On hate, and hatred in response to hate: Ring Shout, by P. Djeli Clark

Read Ring Shout, by P. Djeli Clark.  It is good.  Flawed, yes, but quite good, and in some ways, it is a sort of antidote to some irritating tropes in modern genre writing, even if it also indulges in a few of the more obvious, if fan- and editor-mandated tropes.  Let’s get into this.

The premise is as follows.  Go with me if it sounds simplistic and a little obvious.  1920s, Macon, Georgia.  The kkk?  Actual, literal demons from another dimension.  Hunt ‘n kill ‘em.  Throw in some musical lore from the Gullah tradition (African-Americans from the Carolina islands), some history from the slave trade through Birth Of A Nation, and Bob’s your uncle, novella worth reading.  It sounds like an obvious thing to write, but nobody else had, so Clark did.  Actually, the uncle in the novella was William, not Bob, but whatever.

The plot is a little more complex.  And cool.  The trick is as follows.  Birth Of A Nation was actually a demonic summoning spell.  There are demons from another dimension that feed on raw hate, and by evoking hate, the movie brought forth the demons.  The kkk was then divided between the regular “klan"-- humans who are just shitbags-- and the “ku kluxes,” who were the actual demons, although only those with “the sight” could see them for what they were.  There’s about to be a re-release with a big showing of the movie.  That’ll be bad.  The heroes need to do something or else, like, demonic ku kluxes, and stuff.

Anyway, there is a lot to recommend about this novella, even amid some cliches.  As is my tradition, I must first gripe about the cliches.  Obviously, this novella is going to be hyper-woke.  Because… come on.  With a concept like this, it’s going to be ten double-espressos, plus a fuckload of meth-woke. Turning the kkk into a demonic force should be woke enough, but as we have learned, there’s no such thing as woke enough, so Clark didn’t stop at that.  He had to go for woke-broke.  Here are two quick examples.  First, demon-fighting and demon-hunting.  OK, Joss Whedon is now the grand villain in genre stuff, and yeah, he’s a douche, but we all loved Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.  Teenage girl kills vampires and demons.  The concept came from Whedon’s image of a cliche scene where the monster leads a girl into a dark, scary place, and then the girl turns on the monster and kills him.  That’s the concept.  She’s the “chosen one,” and really, I hate that cliche, but still, Buffy was awesome.  (Actually, Buffy herself was one of the less interesting characters, in my opinion, but I'll still admit to being a total Buffy fanboy.) In order to have the ass-kicking teenaged girl lead the show, though, Whedon created lore.  Is fightin’ and killin’ purely male?  No, but anything martial skews heavily male.  Write a story where the lead is an ass-kicking woman, and that’s now standard. Why? Woke.

Three?  African-American women, in Macon, Georgia in the 1920s?  You have now deviated not just from modern feminism, but from history.  Now OK, Clark is turning the kkk into a summoned demonic force, but he is doing it in order to comment on historical injustice.  So, maybe at least some commentary on what’s happening!  In sci-fi/fantasy/horror, you are allowed to deviate from reality.  That’s… kind of the point.  Definitional, even. But you kinda have to deal with the ways in which you do so rather than just act like 1920s Macon, Georgia is so totally women’s lib.  Explain it, lampshade it, something.  What you don’t do is just act like you are writing about the history of the slave trade, racial oppression, and all that, but gender politics in the 1920s in Macon, Georgia are just 2020s women’s lib.  That’s just going for woke. That's saying, OK, my main characters are ass-kickers, so they need to be women, or I'm insufficiently woke. In the 1920s, in Macon, Georgia. If you're going to write that, you need to address it, or it's just virtue-signaling.

Next example, along the same lines.  One of the trio is Chef, who is not, alas, Isaac Hayes. Seriously, though, if one of your characters goes by the nickname, "Chef," all I picture is a cartoon-ized Isaac Hayes. She is, however, a bad mother… me, watching my typing fingers.  Anyway, since the rules of wokeness prohibit a story with more than one character in which everyone is straight, Chef is gay.  And completely out of the closet.  In, and I hate to repeat myself (kinda), 1920s Macon, Georgia.  And everyone is totally cool with it.  Like, you know, they were in Macon, Georgia in the 20s.  Among, yeah, African-Americans, who were a little late to the party on gay acceptance if we’re honest about empirical data.  (Short version:  religiosity explains a bunch of it, but African-Americans have historically been less accepting of the LGBTQ population. Yeah, deal with that, wokestirs.)

Anyway, the rules of wokeness required Chef be there, be queer, and everyone be used to it. In fact, she was a WWI vet, who presented as a man to go.  A popular reading will likely be that she’s actually a trans man, even if Clark wrote as though that wasn't a thing yet.  She (he?) is described dressed in a suit at one point anyway, so actually, everyone is cool with a trans man.  In… 1920s, Macon, Georgia.  In the African-American community, which was, to repeat, slow to catch up on LGBTQ acceptance.  Sorry, folks, but that’s just there, in the survey data.

Oh, the wokeness.  Unneccessary wokeness.  Fantasy-levels of wokeness, as in, this is how woke Clark wanted the African-American community in Macon to have been.  So he made it so.  Which is weird, when writing about the history of oppression. Dude, if you’re going to write about the history of oppression, don’t “whitewash” a shitload of it for the sake of woke writing conventions. Why do it? It wasn't merely intersectional whitewashing. Clark wanted to portray one side as the side of good, and he couldn't do that if he didn't portray them as 12-wave feminist and cooler than the Castro district. So fuck history, which is weird as fuck when your goal is at least partially to convey historical injustice. You just can't write about it when it's comin' from within.

So yeah. I'm basically accusing Clark of "whitewashing," on how the African-American community has handled issues of gender and LBGTQ equality. Why? Because he was more interested in virtue-signaling than a full rendering of historical injustice. Ask a black trans person about this. Go ahead. Don't trust me, go ask a black trans person.

OK, rant over.  Let's get to the good stuff, and there's a lot, or I wouldn't recommend Ring Shout.

Let's look at how Clark handled the leader of the ass-kicking Buffy-trio, Maryse, because he did a great job with her.  Here’s her deal.  A few years before our story starts, her family is murdered by the klan, and she hides, then enters a spiral of self-loathing, etc., but she winds up with a magical sword, imbued with the spirits of slaves, and the Africans who sold them to the slavers.  And by the way, yes!  Little thing, but an important thing.  Clark didn’t ignore this important historical observation that the vast majority of slaves were sold to slave traders by Africans.  Anyway, the magical sword thingy allows Maryse to go on a vengeance spree, killing the demonic “ku kluxes,” which she can see, separately from the normal, human klan.  Amid her spree, she is called by a Gullah woman with various, unspecified magical powers to use her sword and abilities in a more orderly way.  She goes out on missions, ‘n stuff, with Sadie and Chef.  Hijinks ensue.

Here’s where it gets really cool.  The ku kluxes are controlled by “Butcher Clyde,” who is arranging everything.  He offers Maryse a deal.  This is the “crux” of the story, so to speak.  She goes into it thinking he’s going to offer her her family back.  Nope.  He can’t do that.

It’s way better.  You see, the ku kluxes feed on hate.  He offers… to switch sides!  And let Maryse lead them.  And let her hate guide them.  They don’t care whom they hate.  Hate is hate.  So, she can turn the ku kluxes around and get some real vengeance!

Oooooh.

Now THAT is a fucking awesome twist.

Maryse, of course, says no, and there are two ways to read what happens.  The moral lesson, or the elevation of one side versus the other.  Let’s go with the moral lesson.

There is one line in which Maryse says that her sword isn’t imbued with hate, but righteous anger and love, which, um… really?  No hatred for the slavers?  Really? If we take that reading, then there’s no twist.  Clyde just had everything wrong, Maryse couldn’t have chosen otherwise, and there’s no story. Bor-ring. (Great virtue-signaling, but bor-ring!)

On the other hand, Maryse had to be tempted.  And even after she defeats Clyde, she goes on to fight more ku kluxes with her sword o' swingin', even after she could lay her burden down, for the sake of vengeance.  The wording is clear.  Not justice, but vengeance.  If you are motivated by vengeance, there’s hate there.  Period.  That’s why she was tempted.

So here’s the moral reading.  Don’t let the anger turn to hate, or at least, don’t let the hate take over.  That’s a real lesson.  An important one.  An old one, a Yoda kind of lesson, but an important one.

And here, I’ll put Ring Shout up against that book I keep bashing-- N.K. Jemisin’s most recent, The City We Became, which I detested because it was really nothing more than a book about how much Jemisin hates, yes, hates white people. Maryse was given the opportunity to turn a demonic force around.  Maryse said no.  Maryse understood the difference between righteous anger and hate, and drew a line, with the demons at the heart of the story being a force that feeds on hate, indifferent to the direction at which the hate is pointed.  Jemisin did not make that distinction, at least in the writing of The City We Became, so ultimately, it became a hateful book.  A book about the intrinsic evilness of all white people, and Jemisin's hatred of white people. Clark succeeded by showing what happens when one goes down that road, that ugly road that Jemisin has followed.

The City We Became was a vile book. It has been, and will continue to be lauded by the genre community because if you say a bad thing about it, or Saint Nora, you're not woke, but obviously, I don't give a fuck about that. Jemisin is racist, and hateful. A genius? Yes, but a genius can be filled with hate. Remember, she jumped on the Isabel Fall dogpile, and never really owned up to it. Hmmm... I wonder what Chef would think about that!

Ring Shout is a corrective. Hate is hate.

The thing is, hatred is just an emotion. Electrochemical impulses. It's really all about what you do. The choices you make. Maryse made the right choice. Electrochemical impulses will electrochemically impulsify your brain. What do you? Do you say, yeah, sure, let's turn those demons of hate around and unleash them on the other side? Or make another choice of action? That's what made Maryse the hero, and what made Jemisin the villain of her own book. Jemisin took Clyde's Faustian bargain.

Me? I'm with Maryse. Does she hate? Yeah. Righteous anger? Yup. Does she want vengeance, and seek it? Understandably, humanly. But she does not take Clyde's bargain.

And some music.  The obvious choice would have been Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues," but I actually know a little something about Gullah music!  Ranky Tanky.  Check these guys out.  They are among the best bands around.  If you don't love this, there is something seriously wrong with you.