2) ‘Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-Realist Aswang’ by Kristin Mandigma
I’m not too familiar with the aswang, but as I understand it, the aswang in Filipino tradition and folklore is a predatory, werewolf-like creature that hunts at night. During the day it can shapeshift into human form, living among and even befriending ordinary people. The aswang in Kristin Mandigma’s story is smart, sharp-tongued and proudly socialist. It does not take kindly to the suggestion put to it by the editor of a science fiction magazine that it submit a story as proof of its existence. Among many other things, the creature’s letter contains a sharp critique of Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers:
I do not care if the main character is a Filipino infantryman. I assume he is capitalist, too. Furthermore, since he is far too busy killing cockroaches on godforsaken planets in a spaceship (which is definitely not a respectable proletarian occupation), his insights into the future of Marxist revolution in the Philippines must be suspect at best.
This story is entertaining and very funny. I loved its sarcastic tone of voice – the communist aswang could have a career in TV, no problem, a prospect which it would undoubtedly view not so much with horror as with scorn. Mandigma packs an awful lot into a few pages, and in the tradition of all the best satirists, she utilizes humour to make us not only laugh at ourselves but also re-examine our own motives and culpability. The purpose of her story is ultimately serious, raising issues of othering, cultural appropriation and the continuing ignorance of these very issues within the SF heartlands. The fact that the aswang’s letter is a letter from America further complicates the subtext. As with Samatar’s story, Mandigma’s piece becomes still more potent on a second reading. I enjoyed it a lot.
3) ‘Somadeva: a Sky River Sutra’ by Vandana Singh
This beautiful and highly complex story takes as its inspiration the Kathasaritsagara, an 11th-century Sanskrit text in eighteen volumes, weaving together numerous tales and legends of northern India. The narrator of Vandana Singh’s story is Somadeva, the Brahmin poet and scholar who set down the original stories of the Kathasaritsagara. His spirit has been restored to life and captured in a glass casket by Isha, a woman of the far future who is travelling the galaxy in pursuit of stories, much as Somadeva did in India in his own time. Isha fell in love with the poet when she first read the Kathasaritsagara for herself. Now she looks to him for inspiration and guidance as she relentlessly pursues the truth about her own lost past:
When she was a young woman, [Isha] was the victim of a history raid. The raiders took from her all her memories. Her memories are scattered now in the performances of entertainers, the conversations of strangers, and the false memories of imitation men. The extinction of her own identity was so clean that she would not recognise those memories as her own, were she to come across them. What a terrible and wondrous age this is, in which such things are possible!
Singh is speaking not just of an imagined far future but of our own age, of course, where one of the most damaging impacts of colonialism has been to rob people of their own historic narratives, replacing them with the myths and mores of the invaders. As the story progresses, we are made to feel ever less certain of what is happening and where. Are we with Somadevi in his own time, where he sends himself on ever more precipitous flights of the imagination in an effort to save his beloved, the queen Suryamati, or are we on the spaceship with Isha, collecting stories that are cosmology codified, the origins of the universe expressed as parable?
‘Somadeva: a Sky River Sutra’ contains vast seas of information and idea, so much that a proper analysis would occupy many pages. Vandana Singh has crafted a story that is not only beautiful, but that conveys highly complex concepts and thought processes about fiction, about history, about the act of retelling, all in a language that manages to be both poetically tactile and bracingly direct. The more I dwell on it, the more moving and accomplished it becomes. As an Englishwoman I am starkly aware that I may only be brushing the surface of what is contained in this story – I know nothing about the Kathasaritsagara beyond the tiny bit of reading I’ve done online for the purposes of understanding the background to Singh’s story a little better – but I’m in awe of what Singh has produced here, and I identified strongly with her ideas about the fundamental importance to every culture not just of the art but of the act of storytelling. I totally love it that she’s also written herself into her story.
She has spent much of her youth learning the lost art of reading, leaning the lost scripts of now-dead languages. Inside the cover of the first volume is a faint inscription, a name: Vandana. There are notes in the same hand in the margins of the text. An ancestor, she thinks.
A wonderful piece. A keeper.