Last week we discussed the role of language in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner universe. The comments, interesting as they were, took a direction I didn’t quite expect. Which is fine, but when you’re building to a different conclusion, the point can get a lost.
So instead of subtlety, I’ll fall back on the explicit: although the focus on language, an outgrowth of Cherryh’s own professional training, is necessary to her protagonist’s profession, it’s also central to the point of the entire series: communication is more than translation — it’s understanding. It’s the ability to put one’s self in the other person’s place, to understand the other’s culture and see the other’s point of view. It’s a universal concept, yes, but it’s easier to do — it’s more natural — if you know more than one language.
Although the language part of Foreigner is minor in the series and mightily refreshing to those of us who are multi-lingual — to watch Bren navigate the mental switches required in his job, to see him approach organizing an entirely new tongue and then execute that organization — it’s in service to the overall theme of communication, the recognition that understanding other people doesn’t threaten but enriches. In short, it’s about the aim of politics, and in a way that is very timely and applicable to current real-world events.
It’s All About the Politics, Baby.
If there were two humans, there were two sides, and if both had a pulse, politics would be at work somewhere in the business.
Explorer, p. 120
Many novels deal with politics. Politics is power, and we’re fascinated by power — who uses it and how, how it affects others, the ways it affects the wielder. Foreigner is different. Most novels explore politics as cause and effect in a single chain. We look at the cause, the execution, the effect. It’s easier to understand in isolation, and a single novel, however long it may be, is simply too brief to explore all the attendant issues that come up in a political situation.
But when you’ve got twenty or so novels to build out a world, you have room. And politics is not a chain; it’s a web. Pull a string and, twenty paces out, something moves, something you didn’t expect.
The first encounter between atevi and human takes place two centuries before the main story begins. That’s two hundred years of history, two hundred relatively quiet years for mindsets to adjust, for adjustment to become calcification, for opinion to become fixed, for event to become myth. The first encounter is not the founding shock that set the great gears in Bren’s world moving; that shock is the return of Phoenix to the atevi earth. It disrupts the settled power structures, and it increases the number of autonomous authorities from two to four (including the station as an independent entity) and maybe to five, if you count the Reunioners. More players equals more complexity, and it becomes quite complex. But the action that spools out in Foreigner starts with Phoenix’s arrival. The events on earth have their genesis in the heavens.
Many of the quotations I’ve pulled from the books come from the last two volumes, Convergence and Emergence. In previous volumes, the political discussions are deeply-embedded and worked out without the kind of conversation between characters that becomes necessary when Bren goes to Mospheira to negotiate with the country of his birth, and from the position of the atevi. That in itself requires a bit of explanation.
The Paidhi
The Paidhi is more than a translator. The duties of a paidhi are to serve as a negotiator. Instead of two adversaries meeting to hammer out their differences, the paidhi is a single person who moves between adversaries, representing each side to the other, until both sides agree.
[I]t flatly didn’t matter which side appointed a paidhi to go negotiate with the other. The paidhi’s job, always and forever, was to represent both sides fairly, at whatever risk to his person.
Convergence, p. 281
The Foreigner series charts the movement of Bren’s job from its beginning stages through its development back to a paidhi’s traditional responsibilities. Bren steps into the position of his nemesis, Wilson, a brilliant scholar who communicated with the atevi only in writing and whose isolation, Bren and some of his aishid suspect, mentally unhinged him. Bren’s willingness to engage more personally and deeply with the atevi make him valuable to atevi leadership, and make his office as translator and arbiter of technology essential from the start.
The arrival of Phoenix at the abandoned space station in the first book throws the world into upheaval. The humans have the knowledge to get back into space, but the atevi have the raw materials and manufacturing capacity. Each side is suspicious of the other, each has two hundred years of prejudice at its back, and each side has political forces that are powerfully interested in keeping hate alive. The ship, also a political entity, has its own history, prejudices and interests, interests that don’t necessarily align with their cousins below, the humans of Mospheira.
As the atevi achieve technological parity, the “arbiter of technology” part of Bren’s job is finished. Tabini finds a better use for him, at Ilisidi’s suggestion, when he is sent to the Marid to negotiate an alliance between Ilisidi and Machigi; and Bren steps into the role of paidhi as the atevi understand the office. He is sent back to space to negotiate with the kyo in that role, and to Mospheira to represent the atevi to the humans. Bren tells the Mospheiran legislature:
[P]aidhiin before me were forbidden to speak the language to atevi. We simply passed notes. No negotiation happened. You now have a voice you have not had before. I urge you use it. And ask me questions, as speaking for the aiji.”
Convergence, p. 301
Always to go between opposing forces, smoothing differences, enabling communications. Talking is better than shooting, and talking will always involve politics.
Back To The Politics
There is far too much politics in Foreigner to isolate or talk about intelligibly. Foreigner is about culture, culture is political, and the politics are multilayered. It would spoil too much to focus on any one, because they’re all interconnected.
Rather than chase that ball of yarn, I’d rather look at what I think are some of Cherryh’s conclusions about politics.
For the most part, few characters are beyond reform and redemption. There are a few. You can tell who they are by the woodenness of their characterizations, and we’ll get to them. But for the most part, even the most entrenched antagonists can become allies when it’s in their interests. Ilisidi starts out absolutely opposed to Bren’s presence, but becomes his staunchest ally. Geigi starts out wanting to kill Bren, but becomes, as he himself phrases it, a “friend,” unwelcome as that word is to atevi. Cherryh’s thesis, although implied, couldn’t be clearer: with respectful communication, reasonable people can be brought into accord with each other. Talking provides a path forward, and successful politics foster conditions where everyone is respected and everyone benefits.
I wonder what the atevi would make of the Republican party.
Actually, I can answer that. Because we can see the Republican party in the Shadow Guild and the Heritage Party.
We actually really see very little of the atevi counterpart to the Heritage Party. They’re names: Murini, Shishogi, most of the Kadagidi and Ajuri clans… but few individuals, except for one. Geidaro is deep in the crime family that rules Ajuri, but she hides her true face until she has no other choice. Even then, she tries to hide her intentions behind outright prejudice, accusing Tatiseigi:
You have been no neighbor to us. You have abandoned the policies of your uncle, you have led the seven clans astray from our principles, you have associated yourself with Easterners and liberals, you have made peace with the Taibeni bandits, you have voted to admit the Edi pirates to the aishidi’tat, you have made association with the aiji’s pet human, and you have sold our heritage!
Convergence, p. 293
We hear similar sentiments expressed to Bren on Mospheira, about selling out to the atevi (more about that below). Despite the cover, it’s a measure of young Cajeiri’s growing political sophistication that he sees behind Geidaro’s mask:
She was smart enough not to speak any threat, not against him, not against Uncle. But Cajeiri thought, she meant one. She very much meant one, as she turned and walked down the steps to the foyer; and he was shivering, not because he was afraid — well, he was — but mostly because he saw a danger he could do nothing about. He had his aishid on those steps, if the Ajuri Guild dared draw a gun, but they were not the danger. That was not the way that woman would work.
Convergence, p. 295
One of the most satisfying developments in Foreigner is the chance to watch Cajeiri grow from an impulsive child into a surprisingly (for his age) competent political force. All the annoyance of young Cajeiri pays off as he grows up and proves his political dexterity as well as his ability to keep a lid on his emotions, in short, to wear a mask.
Speaking of masks, keep an eye going forward on Machigi, the southern lord who has been made an associate of Ilisidi. Just as the name of Murini, the despot during the coup, means “rats” in Japanese, Machigi means “street clothes” (if I can trust Google translate). This is interesting, since Cherryh rarely flags characters this openly. Bren has seen several of Machigi’s faces in Deceiver, Betrayer, and Intruder, and still doesn’t know which is the real man, whether he’s the thug who menaces him with a gun, the careful and conscientious leader of his people, or the collector who treasures his fragile porcelains. He changes his outward aspect, his “clothes,” in the blink of an eye. However he turns out, he’s a wild card and a canny politician, and he bears watching.
Turning to the human side of things, the politics are more explicit, or at least, expressed in more sound-bites. Asgard Industries, which plays a role analogous to the Koch Brothers and the Tea Party, staunchly funds and supports the Heritage Party...right up until the moment it is no longer profitable to do so, and that moment comes when Heritage Party darlings come up in the center of an enormous corruption scandal.
The Heritage Party is, I’m convinced, Cherryh’s response to the Republican move toward demagoguery under Newt Gingrich. Since then, the satire has only become more biting, as she traces the Heritage evolution from a “Humans First” agenda to a spittle-flecked fringe of dangerous lone actors. After their most prominent legislator, Woodenhouse, attacks Bren in a televised committee hearing, accusing him of betraying all humans, Bren explains Woodenhouse’s supporters to his aishid this way:
Think of him as a human Lord Topari—willing to demand war with the continent, since there is absolutely no chance that atevi will ever descend on his village. His people live comfortably enough, absolutely certain that they are in constant danger from atevi, and Woodenhouse is their voice and their source of information, because he tells them what they already believe: that outsiders lie to them.
Convergence, p. 160
(That comment has to be informed by Fox News Derangement Syndrome.) It’s not exclusive to humans, since Lord Topari in his mountain region is similarly disposed to hate whoever doesn’t look like him, and indeed, many who do but aren’t him. But Topari shows promise — he can, however slowly and with sufficient appeals to his greed and sufficient constraints on his ambition, be won over. Woodenhouse and his followers will not.
Indeed, as President Shawn Tyers predicts, the diminishing of the Heritage Party’s power, and the possibility of its dissolution, will not lead to peace, but to a splintering, as most members moderate their positions, leaving a space for an unstable fringe:
“I don’t think they’ll be a political party. I think they’ll be a problem, and problems pushed by fanatics tend to fund themselves in small, nasty ways.”
It was a rational scenario. [Bren] could very well see it. ...Those still obsessed with a fiction two hundred years old were not going to change their minds. What really had happened was not what was still taught to kids. And replacing that treasured mythology with the Reunioners’ version of history was going to stir up its own storm.
Emergence, p. 165
Whether that mythology is the Lost Cause of Southern Lore, Ronald Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill, or Superior Humans Betrayed in the War of the Landing, cultural mythology has a certain consistency. As far as the irrationality of those who hold such beliefs dear, Tyers has a theory, calling such believers
a certain portion of unhappy people who just can’t figure why they don’t have what they planned in life. When we landed, it was the ship’s fault. Yesterday it was the atevi’s fault. Now it’s the Reunioners’ fault. I’m sure it will somehow become the atevi’s fault again. I don’t know how the radicals will get there, logically, but they’ll work at it. It’s their calling in life, I suppose…
Emergence, p. 165-166
The politics of personal grievance is dangerous. Bren has been dealing with it for a long time. He tries to warn the three tutors who will teach the Reunioner kids what it’s going to be like. As he warns them, he speaks from personal experience.
There may be people looking for any fault they can find…even in three young kids, or their associations. There is a stirring of political opposition, and it may touch off unstable people. There may be some politically motivated individuals who will use any means whatsoever to get to you. Including getting to your social contacts. Politics. Serious, dangerous politics that may turn your lives in ways you can’t predict. That’s what I’ve met. It’s what you could meet. You will have to live under security the rest of your lives. It can affect your relationships, it can upset your life, it can affect everything. Nobody warned me. I’m warning you.
Emergence, p. 88
This is the bad side of politics: dealing with everyone from the professionally aggrieved to the amorally opportunistic. Neither pole on the bad side is interested in communication or understanding, and both default to violence, defining compromise as failure and winning as destiny (sound familiar?). The stage is set for fraught circumstances going forward, on both sides of the straits.
The good sides of politics are bound up in the events of the novels, and are not as easily extracted or summarized. The Shadow Guild is exposed but the exposure reverberates and destabilizes almost as much as the race into space shakes up the economic stability of the aishidi’tat. Change brings both opportunity and problems. The sheer length of the series affords room for all the consequences to play out in all their complexity, which is one rare pleasure and reward for a patient reader.
I suspect that one reason Cherryh introduces Cajeiri as a viewpoint character, the only one besides Bren, is so she can demonstrate situational understanding from two different cultures. The only characters who know more than Bren about political realities on the ground are Tabini and Ilisidi, so Bren is no novice to politics. Cajeiri is, although at age 9, he’s remarkably astute, deciding that, in the end, the role of politics is to “put fragile things into good hands,” (Emergence, p. 238).
Despite setbacks, the good guys on both sides of the strait (as well as in the sky) understand a fundamental truth that holds across culture and time. Nomari, speaking of his clan the Ajuri and about the Shadow Guild, puts it this way to the Assassin’s Guild:
I know deep secrets of your Guild, nadiin, and if you do not know them I will tell them to you, but I think you know — that there was a faction, and may be a faction, so convinced that humans will change us, that they changed us…. I know very little about humans, but I care very little about them, too. They are not the monsters. The monsters were the ones who killed their own brothers and sisters so we could then go kill the humans.
Convergence, p. 228
Bren says the same thing both on Mospheira and on the space station: that focusing on weapons development to destroy the kyo won’t destroy the kyo — but it will destroy what is most precious about who they are, both human and atevi.
And Shawn says to the people on Mospheira:
We have these people on our doorstep who came here for help, who’re being told ...to go off … and die, because somehow they’re going to change us if they come down here. Well, my fellow citizens, they’re not the ones bent on changing us. What will change us is not five thousand men, women, kids, and old people who’ve come to us for refuge. It’s the notion that we’re too fragile, too morally impoverished to give it. We can give it, we should give it, and by all we hold sacred, we’re going to give it! We’re not intimidated. We’re not stupid. And we’re not going to react in fear of each other.
Emergence, p. 313 [bolding mine]
All of this resonates, doesn’t it? It has powerful application today.
Azar Nafisi writes in Reading Lolita in Tehran, “what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.” You can find it anywhere: in classic literature, in graphic novels, in space opera. The epiphany of truth: we see it in the mirror. Even if it looks back at us with black skin and gold eyes.
Sources
All of C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner novels are published by DAW. Look ‘em up. Preferably in order of publication.
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. NY: Random House, 2004, p. 3.
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