The worthless ones of immense value
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There’s a recurring theme among several of my favorite science fiction reads from the last few years, related in a foundational way to my ideas about the loss of the commons, the creation and promotion of private property, and how both are made possible by a false perception of humans’ disconnection from the natural world—a perception that was born thousands of years ago: who gets to be a person?
In N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, it’s orogenes—people who can control geological forces and energy; they have a magical relationship with rock, essentially—who are not considered human. They’re reviled and expendable, made to use their gifts in service of those in power until they die. In Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, people are considered less full “persons” the further from the empire’s center they live. In Martha Wells’s Murderbot series, the question of SecUnit’s personhood is a constant beat throughout the books, where “Who gets to define ‘person’?” is framed within struggles over individual agency against corporate power and ownership.
I recently reread Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds. I’d forgotten how immediately Johnson presents the question of personhood and value, tangled up with perceptions of self-worth. It’s almost the first sentence:
“Even worthless things can become valuable once they become rare. This is the grand lesson of my life.”
And later,
“When I was young and the multiverse was just a theory, I was worthless, the brown girl-child of an addict in one of those wards outside the walls of Wiley City that people don’t get out of or go to.”
The narrator, Cara, is one of the few able to travel to Earths in other universes. She can only do so because the Caras in so many of those worlds have died—“traversers” can only travel to worlds where their other selves are dead, a reality that the powerful learned the hard way doesn’t apply to those with comfortable lives. The universe exacts a price from those who wish to travel her between spaces, the highest price of all from those who have not already died in that parallel world. Those with money, those with power, those deemed of value to society, are more likely to have other selves who lived long, safe lives. To harvest resources and data from Earths in other universes, the powerful “needed trash people.”
Johnson’s exploration of worlds—the spaces between people, the spaces between socioeconomically divided societies, all kinds of universes separated by uncrossable spaces—is so multilayered and deft that I get a thrill even opening my copy of the book. But it’s this question of humanity, of who gets to be a person, that brings me back to it.
Read the first chapter of The Space Between Worlds for free on Threadable.
She sought no outside validation. She loved, but did not believe her love reciprocated. She built a sense of worth that had to be, by necessity, independent of whether anyone else ever saw it or not.
Cara was self-sovereign but not self-centered. She knew that owning oneself by nature recognizes our need for interdependence. You cannot be self-sovereign if you only take from others and never give, nor can you find it if you always give and find yourself balking at receiving. Self-love has no home if all your attention is directed at others’ validation and treatment of you and never yours to them, but the reverse is true, too. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, as it goes, but likewise do unto yourself as you would unto others.
With nature, too, give as well as receive. When I spend time by rivers or go on a walk or venture into the wilderness, I do not go without some kind of gift in thanks for receiving me, and Earth gets the first drink of coffee every morning, no matter how dark or cold outside.
This sounds preachy, probably. I’ve had forms of it on my mind recently, thinking about the ways in which people try to destroy others and why, and the many ways in which our power and agency are ceded, taken, or attacked. And the many ways individual humans try to fill their own emptiness through an endless seeking for validation and recognition and even what looks like love, in larger ways and small.
Like the Murderbot series, The Space Between Worlds asks what it means to be a person, what it means to have value. And who decides—you, or those who have power over you?
“‘It’s the first one I saw. When I hacked my governor module and picked up the entertainment feed. It made me feel like a person.’ . . .
‘You are a person.’
Oh, that we can’t talk about. ‘Not legally.’”
—The Murderbot Diaries, Exit Strategy, Martha Wells
True freedom is found in that space where we define it for ourselves, as my father and his family and friends once did living under constant threat in the Soviet Union, even after Stalin had died. But it is also found in what we provide for one another, whether it’s actively expressed mutual respect, or laws and institutions shaped to nurture a culture where everyone can flourish in safety.
Power has always dehumanized, un-peopled. Power has always needed to sever our relations from the rest of the living world as the first step to exploitation, and the first step to severing our relationships from one another. That’s what power does. Maybe part of revoking its stolen authority requires us not just to fight without, but to reclaim our own worlds within.
Cara created her own internal freedom. She did her work and sought no recognition, either from those around her or from those who had power over her. When she had the chance to create external freedom for herself and others, she took that, too, but she did it, again, without demanding recognition or admiration for her fight. She just wanted to live her life in peace. But it took its toll on her, as it does on anyone who seeks freedom under oppression.
I return often to a book by Riane Eisler, Nurturing Our Humanity, and the entwining of adults’ behavior, expectations, values, and prejudices with how children are raised.
“[Psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswick’s] findings not only foreshadowed Milgram’s and Earl’s later findings that people from authoritarian backgrounds tended to follow orders regardless of how much they hurt others, they also showed that these people were prone to vote for and support authoritarian leaders. . . .
Our cultural heritage from more domination-oriented times continues to communicate the message that hierarchies of domination are normal, desirable, and inevitable. And this normalization of domination starts very early in life. . . .
Authoritarian families—where fear, violence, and the threat of pain impose and maintain domination—prepare people to fit into an authoritarian and violent social system, which mirrors the relationships within the family.”
The book is full of studies and observations like these, a consistent link between child abuse and child-rearing bent to domination, and an attraction to “political leaders who advocate a punitive social agenda.”
To reframe a life that feels wrecked or warped by early wiring is a monumental task. To do it in the face of ongoing societal oppressions, others’ needs and valid expectations of us, our own self-doubt and insecurities, and the navigation of the very real self-centeredness of many people, is so exhausting and exhaustive that I despair of most of humanity ever making the effort. But it is exactly what is needed to change the political, cultural, and social systems that make human life so consistently miserable and difficult.
Know thy self. To do so is to walk through fire. A submersion into darkness. It is not all that easy. The universe exacts a price to traverse that space.
Stories like The Space Between Worlds can give us hope and a framework for going forward. Most of my favorite fiction books are about people trying desperately to find or maintain a sense of humanity and kindness to themselves and others even in the worst circumstances.
Every generation, we can do better, and help others to do the same. I don’t think it’s possible without finding a way to true self-respect that has no dependence on others’ validation, and likewise not if we’re dependent on always validating others and never oneself. Authentic self-respect and authentic humility go together.
I rely a lot on my Russian-Jewish grandparents for these lessons, but since my father lived in exile and I never knew his parents growing up—I met my grandmother twice before she died, both times when I was fourteen—it’s more often books that have shaped my own expectations of my own self. Even in Lord of the Rings, Frodo broke his own life, gave up any hope of internal peace for himself in order to save Middle Earth, but he did not do it alone and never could have. He and the other hobbits never expected recognition for their heroisms, acting solely out of love and a sense of obligation to their world, though they received them all the same.
And there’s my stepmother’s great-aunt, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who never knew a life without hardship, oppression, and some of the worst shades of grief humanity can inflict on others. She did not have hope, she did not have support, she often did not have food and rarely had societal respect. But it is her poetry that has lasted, her impassioned lines that have given heart to generations long after she has gone.
“I refuse to swim on the current of human spines.
To your mad world—one answer: I refuse.”
—from “Poems to Czechoslovakia,” Marina Tsvetaeva, 1939
In The Space Between Worlds, though dismissed and devalued in her society, and personally broken-hearted, Cara found peace within herself, and the capacity to both give and receive love and support from others. With a few people, she learned how to be truly vulnerable with her trust and her heart in a world that had shown no regard for either. That kind of vulnerability, with those close to us, might be the most terrifying thing of all.
When we do that, we expose ourselves to being ignored, unheard, dismissed, unseen, scorned, invisible, rejected. But when we come to know ourselves, maybe for the first time, to find our way to self-respect and the kind of humility that is carried with honor, and along the way recognize those few people who do see us, a world can open up. That world is so rich, so full, so vibrant and alive, that it’s worth the darkness, worth the price the universe exacts, to find our way home.
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I think this question of who gets to be a person and its opposite, who gets classified as a trash person, lies at the heart of our political division (not to mention the Middle East). So many layers to it. I've offered my college essay coaching pro bono to students at my old high school, but no one has taken me up on it in two years. Though I can understand why young people growing up in Troy might choose to define their personhood independently rather than placing themselves in a power structure defined by wealth. Part of me revels in that idea of people defying the rules, living outside the power structure however they can, even if another part of me knows that I'd be an incomplete person without my college education.
I am in awe of the concept of Caras—the simultaneous tragedy and enormous gift of being able to travel through the multiverse based on the death of your other selves. What a brillliant conceit.