32 pages • 1 hour read
Rivers SolomonAn Unkindness of Ghosts
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Normalization of Supremacist Ideology
On the Matilda, class is codified by the letter assigned to living-quarter decks. People at the end of the alphabet, in the Q and Y and Z Decks, are lower class. People at the front of the alphabet are higher class. There is also a middle class with far more freedom to interact with the upper classes than with the lower classes. We know little about what people from the higher classes do for work or how they preserve their place in the hierarchy. Mostly, we see Matilda from its lower-class residents’ perspectives.
The lower classes work for little to no pay on a set of vast, mechanically rotating fields under a large and radiant nuclear generator called Baby, which resembles a sun. Their labor is systematically coerced within the rigid class hierarchy. This system parallels the structure of slavery in the pre-Civil War American South. Like antebellum slavery, it is based in an ideology of race and gender supremacism.
Normativity and the more casually employed adjective “normal” are not synonymous. There is nothing special about the fact that the Sun revolves around our crops here on Earth, helping them grow. Even before Copernicus described the model of the solar system, there was nothing much human beings could do to change that relationship. Such a thing can safely be thought of as “normal.” In the man-made environment of the Matilda, however, crops revolve around the Sun, though the long-dead engineers of Matilda may very well have designed the ship so that the sun revolved around the crops. Before the construction of the ship, the engineers had a range of ingenious design options from which to choose. Generations after these choices were made, they became named and fixed in the imaginations of those whose lives they affect. When powerful forces perceive a phenomenon as helpful, they often normalize the phenomenon, constructing a language from scratch in order to perpetuate it. As this normalization is inherited, it deepens in power, becoming a sort of natural law.
The fact that the skin of human beings varies from light to dark in a myriad of different shades, or that sexual self-identification and neurological type vary similarly, is as normal and trivial as the rising and setting of the sun on Earth. People, quite simply, are different. However, the partitioning of those qualities into arbitrary racial, gender, and neurotype categories in order to determine who does the hard work and who profits from that work is a normative process, one meant specifically to favor one group over another. If this normalizing process is reinforced enough, even its victims will come to internalize it. Solomon emphasizes this point with a comment about Aster, who internalizes insults even as she performs astonishing acts of intelligence and skill, thinking, “With everyone insisting it was true, it was hard to believe she was any good at all” (273).
Systematic Violence and its Legacy on the Matilda
In American history, the legal claim to the perpetuation of slavery was mostly subsumed into laws pertaining to property and inheritance rights. What was less frequently codified into written law was the right (or lack thereof) of slaveholders to beat and rape the human beings they legally held as property. Both the unofficial and official sanctions of these moral abominations, however, relied on an undergirding of systematic and asymmetric capacity for violence by the ruling class against those they enslaved. The violence of a property owner to their living property was a matter of who holds the most efficient killing tools and thus has the greatest capacity for intimidation and coercion. One person holding a truncheon may enforce the involuntary labor of 20. After a generation of such systematized violence, the truncheon may no longer be visible. The weapon’s presence, however, may yet be assumed and normalized, losing none of its motivating power.
We do not know the exact letter of the law of the generation starship Matilda. We know that the story takes place more than 800 years after the real-world date when first slave was forced to work on American soil and more than 400 years after American slavery was actually abolished, but it is unspecified in the text whether slavery was ever abolished in this version of history. We know that lower-deckers are paid for their work not in money but in food and substandard housing. We know that there is something like a “stop-and-frisk” law on Matilda, by which people may be detained on no other basis than the way they look and the neighborhood they live in. Such interruptions can lead to dire and unexpected violence for the detained, based on whether those doing the detaining are having a bad day. We can see that the accountability mechanism for guards is missing or obscured. As witnesses, we can draw easy parallels between the systemic violence of the Matilda guards and our own contemporary reality. Furthermore, we may feel anger and revulsion at those guards and hope that, perhaps in another 800 (or 1,600 or 3,200) years, the reason and kindheartedness of engaged people may make their violence seem less of an inevitability.
Such is the normalization of the everyday violence of the ruling class that, when Giselle and the other lower-deckers rise in sudden, bloody retribution against the guards, we might be inclined to perceive it with a special reserve of horror. We may even perceive such revolutionary violence as excessive or abnormal compared to the sad inevitability of the guards’ near-millennium-old violence. In this way, Solomon’s narrative forces a reckoning with our ideological assumptions about violence, its origin, and who deserves to wield it.
Diasporic Culture
When slaves were brought across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa, they were sorted by the cruel pragmatism of their captors into reductive categories of skin color and ability to perform labor. Those enslaved had self-identities, languages, modes of exchange, and belief systems going back centuries. As soon as such people were displaced from their homes, they had to develop new, improvised languages and systems of belief, often with other displaced people, in order to survive. This process parallels the experience of Jewish people fleeing Europe during World War II and the flight of climate and war refugees in our own time. Such displaced cultures are called diasporic, from a Greek phrase meaning “scattered across.”
The starship Matilda, scattered across the stars with no intelligent hand to guide it, has its own polyglot diasporic culture. This scattering is represented by the different cultural norms and languages practiced from deck to deck. On Flick’s deck, for instance, all people use the pronoun “they,” while on Aster’s deck, all people are referred to as “she.” When Aster visits the middeck student Cassidy Ludnecki, he quickly reveals his origins as a low decker by accidentally referring to Aster as youngwa, or “youngster.” While people above deck trade in bits of symbolic cash, the poor residents of the low decks deal only in trades of tangible goods. Aster’s power to thrive on Matilda lies partially in her ability to navigate through and communicate with these different cultures.
