The City We Became Book Report
- Kingkhu Fowl
- Sep 4, 2024
- 18 min read
Introduction
I would be lying to you if I claimed that I’m not a bit daunted by the task of writing a report on this book. Even with no person sitting over my shoulder to poke my theories full of holes, the complexity and abstractness of this book is every bit as daunting to talk about as it is exciting. And boy am I excited to talk about this book!
My only other experience with the writing of NK Jemisin prior to reading The City We Became is her Broken Earth trilogy which I read in 2022, and still love to this day. However, with so much time passed since then, and such a dramatic shift in setting and premise for this series, I really wasn’t sure what I was going to get myself into.
If you want to hear me discuss the plot of the book, you can watch me go over it in this video. In it, I cover the book from a more casual and entertainment-focused review, whereas here I will be discussing my thoughts about some of the themes, motifs, historical allusions, philosophical musings, and more that this book raised up for me, either directly or indirectly. To get there though, I will have to give a very quick introduction to the story and concept of this book.
Book Review
The central idea of this book is that cities have souls, and those souls are self-created beings that have actualized through the concentrations of culture and life that imbue them with their own identities. These cities exist in a separate dimension layered atop and conjoined with our own. They then empower champions to fight for their values and identity against whatever forces might try to erase them. For a city like New York, so full of diversity and contradiction, there are six champions, one prime champion, and 5 others to represent the 5 boroughs of NY: Manhattan, The Bronx, Harlem, Staten Island, and Brooklyn.
To aid in the understanding of this concept, here is a quote that helps to explain it a bit from Dr. Bronca, the Bronx champion:
“This process? It happens all the time. All over the world, wherever there’s a city. Enough human beings occupy one space, tell enough stories about it, develop a unique enough culture, and all those layers of reality start to compact and metamorphose. Eventually, when it’s close to that, uh, moment…the city chooses someone to be its…midwife. Champion. A person who represents the city and protects it, as we do."
(Jemisin, pg. 304)
Uh… yeah, I hope that helped. You may have noticed the discussion of layers of reality, the birthing analogies, or the talk of stories and culture and be asking yourself “Is this describing a city as a spirit? Another dimension? A living being?” And the answer to those questions is a resounding YES!
There are a lot of different flavors of reality that go into the configuration of the world in this book. It’s a little dash of science, a pinch of magic, a sprinkle of metaphysics, a smidgen of horror, a drizzle of spirituality, and more, all mixing and reinforcing each other.
A useful way to think of how cities are depicted in this book is through Plato’s World of Forms. Plato theorized that everything that man created, first started with an idea, and that idea of the thing exists in its perfected form. Whatever we create that resembles that perfect idea will only be our closest approximation of the idea because we will never be able to achieve the ultimate perfection of the idea.
Applied here, you can think of the World of Cities as the World of Forms where the perfect and true souls of the cities exist. This makes it so that the city's champions have very creative and odd powers, but are also insanely powerful at the same time because they derive from the character of a city.
This results in spectacular scenes like Manny taking a deep breath in of the rank scent of the nasty subway station to empower himself, or allowing him to hail a magical old-timey New York checkered novelty cab and ride it like a jouster through the body of a semi-real tentacle worm that burrowed out from beneath FDR Drive. Or Bronca performing a dance to control (become) the Harlem River, raising her arm and lifting the entire river thirty feet into the air! Yes, quite the range.
Speaking of Bronca, let us use her to discuss one of my favorite aspects of this book, and that is the way that Jemisin uses characterization as the glue that ties the supernatural adventure to real-world history and social commentary.
Bronca is the chosen champion of the Bronx, which is considered to be the oldest borough. She is a 60-something professor and art director at the Bronx Arts Center, a lesbian and vocal Stonewall veteran, and from the Lenape people a native tribe that used to occupy the land that covered parts of New York and New Jersey. (Bronx River Alliance).
Of the five champions, Bronca is the one who has the most information on what is going on, as well as the most established connection with her borough, a reflection of the deep history that ties her to the land, which in turn made her the perfect candidate to be chosen as Bronx’s champion. Jemisin’s approach to the supernatural in this book is so beautiful to me because all at once it provides characterization to both Bronca and the borough she represents, all while tying in history that forms the bones of the magic system. It makes the magic system harder to predict but imbues it with such meaning that it keeps everything grounded in reality.
When Bronca tells her subordinate and unofficial adopted daughter, Veneza, the truth of her power and the World of Cities, she summons the story and taps into her connection with the city by performing a Lenape powwow dance. Most, if not all, powwow dances tell a story, and as I’ve discussed art is often used as a vehicle for transmuting power in this book because it is how humans write their stories into the world that eventually changes it. So OF COURSE Bronca would tap into the magic of the city’s memory through one of the oldest forms of storytelling that she knows, a detail that not only adds more depth to the character but also teaches a bit about a history of New York that I had never heard! And this is only one small example of how Jemisin’s approach to magical realism is expressed in this book. I will talk about it a bit more later, but for now, I will be passing the mic to Professor Bronca to hear a bit of the history she shared with Veneza in this scene because it is actually fairly important:
“A long time ago, when existence was young, there was just one world that was full of life…each decision those living beings made fissioned off a new world…so on, and so on…an endlessly growing tree, sprung from a single tiny seed, whole branches are each so wildly different that life on one world is unrecognizable to life on another.” (Jemisin, pg. 165-166)
Bronca goes on to say that there is one exception to this rule, and that is cities, which ”traverse the layers.” We later learn she is being a bit deceptive here because the reality is that cities PUNCH through the other layers of reality, destroying them to create the city. To put it another way, think of cities being born as them being so full of history, culture, and identity, that they obliterate the other possible universes with the weight of their “realness.” If you’re still confused, join the club. The thing about abstract concepts is that they are difficult to describe, and there’s not necessarily one static answer.
What I can tell you is that these other possible universes aren’t simply these worlds that never exist. I used the verb PUNCH for a reason. This is a violent and cataclysmic ending of countless universes each time a city is born. Yea… Freaking BRUTAL. It’s something that is so large and horrible, but also seemingly a naturally occurring phenomenon, that it is hard to even concept. It’s like finding out that a tsunami gave birth to your reality, and also that you are the champion that is charged to protect it from the beings that it hurt in its creation, but now that tsunami is also you as well and holds everyone you love in it. It gets tricky.
It is here that we shall now talk about what it is that our protagonists are fighting against. On a meta-level, they are fighting against ideas and energy, which synchronize to create the naturally occurring horrors of the current age- toxic internet crusades, vindictive uses of systemic power like the use of eminent domain, police power abuse, and profiling to name a few.
The main source of these happening is a lady dressed in blindingly bright all-white, who comes from another universe on behalf of some mysterious extradimensional arbiters to kill off cities like New York. We later learn that her name is R’lyeh, which is a reference to a fictional city from HP Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulu” that was said to serve as the tomb and home for an ancient eldritch horror named Cthulu, as well as a host of other cosmically abominable creatures. HP Lovecraft actually appeared quite a bit in this book, not only through his fictional worlds but also in the critique of his apparently super racist outlook towards so many different groups of people that it would be simpler to just say “non-whites”.
Considering the aesthetics of the evil entities in this book, I suspect that Jemisin’s image of corrupting evil was inspired by the works of Lovecraft to a degree that I, someone who has never read an HP Lovecraft story before, probably missed.
The Lady in White is the personification of the city of R’lyeh which appears in our world much more commonly as an infecting miasma and works in a similar way that cordyceps do, infecting hosts, spreading, and taking control. Their goal is to act through whiteness, erasing the elements of uniquity and culture from the city, and subsequently killing it.
It is important to note that this Whiteness is not the quality of being a white person, but rather refers to the stripping of culture and identity that is involved in being accepted into the fold of Whiteness.
Whenever you hear Italian or Irish Americans reflecting on how hard it was for their ancestors to assimilate into American culture, this usually refers to the time shortly after these groups immigrated when they hadn’t been folded into the fold of Whiteness that allowed them to participate in the exploitation of the non-white, non-humans. Y’know, the people not included in “We the People…”
When I first met R’lyeh, I wrote this in my notes:
“I am trying to find out what to call the antagonist still, and the book's hesitance to name her makes me feel that she is either a. representative of an evil larger than any one word or term that can be placed upon her, or b. it is a mystery that Jemisin seeks to reveal at the end. In any case, the Lady in White definitely has a tie to Whiteness. “
And I think I was on the right track. Whiteness in this context was an apparatus of power stratification, of which other tools like capitalism and colonization further aided along, and its inclusion in this book I believe is about that cold, calculating attitude, devoid of purpose besides the accumulation of more power. This is supported by a scene where a Starbucks gets possessed by the miasma and turns into a monster that chases our heroes down. Hong Kong’s champion explains this, saying “Starbucks is everywhere…All over my city too. Big chain stores make a city less unique, more like every other place.” (Jemisin, pg. 384).
Starbucks showing up in poor neighborhoods being a harbinger of gentrification has been a well-established joke for at least the better part of a decade, and here it is given form. Their uniformity, their extractive nature, their uncompromising ubiquity that seeks expansion and consumption to be its prime scale for success, it is a perfect vehicle to communicate this idea.
Interruption
Alright. This small juncture here exists because I decided to take a break from writing this to read “The Call of Cthulu” because I felt that its recurring appearances throughout this book might hint at some greater meaning that I might be missing. Having read it, I am even more convinced of my interpretation of R’lyeh and the nature of the evil miasma that was spreading. If it isn’t clear from googling a picture of HP Lovecraft, which I ended up doing in the course of writing this, then it is very clear from his writing that he comes from a very Age of Enlightenment-era type of classist, racist, and prejudiced thought.
That same “We the people” thinking that I mentioned earlier pre-supposes white men to be the direct reflection of God, and reckons the ability to reason is the divine boon that separates man from the beasts of the earth. The combination of these beliefs results in a worldview that assumes white men to be the pinnacle of humanity, reason, and therefore divinity, and subsequently what remains to represent savagery, chaos, and disorder. This worldview is reflected in sentences like “the region now entered by the police was one of the traditionally evil respite, substantially It is this undercurrent of thought that gives me a different outlook to the way that Lovecraft describes his horror, which he strains to paint as inhuman, otherworldly, strangely foreign, and counter to reason. He repeatedly refers to the indecipherable architecture of R’lyeh, and how it acts counter to our every understanding of shape and form.
Initially, this felt like Lovecraft attempting to tap into that inherent sense of uneasiness that results from encountering something that is slightly off in an indescribable way. After reading his story, however, I feel that this was tied to something much deeper, his outlook on the world and its mysteries. The cultures that he attributes to being associated with nefarious occult activities in his book are cultures that most likely already embodied this horrific sense of otherworldly otherness to him, and that stood in antithesis to his very ordered worldview. We are frequently encountering the likes of “Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans” which refer to the Inuit tribes and practitioners of vodun. Clearly we can see how he viewed these cultures, and that’s not even getting into all the half-caste talk.
It is quite coincidental that I am encountering this story right now because, in one of my more recent book reviews for the book Black Shield Maiden by Willow Smith and Jess Hendel, I discuss how the practice of voodoo/vodun has been villainized by dominant white culture and power structures for centuries, and here we are a few weeks later encountering said villainizing works.
Interestingly enough, I believe that the very conception of the creature horrors within The City We Became is directly inspired by “The Call of Cthulu,” particularly in this passage “There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless, white polypous thing with luminous eyes” describing one of the entities found at a ritual site in the book, and which is very reminiscent of the way that the creatures are described in “The City We Became.” Only where this eldritch horror is summoned by human sacrifice and “voodoo orgies” in Lovecraft’s tale, and for NK Jemisin it is proliferated through the spread of vindictively ignorant thought and represents the corrosive worldview and systems that have contributed to the continued destruction of harmonious living on earth, I.E. evil.
In describing the behavior of R’yleh and the vestiges of evil she leaves behind, Jemisin describes it at one point as similar to the way that Cordyceps behaves. Cordyceps fungi are parasitic, primarily targeting insects and arthropods. They infect their host by infiltrating its body with spores. Once inside, the fungus grows and eventually takes over the host's body. As the fungus matures, it consumes the host from the inside.
Fungi, in general, communicate within their mycelial networks (the root-like structures of fungi) through the exchange of nutrients, signaling molecules, and even electrical impulses. While Cordyceps is primarily parasitic and doesn't form large mycelial networks like some other fungi, it is clear that R’lyeh and her brood mirror the interconnected nature of mycelial networks.
We can connect this to the collective consciousness and memory of society, with this chemical signaling mirrored against the ways that ideas are spread throughout society by nudging the entire network towards an idea or outcome with a widespread message.
A different interpretation of this concept is shown in the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only the dangerous idea that was spreading in that film was obviously communism
The monstrous evil that HP Lovecraft attempted to construct through a misshapen amalgam of ignorant thought, NK Jemisin then uses to place the face of white supremacy upon, consequently placing Lovecraft as a minion to this cosmic force of evil in analyzing the ways in which his art fed into the spread of parasitic thought that contributed to countless atrocities through time.
Jemisin crystalizes this concept in a scene that occurs in chapter 9, where minions of R’lyeh commit an interdimensional psychospiritual on Bronca using a painting that depicted Lovecraft’s outlook on other peoples and cultures and hideous misshapen sub-humans. Bronca experiences this as an attack on spiritual attack on her very personhood, feeling herself being erased from the world, made over.
If you have any deep attachment to a minority group, you can most likely sympathize with the struggle to control your image and story, as well as the dread of its erasure. By having characters like Bronca, who are both representative of an individual and an avatar of a culture she represents and protects, we can see this dynamic represented on different scales.
It also shows how the spreading of Lovcraft’s ideas carried with them these views and left a mark in the world that can’t truly be quantified. This is the power of art, regardless of the artist's intention, though having read “Call of Cthulu” I’m certain that was Lovecraft’s goal.
Conclusion
As someone who loves mythology dearly, and still resonates deeply with the idea of the supernatural being a vehicle to conceptualize and dissect the more abstract aspects of human existence, I think that this book does this spectacularly. With the approach that Jemisin takes, I could easily see this book falling on its face because there is so little explained about the way that the "magic" in this book behaves, or what attacks are powerful or why, but ultimately it doesn't matter because that isn't the point of this book, and I quite like that.
The concept of cities becoming these massive spiritual living entities is beautiful and profound to me in a way that I find it difficult to put into words, or even conceptualize fully. I also think that perhaps there is no such thing as being able to look at the complex identity of a city like New York as a living entity and conceptualize it fully, just as is the case with the human body. We can characterize and describe the different parts (which NK Jemisin does beautifully to me, someone who has never been to New York) but there will always be a horizon of mystery we will get closer and closer to and never quite reach, like an asymptote. I digress. The point is that as hard as it might be to maintain a sense of a city as a living magical entity and how its history and current reality affect that essence, it isn't hard for one to "feel" the spirit of cities, and how the culture of a city (aka attitude) directly affects how it interacts with the rest of the world, or in this case, itself.
Maybe it is my identity as an artist that makes this idea resonate so deeply with me because it makes tangible the impact that art has on the world. The book begins with a prologue in the POV of the prime avatar who begins with the statement “I sing the city.” (Jemisin, pg. 1) and later in that same prologue starts a new section with the phrase “I paint the city” (Jemisin, pg. 4) and ends the chapter with the inclusion of the sentence” I live the city” (Jemisin, pg. 20). This same sentence is used to begin the epilogue of this book, titled “coda” bringing the whole story back to this central idea. The avatar of Brooklyn often taps into her power through the conduit of music, and Bronca often does the same with visual art. The prime avatar filled the city of New York with graffiti, holes that allowed the city to “breathe” and aid in its thriving. A connection is drawn between art and life because art is the way that humans inscribe our stories into the world, and the stories we inscribe onto the world actively shape it, just on so many scales, and sometimes too subtly for us to draw direct connections to at the time.
I also love the different perspectives that this book acknowledges regarding the way that history informs and influences the present, and how the dismissal of these histories removes critical context to understanding how to authentically interact with a place.
It is this aspect of this book that also makes me enter it into a specific subgenre of black fantasy that I’ve read as of late that is creating what I consider to be modern-day folk and fairy tales that address the monsters of modernity, particularly how it interacts with minority groups. These are books like Ringshout by P. Djeli Clark and even Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, a middle-grade fantasy book by Kwame Mbalia. The original purpose of fairytales was to package useful ideas and lessons within entertaining tales, and what better way to discuss the complicated beasts of the modern age, like patriarchy, gentrification, or capitalism, than to anthropomorphize these concepts and show how they appear in the world around us.
To say that I like this book would be an exercise in redundancy at this point, but the schooling system has drilled essay conclusions into my phalanges, so I am compelled to say it once more! It is definitely a book that can take some adjustment to get into and not one that I would recommend if you want a quick read or some fun escapism. Despite how crazy and out-of-this-world the magic can get in this book, it is so connected to real-world realities and systems that it feels difficult not to classify it as magical realism.
If you want a book that utilizes brilliant perspective work, a unique magic system, a modern approach to viewing the magic in the world around you, and the novel faces of our demons. That centralizes marginalized voices, stories, and experiences with details and tact. That critically converses with past storytelling traditions and works to provide a message for a new age. If that, peradventure could be the persuasion of your interest, then I couldn’t recommend this book more!
Quote Bible
As I close, I just wanna leave some of my favorite quotes from this book here because NK Jemisin has such a way with words, and if you would like to hear more this book is full of them!
‘This is the lesson: Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn…as more people come in and deposit their strangeness and leave and get replaced by others, the tear widens.” (Jemisin, pg.8)
“Ain’t about being alive.” I’ll starve to death someday, or freeze some winter night, or catch something that rots me away until the hospitals have to take me, even without money or an address. But I’ll sing and paint and dance and fuck and cry the city before I’m done because it’s mine. It’s fucking mine. That’s why.” - (Jemisin, pg.7)
“That’s when he realizes he can’t remember where he came from.
And he tries, but he still can’t remember the school he's here to attend.
And this is when it finally hits him that he doesn’t know his own name.
As he stands there, floored by this triple epiphany of nothingness, the portly guy is turning up his nose at the tumbler.” - (Jemisin, pg. 28)
“He ain’t no tourist,” says he of the southern left nut.”(Jemisin, pg. 33)
“I am Manhattan, he thinks again. Every murderer. Every slave trader….” (Jemisin, pg. 81)
“But some new things become part of the city, helping it grow and strengthen – while some new things can tear it apart.” (Jemisin, pg. 46)
“...So anyway, this map? It’s bullshit… This is the first thing most people see when they come here. Even people who’ve been here for years think this is this city…They think Manhattan is the center of everything when most of the city population is actually in the boroughs. They think Staten Island is some tiny thing, an afterthought because they shrank it down to fit this map. But it’s bigger than the Bronx, at least geographically. So, lesson one of New York: what people think about us isn't what we really are.” - (Jemisin, pg. 134)
“She turns to Strawberry Manbun, who’s watching her with an overly polite, fuck-you smile on his lips. He knows full well what she’s thinking. He’s waiting for her to say it out loud and violate the unspoken contract that covers white people who are doing everything short of tossing around the n-word in public.” (Jemisin, pg 140)
New Words and Concepts
Inchoate
Something that is just beginning to develop, not fully formed, or incomplete. It often refers to ideas, plans, or processes that are in an early stage and lack structure or clarity. The word can also imply that something is disorganized or not yet fully realized.
Mannahatta
An old name for Manhattan, the island and borough that is part of New York City. The name "Mannahatta" comes from the Lenape language, spoken by the indigenous Lenape people who inhabited the area before European colonization. It is often translated as "island of many hills," reflecting the original topography of Manhattan before it was heavily altered by urban development.
Atavistic
Refers to characteristics or behaviors that are reminiscent of a distant ancestral past, often implying a return to a primitive or more instinctual state. The term is often used to describe traits or actions that seem to belong to an earlier stage of human development or evolution, rather than to the present time.
Tamil
Tamil is a Dravidian language predominantly spoken by the Tamil people of India and Sri Lanka. It is one of the oldest living languages in the world, with a rich literary tradition that dates back over 2,000 years. Tamil is the official language of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherry, as well as one of the official languages of Sri Lanka and Singapore.
Unified Field Theory
Unified Field Theory is a term used in theoretical physics that refers to an attempt to describe all fundamental forces and the relationships between elementary particles within a single, all-encompassing framework. The idea behind a Unified Field Theory is to unify the fundamental forces of nature—gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force—into one theoretical framework that can explain the workings of the universe in a coherent and consistent way.The major challenge in creating a Unified Field Theory is that gravity (described by general relativity) operates on a macroscopic scale, bending spacetime, while the other three forces (described by quantum mechanics) operate on a subatomic scale with entirely different principles. Combining these into a single theory has proven extremely difficult.
Various attempts have resulted in several developing theories like Grand Unified Theory, Loop Quantum Gravity, and probably most notably String Theory. No fully successful Unified Field Theory has been established. Research is ongoing, with scientists exploring various theoretical approaches, including string theory, quantum gravity theories, and other emerging models. The search for a Unified Field Theory is one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics, as it would revolutionize our understanding of the universe and potentially provide answers to fundamental questions about the nature of reality.
Citations
Jemisin, N. K. The City We Became. Orbit, an Imprint of Hachette Book Group, 2021.
Ndiaye, Diogomaye. “The Indigenous History of the Bronx River: A Story of Honor.” Bronx River Alliance, 11 Oct. 2021, bronxriver.org/post/greenway/the-indigenous-history-of-the-bronx-river-a-story-of-honor.
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