Differing Perspectives In Writing the Future
Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”
"The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" is a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin in which the narrator asks the audience to imagine a utopia. In the story, the narrator describes the activity of a place called Omelas on the day of a festival called the Festival of Summer. The city seems to be perfect, at least on this day: the streets are packed and laughter and happiness abounds throughout the streets without mention of violence or poverty. The happiness of the people of Omelas cannot be overstated; they perfectly happy to the point that the narrator admits how inconceivable it is to the audience: “They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better… Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time.” [1] The narrator understands that to the audience, this city seems impossible, that everyone be so happy and content all the time. It is because of this fact that the narrator begin to involve the reader in the story.
Omelas and Reader-Authors
From the beginning, the story reads differently from other stories due to the conversational nature the narrator takes with the reader, effectively breaking the fourth wall from the beginning of the story. While describing the happiness of the utopia called Omelas, the narrator talks directly to the audience, saying “I wish I could convince you… Perhaps it would be better if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.”[2] The perspective of Omelas that is given to the reader is one akin to a God’s eye view – the reader sees both the minute and the big picture; the individual thoughts and the hegemonic culture. Moreover, the explicit invitation to fill in the blanks of Omelas with the reader’s own utopia makes the reader a co-author of the story; given the scaffolding of Omelas, the reader is free to contribute to the makeup of the utopia being described. For example, after the narrator describes the technology that the people of Omelas have in their city, the narrator releases authority back to the reader-author: “Or they could have none of that: it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people…”[3]. One reason that Le Guin endows this position to the reader-author is because, generally speaking, the more a utopia is described, the more it falls apart. Each reader has their own version of utopia in their own head, and so Le Guin neatly works around the pitfalls of describing a utopia in too much detail by asking each reader to fill in the world around her scaffolding, making Omelas the ideal utopia for the reader.
The Dilemma and Implications of Omelas:
The happiness of the people of Omelas is overwhelming, and the narrator understands that. Talking directly to the reader-author, the narrator admits, “Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing…”[4] The dark secret of Omelas is that all of the unhappiness, misery, and pain that the people of Omelas does not feel has all been concentrated into one, innocent, unaware child, who is trapped in a dirty, dank, dark cellar underneath the city. The narrator does not explain how this is the case – just that it is the trade. The happiness for the city, at the expense of the one child. Everyone in the city is aware of the cost of their happiness, as they are all shown the child when they reach the maturity to understand the implications. Though, the narrator admits, not all people stay:
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or a woman much older falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. [5]
The other major reason for creating the short story like this is to embroil the reader-author of Omelas in the ethical situation. By inviting the reader to build the mystique and the creation of Omelas, the narrator also forces the reader to be complicit with all of the moral and ethical implications that Omelas brings. Just as the children in Omelas first experience the happiness and prosperity of the utopia before being exposed to the price it costs to maintain the utopia, so too does the reader indulge in creative process before being forced to reckon with the ethical conundrum of the situation. When the narrator finally admits the scapegoat of Omelas as the child who has done nothing wrong, and yet must still bear the all of the negative effects of a society to set the rest of it free, the reader-author must confront the reality of the utopia that they helped create. By the time the reader-author realizes the negative aspect of their utopia, they are too intertwined in the creation of Omelas to look at it objectively. The reader-author must weigh the positives of their own utopia with the negative aspects of the scapegoat: what kind of future does the reader-author want and what are they willing to give in order to make that a reality?
N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”
Science-Fiction author N.K. Jemisin’s “The Ones Who Stay and Fight” is a direct response to Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” and it shows within the text, as Jemisin shadows Le Guin’s way of writing and the perspective she took, while at the same time making several major distinctions between the utopias described. Jemisin explicitly mentions the multi-cultural nature of her utopia and states that “But this is no awkward dystopia, where all are forced to conform,” and that “The citizens of Um-Helat are so many and so wildly different in appearance and origin and development. People in this land come from many others, and it shows in sheen of skin and kink of hair and plumpness of lip and hip.”[6] In her imagined utopia, Jemisin explicitly tackles the topic of racism, stating that “[Racism] is still being actively, intentionally corrected – because the people of Um-Helat are not naïve believers in good intentions as the solution to all ills… Um-Helatians are learned enough to understand what must be done to make the world better, and pragmatic enough to actually enact it.”[7] Embedded in every sentence of her story, Jemisin gives her characters agency to make decisions and follow through with them. In the same way, Jemisin gives the reader-author the agency to make decisions, as the reader-author sees at the end of the short story.
Jemisin’s Um-Helat still has a dilemma embedded in the story, and Jemisin still waits until the end of the explanation to tell the reader-author this for the same reasons that Le Guin did as well. Though Jemisin makes several mentions of “America” by name, nowhere in the story is it more clear that she is describing the United States as when she explains the ethics of Um-Helat: “Um-Helat has been a worse place, after all, in its past... Remnants of that time dot the land all around the city, ruined and enormous and half-broken. Here a bridge, there a great truck, on its back a rusting, curve-sided thing that ancient peoples referred to by the exotic term missile.”[8] Jemisin makes clear that the utopia of Um-Helat was built from the ruins of a nation very similar to America. The dilemma that exists in Um-Helat is that sometimes knowledge from “our world,” as Jemisin refers to the United States, specificially that “some people are less important than others,”[9] spreads through citizens of Um-Helat, and social workers must come together and either save or kill the person infected by this thought. The child who watched her father die is infected, distraught that her father has been killed, and yet the social worker reaches down to take the child’s hand. Jemisin speaks directly to the reader-author, saying “What? What surprises you? Did you think this would end in the cold-eyed slaughter of a child? There are other options – and this is Um-Helat, friend, where even a pitiful, diseased child matters… The child must grow, and learn, and become another social worker fighting an endless war against an idea… but she will live, and help others, and find meaning in that. If she takes the woman’s hand.”[10]
This contrasts to Le Guin’s utopia which was created as a thought experiment in which the parameters are laid out for the people of Omelas, and the reader is asked to imagine themselves in this society. After explaining Um-Helat, the narrator looks to the reader-author and says, "So don't walk away. The child needs you, too, don't you see? You also have to fight for her, now that you know she exists, or walking away is meaningless. Here, here is my hand. Take it. Please. Good. Good. Now. Let's get to work." [11] Jemisin uses the same technique of breaking the fourth wall to make the audience a reader-author of the utopia of Um-Helat, with a few differences. Le Guin embroils the reader-author in the utopia specifically to ask them to take the ethics question seriously; Jemisin gives the opportunity to the reader to become an author by asking them to help fight for the future of Um-Helat; to help the world that the reader-author and Jemisin are currently in become like Um-Helat. Just as Jemisin gives her characters agency, so too does Jemisin give the reader-author agency in the fight for equality in this world.
Philosophy: Afrofuturism
This multicultural attempt plays into the tradition of Afrofuturism which describes the intersection between the African diaspora, science-fiction, and history. Many find the tradition of Afrofuturism as a direct response to the history of science-fiction as a homogenous white imagined future, and even, that Afrofuturism is a better avenue for science-fiction than the White tradition it is embroiled in. This is because some science-fiction grapples with the role of humanity within the larger space universe while encountering the “other;” in traditional science fiction, this is alien life forms. Some science-fiction will try to write out the race question by ignoring race entirely. However, Burnett explains that part of the importance of Afrofuturism is that “Our imagined futures cannot be exclusively white and Western with people of color absent or peripheral, either way written out of humanity’s future and the past. Instead postcolonial writers must take the meme of colonizing the natives, and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique it.”[12] Afrofuturism, as a tradition, is concerned with making sure that each imagined future, each imagined iteration of the path humanity could take, also makes space for the African people, history, and culture. While Afrofuturism can also rewrite the past or present, this essay concerns the relationship between Afrofuturism and imagining a future that centers the African diaspora experience. This type of imagining is what Jemisin attempts in her short story.
Jemisin’s Response to Le Guin
For Jemisin, the answer of Le Guin’s dilemma of staying or going is neither: the answer is to fight for a better world that is more just for all. Jemisin rejects the two options that Le Guin creates, and instead creates a third option that she feels best contends with the situation. Implicit in Jemisin’s response is a critique of the assumption the Le Guin uses in which race relations will solve itself through the lens of being ‘color-blind.’ The repeated attempt by various science fiction authors to deal with the race problem by being color-blind is that it “Enables discussion of race and prejudice on a level of abstraction while stifiling a more important discussion about real, material conditions, both historical and contemporary. And by presenting racism as an insanity that burned itself out, or as the obvious folly of the ignorant and impoverished who would be left behind by the genre’s brave new futures, [science fiction] avoids confronting the structures of racism and its own complicity in them.”[13] By avoiding the topic of race in utopia and science fiction, the history of racism rings in the hollow spaces where it is left out. Jemisin, however, creates a version of Omelas that is not color-blind, and is instead multicultural.
Footnotes:
[1] Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” in New Dimensions 3, edited by Robert Silverberg. (New York: The New American Library, 1973): 3.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, 4.
[5] Ibid, 7.
[6] N.K. Jemisin, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” in How Long ‘til Black Future Month?, (London: Orbit Books, 2018): 2 & 5.
[7] Ibid, 5.
[8] Ibid, 8.
[9] Ibid, 9.
[10] Ibid, 11-12.
[11] Ibid, 13.
[12] Joshua Yu Burnett, “The Great Change and the Great Book: Nnedi Okorafor's Postcolonial, Post-Apocalyptic Africa and the Promise of Black Speculative Fiction,” Research in African Literatures, 46 (2015): 135.
[13] Mark Bould, “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF,” Science Fiction Studies 34 (July 2007): 180.
This page has paths:
- The Three Ghosts of Science Fiction Past, Present, and Future Adelmar Ramirez
