An Unkindness of Ghosts

“You’re a smart one. You know as good as me and as good as Flick that there is no Promised Land. Matilda’s an orphan, a daughter of dead gods. But the Ancestors is real and their spirits are at work.”

These words are spoken by Flick’s great-meema. As we later learn, the Matilda is on no course set by its founders. A complete rerouting of her course 25 years ago has gone unnoticed by those in power, who are interested only in the nihilistic perpetuation of their own power for power’s sake.

“You’re one of those who has to tune the world out and focus on one thing at a time. We have a word for that down here, for women like you. Insiwa. Inside one. It means you live inside your head and to step out of it hurts like a caning.”

The issue of neurotype identity is an important one in Solomon’s novel. The word “autistic” has a fraught legal history, with advocates today torn between “curing” the condition and normalizing it as a part of a spectrum of behaviors. Here, Flick’s caretaker poeticizes the condition in a single word, erring on the side of normalization.

“It’ll all go to dust one day anyway. The sooner you know that, the better. Whether it’s today, tomorrow, or a million years from now.”

Giselle, who speaks here, is a destructive force in the novel. She externalizes past trauma through self-harm and a desire to burn Aster’s notes for the sake of watching them burn. Her love for Aster is subsumed in this desire to go through rituals of harm with her.

“The symptoms the Surgeon described didn’t speak to any poison Aster knew. Sounded more heavenly than that. Sounded like retribution.”

While not as destructive as Giselle, Aster understands her role in relation to the Sovereign as lesser, and she hates him for it. Her solidarity is with the oppressed, and any Hippocratic oath she might have taken (“first do no harm”) does not apply, in her mind, to those who do harm to her and her people.

“She didn’t believe in the supernatural the way other Q-deckers did. [...] The Spirit World was as much a myth as a planet or a real star.”

Aster is, above all, a scientist. She tolerates the strange stories and emotional valences surrounding her but is far more interested in hard facts and concrete solutions.

“My sissiness and my sickliness were two sides of the same coin to my father.”

Theo presents as gender nonconforming, according to the arbitrary norms of upper deck life, in which masculinity is measured by the length of one’s beard and one’s ability to perform casual violence on helpless people. Anything deviating from this norm is pathologized and made to seem like a sickness. Theo’s apparent gender ambiguity is one of the things that sets him apart from his family, and that drives him to help Aster, who is also gender nonconforming.

“‘Night Empress,’ Aster said, despite knowing this was make believe. Giselle so looked the part, with her device just like the comic book heroine, launching magic pellets.”

The same comic books have been passed from hand to hand through the centuries, and few are more popular than the rollicking tales of the superhero Night Empress, who uses a gun in her adventures. While the tone of the novel is serious and somber, the story often references and comments on heroic and popular forms of science fiction, in which matters are settled with last-minute escapes and two-fisted violence.

“Her meanness was pure, forged from pain. It was a cruelty Aster could understand if not always tolerate.”

Aster and Giselle are very different people, but they have both experienced similar, class-based trauma. While Aster’s anger is more often usefully externalized against her class enemies, in Giselle’s case such anger is turned within, against herself. This self-hate will finally undo Giselle.

“Jutting Cliff Wing was filled with rosy-cheeked, rosy-lipped, rosy-gummed upperdeckers. In the nebula of pink, Aster stood out. Brown. All brown.”

Although Matilda is modeled on the racist antebellum South, until this point, Aster is more discriminated against because of her neurotype and gender fluidity, and often by her own class cohort. It is not until she enters the white-dominated middeck that she is made to feel the visibility of her skin.

“He may have prayed five times daily because the scriptures demanded it, but there was no denying that independent of God or religion, his mind demanded it, too.”

There are myriad external revelations of the trauma Matilda inflicts on its passengers, and that trauma is not limited to the lowdeckers. Theo Smith’s religious self-harm bears relation to Giselle’s and even to Lieutenant’s, representing an attempt to impose order on mental and political chaos.

“This is the stuff ghosts is made of. She heard it in her head in Aint Melusine’s voice. Aster thought to call it eidolon, after the wraiths of the ancient world.”

The rare form of heavy metal that first motivates Aster’s search for her past is an example of what people who study narrative sometimes call a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is a focal object, of no real importance itself, that motivates plot-driven actions and circumstances. The real point of Aster’s search is a real ghost, belonging to her mother.

“They can beat me and beat me and beat me until my frail little body breaks, but until they kill me, I am glad. I am so glad.”

Where Giselle embraces self-harm as a way of soothing mental turmoil, Aster embraces life and self-care, even in the face of dehumanizing violence.

“Aster knew now, years later, that Giselle’s phobias and anxieties breeched into the territory of psychosis: a paranoia difficult to identify because so many of Giselle’s concerns made sense.”

Giselle regularly dissociates, freeing herself from thoughts, feelings, and self-identity. This dissociation manifests in invented history, hallucinations, and violence. Here, Aster notes that, in fact, Giselle’s history has been taken from her, and that the people in charge of her care are also the ones who commit the worst violence on her.

“More than anything, I pity you. We try to tame you, but there is no taming vermin.”

Lieutenant expresses his view of Aster and her place in the ship’s structure of power, yet all his focus is trained on her. He fears her intelligence and bonds of connection, things he does not have. His monomania regarding Aster will lead to his downfall.

“Quarry is not my home. I am homeless. We are all homeless. We are the very definition of homeless. We are vagrants in Lieutenant’s kingdom.”

The low-deck residents work on a ship for which they receive few rewards, and the price they pay is connection to family and self-autonomy. One must not be born in a land to find a home in it, but one cannot ever call home a place to which they have no stake or control, as Aster expresses here. Only in escape or revolution will the lower-deckers find a home.

“In stories, girls were brave and played tricks, and won. Aster wanted to be one of those girls.”

Stories model behavior, a point that is particularly important for an Insawa such as Aster, for whom uncontrolled social interaction can sometimes be overwhelming. In a story with a beginning, middle, and end, a reader can find the solace of order.

“You called me yongwa. Not even the Surgeon calls me that, and he speaks Low like a native.”

An important part of separation of people by class, race, and gender is the need for people to pass as a member of a higher class in order to thrive. Theo was born to a black mother but is accepted by his white family when they discover the lightness of his skin. Aster often passes for a boy when she’s in the higher decks. Here, Aster reveals Cassidy as having been born in the low decks by his language.

“Ghosts talk in riddles and metaphors. Those have never been my strong suit.”

The mystery of Lune’s research and disappearance does not have the satisfactions of a heroic adventure story, with a neat beginning, middle, and end. There are codes to unpack and unexplored emotional valences to distract Aster’s research, as she notes here.

“Theo giveth. Theo taketh away.”

In this section, Theo is playfully teasing Aster after a long-delayed coming together as lovers. However, his teasing underscores their relationship in a serious way. Theo may not want to have power over Aster, but through his access to education and powerful audiences, he nevertheless does. Aster cannot thrive without his help, so even his best intentions become a prison for her.

“I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body.”

As Aster extends her research, she also gains self-knowledge. Whereas before she was a scientist and a subject and a sister and many other things combined, here we see her make a start toward coalescing an identity. While it’s not completely coherent, her thought process here registers as evidence of healing.

“Let’s dip our bread into a common pot.''

Here, Giselle remembers a common phrase repeated among lowdeckers on Matilda, translated from a low deck language: Sevri o’lem mol’yesheka ris ner. This phrase is used as a form of greeting, synonymous with “hello.” The common pot of Matilda is composed of different languages and cultures, and so even a mere ‘hello” requires a bit of exposition.

“I want to be the chip on your shoulder. Fifty years from now, you’ll think of me with a sodden heart.”

These are Giselle’s last words. Typical of this character, they are memorably abrasive words. Giselle is asking that she be remembered with her trauma and not sentimentally severed from it. A person may learn from or transcend such trauma, but it never disappears.

“She typed once more into the keypad A-D A-S-T-R-A. To the stars. It had been there all along.”

The name Aster derives from Astra, the Latin word for star. When she enters this combination into the keypad, she is entering a symbolic code to gain access to herself, her mother, and her history. Of course, the next password in the sequence will be A-D T-E-R-R-A-M, or “To the Earth.” Aster’s voyage of discovery will bring her to Earth by the end of the book.