Meta Rec: "A Stream of Blood and Tears Mixed Together: Power, Consorts, Monarchy and Stories"

[raven_cromwell]

I read a lot! of second-world fantasy, and A Stream Of Blood And Tears Mixed Together: Monarchy, Consorts, Power and Stories is one of the most searingly thought-provoking indictments of why blind, critiqueless replication of monarchy and its power within the fiction that shapes us is so dangerous. Pasting a bit of the essay below, but the whole is so very worth a read:

It’s early in the 2000s, and I’m sitting in a lecture hall at the University of Illinois. I’m taking notes, I’m drawing in the margins of my notebooks. I write down the words Yang Guifei.

Almost twenty years after that, I can’t remember if I was in a history class or a literature class, and I’m both appalled by that fact and struck with its rightness. More than a thousand years after Consort Yang’s demise, it feels like the worst kind of arrogance to think we’re going to get any kind of truth from it or that we get to make some kind of judgment. What we’ve got left are the stories, and if we’re lucky and compassionate and clever, maybe we can feel the shape of the truth in the negative space around them.

The story of Consort Yang is one that’s wrapped around monarchy and power, and at the center of it is a woman who lived more than a thousand years ago. She has been a temptress, a scapegoat, the romance of an era, a historical curiosity, and the subject of countless pieces of art. Dozens of actresses have brought her to life on the stage and screen, and they say words she never said with mouths that are living while hers is filled with the summer dust of the road from Chang’an.

When we look at the story of Consort Yang, we’re looking at something that has taken on a life of its own, something I always found unfair given that Consort Yang had hers taken away from her. It’s good to give voice to the voiceless, but it’s also too easy to let our own voices speak through long-dead, long-silenced mouths as well.

That’s power, and it runs straight through all of these stories. It’s power to pull her from her first marriage and make her a consort, it’s power to use the story of her rise to whip an army into rebellion, and it’s power to turn her into a tragic love story that resonates for a thousand years. She’s not royal herself, but every step of the way, she’s glamorized, victimized, lionized, and convicted by her association with royalty.

It’s also power to give her a softer and a better ending, and to allow her to live on in other stories. (Maybe it’s compassion or empathy or sympathy, too. It depends). It’s power and privilege to be living a thousand years later and to listen to her story in an elective class half a world away. It’s a power that was never given to her, and with every rendition of her story I gave you above, I’m uneasily aware that somewhere, hidden in the far depths of history, is a woman who might have lived a longer, better and kinder life if she had never been run over monarchy and the stories we tell about them.

Monarchy is too big to look at. Too many emperors, too many centuries, too much pain weighed against too many moments of redemption. This is another place where we have to find the truth in the negative space, by looking at the ways the emperors and empresses warped the stories around them.

We probably wouldn’t know Consort Yang’s name at all if she hadn’t been loved by an emperor teetering on the brink of disaster. As it is, we still don’t know so very much. All I know is that she’s dead, and all I know about death is that we are dead a long, long time.

I'm now very, very much looking forward to Vo's Empress Of Salt and Fortune, especially after her thoughts on diaspora fantasy and can't rec the Stream Of Blood and Tears essay highly enough.