“’Barbarians,’ Mahit said, imagining Three Seagrass’s face the whole time she was saying it, ‘are human beings; good citizenship in the face of existential threats extends beyond the boundaries of sovereignty.’”
-A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine
In the past month I have read, more or less back to back, two books which deal with the themes of language and empire, violence and its role in responding to oppression, identity and complicity, and conspiracy and politics. One argued for violence’s place, argued that it was a necessity in the face of repeated attempts to challenge aggressive imperial systems of control and expansion. The other, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace, argued something like the opposite. Language in Martine’s world and story is a solution to violence, despite the pain it can and does cause all on its own. I will not go so far as to saying that it is a more hopeful answer, nor is it anywhere near a perfect answer even within the pages of A Desolation Called Peace—but I might go so far as to say it is the answer I prefer.
This seems natural, yes, for someone so deeply in love with language, and for someone who was and is deeply in love with Martine’s prior novel, A Memory Called Empire. I reviewed that one, too, and it remains one of my favorite reads in recent memory. A Desolation Called Peace builds beautifully on the world, characters, and events found in A Memory Called Empire while also expanding on the themes present: namely language and all its beautiful and destructive uses, and the overarching question of just how big the concept of ‘you’ is, anyway.
It is the latter I wish to discuss first. Where Martine’s skill lies strongly, with little surprise given her background, is in handling the vast complexities of empire and identity. It is a question that is for myself more than a little personal, an adopted person of color who was raised and who lives in a culture some insists is not theirs and others insist is theirs by virtue of their or its existence. For Martine, and her characters, the question looms existential as they face down a threat from without, an entity that challenges their conceptions of personhood, with their threats from within—and how different characters raised and experience different cultures themselves react to this shift.
Be it Shard-sight, a trick of the Teixcalaani military that allows its ships to move (think?) as one, or Lsel’s imago technology which grants a person the lived experiences (personhood? memory?) of dozens of others before them, or the simple reading of a comic written in one's native language (is it still?), the dueling impulses of belonging or not, existing or not, of being a person or not swirl about ships preparing for battle, heirs preparing to rule, and lovers exploring one another’s bodies and souls. This plays out in small ways and writ large over the course of the novel—and deals directly with the primary threat in expertly crafted ways. Martine never quite loses sight of the stakes, and in doing so manages to weave a story which is deeply thematically coherent and utterly heartbreaking for its understanding of what it means to be a person and what it does and doesn’t mean to be yourself.
Part of her skill lies in her mastery of language, and in one sense I am directly referring to the beauty of Martine’s writing. Poetry plays a large part of her story, and the pose in A Desolation Called Peace is nothing if not poetic. Be it the poetic epithets which follow a person’s name (“She Whose Gracious Prescence Illuminates the Room like the Edgeshine of a Knife” will always stand out to me), or the gorgeous ways in which Martine perfectly captures the raw experiences of life.
“Nine Hibiscus had been a Shard pilot herself, on that long-ago first deployment, and she still felt the scramble alarm like a delicious vibration in the marrow of her bones: go, go, go. Go now, and if you die, you die star-brilliant."
“It felt like her gaze had weight, weight and edges, a sudden revealed landscape of places to cut oneself open on.”
But it is, of course, language that plays the central part to the theme and plot of A Desolation Called Peace, and the inspiration for examining the novel as closely as I am. Martine has a deep love of language, evident enough in her writing, and over the course of her novel, we are engrossed in the ways it can be used and abused. Martine writes intrigue better than most, and romance as breaking as it is affirming, and through all of this language comes to the fore.
The conceit of A Desolation Called Peace is communication and miscommunication—how we as people handle concepts we sometimes do not have words for and can therefore only approximate. Even things we believe are basic, or inherent, struggle when exposed to the unfamiliar and the challenging. Personhood is first in one’s minds reading Martine’s work, a theme carried over from A Memory Called Empire, and reinforced when our characters are exposed to something (someone? someones?) that (who?) doesn’t think (communicate? speak? live?) in language. It’s a clever way to raise the stakes, and oh, how the world we read of values cleverness. Suddenly the idea of what constitutes a person, already tinted through the lends of empires and barbarians, citizens and non, clones and memories, stretches to its limit with personhood and humanity.
Our only tool to understand it, our character’s best chance at staving off annihilation of themselves or of millions, is language. Or, communication. In a race-against time, we find ourselves stumbling through Martine’s world of maddening miscommunication, where the stakes rise and fall with heartbeats and swirl through the expansion and decline of empires.
The reality of the situation is that, of course, such hopes and answers a perpetually incomplete. A little like translation. In getting our points across we lose something, we sacrifice, and it would not do to not discuss the power of sacrifice in Martine’s work. There is that sense of something greater, something I might still not call hope, when there is connection and understanding. But there is that gutting sense of loss, whether it is losing another or losing oneself. And in the end, we are left with an aching answer to a question too near “What’s the point?” for anyone’s liking. I am faintly reminded of the simple beauty found in Lemony Snicket’s Poison For Breakfast (which I also reviewed), and yet all the more blown over for the way in which Martine handles such a beautiful, horrible, important concept:
“Language is not so transparent, but we are sometimes known, even so. If we are lucky.”