Friday, July 11, 2014

Deconstructing Fire by Kristin Cashore, Part 2: Chapter 1

Spoilers for Graceling, Fire, and Bitterblue. Also The Hunger Games.

Content Notes: discussion of sexual harassment and assault; discussion of racism. And since I'm talking about that, it seems relevant to disclose that I myself am white. As always, please let me know if I have missed anything!

I love Fire. I mean, I love Fire, the book, but I really love Fire, the protagonist. She fascinated me from the first two lines of Chapter 1:
It did not surprise Fire that the man in the forest shot her. What surprised her was that he shot her by accident [p. 19].
Here's a teenage girl who has lived her whole life under attack - by monster animals, who crave her flesh and blood, and by humans who fear and hate her. Many other humans adore her in a really creepy, possessive, and often sexual way.

Fire is scarred all over her body from various attacks. She is sexualized against her will, and presumably has been from quite a young age. She is only seventeen when the book takes place, and seems accustomed to sexual harassment ranging from micro-agressions, like being stared at, to people actually throwing themselves at her. She also - and I will return to this in a moment - has brown skin.

Fire's choices throughout the novel are governed by three tenets:
  1. She is her own best defender;
  2. She will only use her monster powers under strict ethical rules; and
  3. She is damn well going to go out and live her life.
Did I mention that I love her?

Her entire existence as a fictional character is an exploration of what it would actually be like to be superhumanly beautiful. AND IT SUCKS. I can't imagine dealing with the constant threats and aggressions that Cashore invents for her protagonist.

Fire, though, is resilient. She uses music to escape from or process her emotions. She also teaches music lessons to children, which builds community, but also gives her opportunities to travel around her friend Archer's lands, using her monster powers of mind-sensing to make sure that no spies have infiltrated the territory.

Cashore pretty deftly segues into exposition about the political landscape (fraught) and Fire's personal history (even fraught-er). We receive the first descriptions of her deceased father, Cansrel, a compelling and deeply disturbed man. In between snatches of memory, Fire is gritting her teeth against the arrow-shaped hole in her arm and sneaking out her window by climbing out of her window and down a tree, just so she can see some stars.

A few notable quotes:
These were always the worst injuries, the ones that left her unable to play her fiddle [p. 27].
I'm a singer myself, and the tiniest of sore throats has the power to make me ridiculously miserable. I FEEL U FIRE <3.
Generally she avoided mirrors. It embarrassed her to lose her own breath at the sight of herself [p. 29].
Multiple rereads, and this line still makes me laugh. Awkward.
Or the monthly humiliation of needing a guard during her woman’s bleedings to protect her from monsters who could smell her blood [p. 31].
I love that Cashore addresses this. SERIOUSLY. THIS. YES. Fire is a monster human; monsters of all kinds crave each other's flesh and blood; the scent of one monster's blood can send another into a frenzy; therefore every time Fire has her period, she cannot leave her house without an armed guard. Cannot even imagine. The literal worst.

Okay, I am returning to Fire's skin colour. As I mentioned in my fanart post, I cannot recall any actual descriptions of Fire's skin colour in this book. It is established in a later book, Bitterblue, that her skin is brown. I am committing, in conducting this deconstruction, to a very careful read-through to make sure I'm not missing a description. So far, I am pretty sure that her skin colour  is not addressed in Chapter 1.

I think a probable in-universe (or Watsonian) reason for this is that everyone in the Dells has brown skin and so there is no reason for Fire to think about a skin tone that everyone around her shares. HOWEVER. This book is not being read by Dellian citizens. From an outside (or Doylist) perspective, I really think Cashore had a responsibility to make this clear, primarily because Fire is also described as having red hair and green eyes. Her colouring is artificial due to her monster genes, yes, but her human neighbour Archer is blond and her mother also had red hair of the normal human variety.

I expect that Cashore meant to create a place where dark-skinned people might have hair and eyes of any colour, and I am totally down with this - but we also all know from the terrible way many racist people reacted to the character Rue in The Hunger Games that readers - no doubt almost entirely white readers, no need to beat around the bush - are totally capable of skipping over relevant racial descriptions that actually ARE in the text. (Rue ... I miss you. :( I will never stop being sad about you). And for ALL readers, it is so, so important to have visible characters of colour, characters with different abilities, characters with different body types, genders, sexualities, religions.

So I wish that Fire's skin tone was somehow addressed in the text. I mean. She gets shot because some guy thought she was a deer, and the text just talks about her brown pelt clothes. I guess I just thought when I first read the book that she had long sleeves?

tl;dr: If you guys haven't read Bitterblue, I am telling you now that Fire is brown. Yes, even though she has red hair and green eyes. She's also magically attractive and can control people's minds. Deal with it.

To end this section, one more quote. This one illustrates the difference between Fire and her father Cansrel, and gives us some insight into her fierce stance on the ethical use of monster magic. Cansrel encouraged his daughter to enjoy the constant attention, and tried to pass on his own sense of entitlement. Fire's attitude?
She couldn’t begin to imagine feeling that way, without fear, or shame [p. 31].

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