What We Believe, Becomes

Hope and possibility, eleven years later, in the midst of polycrisis

Eleven years ago today, The Mapmaker’s War, my second novel, released. It’s the stand-alone first book of a trilogy. This essay isn’t as tight as I’d like because I still struggle to put words around what writing that book required of me. Considering the bleak chaos going on everywhere, on every level (polycrisis), I can’t not talk about it. Not when the story offers respite, comfort, and hope for those looking for it. Not when I, too, need to be reminded of what the story holds.

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You wanted to find fault in the Guardians. You did not want to believe that all was as it seemed. You felt an elusive unease with their goodwill and welcome. You desired what made you suspicious. The latter was the poison of your past. You had seen little proof that peace within one’s self, one’s home, and one’s world was even possible.

It was. You had to unlearn.

—The Mapmaker’s War

***

It’s not woo-woo b.s. that we’re all connected. Only a few weeks into research for what would become The Mapmaker’s War, I was swept up in a deluge of archetypes. Photos and drawings of symbols and pages of myths, folklore, and fairy tales. An ineffable mystery it was, how across cultures—separated by oceans, mountains, and valleys—humans shared similar images, motifs, and themes for millennia.

By day, my notebook filled with sketches and paraphrases from what I read in my stacks of books. This intermingled with the jotted-down fragments of images, inklings, and words streaming in for “my” story.

By night, for a brief period, I read dystopias.

This wasn’t research, exactly. Where “my” story was going, I had no clarity, but I was crystal clear it would be an allegory and meant to bring some light into this world. I was reading for contrast. My high school copy of George Orwell’s 1984 included a foreword by journalist Walter Cronkite and an afterword by psychologist Erich Fromm. I read the extras first and forced myself through the novel’s opening pages. In my notebook, I mentioned, “…yesterday, it occurred to me why dystopias don’t engage me in the same way anymore. Even though there’s typically a resistance, one doesn’t end the book with much hope of change.”

Weeks later, I started Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. It was everything I wanted from an Atwood book—and not. The college sophomore who’d cut some feminist teeth on The Handmaid’s Tale had grown into an almost middle-aged adult who felt…betrayed…by what an idol had written. I wouldn’t have felt that way if I’d been reading for pleasure and not in perpetual reflection about how to write a novel that aimed to inspire. If I hadn’t been searching for visions of a kinder, quieter future.

I wondered what prompted Atwood to write Oryx and Crake, about technology gone mad, humans right along with it. Like The Handmaid’s Tale, the story was a warning, beautifully and intelligently written.

Dark prophecy begs for heed, for corrective action—and yet the prognostications are just a telegraph from a writer in their present about a potential future on its way to an audience who can’t escape the hell of the past as prologue.

I wanted my work to be something else, to shape a different kind of consciousness.

***

You were taken to a woman who knew of healing plants, and were given teas to clear your cold.

I have no means to pay, you said.

How could I turn away a sick child? asked the gentle old woman.

You were fitted for new shoes with sturdy soles and soft covers.

I have no means to pay, you said.

Your feet cannot wait until you do, said the fatherly shoemaker.

You were led to a small room in a warm house with a neat bed covered in soft linen, a painted chest open and waiting, and a table with a brush, comb, and mirror.

I have no means to pay, you said.

You are the one from that kingdom, said the young woman.

I am.

Is it true you were forced to leave?

Yes.

Sleep now. You’re safe.

—The Mapmaker’s War

***

The winter after I read the dystopian novels, the library angels (well known to those who are guided to the right books at the right time) introduced me to Riane Eisler, Marija Gimbutas, and Buffie Johnson. These women, who were from different academic and creative disciplines, got plenty of criticism for their assertions that once upon a time, Paleolithic and Neolithic human beings honored, even worshipped, the Feminine; lived among each other in cooperation; and did not constantly slaughter each other in war. Rather than patriarchal or matriarchal, these early societies were, perhaps, in balance—among genders, with Nature, with Mystery itself.

Unbelievable! Where’s the science? Where’s the proof? These women looked at the archeological evidence through another lens, and wow, did folks have a problem with that.

I needed to read those books because “my” evolving story had revealed a culture of people who coexisted in peace, equality, and nonviolence. Having no lived experience of a society like that (how many generations have my/our ancestors writhed under the fist of patriarchy and the heel of capitalism?), my own imagination fell far short. Thus the visions coming for the book. Whatever they were, wherever they came from, they invited a gaze into another way of being.

Leit (pronounced lite) was the first to show me his community. His people were called the Guardians, who protected a mythic treasure connected to the world’s creation; Leit was a warrior whose role was to defend it with his life. Through him, I saw his village, the narrow streets, the homes.

Aoife (pronounced ee-fah)—the mapmaker exiled from her Dark Ages-esque kingdom—was the one who described what it was like to first encounter the Guardians and, later, live among them. I say described. Yeah, well, that’s insufficient. For two weeks, I sat on a bed in a dark room writing every word I heard Aoife speak as fast as I could. Flow-turned-flood state, channeling, automatic writing—it doesn’t really matter what I or anyone thinks it was—she told me nearly all of her story out of chronological order, slipping from memory to memory. As she spoke, I could see what she saw—the woman who found her, the steppe, the stag with icicles on his antlers, Leit’s fire, the men in blue coats, the obsidian mirror.

Peace, peace, peace—the word, the feeling—surfaced again and again. What she had wanted since she was a child, what the Guardians taught and gave her.

***

After Trump’s inauguration in 2017, sales of dystopian fiction surged. That year, top sellers included 1984, originally published in 1949, and The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985.

Fascinating, right, the collective (Western?) instinct to consume what we fear.

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to insert some pull quotes and paraphrases about what academics, sociologists, and psychologists have to say about why people read dystopian books and what value these stories have. But I’m not writing a proper essay at the moment, and although I did read several articles and studies, nothing jumped out as something I hadn’t already thought myself.  

Dystopian and post-apocalyptic stories serve a crucial purpose—they allow people to experience, but contain, their feelings of worry and terror and even rage. Readers can imagine themselves as scrappy survivors or brave resistance fighters. The stories act as warnings of what could happen, thus offering the opportunity to avoid the worst in our own time.

But dystopian stories have failed us. Their warnings have not prompted significant change in social, political, or economic structures. They keep us afraid, they keep us confused, and they keep us blunted from our ability to imagine, envision, and receive other possibilities.

For a long while after I read Oryx and Crake, I questioned what I was contributing to the world through my work, what was I saying about the world I wanted to live in. Based on current circumstances, I’m a cynic who thinks the human species, and millions of others, won’t survive more than a few decades—but at the same time, as an idealist, I believe a course correction is still conceivable.

As The Mapmaker’s War took shape and I reflected on the details of Aoife’s life, I kept thinking about philosopher Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. It was a difficult read because it’s about war and genocide, but Glover included examples of soldiers and civilians who didn’t give in to violence and cruelty. Most of the book is relentlessly gruesome, but when I finished, I had a clear, distinct thought: We choose the evil we do to each other. All of it—from the level of a family to the level of nations. Of course, the reverse is also true. We can choose the good. Aoife contemplated the interrelationship among individual, group, and collective choices—and the power these have to cause suffering and strife as well as peace and contentment.

***

We wish to live in a place where each person feels valued and loved. Whatever gifts each has are respected and brought to bear, said he. The Guardians as a people wished to help one another. They intended that no misunderstanding led to hatred or violence.

—The Mapmaker’s War

***

Psychologist C.G. Jung wrote, “…what is the fate of great nations but a summation of the psychic changes in individuals?”

In the US, we’re experiencing a collective psyche’s mercurial nature—the rupture of Obama’s election leading to Trump’s, holding tenuously with Biden. Globally, the collective psyche isn’t much better off as authoritarian Daddies (and complicit Mommies) rise with the promise of safety, order, and stability, telling their tired lies to exhausted people too distracted, wounded, stubborn, or frightened to question them.  

And yet, the future is not fixed. The current trajectory looks grim, but it isn’t locked.

One must believe that to take action, no matter how small.

In 2015, reflecting on how she felt after George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection, Toni Morrison wrote, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” 

My action—small compared to holding a powerful office or leading a movement—is to “do language” because I believe in the power of it. Words from a soul-wounded man to an embittered people led to the Third Reich and the death of millions. Words from a marginalized man to a second-class people strengthened the Civil Rights Movement and led to the end of Jim Crow. Gone with the Wind romanticized an era of cruelty; Beloved laid bare the horror of enslavement.

The Mapmaker’s War will not save the world, but I have faith in its potential to inspire minds and touch hearts. Even now.

***

To the reign of love, shouted Wei.
To the reign of love, echoed all.

—The Mapmaker’s War