Before my own panelist duties at Readercon 33 commenced, I attended a Readercon panel that was a conversation between Sofia Samatar and Greer Gilman about Greer’s Cloudish novels, Moonwise and Cloud and Ashes, and Sofia’s A Stranger in Olondria and The White Mosque. Below are my notes, which hopefully captures some of the flavor of their discussion.
Greer said The Owl Service by Alan Garner stuck with her, especially the aspect of people being taken over by Myth. In Cloud and Ashes, a person who becomes Ashes is silent for a period of time, except for “telling the dead” (sending them on their way); Ashes must not keep anything. Greer mentioned a mirror/chiral self, but I didn’t get the whole thought down in my notes!
Sofia pointed out all of the Theater in Greer’s work, and how that intersects with characters taking on the roles of gods. Greer describes her traveling actors as “louche friars” who show people the embodied gods; it’s forbidden for them to write down their roles.
Greer brings up Sofia’s A Stranger in Olondria. Olondria is “the country of books and angels.” Olondria has writing and books; Cloud does not. Sofia notes that her Somali father was illiterate until his late teens, and while she was writing that book she was teaching English in South Sudan, an ambivalent feeling because though she was asked to teach reading and writing, at the same time learning English is a factor in local language loss. The angels in Olondria are spirits of the dead, oracles; Literature and Death; written down language is dead. Greer: “The burden of godhead.” Olondria: books are “a weird kind of living dead – you can read the words of the dead!” Conflict of literary and oral culture. She explored what happens when a person’s world changes (protagonist becomes literate); the person is slow to catch up.
Sofia noted, “I don’t think a novel is for resolution [of her questions]. A novel is for experience.”
In Cloud, the world literally changes. Some discussion of “The Thinning” at the end of Cloud and Ashes. A third Cloudish book has just been completed, set at a women’s college envisioned by Margaret at the end of Cloud and Ashes.
Sofia: We are captive to myths of hierarchy and scarcity.
Greer on Cloud: shows the status of myths as the world is changing. We’re excited by the beauty of the myth; studying it makes it poetry, you tame it, put myths into metrics, i.e., the horrors and tragedies and beauties of the former world. Actors taking on bearing gods eats them out from within.
Greer talks about Sofia’s memoir The White Mosque as a mosaic [I agree!]; the Mennonites in the book go on a quest and are living a myth while Sofia follows in their footsteps. It’s an Epic mosaic. Sofia: “How do you come back from the wreck of your hopes?” The Mennonite group stayed in Uzbekistan approximately fifty years until cast out by Bolsheviks, even though Jesus didn’t appear 3/8/1889. They’d traveled two years to reach their destination. Most Mennonites find this episode shameful, but there’s now a Mennonite museum in Uzbekistan of the things they weren’t allowed to take away with them, so they gave to their Muslim neighbors.
Sofia mentions her essay in Realms of Imagination, which accompanied a British Library exhibit. She described five dynamics operating in Epic and in modern fantasy. Epic: combining different episodes. Cloud: centers women and the domestic, not considered Epic. Digression: Romance invades the epic.
Sofia recommends the book Planet Narnia; theory tying each Narnia book to a different planet, Lewis thinking medievally. She didn’t entirely buy the theory but loved the book.
Greer says Cloud is more Romance (like the Mabinogion) than Epic. The whole thing is a Digression; what if women wrote epics? And coming out of the Underworld rather than going into it. Greer writes about Persephone a lot; Sofia as well, and including Isis and Osiris version.
[end of my notes]
