DIdentifying the city with a person is a classic of both city marketing and local poetry: “Be Berlin”, as the capital city campaign from the noughties was called, or in the Rhenish variant: “Du bes Kölle” (Tommy Engel).
The American writer NK Jemisin takes this literally for her new novel “The Guardians of New York”, which is clearer in the original title “The City We Became”: The rhetorical topos becomes a fantastic epic.
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A swaggering newcomer to business, a lesbian veteran of the street fights of the ’70s with Native American roots, a black rapper from the very beginning, a Gen Y Indian-born math prodigy and a xenophobic white-trash bitch from suburbia: five dwellers becomes independently one day the revelation that they were the real personifications of the boroughs of Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. There is also a sixth, a gay, homeless graffiti genius who embodies the entire city as the “primary avatar”.
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Her Broken Earth trilogy made her a fantasy celebrity: NK Jemisin
Source: AFP
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Together, the troupe should support the city as a team of midwives during its final birth into a true metropolis and fight against the evil powers that want to prevent this and destroy the entire city, like two incarnations of those who have already come into the world, who have come as coaches, so to speak São Paulo and Hong Kong explain: “The lesson is this: big cities are like all other living things, they are born and they grow old, and they tire and die when the time comes.”
However, since demonic forces in the form of a “woman in white” and all sorts of disgusting giant tentacles want to nip the birth of true urbanity in the bud, a struggle of apocalyptic-catastrophe-like proportions ensues in the prologue, to which the Williamsburg Bridge, among other things, falls victim.
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The scope of the novel’s plot is explained by the various problems that arise when recruiting the six “guardians”, who are by no means eager to throw themselves into the fray for the greater good.
But only together can they defeat the enemy: “There are certain things we can all do, and then each one of us has additional special abilities, just as each borough brings different strengths that make New York what it is.” , says “Bronca” Bronx, of all people, who is more likely to be one of those who have learned to fight their way through the hard life on their own.
Dream fasting and sweat lodges
In general, you shouldn’t rely on logic and strict causality in this genre, especially since the syncretistic worldview is one of the loudly and constantly praised advantages of New York.
Much of the dialogue consists of the neighborhood superheroes trying to make sense of what is happening and their transformation for themselves. Bronca, who works at a neighborhood cultural center, puts it this way: “‘It all reminds me a lot of different things I’ve read over the years. The Australian Dreamtime, CG Jung’s Collective Unconscious. Dream fasts and sweat lodge rituals, as practiced by some of my peoples.’ Queen takes a deep breath. ‘Oh, I thought you were Latina. So you’re one of here-here.’”
The series-appropriate cast of the main characters and the storyline with all sorts of New York-typical driving around allow Jemisin, who became a high fantasy bestseller with her “Broken Earth” trilogy, to draw an inclusive and diverse city portrait in every respect. Now that diversity is the essence of New York is not a particularly original claim.
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The current thrust of the novel is the mortal threat to this very organic structure. The bulldozing of Bronca’s favorite burger joint becomes a beacon of the coming apocalypse. In fact, the evil forces are in league with global real estate developers: The monster is actually called gentrification. “’Condos,’ she growls, in the same tone of voice the other uses the word venomous snakes say.”
Jemisin turns this urban-sociological dynamic of decay into a gnostic dualism that knows only good and evil, salvation or catastrophe, birth and death. On the good side there are everyday problems, apartment blocks, chaos, history, music and art, on the bad side suits, sexism, cops, global corporations, uniform row houses and alt-right youth. Here-here versus there-there.
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It’s easy to guess who wins in the end, after all it’s fantasy. But it has its price to negotiate social conflicts in the final battle scheme. The triumph is bought less by overcoming the opposites than by deepening them: the evil is simply split off, the binary logic of own and foreign is not overcome, but strengthened. That can still take revenge, which it will definitely do in the next part of the announced trilogy.
NK Yemisin: “The Guardians of New York”. Translated from the English by Benjamin Mildner. Tropen Verlag, 544 pages, 25 euros.
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