Generational retribution, stolen land and the road to evil: The Empire of Gold, by S.A. Chakraborty (Part 1?)

 This may or may not be Part I in a two-parter on The Empire of Gold, by S.A. Chakraborty.  The novel is the conclusion of The Daevabad Trilogy, to which I am returning after a longer gap than I normally leave when reading a series, but Chakraborty decided to blow up her own world at the end of The Kingdom of Copper.  The first two books were outstanding, but I was trepidatious given how thoroughly the author FUBARed everything, leaving herself I-had-no-idea what with which to work for a third book.  So, here we go.  There may or may not be a Part II.  (And I have just a tad left in the book, which I do not expect to change my reading of these observations.)  I have some other thoughts that do not fit here.

First, a very quick explanation and recap, leading up to The Empire of Gold.  (My posts on The City of Brass and The Kingdom of Copper are linked.)  The novels take place at the start of the 19th Century, beginning in Cairo, moving over to the fictional djinn city of Daevabad, because djinn are real.  There are elemental critters.  There are air elementals (peri), water elementals (marid), humans are earth, and there are fire elementals.  That's the djinn.  Long ago, djinn were fucking around with humans too much, metaphorically and literally, so Suleiman cursed them and told them to stop it, and leave humans alone.  A tribe of djinn-- the Daeva-- built the city of Daevabad somewhere around Afghanistan, put strict prohibitions on mating with humans, which results in "shafit," who sometimes have some of the djinn's magic powers, and the djinn mostly isolated themselves, either in Daevabad or various enclaves.  One of the tribes, the Geziri, rebelled and overthrew the Nahids (the heads of the Daeva), in part because of the mistreatment of the shafit.  Their leaders, the al Qahtani family, established rule, and that takes you up to the Napoleonic Wars when the novels start.  A shafit named Nahri is hanging around Cairo.  She is part Daeva, with all of the healing powers of the Nahid because her mother is the exiled (thought dead) leader of the Daevas.  A long-gone Daeva warrior (Dara) whom I have called a combination of Han Solo and Darth Vader shows up, and whisks her off to Daevabad.  The king there, Ghassan, is trying to maintain a fragile peace, which is not working because the tribes are in a constant state of near-war with each other.  He marries Nahri off to his eldest son, Muntadhir, while his younger son, the idealist, Alizayd gets caught up in revolutionary stupidity, wackiness ensues, Ali gets exiled, comes back, Ghassan cracks down, Dara gets resurrected again by Nahri's mother-- fuck it, Palpatine-- so that she can invade Daevabad and reclaim it for the Nahids, which she does using a brutal magic/bio-weapon, lots of people die, Daevabad blows up, Nahri and Ali wake up in Cairo with the magical whatsit from Suleiman that Nahri's mother, Palpatine/Manizheh wanted, everything is fucked, the end of Book 2.

Got that?  No, I know it's a lot, and they are densely plotted books, but I will keep these comments contained.

Let's talk about Manizheh.  Or Palpatine.  Or whatever we want to call her.  What's her deal?  When The Empire of Gold opens, she has taken over Daevabad by the release of a magical bio-weapon that targets Geziri, which was her method of killing Ghassan back in The Kingdom of Copper.  It did not work quite as she hoped, because rather than claiming Suleiman's seal from Ghassan's corpse herself, Nahri got the ring and gave it to Alizayd before they escaped, and then magic vanished, but Manizheh still wound up ruling Daevabad.  She wanted Daevabad, and she got it, after killing fuckloads, and then she kills fuckloads more.  Why?  Well, as it turns out, Daevabad has a lot of people living there, some Daeva, many from other tribes, lots of shafit, and at this point, even the Daevas are scared of her because holy shit, is this woman nuts-o.  The other tribes don't lay down, the Daeva nobles are cutting deals behind her back with Muntadhir, the only way she can keep Dara in line is magical enslavement thanks to ifrit tricks (think "genie in a trinket"), and all of this has Manizheh moving closer to the ifrit.  One way for the character to go would be Faustian bargains with those ifrit, understanding the nature of the moral compromise, but that's not Manizheh, because she is blinded by rage, the drive for vengeance and the combination of resentment and entitlement that creates most of the evil in the world.

Even if it is rooted in events centuries old.

Daevabad was taken from the Nahids by the Qahtanis centuries earlier.  As we learn, some of the Daevas, and in fact, many just got wealthy and stayed wealthy, as some of the real powers in Daevabad because no Qahtani ruler could manage just by slaughter, and Ghassan certainly understood that.  He knew something that Manizheh didn't, and in my discussion of The City of Brass, I gave Ghassan a sympathetic reading even though he was not intended to be a hero merely because his goal was to maintain peace and stability, which was a hard job.  Take note.

Here comes Manizheh.  She still looks back to the original Zaydi al Qahtani, namesake of the idealistic Alizayd, leading a coup, centuries earlier, and seethes.  That's my city, rightfully.  Because centuries ago, my ancestor, Anahid built it.

Take note.  Gettin' any modern vibes here?

Ghassan, in truth, treated her badly, but in truth, she wasn't exactly honorable herself.

Yet Manizheh was holding a centuries old grudge.  And what did she do?  After her "death," (faked) her response was not to build something new, having plenty of options and opportunity, but to insist that Daevabad was hers, and that she had a right to murder as many people as it took, for the sake of that ancient grudge.  Because Zaydi al Qahtani did not build Daevabad, Anahid did.  So it belonged not to Ghassan al Qahtani, but to Manizheh, and she had a right to murder anyone she saw fit (saw fit?  shafit? get it?) to take that which by ancient right was hers.

A right to commit genocide.  Her biological/magic weapon-- a vapor that targeted Geziri-- was a genocidal weapon.

Back in The Kingdom of Copper, Dara saw where Manizheh was going, and he tried to talk her out of it.  Go, build something new.  Don't do this.  He had already committed so many atrocities for the Nahids, giving him the moniker, "The Scourge."  Yet, the reason I keep going with the Palpatine/Vader reference is that he still had some good in him, he was wracked with guilt, and he did not want to do it again.

And for what?

Merely vengeance.  The lowest and most self-destructive impulse humans, or djinn can have.  Had Manizheh taken Dara's advice, what would have happened in Daevabad?  Well, the Qahtani kids were plotting a coup with Nahri anyway, so who knows?  But it wouldn't have been the genocidal bloodbath and chaotic shitstorm that Manizheh created.

And what would have become of Manizheh?  And those around her?  They could have gone anywhere, and built anything if not so driven by vengeance, and not just personal grievance against Ghassan who was about to die in a coup anyway, but for the centuries-old coup committed by his ancestor against the Nahids.

So instead, genocide, chaos, shitstorm.  To get revenge because land was stolen from her ancestors, centuries ago, and rather than do something now, she needs to kill the descendants because that land, and only that land will do.

The Empire of Gold was published in 2020, and Chakraborty is an American convert to Islam.  She did not intend for this to be a metaphor for October 7, because time does not work that way, and indeed, I would bet money that she sides with Hamas, but Manizheh is Hamas.  All I did was describe the plot, on December 17, 2023, and it is difficult to read that description without thinking immediately of the relationship between Manizheh and Hamas.

And even writing that would be an acceptance of the "stolen land" claim, which is itself contestable.  In the novels, Anahid built Daevabad, with the help of the marids.  I should probably put "help" in quotation marks, because it was not exactly consensual, and the marids want vengeance too, which turns a lot of the plot of The Empire of Gold, and the mythology of the marids is a little muddled in my opinion, even though meeting Tiamat is cool.  Way cooler than the D&D Tiamat, and closer to original mythology.  Thumbs up to Sobek, too.

The point, though, is that the Nahids really were first, at least from the djinn perspective.  Whether or not the Qahtanis had a moral right, given the Daevas' treatment of the shafit, is another question.  Zaydi was a little more morally ambiguous than just a djinn Abe Lincoln, but do consider the shafit.  The history of Jerusalem is not the history of Daevabad, much less Judea, yet the moral point is that even though Anahid really did literally build Daevabad, that says precisely fuckall about Manizheh's moral right to release a vapor that murders Geziri to clear the place of Geziri because fuck the Geziri because Daevabad is rightfully hers.

No.  That is morally wrong, period, end of discussion, you do that and you are the villain.  Not just a villain, but in many ways, a boring villain.  Uncomplicated evil is boring.  Ghassan was interesting because while he did evil things, he had motives that one could view, "from a certain point of view."  Manizheh?  No.  Manizheh is just evil.

Yet, she is evil of a very human sort.  She is evil spawned by centuries old grievance, resentment and the drive for vengeance, turning her into someone who can do nothing positive.  This exists in the world.  This is destruction.  This is real.

This is Hamas, the purest of evils.

A leftist reading the novel, outside the context of October 7, would be primed to accept the moral lessons, ironically since Alizayd is the idealistic, virtuous, moral one, and the devout Muslim.  The Daeva religion is vague, referenced with the slur of "fire-worshippers" by those who harbor bigotry against them, but the fact that Chakraborty set up Zaydi al Qahtani as a proto-liberator of the shafit, with Alizayd as the modern moralist, and devout Muslim to oppose Manizeh makes it easier to see Manizheh for the evil that she is.  Who represents whom?  It's a morality tale, and Chakraborty has the morality correct.

And Manizheh is the villain.  She is also Hamas.  Even if one accepted the highly contestable claim that X chunk of land is truly stolen, because Y years ago it belonged to Group A, but Group B took it so now it belongs properly to Group A, what does that justify?

Would the Cherokee be justified in releasing a bio-weapon that targeted everyone without Cherokee blood in the Southeast?  A "land acknowledge" is sufficient here because it is costless, but as long as it is somewhere else, happening to someone you don't like, look what will be excused by those without moral clarity.  And the Cherokee were indisputably there first, unlike, say, Jerusalem, or even Judea.

Fiction can provide moral clarity because it is easy to see that Manizheh is the villain.  You feel no moral need to justify her actions merely because Ghassan was kind of a shit, nor any attachment to the concept of stolen land for land that doesn't exist in the real world.  But if you take stolen land claims and the right of generational retribution seriously, then who is allowed to rape you to death for your land?

Lay down and take it.  Take it, or shut up.

Anahid literally built Daevabad, and even then, the marid have a grievance against the Nahids if you take it back that far.

Generational grievance is one of the most destructive ideas humanity has ever concocted.  It is a permission structure for the worst evils imaginable, committed against those who didn't even do whatever wrong you claim was committed.  Whether that is against the swath of Geziris slaughtered by Manizheh's vapor, the Daevas who dared to work with the Qahtanis during the centuries of their rule of Daevabad, or some kids at a fucking music festival who were born half a century after the thing you think is the worst atrocity in the history of humanity with your own twisted pseudo-morality.

If you read these books, and recognize that Manizheh is the villain, and recognize that generational retribution is that which is to be condemned, then take a lesson.  Apply that lesson.  The world is as it is now.  What do you do now?

If your answer is, release a bio-weapon, you are the villain.  Period.  If your answer is, slaughter kids at a music festival and rape women to death, you are the villain.  Even if one were to accept the factual claims you made about history, you'd still be the villain, because Manizheh has more of a claim than Hamas, and she's Palpatine.

Richard Thompson, "Dry My Tears And Move On," from Mock Tudor.  Interesting side-note: Richard Thompson is a convert to sufism.