the people are all characters and also metaphors, there was a certain exhausting quality to the read, as every time someone did something I had to stop and consider: how do I feel about this generalization, about a place I lived and know and love? About this one? And that one? And frequently the answer was "pretty good actually" and sometimes it was not (I think I'd have a real rough time with this book if I'd ever lived on Staten Island) but it still made it an overall challenging reading experience, for me, personally.
The other thing I have a hard time with is the notion that, like ... okay, I think I would feel better about this if the metaphysics was like "every city's birth is different and complicated in its own way, we just never know how it's going to go because it depends so much on a city's individual character." But to have various other cities come and remark on how special and weird the New York process is, to have it implied that New York is the only city that's complicated and divided and balanced enough to require separate sub-avatars (there's a complicated London Situation that's referred to several times and never elaborated on, but definitely seems to have resulted in just a lone London) is ... it's New York exceptionalism in a way that I'm not a hundred percent comfortable with. Of all the cities? All the cities that ever were?
tl;dr;it's a well-written, well-characterized, and compelling book that I have some complicated feelings about on a broader conceptual and metaphorical level, and I think some of my complicated feelings are just 'I don't get on well with books that are more than 50% metaphor'. But also I have a book club discussion about it tomorrow so I'm sure some of my thoughts will change as they come into contact with other people's!
The premise: sometimes, very old, very lived-in cities undergo a complicated evolution in which they become sentient entities, born and avatar-ized in the personage of someone who both lives in the city and is powerfully representative of the city's character in some key way. New York is the second city in the Americas to undergo this process, assisted by its predecessor São Paulo (New Orleans and Port-au-Prince having both almost made it but died in the 'birthing', possibly as a result of interference by a sinister cosmic entity, on which more anon) but something is weird and different about New York: a.) in addition to the one Avatar of New York, there are also five separate avatars representing each borough, and b.) the sinister cosmic entity attempting to kill the city at birth has also personified itself and brought its A game to bear against New York in a way that none of the other personified cities have ever seen before.
With New York personified in hiding after a big battle at the beginning, the main characters of the book are largely the humans who have now found themselves as avatars of their boroughs, and they're great characters -- interesting, compelling and complicated. Even with all this, I still find myself stumbling at the level of generalization required to say, 'this person, because of these traits, represents a whole borough.' A whole borough! Cities and neighborhoods have unique characters, of course they do, but like -- there's a bit where Brooklyn and Manny (Manhattan) are trying to figure out how to find the people who have become Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, and a lot of that conversation is so true and fantastic about New York and then Manny boils it down to "So we're looking for a hardworking non-techie in Queens and somebody creative but with an attitude in the Bronx" and all of a sudden I come screeching to a halt once again at the idea that one pre-existing person can embody the most Queens, the most Bronx, more than everybody else who lives there too.
And I do think that Jemisin does as well as anybody could do at writing people and characters who embody the level of contradiction required to make this work -- I especially love Brooklyn, former rapper turned city councilwoman, and the Bronx, queer Lenape artist and arts administrator with ferociously stompy boots and a grandchild on the way -- and I love some of the ways this plays out in the way the tensions and dynamics between the boroughs become mapped onto the tensions between the humans representing them, how Manhattan is the one most weirdly invested in the concept of New York As City, how the boroughs all set each other's teeth on edge even as they have to work together. But because the people are all characters and also metaphors, there was a certain exhausting quality to the read, as every time someone did something I had to stop and consider: how do I feel about this generalization, about a place I lived and know and love? About this one? And that one? And frequently the answer was "pretty good actually" and sometimes it was not (I think I'd have a real rough time with this book if I'd ever lived on Staten Island) but it still made it an overall challenging reading experience, for me, personally.
The other thing I have a hard time with is the notion that, like ... okay, I think I would feel better about this if the metaphysics was like "every city's birth is different and complicated in its own way, we just never know how it's going to go because it depends so much on a city's individual character." But to have various other cities come and remark on how special and weird the New York process is, to have it implied that New York is the only city that's complicated and divided and balanced enough to require separate sub-avatars (there's a complicated London Situation that's referred to several times and never elaborated on, but definitely seems to have resulted in just a lone London) is ... it's New York exceptionalism in a way that I'm not a hundred percent comfortable with. Of all the cities? All the cities that ever were?
tl;dr;it's a well-written, well-characterized, and compelling book that I have some complicated feelings about on a broader conceptual and metaphorical level, and I think some of my complicated feelings are just 'I don't get on well with books that are more than 50% metaphor'. But also I have a book club discussion about it tomorrow so I'm sure some of my thoughts will change as they come into contact with other people's!
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The Latin Americanist in me was and remains furious about the truly blatant US-centrism and anti-indigeneity (ironic, considering the Bronx) inherent in this concept that NYC was the second "New World" city to Awaken. What the heck happened to all the major indigenous cities that didn't actually just disappear into thin air after colonialism? What about Cusco, Cajamarca, all these cities that have been continuously inhabited since well pre-Colón? They didn't just go away, and they were not destroyed. The destruction, murder, and relocations of their indigenous populations were devastating, and some cities, like Tenochtitlán, were indeed fully razed, but many others survived and changed and in several cases persisted as bases of indigenous power and safety within the colonial system right up to the present day. So much of the book is about how cities are fluid and shift and change over time, and the absolute destruction of agency it is to just assume that indigenous metropolitan cultures failed to survive colonization is enraging. They did survive; they are still surviving. I will never believe that NYC is alive but Cusco isn't.
If for the sake of argument we have to submit to that old lie that all indigenous civilizations in the U.S. were wiped out and left no direct connection to the modern world, then I can still quibble with the fact that NYC is only the second city in the Americas to find its avatar. Just off the very top of my head, the Spanish-founded cities of Lima, La Habana, Ciudad de México, Santiago de Chile, Caracas, Quito, Buenos Aires, and Santo Domingo were all founded a century or more before NYC. In an effort to be a little less Hispanophone-centric, even Québec is a tad older. Like, great that São Paulo is in the mix, great that Port-au-Prince and New Orleans tried, and I do understand that it's implied that white supremacy killed those last two and they don't get to try again, but uh… the rest of South and North America exists too, had relationships with white supremacy, and kept on existing, sometimes continuously. On a plot level, most of them don't even recent large-scale natural disasters to attach metaphor to. Considering the implicit points made in the narrative about ethnic and cultural diversity's roles in awakening cities, gotta point out that these Latin American cities were almost inherently more diverse than NYC for a good long time, considering the semi-settler nature of Spanish colonialism, mestizaje, the long west coast sans Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Transatlantic Trade. /rant
So I'll read the next book, but I will probably get it from the library rather than buying it, because I am sick and tired of ""Americans"" forgetting that the rest of the Americas exist.
Lord, sorry, ETA again: I don't mean that Jemisin has to feel about these cities anything like what she feels for NYC, or write her book about them too. Of course she doesn't! In fact, she maybe shouldn't! She has tons of reasons to focus on NYC alone, and those are compelling, interesting reasons that make for a wonderful book. But I don't understand why NYC had to be special to the ahistorical exclusion of real, important, untold history elsewhere in the Americas.
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Honestly, the thing that reminds me most of is that old "X-place Gothic" meme that went 'round tumblr a few years back -- lots of people creating variously faceted jokes about their places of the heart. So particular and diverse!
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Honestly, it would have been better if she'd just not mentioned any other cities at all beyond a vague "oh, yeah, other cities have avatars too, but that's not what we're talking about here, so we're not going into it." That would be so much easier to live with.