If you do not learn the things I have to teach you. If you do not help. The time will come and you will fail, and this city will join Pompeii and Atlantis and a dozen others whose names no one remembers, even though hundreds of thousands of people died with them.
N.K. Jemisin’s short story “The City Born Great” was one of my favorite entries in the 2017 Hugo Awards, so I was delighted to find out that the prologue of Jemisin’s latest novel is practically word for word from the short story. It’s all here: the young homeless street artist discovering that he’s both the living embodiment of the city of New York and the person who has to guide the city through its birth, the battle with the Enemy that attacks pre-born cities when they’re at their most vulnerable, and the young avatar’s triumph when he drives back the Enemy using skyscrapers for claws and traffic jams for poison. The city is born…
….at which point the avatar thinks “something’s wrong”, collapses, and then disappears.
…at which point five people across New York realize they can hear the city breathing (or acknowledge that they’ve heard it their whole lives), and that their boroughs are under attack from a strange infection. There’s a ghostly figure who’s infesting all parts of New York with strange white tentacled shapes, all while somehow using the worst impulses of the worst people available to finish what the first battle started.
The City We Became is more than an urban fantasy, more than an illustration of racial tensions in this country, and even more than a love letter to the author’s home city. It’s a deep dive into the entire concept of what it means to be New York.
We start with a young soon-to-be grad student who arrives in Manhattan on the subway for the first time and realizes he has no memory of his new address. Or the town he came from. Or his name. He collapses in utter shock, but several fellow passengers help him out of the subway and give him a few moments to figure out a tiny fraction of what the hell is going on. (This is an early sign of the warmth Jemisin has for the city: there may be enough danger around that you have to watch your back and stay on your toes, but goodhearted total strangers are everywhere.)
“Manny”, as he decides to call himself, isn’t exactly ordinary, but then neither is the enormous white-tentacled monster he has to battle on the FDR armed with only a classic Checker cab and a borrowed umbrella. You heard me. The war is on, and since we jump between six different viewpoints we have zero chance to get bored.
The “awakening” is different for each character. I love a good story of character transformation and coming-of-age, but this one is unique because the person coming of age can be a zero-fucks-to-give soon-to-be-grandmother art gallery director from an indigenous northeastern tribe. Or a former famous MC now mother and local politician (with an equal number of fucks to give). Or a somewhat shy Indian national trying to keep from losing her student Visa. Or a thirty-something woman of Irish descent who’s led a quietly miserable life under the thumb of her overbearing police officer father.
It’s fascinating, because each one of these characters are human beings with kids and/or difficult relatives and jobs and a history they’re maybe not entirely proud of having (or of leaving behind), but they’re also metaphysical avatars of the life of their respective borough. And I mean life; this isn’t just about the historic buildings or a famous landmark (although there’s some of that too). This is about everything that makes each borough unique: the history, the art, the food (love all the mentions of food) the makeup of the neighborhood, even its attitude (and I do mean attitude) when dealing with the other boroughs. When they’re under attack by the Enemy they fight back with music, with math, with a forcewave of “you come into my home and mess with me?”
And the attacks are relentless, because the Enemy they’re dealing with is a lot more insidious than the strange white-tentacled monsters that most New Yorkers can’t see. The Enemy fights with Eminent Domain and Gentrification when they’re being “civilized”, doxing and death threats from “nice boys from nice families” when they’re not. You can probably see what the nature of the war is already; the main characters are part of the vibrant, multi-cultural population that’s made New York what it is, and the Enemy weaponizes xenophobia and a tunnel-vision desire to make the city “great again”. There’s at least one incident that you might think was inspired by current events in 2020, except the book was finished last year, so it’s really just one more reminder to anyone not paying attention that these are problems that have been going on for years. Decades. Centuries. And Jemisin doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to portraying the basic cowardliness and racism of, say, a shrill white woman trying to commit Murder By 911 Call.
I think you filmed us because you didn’t think we were dealers. Because we were just ordinary people going about our own business and it bothered you to see us comfortable and unafraid.
So it’s not subtle, is what I’m saying. But oh boy is it satisfying. There are so many times when I could picture something as a scene in a movie: invasive franchises turning into literal monsters, cosmic images of personified cities, a fractal display of universes, and the avatars of New York fighting back with the essence of New York pop culture, or the sensation of riding a subway, or just driving full speed through downtown Manhattan, hurling profanities at anyone not driving enough like a maniac. It’s utterly insane and absolutely glorious.
…blending the power of their two boroughs into one massive, preemptive wave of Get The Fuck Out The Way.
I think some New Yorkers may possibly feel a little called out here, but it’s important to remember that the people in this book who count as “real” New Yorkers…are the people who want to be. It’s a metropolis of immigrants and transplants and native-born and people who left but couldn’t stay away. This is a vision of New York that’s great because of its flaws and its contradictions, and nothing sums that up better than the New Yorkers who will complain at the first opportunity about everything having to do with life in New York, and somehow keep finding reasons to stay anyway.