Colonialism, anti-colonialism and unintentional subversiveness: Gods Of Jade And Shadow, by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia

 I am a bit behind on this book.  Sylvia Moreno-Garcia is among the new stars of sci-fi/fantasy, and Gods of Jade and Shadow was quite a hit a while back.  It took me a while.  We all have large stacks of reading.  Interesting book.  Flawed, as most books are, but it has a few clever tricks, and for this morning, let's consider the most fun element of the novel, which is what I think is its unintentional subversiveness.  Colonialism.  Anti-colonialism.  These are buzzwords in the current political climate.  Moreno-Garcia's politics, at the surface level, would seem to place her on the modern left, and yet a close reading of Gods of Jade and Shadow reveal a sort of anti-anti-colonialist sentiment, that, if we count the negatives, by the rule of the double-negative, is almost colonialist.  Oooh.  Scaaary.  And fascinating in its shades of grey.  Grey as the outer boundaries of the Mayan underworld, Xibalba.  Let's delve.

The premise of Gods is as follows, and it has shades of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, but without any appearances by gods of other pantheons (just a French demon).  When the meteor hit Chicxulub-- at least, it is strongly implied that this was the root cause-- the magical underworld of Xibalba is created.  The belief of the Mayans then eventually creates and shapes the Mayan gods who rule Xibalba.  At the top, there is Hun-Kame, despite having a twin brother, Vucub-Kame.  Resentment is inevitable.  Eventually, the Europeans show up, Mayan civilization falls, and people stop believing in the Mayan pantheon.  Yet, because of the power imbued into Xibalba by the meteor impact, the gods are still hangin' around.  Bored.  Hun-Kame accepts that their time has passed.  Vucub-Kame does not.  Vucub-Kame usurps the throne of Xibalba in a plan, not only to bring himself to power and get a measure of personal vengeance, but to return the Mayan gods to power.

Let's just take a moment to appreciate an author playing around in different territory.  Moreno-Garcia does it with some witty writing, and that's the main reason to recommend the book.

Anyway, Vucub-Kame's plan involves enlisting the aid of the Leyva family.  Vucub-Kame gets the patriarch's help, and then has the patriarch lock up the bones of Hun-Kame in a chest, to keep Hun-Kame semi-dead and imprisoned, until unwittingly freed by Cassiopeia, who is the patriarch's granddaughter, but basically just someone the old bastard kicks around because reasons.  Once Cassiopeia frees Hun-Kame, they go on the inevitable quest, blah-blah, novel ensues.  OK, so the novel actually starts with Cassiopeia getting kicked around and telling her life story, she unlocks Al Gore's lock box (sorry, old reference), and wackiness ensues, including the inevitable "romance."  Which is weird, because the only reason Hun-Kame has anything like human emotion is that Cassiopeia stuck her hand in Al Gore's lock box, got herself a Donny Trump bone spur, creating a blood connection between herself and Hun-Kame, and that human spark in Hun-Kame?  That's actually part of Cassiopeia.  So, she's technically in love with herself.  Wrong Greek myth, there!

Anyway, I'm-a-ramblin'.  Let's look for a track around here.  A thread, maybe.  Ariadne?  Little help!

So this book has a lot of plot holes.  To borrow a line from Neal Stephenson, it's plot "looks like a doily that has been eaten by moths."  And now you see why Neal Stephenson is among the greatest living writers, and I... am a schlub shouting into the void.  Anyway, at a basic level, Gods Of Jade And Shadow has a bunch of cliches that don't require my attention here.  Instead, I shall grumble briefly about some plot holes before getting to my main point.

First, and I know this is petty, but let's just talk about suspension of disbelief.  This is a book about magic and gods and demons and such-and-so-forth.  And at the end, in 1927, Cassiopeia jumps into the driver's seat of a car for the first time, a demon named Loray tells her how it works, and she drives away.

OK, do you know how to drive a stick?  Do you remember the process of learning?  I learned on an early-90s model Toyota, some decades back.  I already knew how to drive, but the clutch/stick thing?  That was a new skill.

You don't just jump in the driver's seat and go in a fucking stick shift.  And in 1927 Mexico, that ain't no automatic.  The Oldsmobile Hydramatic didn't come out until 1939.  That car in Mexico in 1927?  Stick.

Mayan death gods?  Ghosts, demons, spirits, spells, illusions, portents... sure.  My disbelief has been suspended in a solution of literary la-la-la-la, "I can't hear you!"

But a kid who has never driven before jumps into a motherfucking stick shift and just fucking goes?!  No.  No, Sylvia.  No.  On that, I cannot suspend disbelief.  Am I being petty?  Perhaps, and perhaps it took me longer than average to make the transition from automatic to stick, but even if it did, nobody, and I mean nobody just gets in the driver's seat and just fucking drives a stick shift.  Lurch, stop, stall.  Turn key, restart engine, repeat.  Grind...  Grind... Grind... Lurch, stop, stall...

Sound familiar?  No?  Then you drive an automatic, and you never learned to drive a fucking stick.  Look, there is something comforting to a stick, if you are a control freak, but that learning process is obnoxious.  To everyone.  Including the teacher.

On this, I cannot suspend disbelief.

OK, that was petty, but it bugged me.

More substantially, there were critical plot holes.  Consider Vucub-Kame's plot.  Usurp Hun-Kame.  Build a new temple, which is actually a resort-casino in Baja, California.  Create some kind of mystical, magical link between that temple and Yucatan.

And this will cause the Mayan gods to return to power and their worshippers will return.

How?

Um... that... is never explained.  It's the South Park underpants gnome problem.  They have a three-step plan for profit.  Step 1) Steal underpants.  Step 3)  Profit!  They just need to figure out Step 2.

Vucub-Kame's plan:  Step 1)  Build resort-casino/temple in Baja.  Step 3)  Worshippers!  He just needs to figure out Step 2.  (Or rather, Moreno-Garcia did.)  Vucub-Kame is an underpants gnome.  He even lives underground!  In... Xibalba!

Anyway, I could pick apart the plot for rather longer than this, but it would serve no point, and it would not interest anyone, which is not particularly important given that this isn't exactly the New York Times Book Review anyway, but I have other things that are more fun to write, so I'll do that.

What are the stakes in Gods of Jade & Shadow?  At a personal level, Cassiopeia's life is at stake.  The blood connection between Hun-Kame and her is sustaining Hun-Kame and killing her.  If Hun-Kame is not restored to godhood, he won't be able to remove the Donny Trump draft-dodger-special lodged in her hand.  And, as long as that get-out-of-Vietnam-free bone spur stays stuck in her hand, her life force will continue to drain, and she will die.  So she needs Hun-Kame to win, or she dies.

But it's bigger than that.  If Vucub-Kame wins, the Mayan ritual blood sacrifices come back.  Human sacrifices, decapitations, blood will flow, Vucub-Kame on a throne on a mountain-o-bones, and so forth.

So Cassiopeia looks at her choices.  It's the roarin' 20s.  The Jazz Age.  The dawn of the modern world, and the Mayan civilization ain't no more, defeated by Europeans, and tradition is being pushed aside by the modern world created by the... colonizers.

And Cassiopeia looks at her choices.  The colonizers and their world, or the indigenous culture that the colonizers destroyed?  That latter culture?  That would be her patrilineal culture, for anyone keeping track.

Vucub-Kame is the kind of villain I appreciate as a reader.  He has a motivation that makes sense.  He isn't a mindless villain.  He has personal motivations, given the whole "twins, but you rule" thing, and he has a political motivation, rejecting the notion that the Mayan gods should accept their titanic fall, so to speak.  His plan sucks, having something of an underpants gnome character to it, but he is comprehensible, rather than being merely a mustache-twirler.

But he's the fucking bad guy.  He wins, and heads roll.  Literally.  Why building a resort and casino in Baja, and consecrating it in Hun-Kame's blood is supposed to restore peoples' devotion to the Mayan death gods at the human level... that's Step 2 in the gnomish plan, but heads would have rolled.  Because Vucub-Kame was the bad guy.

The moral premise was that the Mayan death gods needed to fall, and go away, to make way for the modern world created by the colonizers.  Which is a better world.  And Cassiopeia recognizes that.  She sides with Hun-Kame, not only because of that don't-draft-me bone spur, but because she does not want a return of the indigenous gods.  Let the colonizers win.  Their world is better.  She is offered a way out by Vucub-Kame, and she declines it, largely because she cannot stomach the idea of Vucub-Kame's world.  The Mayan world.  The indigenous world.  The colonizers must win.  She sides with the modern world over the indigenous.

Wow.  Holy shit.  That's... subversive, these days!  To say that the colonizers created a better world than the indigenous people?  Holy shit, you can't say that!  At least, not directly.  And I don't think Moreno-Garcia realized she was doing it.  The book was filled with gestures towards modern concepts of left morality, which would tend to suggest she was thinking more in terms of something like progress and "progressivism," without fully understanding where that comes into conflict with the tradition of certain cultures, and the whole colonialism-vs.-anti-colonialism thing, but that's rather the point, isn't it?  This is the tension between the multicultural, moral relativist side of left-wing thinking and the specific philosophical doctrines.

In the case of Mayan death gods and human sacrifices, there isn't a whole lot of modern resonance, but consider the issue of the day.  Afghanistan.  The horror of the country, and the world, is our failure to impose our value system on Afghanistan, as it reverts to local power.  The colonizers leave again.  Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, resists colonization in its political, economic and cultural forms, and it is that final aspect that forms the basis of the horror of the Western world.

But girls have been going to school!  Women have been working outside the house!  How low is the bar?  How low has that bar been that these are the things to celebrate as progress in a country?  A bar set, not just by the Taliban, but set by a country in which the majority actually believes in honor killings.  I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago, and it is one of those things that the multicultural side of the left doesn't want to discuss, but Pew did the analysis.  Yeah, it's not just the Taliban.  It's Afghanistan.  Girls going to school, and women working outside the home constituted progress, imposed by us, the colonizers, against the dominant culture, because that's what the dominant, indigenous culture is.  Not a rule imposed by this weird, obscure group called the "Taliban," but just mass opinion there.  There are entire countries where predominant opinion is so far from that of not just a woke college campus, but even a place like rural fucking Mississippi that if you make the mistake of assuming you have any common values, any common understanding of morality or even reality, well...

I'm gonna take a brave stand and say I'm for women's rights and equality.  I don't care who knows it.

I'm gonna take another brave stand and say "honor killings" are evil, and you don't get to do it just because you say it's your culture.  Strangely, that one does require some bravery.  It's insufficiently sensitive to oppressed cultures, it's colonialist, and blah-blah-blah.

I wonder how the murdered women felt about all that sensitivity to oppressed cultures as they were being murdered.  No, no, don't colonize us!  Anything but that!  Let them murder me, but don't colonize us!  This is our culture, and you can't judge us!  There's no such thing as a neutral value system!  All value systems are racial value systems, and don't impose your racial value system on us, you racist!

How would those murdered women have felt?  Probably about the same way the human sacrifices would have felt if Vucub-Kame had won.

Cassiopeia eventually solves everything through a deus ex machina self sacrifice, and then getting everyone to hug everything out, because goodness and hugging wins, or some such drivel.  Like I said, there were... some flaws in this book.  I ain't huggin' no Taliban.  That is not a practical solution.

Yet recognizing that the culture of human sacrifice and other such objective evil should not be allowed to win... well, doing that requires recognizing "objective."  Somehow, that's now controversial.  And it makes Gods of Jade & Shadow interestingly and unintentionally subversive.  Hm.  I'll take it where I can get it.

Subvert the dominant paradigm!  (Which now means "be rational and objective, in subversion of postmodern bullshit.")

And now for something completely different.  Gary Lucas, "After Strange Gods," from Bad Boys of the Arctic.