Book Review: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin, Hachette Australia (2020)
A couple of weeks ago the director Spike Lee posted a three minute film that he recently made titled New York, New York. Watching it, I found myself sobbing in a kind of ungovernable manner that really surprised me. As someone who has only visited the city a handful of times, and has never lived in New York, what accounts for the type of existential grief I felt at that moment, the sort of fear that New York as we know it might be lost forever, as well as a certitude for the inextinguishable spirit of the city?
N.K. Jemisin opens her latest fantasy series and the first book in her new trilogy, The City We Became, with a quote from Thomas Wolfe: “One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” This is perhaps the drawcard of the book for those of us who do not normally read the speculative fantasy genre that Jemisin has honed the most of brilliant careers from. Whether we are brief visitors, peripatetic acolytes or inveterate dwellers, there’s an allure to New York City that many of us are infected with, that is seemingly incurable.
The City We Became opens with an infection too, but one that is a stomach-curdling, malfeasant, destroyer of cities and universes type of sepsis. When described, this infection reminds me nothing so much as the vine-like monstrousness of the Upside Down in Stranger Things, but with the one crucial difference: the malignancy destroying New York is white—a porcelain, bone-like, divested of life or vigour, white. In some ways, The City We Became follows some very well-worn tropes: inherent is the type of plot that, if you’ve watched a single Avengers film, you are very well acquainted with. But as a critique of racism—not only the racism entrenched in fantasy literature, but of the very real reality that Black Americans and people of colour experience every single day—The City We Became feels like a remarkable (even essential) piece of contemporary fiction that has so much to say about the way we live now.
For those of us who love New York, Jemisin’s conceit of an avatar, York (who represents the vital heart of the city)—and the five individuals who act as guardians for the five boroughs of the city: Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island—is a delightful one. Much pleasure can be had marvelling at the ways Jemisin infuses these avatars with all the elements that make each borough so distinctly compelling, but which also comprise the essential components of New York’s unique allure. But even if you are unfamiliar with New York, it’s hard not to be compelled and disturbed by Jemisin’s big baddie, which—when manifested into sentient being—emerges in the form of the “Woman in White.” It feels eerily prescient that Jemisin’s work (published at the beginning of the year) so accurately prefaces the monstrousness of White women like Amy Cooper, who use their Whiteness as a weapon of destruction, and with such casual malice. In presenting the monster of The City We Became as metaphors for gentrification and the racism inhabited by White women, Jemisin ingeniously inverts one of the most familiar tropes in genre fiction: of the White woman as victim and damsel in distress who must be rescued from the “Other”, which are often thinly veiled portraits of the perceived threat that people of colour pose for many established genre writers.
But Jemisin’s refuses to paint her universes with a broad brush, and there is a lot of humanistic detail and empathy too, particularly in the ways she draws Aislyn, Staten Island’s avatar—a repressed White woman living under the thumb of her bigoted, right-wing father—examining the ways in which misogyny is often the propagator of other forms of violence and oppression, explaining but not excusing, the complicity of some White women to support institutions and communities that seem at odds with their own self-interest and agency.
As someone who doesn’t read fantasy regularly—particularly this urban, speculative category of fantasy—The City We Became was challenging read, one in which I found I had to acclimatise to and develop a new way of reading for. In some ways I find the book difficult to critique because I myself am so unfamiliar with the references, tropes, the history of hegemony entrenched in the fantasy genre: the canonical prejudices that Jemisin has been clearly challenging and dismantling in The City We Became, and throughout her entire career. Though I can only see and understand partial elements of Jemisin’s wider project, I have nothing but admiration and delight for her often audacious, frequently ingenious, methods by which she knits acute critical race discourse into a book that so whole-heartedly embraces its genre appeal. The City We Became definitely has many mainstream pleasures, and if you have the taste for it, it will likely be pretty irresistible.
**** (4 stars out of 5)
(June 2020)