Book Review: Earthsong

Title: Earthsong (Native Tongue III)

Author: Suzette Haden Elgin

Date: 1994

Publisher: Daw

ISBN: 0-088677-592-2

Length: 255 pages

Quote: “My name is Nazareth Joanna Chornyak...I died of a broken heart in the summer of 2389...on that day when all the aliens suddenly returned to their homeworlds; I was one hundred and twenty-one years old at the time...If I had known the aliens were going to leave, I would have died the day before, or the day after. I would never deliberately have done anything so gaudy as seeming to be a part of their exodus.”

Well, there’s a spoiler for Native Tongue and Judas Rose...but that’s where Earthsong begins.

Native Tongue was written as part of an actual scientific experiment—a test of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which postulates that the language people learn first shapes the way they’re able to perceive the world. If that hypothesis were true, and women’s perceptions differed from men’s as much as some people claimed, wouldn’t women want a language of their own? (It’s rare, but there are historical records of cultures where women and men spoke at least very different dialects of a common language—beyond just grammatical gender forms, as in French or Hebrew, or cultural rules that women should always use the more formal phrasing, as in Japanese.)

If women wanted a language of their own, obviously most of them were able to live with their dissatisfaction. Most American women obviously didn’t want to bother becoming fluent enough to read newspapers in the languages they studied at school. But what about young university women, very conscious of workplace discrimination and the defeat of the E.R.A., and studying linguistics, so they had to learn new languages in any case? Would a fictional scenario of a postfeminist dystopia, where all women are grossly oppressed by an ingrained belief that they’re all fools, motivate these students to use a special language of their own?

So Elgin wrote the compelling dystopian story that is Native Tongue, drawing on her memories of being a White Southerner in the 1950s to generate absolutely infuriating scenarios of how well-meaning men emotionally abuse women in every conversation.

In the alternative world of these novels, only in linguist families do women receive enough education to be able to preserve valuable information about, e.g., gynecological health. They receive that education because a world still obsessed with the Cold War between its U.S. and U.S.S.R. has made contact with aliens, some of whom insist on communicating with humans through female translators. All the aliens despise this Earth for still having problems like war, rape, overcrowding, and sexist bigotry. The ruler of this Earth don’t realie that they’re on trial to find out whether they can evolve fast enough to be allowed to trade and interact with other worlds on equal terms, or need to be quarantined for another millennium or so...

In Native Tongue, young Nazareth and friends construct a women’s language. In Judas Rose, they’ve used their language construction project to achieve a small measure of freedom for themselves, at home, and to negotiate the right for Earthlings to colonize a few other planets. Reducing the level of overpopulation is improving the standard of living on Earth, and Nazareth, now a revered elder, thinks it’s time to let the women’s language, Láadan, escape into the larger world.

Then Elgin sat back for ten years and waited. Most readers outside the universities where the experiment took place weren’t told that the experiment was being carried on in our world, so as a language construction project it didn’t get far.

Láadan did not catch on...I’ve written about its shortcomings at Live Journal. In any case, what the Láadan Project proved was that college linguistics majors who believed they had different perceptions of the world from men found it easier to adapt English to their purposes than to learn or improve Láadan.

So Elgin finished the trilogy with Earthsong. It’s obviouly not the ending she’d hoped to write. She’d hoped that Láadan would at least become a campus fad like Elvish or Klingon. That didn’t happen. Nor did Native Tongue reignite the push for an Equal Rights Amendment. Nor did the Láadan Project transform students’ lives any more than other shared activities like sports, band, or community service did. Real-world data suggested that Láadan would not have saved Nazareth’s world.

So what did? How do people end oppression?

In the real world, oppression ends when the victim walks away from it, not needing what the oppressors are using to control person any more. If a man “loves and protects” a woman only as long as she serves as an emotional doormat or a punching bag, the day that woman decides she can live without his “love” is the day he has to stop abusing her. If a self-anointed “upper class” are niiice to their social inferiors as long as the servants sing cheerful songs of gratitude for being able to earn barely enough to eat on for their ten-hour workday, the day those servants decide to quit the old plantation (or corporation) is the day their “superiors” have to stop exploiting them. If men use language in a way that communicates a belief that women are fools...

I’ve written speculative fiction about a world, otherwise not unlike our own, where a generally much lower incidence of pollution and war is a natural consequence of rape being impossible. Such a world is not always “happy”; people age and die; but they are free to take and pay for what they want, in life, while respecting one another so much that just flying over someone’s house without permission might be an act of war if it weren’t so obviously the act of a troubled teenager. I don’t know whether our world could ever become like that. I believe we take a long step closer when we realize that, in fact...let’s just say that the reason why 13-year-old boys are raped more often than 25-year-old women is not that men aren’t attracted to 25-year-old women. It is that 25-year-old women understand men and sex well enough to prevent rape. Usually they even have a free choice whether to do that by giving pleasure or pain. For some of my fictional characters whose home world is based on ours, being able to move to that more peaceful world is a metaphor for that change of consciousness.

I am not helpless rape bait. If a man chooses to expose his vulnerability to me, I can choose whether to give him pleasure or pain.

I am not a slave to “the custom” or “the fashion.” If I don’t like it, I don’t have to do it or wear it or buy it.

I am not a prisoner to abusive social relationships. if I enjoy my own company more than someone else’s, I can walk away and enjoy being alone.

I don’t have to participate in practices I believe to be unethical. If I can’t support the way other people are doing their job, I can work independently of them.

Nobody is forcing me to do ANYthing that leaves me feeling guilty, ashamed, angry, or depressed. If I “don’t fit in” with some people, I can enjoy being alone until I find people I enjoy being with.

Whatever “hand I was dealt” in life, whatever combination of advantages and disadvantages, I can choose to be a self-actualizer.

Elgin was a self-actualizer. So were her characters. Her fictional characters, like Nazareth as “channelled” from beyond the grave in Earthsong, can seem larger than life because they are who they’re meant to be.

“Only God can bring a thing to be by saying its name,”

they male-said. “Only God.”

But they themselves had said the words that brought these

things (and countless more like them) into being:

The Mexican border.

Obesity.

National airspace.

Ugly women.

Borderline personality disorder.

Hypoestrogenemia.

The poverty line.

Attention deficit disorder.

Fibrocystic breast disease.

Retirement age.

Private lakes.

Hyperactive children.

War. And sometimes peace.”

If humans step back and think about these human inventions that so many humans dislike, Elgin said, we can start to change them. No, we can’t just “choose to be happy,” by fiat, about everything, the way certain (materially privileged) people were saying when Elgin’s books were being published. But we can choose to do something toward the more realistic goal of Fixing Facts First and letting Feelings Follow. Language is often a first tool for change.

In Earthsong Earth is not transformed simply by changing the way Earthlings talk and think. Elgin took it to another level. Oppression continues because, even though most of us do have the privilege of walking away, parents have to do what it takes to feed young children. The literature of popular psychology in North America tends to assume that no one’s back is against that particular wall. Elgin didn’t make that assumption.

In Earthsong she postulates an ideal solution, probably not achievable in our world. So, although Nazareth gives us her fictional word that we’ll not be sorry if we read Earthsong, and although anyone who’s read the first two volumes in the trilogy probably likes Nazareth, many readers did express dissatisfaction with Earthsong.

I was one of them. Why, I wondered, would Elgin choose to start a trilogy with such an emotional wallop and end it with such an unconvincing whimper? Still, along with Nazareth, I give you my word that Earthsong is worth reading if you accept its limitations. Along with a plotline she didn’t believe or expect anyone to believe in a literal way, it’s as close as Elgin came to a credo of what she did believe.

For some readers the fictional device of having the story “channelled” from a long-dead Nazareth, punctuated by little sketches of a gradually improving world, may be an unpardonable novelistic sin. However, as readers of the Ozarque blog knew, some of those fragmentary short stories that seem unrelated to the main plot illustrate some of Elgin’s deeply held convictions. The main plot may be a confession, “I don’t know exactly how this is all going to come together and work,” but the novel as a whole is an affirmation, “These are things that have to make the world better...somehow.”

To buy it here, send $10 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment to P.O. Box 322 or the Paypal address you get from Salolianigodagewi. All three Native Tongue books plus several of Elgin's earlier, more whimsical science fiction books will fit into one $5 package, or you could order only Earthsong and fill up the package with books by living writers. (If you order one book from this web site, you're entitled to order others that this web site has not discussed--yet; you're also entitled to send your own book reviews, which we will post.)