May 9, 2023
There is a scene near the beginning of A Memory Called Empire that I remember reading with so much clarity. In the scene, the protagonist Mahit Dzmare, ambassador from the (tenuously) independent Lsel station to the empire of Teixcalaan, is introduced by her cultural liaison to a crowd of Teixcalaanli literati during an imperial banquet:
I was immediately struck by a powerful sense of recognition. These few sentences handed me a vocabulary for a hitherto inexpressible private reality: standing “in the midst of the sharp chatter of ambitious young people” (128) who look nothing like me, who speak effortlessly in a language that was not native to me and was therefore still twisting my tongue into spirals, and being aware, to an almost abject degree, of the incalculable distance that separated me from them. This is a feeling I would come to know, as a post-colonial immigrant student, as a hard and brutal thing: the engulfing sense of being somehow diminished, of being rendered abruptly unreal, disconnected, and—in some inconsolable way—depersonalized. I felt seen in ways I found difficult to explain a few years ago, when I read this book for the first time.
The conflicts of displacement and (un)belongingness are still open and devastatingly familiar to many immigrants today. I’ve never had any illusions about being unique in this. But, years later, it is not the aching deprived longing for acknowledgement from the center—the “dumb longing of a noncitizen to be acknowledged as a citizen” in Mahit’s terms—that smashes into me as if it is newly wrought. It is rather the icy realization of how this longing ultimately fulfills an important function for empire: it is a form of internalized belief in imperial superiority constructed and maintained by the center to embed and ensure the subordination of the margins. It is, in other words, simultaneously a reminder that we will never be good enough to reach complete and unconditional belongingness—that we are always going to be marginal—and an invitation to strive for it anyway.
This is, to borrow some of the author's own words, both “the seduction and horror of empire.” I understand this today in ways I couldn’t wrap words around two years ago: that this longing for belonging—precisely by virtue of being subtle, pervasive, conditioned, and falsely innocuous—is perhaps the most effective and enduring brutality of imperialism, and furthermore, that the work of decolonization cannot, and will not, begin without first taking a long, hard look at one’s own hunger for the center.
**
This is, of course, easier said than done. To confront one’s own colonization is an act like forcing poison from a wound: painful, no matter how utterly necessary. This is a central point of tension in A Memory Called Empire. The protagonist, Mahit Dzmare, arrives as an international ambassador to the imperial City of Teixcalaan with clear-cut instructions from her home Station of Lsel: investigate the sudden death of her predecessor, advocate for Lsel citizens, and—at whatever cost—prevent the absorption of Lsel into the all-devouring empire of Teixcalaan. This arrival, however, has the added effect of setting into motion a reckoning over Mahit’s self-confessed infatuation with Teixcalaanli culture, her internalization of Teixcalaanli ideas of superiority and inferiority—what constitutes “citizens” and “barbarians” for Teixcalaan—and the dangerous implications those have for the safety and continuity of Mahit’s homeland and culture.
Mahit grew up with dreams of Teixcalaan. She spent her youth studying every inch of Teixcalaanli culture, memorizing Teixcalaanli poems, and trying out the rhythms and cadences of Teixcalaanli language until they moved the right way on her tongue. Her position as an ambassador was, in fact, obtained due to this cultivated familiarity with Teixcalaan, a closeness disdainfully characterized at one point in the novel by Mahit’s superiors as a “xenophilic love” for a heritage that was not their own, a diseased way of thinking that made her both undeniably useful for her homeland of Lsel—and potentially dangerous. However, this dream Teixcalaan—the Teixcalaan Mahit hankered for—quickly slips away when confronted with the reality of Teixcalaan, the Teixcalaan that is unfiltered through language and literature and poetry, the “poison gifts” of empire (7).
Immediately upon her arrival, Mahit hits several walls of institutional indifference, hostility and neglect that demolish, in increments, the illusion (and possibility) of belongingness. Despite her aptitude for Teixcalaanli literature that equaled that of any Teixcalaanli-born citizen, Mahit becomes increasingly aware of endless chasms opening up between her and the rest of the Teixcalaanlitzlim. The dose of othering delivered to Mahit in the scene that opens this review is replicated both in text and in conversations throughout A Memory Called Empire. The first Teixcalaanli citizen Mahit meets upon her arrival in Teixcalaan is her cultural liaison, Three Seagrass, who, Mahit immediately notes, wears a glass device over her left eye called “a cloudhook”. Only imperial citizens are allowed access to this cloudhook, and by extension, to the imperial information network that flows through it, and which facilitates the lives of Teixcalaanli citizens, connecting them to the empire and to each other. A few pages later, Three Seagrass pointedly reminds Mahit: “You don’t have a cloudhook. You can’t open some doors, Ambassador. The City doesn’t know you’re real.” (31) The City doesn’t know you’re real. Mahit is quite literally invisible in the eyes of empire, her erasure so rigorous that she is no longer real. Thus denuded of that single device which singles belongingness, visibility, and legitimacy, Mahit is forced to walk through Teixcalaan shaped and reshaped every single moment around the knowledge that she is not a citizen, and therefore she is not real. It is a realization Mahit has to constantly deal with, an adjustment to be made over and over again. This displacement is further intensified by the fact that Mahit’s positionality as a “barbarian” in Teixcalaan’s eyes not only disallows her access and participation in imperial rites and rituals, but also exorcises her from the category of “human” by Teixcalaanli definition: “the physiologies of noncitizens […] are quite different from human people! Not that I’m implying Lsel Station isn’t human, Ambassador, nothing of the kind. But I am insatiably curious” (41).
This deliberate withholding from belongingness is also effectively reproduced in Teixcalaanli language which is filled with labyrinthine twistings and symbolic valence imbued into the smallest epithet, the smallest gesture (“Allusions and references were the center of Teixcalaanli high culture” (53)). Faced with the uncomprehending and incomprehensible gaze of Teixcalaan, and her own helpless sense of inadequacy, Mahit often has to rely on her cultural liaison, Three Seagrass, to translate Teixcalaan to her and translate her to Teixcalaan. Over time, this dependency brings home to Mahit most sharply, most potently, the fact that Teixcalaan-born citizens will always be more Teixcalaanli than her, no matter how high she scored in Teixcalaanli examinations, or “how much poetry she memorized”. In fact, trying to be up close to Teixcalaan only reminds Mahit of her distance from it, longing highlighted by the specter of its unattainability. In other words, Mahit will never be Teixcalaanli, and she will “never stop knowing it.”
This endlessly complicated dynamics of fragmentation is made even more fraught in the novel by the fact that Mahit seems to have a growing acute sense of its presence and implications. She is not a racialized subject who has swallowed empire’s ideals and assertions as incontrovertible truths, nor is she blind to the seduction of empire and to the dazzling inappropriateness of falling for it. “Teixcalaan was made to instill the longing, not to satisfactorily resolve it,” (128) Mahit indeed knew that, and throughout the novel, she heartbreakingly attempts to transform that longing into an inoffensive fact that she can harbor within herself without either disowning it or suffering from it. “Be a mirror,” she desperately repeats to herself at one point, “be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone. Be as Teixcalaanli as you can, and be as Lsel as you can, and—oh, fuck, breathe. That too.” (107) Perhaps nowhere else is this struggle clearer in the novel than in this desperate, broken mantra: the soul-crushing difficulty of negotiating liminal spaces and fraught hyphenated realities, made sharper by the absolute necessity of it for the sake of one’s survival.
At the close of the novel, to be truly Teixcalaanli seems more and more an irretrievable possibility, and the longer Mahit stays in Teixcalaan, belonging to Lsel becomes just as inconceivable, as if Mahit had already crossed to the other side of some tremendous divide, a zone of no-return. Mahit eventually concludes with an aching finality that “nothing touched by empire stays clean” (361), a poetic confession of the agony of trying to articulate the nuanced reality of being “Other”, of being condemned to an existence in which you are neither here nor there, too much of this and never enough of that. For Mahit, this reckoning rings with layers upon layers of difficult choices, every single one of them infused, inconsolably, with a sense of loss, the knowledge that Teixcalaan and Lsel will always fight for the same room inside Mahit’s life, half of her both at war with and longing for the other half: “Mahit felt that way now, as Lsel came back into the center of her ship’s viewports. Very distant. A certain kind of free. Not, in the end, quite home.” (370)
At bottom remains for Mahit the fact that once you leave, you can’t really be home again; not all the way anyway, no matter how hard you try. Once you leave, something is lost and I don’t know if you can ever find it again. If you’re lucky like Mahit, the novel seems to say, you might “never stop knowing it,” for it is precisely in that knowingness, no matter how painful, that a reckoning with (if not outright repudiation of) any diseased longing for empire—the first gesture at real decolonization—can truly begin.
She could follow about half of the allusions and quotations that slipped in and out of their speech. It made her jealous in a way she recognized as childish: the dumb longing of a noncitizen to be acknowledged as a citizen. Teixcalaan was made to instill the longing, not to satisfactorily resolve it, she knew that. And yet it wormed into her every time she bit her tongue, every time she didn’t know a word or the precise connotations of a phrase. (128)
I was immediately struck by a powerful sense of recognition. These few sentences handed me a vocabulary for a hitherto inexpressible private reality: standing “in the midst of the sharp chatter of ambitious young people” (128) who look nothing like me, who speak effortlessly in a language that was not native to me and was therefore still twisting my tongue into spirals, and being aware, to an almost abject degree, of the incalculable distance that separated me from them. This is a feeling I would come to know, as a post-colonial immigrant student, as a hard and brutal thing: the engulfing sense of being somehow diminished, of being rendered abruptly unreal, disconnected, and—in some inconsolable way—depersonalized. I felt seen in ways I found difficult to explain a few years ago, when I read this book for the first time.
The conflicts of displacement and (un)belongingness are still open and devastatingly familiar to many immigrants today. I’ve never had any illusions about being unique in this. But, years later, it is not the aching deprived longing for acknowledgement from the center—the “dumb longing of a noncitizen to be acknowledged as a citizen” in Mahit’s terms—that smashes into me as if it is newly wrought. It is rather the icy realization of how this longing ultimately fulfills an important function for empire: it is a form of internalized belief in imperial superiority constructed and maintained by the center to embed and ensure the subordination of the margins. It is, in other words, simultaneously a reminder that we will never be good enough to reach complete and unconditional belongingness—that we are always going to be marginal—and an invitation to strive for it anyway.
This is, to borrow some of the author's own words, both “the seduction and horror of empire.” I understand this today in ways I couldn’t wrap words around two years ago: that this longing for belonging—precisely by virtue of being subtle, pervasive, conditioned, and falsely innocuous—is perhaps the most effective and enduring brutality of imperialism, and furthermore, that the work of decolonization cannot, and will not, begin without first taking a long, hard look at one’s own hunger for the center.
**
This is, of course, easier said than done. To confront one’s own colonization is an act like forcing poison from a wound: painful, no matter how utterly necessary. This is a central point of tension in A Memory Called Empire. The protagonist, Mahit Dzmare, arrives as an international ambassador to the imperial City of Teixcalaan with clear-cut instructions from her home Station of Lsel: investigate the sudden death of her predecessor, advocate for Lsel citizens, and—at whatever cost—prevent the absorption of Lsel into the all-devouring empire of Teixcalaan. This arrival, however, has the added effect of setting into motion a reckoning over Mahit’s self-confessed infatuation with Teixcalaanli culture, her internalization of Teixcalaanli ideas of superiority and inferiority—what constitutes “citizens” and “barbarians” for Teixcalaan—and the dangerous implications those have for the safety and continuity of Mahit’s homeland and culture.
Mahit grew up with dreams of Teixcalaan. She spent her youth studying every inch of Teixcalaanli culture, memorizing Teixcalaanli poems, and trying out the rhythms and cadences of Teixcalaanli language until they moved the right way on her tongue. Her position as an ambassador was, in fact, obtained due to this cultivated familiarity with Teixcalaan, a closeness disdainfully characterized at one point in the novel by Mahit’s superiors as a “xenophilic love” for a heritage that was not their own, a diseased way of thinking that made her both undeniably useful for her homeland of Lsel—and potentially dangerous. However, this dream Teixcalaan—the Teixcalaan Mahit hankered for—quickly slips away when confronted with the reality of Teixcalaan, the Teixcalaan that is unfiltered through language and literature and poetry, the “poison gifts” of empire (7).
Immediately upon her arrival, Mahit hits several walls of institutional indifference, hostility and neglect that demolish, in increments, the illusion (and possibility) of belongingness. Despite her aptitude for Teixcalaanli literature that equaled that of any Teixcalaanli-born citizen, Mahit becomes increasingly aware of endless chasms opening up between her and the rest of the Teixcalaanlitzlim. The dose of othering delivered to Mahit in the scene that opens this review is replicated both in text and in conversations throughout A Memory Called Empire. The first Teixcalaanli citizen Mahit meets upon her arrival in Teixcalaan is her cultural liaison, Three Seagrass, who, Mahit immediately notes, wears a glass device over her left eye called “a cloudhook”. Only imperial citizens are allowed access to this cloudhook, and by extension, to the imperial information network that flows through it, and which facilitates the lives of Teixcalaanli citizens, connecting them to the empire and to each other. A few pages later, Three Seagrass pointedly reminds Mahit: “You don’t have a cloudhook. You can’t open some doors, Ambassador. The City doesn’t know you’re real.” (31) The City doesn’t know you’re real. Mahit is quite literally invisible in the eyes of empire, her erasure so rigorous that she is no longer real. Thus denuded of that single device which singles belongingness, visibility, and legitimacy, Mahit is forced to walk through Teixcalaan shaped and reshaped every single moment around the knowledge that she is not a citizen, and therefore she is not real. It is a realization Mahit has to constantly deal with, an adjustment to be made over and over again. This displacement is further intensified by the fact that Mahit’s positionality as a “barbarian” in Teixcalaan’s eyes not only disallows her access and participation in imperial rites and rituals, but also exorcises her from the category of “human” by Teixcalaanli definition: “the physiologies of noncitizens […] are quite different from human people! Not that I’m implying Lsel Station isn’t human, Ambassador, nothing of the kind. But I am insatiably curious” (41).
This deliberate withholding from belongingness is also effectively reproduced in Teixcalaanli language which is filled with labyrinthine twistings and symbolic valence imbued into the smallest epithet, the smallest gesture (“Allusions and references were the center of Teixcalaanli high culture” (53)). Faced with the uncomprehending and incomprehensible gaze of Teixcalaan, and her own helpless sense of inadequacy, Mahit often has to rely on her cultural liaison, Three Seagrass, to translate Teixcalaan to her and translate her to Teixcalaan. Over time, this dependency brings home to Mahit most sharply, most potently, the fact that Teixcalaan-born citizens will always be more Teixcalaanli than her, no matter how high she scored in Teixcalaanli examinations, or “how much poetry she memorized”. In fact, trying to be up close to Teixcalaan only reminds Mahit of her distance from it, longing highlighted by the specter of its unattainability. In other words, Mahit will never be Teixcalaanli, and she will “never stop knowing it.”
This endlessly complicated dynamics of fragmentation is made even more fraught in the novel by the fact that Mahit seems to have a growing acute sense of its presence and implications. She is not a racialized subject who has swallowed empire’s ideals and assertions as incontrovertible truths, nor is she blind to the seduction of empire and to the dazzling inappropriateness of falling for it. “Teixcalaan was made to instill the longing, not to satisfactorily resolve it,” (128) Mahit indeed knew that, and throughout the novel, she heartbreakingly attempts to transform that longing into an inoffensive fact that she can harbor within herself without either disowning it or suffering from it. “Be a mirror,” she desperately repeats to herself at one point, “be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone. Be as Teixcalaanli as you can, and be as Lsel as you can, and—oh, fuck, breathe. That too.” (107) Perhaps nowhere else is this struggle clearer in the novel than in this desperate, broken mantra: the soul-crushing difficulty of negotiating liminal spaces and fraught hyphenated realities, made sharper by the absolute necessity of it for the sake of one’s survival.
At the close of the novel, to be truly Teixcalaanli seems more and more an irretrievable possibility, and the longer Mahit stays in Teixcalaan, belonging to Lsel becomes just as inconceivable, as if Mahit had already crossed to the other side of some tremendous divide, a zone of no-return. Mahit eventually concludes with an aching finality that “nothing touched by empire stays clean” (361), a poetic confession of the agony of trying to articulate the nuanced reality of being “Other”, of being condemned to an existence in which you are neither here nor there, too much of this and never enough of that. For Mahit, this reckoning rings with layers upon layers of difficult choices, every single one of them infused, inconsolably, with a sense of loss, the knowledge that Teixcalaan and Lsel will always fight for the same room inside Mahit’s life, half of her both at war with and longing for the other half: “Mahit felt that way now, as Lsel came back into the center of her ship’s viewports. Very distant. A certain kind of free. Not, in the end, quite home.” (370)
At bottom remains for Mahit the fact that once you leave, you can’t really be home again; not all the way anyway, no matter how hard you try. Once you leave, something is lost and I don’t know if you can ever find it again. If you’re lucky like Mahit, the novel seems to say, you might “never stop knowing it,” for it is precisely in that knowingness, no matter how painful, that a reckoning with (if not outright repudiation of) any diseased longing for empire—the first gesture at real decolonization—can truly begin.
