wisb-Guardian-Express

(Disclaimer:  If you are easily offended by the proper spelling of the words hinted at in my title, then do not read beyond this point.)

As a postcolonial scholar, I've become familiar with what Homi Bhabha calls the "ambiguity of colonial discourse."  In short, Bhabha suggests that colonialism attempts to recreate indigenous minds/bodies in the image of the colonizer, but only to an indeterminate line that allows the colonizer to differentiate itself from the "other," since its existence as "colonizer" requires an opposite from which to draw its identity.  Within that ambiguity, Bhabha argues, is where the indigenous can launch a different kind of resistance.

I've often wondered if this same idea might apply to words like "nigger" or "bitch" (and their various spellings).  While I won't call myself a feminist scholar or race historian, it seems to me that it is within the realm of possibility that women or people of color could reclaim the words previously used against them by a particular dominant group.  Otherwise, I'd have to look at a site like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books with a certain degree of contempt.  Likewise, I'd have to view any use of the word "nigger" by people of color as inherently derogatory, even if within a particular cultural context, it means exactly the opposite.  Are some of these instances moments of resistance / reversal / reclamation?  How do we know?

That's where I want to leave it.  A wide open question for the general public to explore.  So have at it!

Several weeks ago, I taught William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying in my Survey in American Literature course. Of all the texts I've taught since the summer before last (when I started teaching literature courses), this one may have been the most difficult.  For those unfamiliar with the book, it is told almost exclusively in a stream of consciousness manner, spanning across more perspectives than you can count on a single hand, each one intensely personal and subjective.  The plot, insofar as it has one, follows the Bundren family as they make their journey to the birthplace of their deceased mother so that they might bury her there.  In other words, As I Lay Dying is a "dark" book that isn't so much a story as a radical de-centering of experience -- multiple minds, multiple experiences, and multiple reactions.

But the book itself is not what I want to talk about today; rather, it serves as the context.  What I
want to talk about is skulls.  At some point at the end of our discussions of Faulkner's novel, my students managed to get us onto the subject of "darkness" (tonal).  Specifically, they were comparing Faulkner's As I Lay Dying to Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts," both of which have been described as dark comedies.  My students didn't quite agree with this, noting that much of the thematic content of As I Lay Dying is difficult to make fun of even when a comic genius is involved (I'm paraphrasing their arguments, of course).  "Miss Lonelyhearts," however, seemed rather amusing in retrospect.  They thought that while much of the story hadn't seemed funny when they were reading it, West's narrative had, in fact, grown on them.  I suspect part of this has to do with exposure to Faulkner, which is such a contrast to West that it's hard to fully argue that "Miss Lonelyhearts" isn't at least half funny.

It was at this point that my one and only Russian student matter-of-factly stated, "When I was a kid, we used to play with the skulls of dead Germans."  I can't recall the exact context in which these words were spoken, unfortunately.  What interests me about this announcement isn't whether it makes sense in my recollection of events, but rather how it was stated:  as if there is nothing strange about playing with dead German skulls.  In subsequent conversations with this student, she provided considerable detail of the catacombs in which she and her friends would play (somewhere in the Eastern edge of what was Soviet Bloc territory -- I cannot recall where at the moment).  Apparently these bones and skulls were left there after the war; nobody bothered to pick them up and bury them (or do whatever you do with the bones of dead Germans).  And so, my Russian student grew up playing with the skulls of dead Germans.

Think about that for a minute.  Imagine what it must have been like growing up in a world in which playing with dead German skulls is just plain normal.  A hard world to imagine, no?

Excuse me while I file this in one of the weirdest teaching experiences I've ever had, right alongside the time one of my students said that whenever they thought of me, they imagined me as the woman being chased by the werewolf in Michael Jackson's "Thriller."  (Among other weird moments, of course.)

Somewhere in Thailand, a mind-controlled ant climbs a tree.  She moves in jerks and starts, her body no longer her own.  Alone, she staggers to the underside of a leaf, and bites the thick central stem.  Her jaw locks.  Her chitin bulges and bursts.  A long gray tendril rises from within, unfurls to three times her length, and pops to release a cloud of spores.  Away on the breeze the spores float, to possess any other ants unlucky enough to remain within the blast radius.

The fungus is called Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani.  The fungus infects an ant, takes over the victim’s brain, forces it to move to a high place near other ants--a place where spores will spread--and explodes.

That’s real.

If you work for a corporation or a non-profit, you’re part of a functionally immortal entity whose life is governed by laws more theological than biological—a being that draws strength from desire,
faith, and sacrifice.  When corporations emerged in the High Middle Ages, jurists compared them to angels: immortal, immaterial, mighty.  And every angel is terrifying.

That’s real, too.

You read these words on a screen lit by lightning, which we harnessed either by burning hundred-million-year-old plants and plankton (and a few dinosaurs), by wrestling rivers like Achilles, by binding the wind or the shifting tide or sunlight or subterranean fire.  Building your screen required labors that would make Hercules blanch.

How can we tell stories about that kind of world?  A world that’s not straightforward, a world with diversities of wonder, justice, injustice, horror, majesty, and sheer scale to beggar the wildest opium dreams?

We can tell some stories by zooming in.  The earth seems flat to most human beings, most of the time.  Newtonian physics works fine for objects about the size of people, moving at people speeds.  A character who calls her former lover to console him after his father’s death doesn’t need to think about cellular towers, satellites, digital audio, or call routing, let alone the Chinese mine that produced the rare earths used to make the phone (and the people who worked there).  By focusing on dramatic structures of everyday life and emotional politics that haven’t changed much since Murasaki wrote Genji, a storyteller can avoid much of reality’s weirdness.

Or the teller can embrace the strange.  Break open the common surface of our lives and expose the machinery beneath.  Show characters who engage with the mad mess of their setting, who are elevated by it or ground to dust or both.  Pull out elements of our daily weird, hold them to the light, and watch them spark.

Some people accuse fantastic literature--science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all their permutations--of escapism.  And sure, some of us come to genre tales for the rich fantasy lives, for the grand open vistas and the capital-E Evils which Must Be Stopped.  But I think the richness of the genre lies in confrontationalism, not escapism: its ability to address the fundamental strangeness of the natural world, and the world we’ve built, and the world being built around us.  The freedom to tell stories out of this world can offer the freedom to name more precisely the world where we live.

And that world is wild, and needs naming.

(Details about The Indigo Pheasant, Mr. Rabuzzi, and his blog tour can be found below the post.  Go buy the book!)

Historians of medieval Europe would be surprised at the pallid, static and simplistic depictions of their subject in the work of many modern fantasy writers.  In the past fifty years, medievalists have overturned Western Renaissance and Enlightenment assertions that the “middle time” was an opaque, undifferentiated hiatus endured between the glittering peaks of Rome and Modernity.

Equipped with digital tools, platoons of medievalists today are able to mine, compile, sort, and index more data about medieval people and places than any prior generation.[i]  Advances in aerial archaeology surveys, underwater excavations, and isotope analysis -- to name but three-- have dramatically expanded our knowledge of daily life (everything from how bricks were made to how bread was baked), migration and settlement patterns, trade routes, funerary practices, and much more.[ii]

A willingness to use methods from anthropology, geographical studies, and other social sciences
-- ­epitomized by the widely influential Annales school in France, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure in the U.K., and the Quaderni storici in Italy -- ­has buttressed our new interpretations of the era.[iii]   Above all, medieval studies has­ -- to great advantage -- wedded its traditional strengths in manuscript analysis and paleography with modern literary critical approaches and semiotics, framing our questions in entirely new ways and forming new understandings from materials previously neglected or ignored.[iv]

I hope we might see more variety, more dynamism and more nuance in the pseudo-medieval settings adopted by many fantasy authors. Transposing modern analogues, or what we perceive as similarities, won’t work.  We need to rasp, file, chisel and mallet ourselves back to another reality, before we can use it for our modern fabulistic purposes.  We must translate ourselves, in the word’s literal Latin sense of carrying over, of  removing from one place to another.  And then the real work begins.  Even medieval concepts we think we know, after having laboriously scrubbed off the verdigris, will betray us because the context is gone.
For instance, where is a modern fantasy novel based on Saint Maurice, one of the most widely venerated in the European Middle Ages, bearer of the holy “Spear of Destiny,” and the patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire?  He is routinely depicted as an African in full knight’s armor­ -- the oldest image we have of St. Maurice is an imposing 13th-century statue in the Cathedral of Magdeburg, right beside the tomb of Emperor Otto I.  He is portrayed elsewhere conversing as an equal with the Pope.  Bridging the centuries and the Middle Passage (and surviving Katrina), there is a St. Maurice Church in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

I want fantastical epics that take as their point of departure the life of the Jewish community documented by the Geniza repository in Cairo, or of Muslim merchants in Aleppo and Damascus establishing a foundation or school via waqf deeds.[v]  I seek spec fic based on the adventures of Malian mathematicians and astronomers, and on the exploits of sastra of jyotisa practitioners in India.[vi]  How about using as a setting the embassy King Harsa of Kanauj in India sent to the T’ang emperor T’ai Tsung or the mission King Pulakesin II of Badami dispatched to the Sassanian emperor Khusru II?[vii]  Imagine riding with the spec fic counterpart of the great Muslim admiral Zheng He on his seven epic voyages for the Chinese emperor in the early 15th century, reaching as far as East Africa -- ­focusing on the common sailors.  Delve into fictional versions of Sundiata’s empire, or the adventures of Oranyan, a prince of Ile-Ife, who followed a serpent as was foretold and thereby founded the Yoruba Empire.  Or explore Cambay in Gujarat and Calicut on the Malabar, and Aden, which 10th-century traveler al-Muqaddasi described as “the anteroom of China, entrepot of Yemen, treasury of the West, and mother lode of trade wares.”
Why indeed limit ourselves to medieval Europe (and a truncated Europe at that) when crafting the backdrops for fabulistic literature?

Feminist perspectives, postcolonialist approaches, and frameworks established by scholars from within the African Diaspora have each revolutionized literary, historical and cultural studies in the United States. [viii]  Insights gained from the study of modern history are helping us identify the thorns in the romance of the rose.[ix]   For instance, Sharon Kinoshita observes that “many of the best-known works of medieval French literature take place on or beyond the borders of ‘France’ or even the French-speaking world,” and argues that the origins of vernacular French writing is “inextricably linked to historical situations of contact between French-speaking nobles and peoples they perceived as their linguistic, religious and cultural others.”[x]

Geraldine Heng makes a similar point:

“Allowing fantasies of race and nation to surface with remarkable freedom, and to flex themselves with astonishing ease and mobility, medieval romance becomes a medium that conduces with exceptional facility to the creation of races, and the production of a prioritizing discourse of essential differences among peoples in the Middle Ages.”[xi] 

From essentializing the Other to erasing the Other altogether is all too often a small step in the medieval European tradition, and in the later scholarship about the Middle Ages.  Erasure is sometimes a part of creating the canon upon which -- unknowingly or not -- ­the modern fantasy genre rests. (I am reminded of how medieval scribes would use pumice stones “ad radenda pergamena,” i.e., “for scraping parchment.”)  Maria Rosa Menocal gives a classic example when she notes that the root word for the quintessential medieval figure of the troubadour may be Arabic, not Latin, and that until recently the Arabic possibility was mostly ignored or obscured.[xii]   Ananya Jahanara Kabir discusses how nostalgia can similarly erase and reorder the past to justify current power dynamics, using as her example 19th-century Britons building a history that showed medieval England inheriting leadership from Rome and in turn bequeathing the right to rule to the Victorians.[xiii]
Commentators on the social imaginary of spec fic have begun to query both the medieval and medievalist assumptions of the genre, and challenge both the inherent and subsequently introduced lacunae, erasures, and distortions.  Such queries and challenges include Michael Chabon’s concept of “imaginary homelands,” Nnedi Okorafor on “Stephen King’s Super-Duper Magical Negroes,” Samuel Delany’s “Racism and Science Fiction,” Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan’s So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, Hopkinson’s “Reluctant Ambassador from the Planet of Midnight,” John Rieder’s Colonialism and The Emergence of Science Fiction, Saladin Ahmed’s “Is Game of Thrones Too White?,” Laura Miller’s “If Tolkien Were Black,”and other recent explorations of race in The Lord of the Rings and in digital role-playing games. [xiv]

I close with two voices that may point us where I believe we need to go ­one voice from the medieval era but strikingly “modern,” the other modern but translating our oldest desire.

The first is the provost Wolmarus, writing to his friend the abbess Hildegard of Bingen near the end of her life, fearing that the lingua ignota would go untransmitted:  “Where, then, the voice of the unheard melody? And the voice of the unheard language?"  And, in fact, the secrets of the hidden language and the mystic melody died with Hildegard...but we can resurrect them -- ­translate them -- through our speculative fiction today.
The second is Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni in her novel The Palace of Illusions, giving voice to the Princess Panchaali, the famous Draupadi, later wife of the Pandavas brothers in the Mahabharat.  Here is Draupadi:

“Through the long, lonely years of my childhood, when my father’s palace seemed to tighten its grip around me until I couldn’t breathe, I would go to my nurse and ask for a story.  And though she knew many wondrous and edifying tales, the one I made her tell me over and over was the story of my birth.”[xv]

[i] “Medievalists and classicists have, over the past twenty years, taken up the use of computers in their work more eagerly than almost any other group of academics working in the humanities” (Marilyn Deegan, “Computers and Medieval Studies: Points of Convergence,” special issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6:1/1991).  The fervor continues undimmed today.
[ii] For a good introduction, see the U.K. Society for Medieval Archaeology, http://www.medievalarchaeology.org/, and the U.K.’s Archaeology Data Service, http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/
[iii] See Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapters 6, 7, 12; Sheila McIsaac Cooper, “Historical Analysis of the Family,” in M. Sussman et al. (eds.), Handbook of Marriage and the Family (Plenum: 2nd ed., 1999); Edward Muir & Guido Ruggiero (eds.), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Selections from Quaderni Storici) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; trans. E. Branch).
[iv] Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Derek Pearsall, ed., Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Late Middle English Literature (Boydell & Brewer, 1987); William Marx, ed., Sources, Exemplars and Copy-Texts: Influence and Transmission (Trivium vol. 31, 1999).
[v] Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 26-27.
[vi] Timbuktu Manuscripts Project, http://www.sum.uio.no/research/mali/timbuktu/project/index.html ;  David Pingree, “The Logic of Non-Western Science: Mathematical Discoveries in Medieval India,” Daedalus 132:4 (Fall, 2003).
[vii]  Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge University Press, 2004),  p. 32.
[viii] Representative works: Toni  Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness & the Literary Imagination (Random, 1992);  Benjamin Alire  Saenz, “I Want to Write an American Poem: On Being a Chicano Poet in Post-Columbian America,” in R. Gonzalez (ed.), Currents from the Dancing River: Contemporary Latino Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry (Harcourt Brace, 1994); Jose David Saldivar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (U. California P., 1997);  Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House (Oxford U.P., 1993);  Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity & Double Consciousness (Harvard U.P., 1993); Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” in Enwezor et al. (eds.), Antimonies in Art & Culture (Duke U.P., 2008);  Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind (Heinemann, 1986); Edward Said, Orientalism (Random: 1978).
[ix] Examples include:  Linda Lomperis, “Medieval Travel Writing and the Question of Race,” Journal of Medieval & Modern Studies, 31 (Jan., 2001); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England,” ibid.; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. chapters 8 & 9 ref. “race relations on the frontiers of Latin Europe”;  Maghan Keita, “Saracens and Black Knights,” Arthuriana 16.4 (2006).
[x] Kinoshita, Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 1.
[xi] Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia U. Press, 2003), p. 7.
[xii] Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (U. Pennsylvania Press, 1987).
[xiii] Kabir, “Analogy in Translation: Imperial Rome, Medieval England and British India,” in Kabir & D. Williams, eds., Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages; Translating Cultures (Cambridge U. Press, 2005).
[xiv] Chabon, Maps & Legends: Reading & Writing Along the Borderlands (Harper, 2008), pp. 157-179;  Okorafor, “Stephen King’s...,” Strange Horizons, October 25, 2004;  Delany, “Racism and Science Fiction,” New York Review of Science Fiction, Issue 120 (August, 1998); Myles Balfe, “Incredible Geographies?  Orientalism and Genre Fantasy,” Social & Cultural Geography 5:1 (2004); Ahmed’s essay is in Salon, April 1, 2012; Miller’s is in Salon, November 9, 2011; Anderson Rearick, “Why is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc? The Dark Face of Racism Examined in Tolkien’s World,“ Modern Fiction Studies 50:4 (2004); Christopher Warnes, “Baldur’s Gate and History: Race and Alignment in Digital Role Playing Games,” Digital Games Research Assoc. conf. proceedings, 2005; Margaret Sinex, “ ‘Monsterized Saracens,’” Tolkien’s Haradrim, and Other Medieval ‘Fantasy Products,’” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010); Hopkinson & Mehan, So Long Been Dreaming (Arsenal Pulp, 2004); Hopkinson, “A Reluctant Ambassador from the Planet of Midnight,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 21.3 (2010); Rieder, Colonialism (Wesleyan U.P., 2008).  See also:  Nisi Shawl & Cynthia Ward, Writing the Other: A Practical Approach (Aqueduct, 2005), Helen Merrick, The Secret Feminist Cabal (Aqueduct, 2009), and the Sheree Thomas Dark Matter anthologies.
[xv] Divakaruni, The Palace of Illusions (Doubleday, 2008), p. 1.

About the Book:
London 1817. Maggie Collins, born into slavery in Maryland, whose mathematical genius and strength of mind can match those of a goddess, must build the world's most powerful and sophisticated machine - to free the lost land of Yount from the fallen angel Strix Tender Wurm. Sally, of the merchant house McDoon, who displayed her own powers in challenging the Wurm and finding Yount in The Choir Boats, must choose either to help Maggie or to hinder her. Together - or not - Maggie and Sally drive to conclusion the story started in The Choir Boats - a story of blood-soaked song, family secrets, sins new and old in search of expiation, forbidden love, high policy and acts of state, financial ruin, betrayals intimate and grand, sorcery from the origins of time, and battle in the streets of London and on the arcane seas of Yount.
About the Author:
Daniel A. Rabuzzi studied folklore and mythology in college and graduate school, and keeps one foot firmly in the Other Realm.

ChiZine Publications published his first novel, The Choir Boats: Volume One of Longing for Yount, in 2009, and in 2012 brought out the sequel and series conclusion, The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount.

Daniel's short fiction and poetry have appeared in Sybil's Garage, Shimmer, ChiZine, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Abyss & Apex, Goblin Fruit, Mannequin Envy, Bull Spec, Kaleidotrope, and Scheherezade's Bequest. He has presented at Arisia, Readercon, Lunacon, and the Toronto Speculative Fiction Colloquium. He has also had twenty scholarly and professional articles published on subjects ranging from fairy tale to finance.

A former banker, Daniel earned his doctorate in 18th-century history, with a focus on family, gender and commerce in northern Europe. He is now an executive at a national workforce development organization in New York City, where he lives with his wife and soulmate, the artist Deborah A. Mills (who illustrated and provided cover art for both Daniel's novels), along with the requisite two cats.

Novel preview links:
The Choir Boats: http://chizinepub.com/media/choir-boats/TheChoirBoats-Preview.pdf
The Indigo Pheasant: http://chizinepub.com/media/indigo/indigo_preview.pdf

Book page links: 
The Choir Boats: http://chizinepub.com/books/choir-boats.php
The Choir Boats Facebook Page:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Choir-Boats/67307451458
The Indigo Pheasant: http://chizinepub.com/books/indigo-pheasant.php
Daniel's web site: www.danielarabuzzi.com
Daniel's Twitter: @TheChoirBoats
Deborah's web site: http://www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com/Our blog tour for The Indigo Pheasant kicks off, with guest posts, interviews, and giveaways!

Tour stops include:
Sept 11 - Small Beer Press/Not a Journal
Sept 14 - Civilian Reader
Sept 17 - Fantasy Book Critic
Sept 18 - Bibliophile Stalker
Sept 24 - That Artsy Reader Girl
Sept 26 - Layers of Thought Book & Yount greeting cards giveaway.
Sept 27 - Dark Wolf's Fantasy Reviews
Sept 28 - So Many Precious Books, So Little Time Book giveaway.
Sept 30 - Disquieting Visions
Oct 4 - Charlotte's Library
Oct 5 - The Cozy Reader
Oct 11 - Jess Resides Here
TBS - Grasping for the Wind
TBS - Bull Spec's new Wednesday feature "The Hardest Part"

JAY HARTLOVE: Hello, I am Jay Hartlove, author of The Chosen, a supernatural thriller published by Damnation Books and winner of Best Thriller by the Independent eBook Awards 2012.  Today I have here in the studio a special guest from The Chosen. I would like to welcome to the show, Joseph de Alvarado. Welcome Mr. de Alvarado. Thank you for joining us.

JOSEPH DE ALVERADO:  It’s de Alverado, with an ‘e.’

JAY:   Pardon me? Oh, sorry. Yes, I see here, it is an ‘e.’ My mistake.

JOSEPH:   Names matter. They have meanings.

JAY:   Okay. I believe you adopted this name from Silas Alverado, the man who brought you into this plane of existence. Is that right?

JOSEPH:   Yes. His name means, ‘Bringer of the Truth’.

JAY:   Interesting. Now, I know you are a very private person so I appreciate your agreeing to chat today.

JOSEPH:   You’re welcome. If by private you mean I don’t seek publicity, then you’re right. I rather think of myself as too busy for a lot of conversation.

JAY:   Too busy with your work, yes? Are you still the captain of the Purgatory?

JOSEPH:   Yes, among other things.

JAY:   You were an executive assistant to Silas Alverado.

JOSEPH:   I still am his Executive Officer.

JAY:   Didn’t that job end rather abruptly when he went missing?

JOSEPH:   No, in fact my responsibilities grew upon his departure. I am continuing his research work, and I am still searching for him.

JAY:   Do you mean you’re searching for a way to bring him back?

JOSEPH:   Yes. I am a reflection of the Opener of the Ways. If anyone can find a way, it should be me.

JAY:   You and I have chatted about this previously, but let me ask you a few questions about that for our listeners. As I understand it, you are an archangel of Ptah given physical form on Earth by
Mr. Alverado. So how does that work? Magic doesn’t really function here on Earth, so how can you manifest your abilities as a supernatural being?

JOSEPH:   It’s not that magic doesn’t work here, it just needs to be converted. What you think of as magic breaks the laws of physics that are part of this plane, getting something for nothing, which you cannot do. To create the desired effect, you have to know how to use the laws of physics.

JAY:   So you had to learn quantum physics to perform your magic?

JOSEPH:   No, the synthesis comes naturally to me. I come from a plane where physical laws are much more malleable. I already know what the effect looks like. A human magician needs to learn the physical laws and then how to bend them to his will. My Master spent his life learning both the scientific and the arcane, because they have to be worked together to create change in this world. This is why most human magicians can’t accomplish any physical result. They have only learned the arcane techniques and not how to use them together with Physics.

JAY:   I imagine modern physicists would love to learn the secrets that, as you say, come naturally to you.

JOSEPH:   Well, that’s what My Master was attempting back in 2001. The Tablets of Aeth allow humans to understand the true nature of your physical laws, which allows humans to see how they can be molded to your will. They are literally the keys to your universe. Without these keys, I could not explain what I do to a human physicist in terms that would allow you to duplicate what I do. I don’t know how to show these secrets to you. No creature in history has been able to do so, except one.

JAY:   That would be the Demon Prince of Liars.

JOSEPH:   Correct. He alone had the audacity and the cunning to reduce these godly secrets to a form that humans can grasp. Of course, he only presented these images as part of his ruse to destroy Pharaoh.

JAY:   That was in the story of Exodus?

JOSEPH:   Yes.

JAY:   Were you there when that happened?

JOSEPH:   No. I was indisposed during that time.

JAY:   Were you in fact in prison?

JOSEPH:   Yes, I had been falsely convicted by my fellow angels of using names that can only be used by evil ones.

JAY:   You mean demons?

JOSEPH:   Yes.

JAY:   I believe Sanantha Mauwad and Charles Redmond thought you were a demon back in 2001.

JOSEPH:   They too were mistaken.

JAY:   Now Doctor Mauwad and Mr. Redmond believe in Voodoo, so how did you fit into their beliefs?

JOSEPH:   They worship my pantheon without realizing it. The gods of ancient Egypt were adopted by the peoples of West Africa and given new names when Egypt was conquered by the Romans. When those peoples were kidnapped and forced into slavery in the Americas, the Egyptian religion was blended with the Christian dogma of the slave masters to become Voodoo. The gods they worship are the gods of Egypt, just with different names. Doctor Mauwad identified that in her religion, I am a manifestation of Guede L’Orage.

JAY:   That’s very interesting how history and religion play hand in hand. I guess that means the Haitians were keeping your gods alive into the modern era.

JOSEPH:   Indeed. I found Haiti a very welcoming place.

JAY:   Let’s get back to your personal history. Some 3200 years ago you were unjustly cast out as a demon, then Mr. Alverado figured out you are in fact an angel, and set you free here on Earth. I guess you owe him a lot.

JOSEPH:   Nothing less than my eternal loyalty.

JAY:   Mr. Alverado was there, though, correct, during Exodus?

JOSEPH:   Yes, his earlier incarnation was given the position of High Priest of Amun after his Master was unveiled to be a traitor.

JAY:   So he was the priest who had to pick up the pieces after the Egyptian defeat in Exodus. Did anyone know this traitor High Priest was in fact a demon?

JOSEPH:   No. the demon covered his tracks very well.

JAY:   Now wasn’t his relationship to his old Master at the heart of why you had the fight in 2001?

JOSEPH:   Yes, my Master had seen his Master use the Tablets of Aeth during Pharaoh’s conflict with Moses. So Mr. Alverado knew these images existed at one time in the physical world. His quest was to reincarnate from the Land of the Dead, come back and capture the demon, and wrest the Tablets from the demon so they could be used again here on Earth.

JAY:   And he nearly pulled it off?

JOSEPH:   Yes. Nearly.

JAY:   I notice you are full of pride when you talk about Mr. Alverado, but just now you seemed a little taken aback. Was there something about how the 2001 fight went down that still bothers you?

JOSEPH:   I replay the episode in my head all the time, trying to see if there could have been something else I could do that would have given us a better outcome. But there isn’t.

JAY:   So you wish you could have done more. Sounds like the sort of thing you could discuss with a psychiatrist. You know a good one.

JOSEPH:   Yes, but I can’t see myself hiring Doctor Mauwad to help me sort through my feelings of failure.

JAY:   She is probably the only shrink in the world you could talk to, since she knows who you are and what you went through.

JOSEPH:   By the end of that conflict, I also considered her a friend. I would never burden her with reliving what was a very traumatic time for her.

JAY:   I believe she has since moved to Malaysia.

JOSEPH:   Yes, she seems happy there with her former colleague Doctor Herrera.

JAY:   So you keep tabs on her?

JOSEPH:   I keep  tabs  on a lot of things.

JAY:   Okay. That kind of brings me to something I wanted to ask you. With Mr. Alverado no longer in a position to exercise his control over you, you’ve been a free agent for the last eleven years. The last time you walked the Earth was thousands of years ago. How do you like our modern world?

JOSEPH:   You didn’t plan for how many of you there are now. This planet is a nearly unique paradise in all the universe, and you are feeding on it with the abandon of mold consuming a loaf of bread.

JAY:   I think we are becoming aware that we need to take a more proactive stand on the environment. You obviously have a strong feeling about this. Do you think we are doing too little too late?

JOSEPH:   It’s not a matter of how I feel. It’s what I see.

JAY:   Oh, that’s right. You have the ability to see the truth. Can you tell us about that?

JOSEPH:   My god Ptah brought order out of chaos with his eyes. Most of what you consider my magic comes from my eyes. I can indeed see the true nature of what I look at.

JAY:   You can do other things with your eyes too, like throw lightning. You also teleport. How does that use your eyes?

JOSEPH:   I have to see the destination in my mind’s eye.

JAY:   That’s great. So are we doomed?

JOSEPH:   You need to do a lot more than you are now. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better. But no, you are not doomed. If you were on a path to break the planet, the gods would intervene.

JAY:   Really? Okay then. Well, let me ask you this. What intrigues you about what we have built? What do you find good in the modern world?

JOSEPH:   The Internet shows a longer planning, forward thinking that I find admirable. For most of history people have hoarded information for its value. Now people give information away and raise the playing field for all players.

JAY:   How do you mean?

JOSEPH:   Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Wikileaks, all have put information at your fingertips, so that knowing how to do something is no longer among the limited resources you have to marshal for an enterprise. People are freed to try more things, invent more things, be more helpful to the world.

JAY:   I am really surprised to hear you say that. You come from a rigidly hierarchical society where everyone has his place and knows where he fits in. This free flow of information promotes a mobility that I would think you’d find offensive.

JOSEPH:   I did at first. My first reaction was to ask, ‘Where are the gods? Why have they failed to maintain order? Where are the institutions of control?’ I found your society shockingly disorganized. So I went back and learned your history, and realized your civilization has been moving toward mobility all along. Our old order, with a place for everyone and everyone in his place, gave comfort to the individual and predictability and manageability to those in higher castes. As you pointed out, 3200 years is a long time.

If you are going to let people rise and fall on their own merits, then fairness matters. I have come to accept that my sense of order may be out of place, but as a guardian at heart, injustice is something I cannot tolerate. Over the last eleven years I have come to see the Internet as a means of assuring justice. It is harder to cheat someone who can instantly fact check. I am still amused by some of the quirks that have grown up around how it is used. The Internet was so clearly built by humans. It is steeped in your idiosyncrasies.

JAY:   Can you give me an example?

JOSEPH:   On Facebook, when a user dies, often his friends continue to maintain the deceased’s profile page so there is a place people can come and pay their respects. Except people then leave messages for the departed as if they were actually talking to the deceased. This shows me that people have not changed in thousands of years. This is exactly why the Egyptians built false doors in the sides of their tombs. People would come and talk to the departed, looking at the door as if it might open and the deceased’s spirit would appear and talk back to them. I am not criticizing the practice. I am just amused that for all the changes you have made to your world, people really haven’t changed at all.

JAY:   You heard it here, folks, and from a being who can see the truth. That’s all the time we have today. I thank you for accepting my invitation. I have thoroughly enjoyed sharing this time with you.

JOSEPH:   You’re welcome.

About the Author:

Jay Hartlove has been writing professionally for 30 years. His writing has been published in games, newspapers, magazines, legal white papers and online articles. His hobby is religious scholarship, and he blogs on spirituality.

Jay exhaustively researches the facts before he inserts his fantastical explanations. He sees the world as already filled with scary coincidences waiting to be discovered.

He describes his writing as, “Dark connections revealed.” You can read about the research that goes into his books at jaywrites.com.

About the Book:
Running from his dark past, former Duvalier hit man Charles Redmond is forced to take sides in a battle that has been raging since Exodus, between a power mad magician named Silas Alverado and Sammael, the Demon Prince of Liars. When Charles' beloved Voodoo is threatened with extinction, he must wager his life between pure evil and the man who could destroy the world. Charles' psychiatrist Sanantha Mauwad steps into this maelstrom of nightmares, violence and insanity to help Charles find his strength. She tries to save Charles' mind but can she save his soul?

Hi everyone! It is really great to see you all on Day 5 of my virtual book blog tour. I truly appreciate your support! A huge thank you goes to Shaun for hosting me today!

I am CJ Bolyne, a first time author. I have wanted to write for a very long time, but like I am sure many other first time authors felt, I was always afraid about what others would think of my writing. Finally, four years ago, I started my first book and thought that, if nothing else, at least I did this for myself!

I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. After a few years, my family moved about an hour south of Winnipeg, to a little town called Sarto, Manitoba. Yep, one blink, and you miss it. The remainder of my childhood was spent in the country. Yes I am a country girl at heart.

I must admit, I did not read a lot as a child. I read only if I had too and that was usually for school purposes. How I hated the boring books in school!

When I was much younger, I felt that my idea of the type of stories I wanted to write were not considered mainstream. When I expressed them to close friends, my ideas were considered too weird. Some said that I had a demented mind. (teehee – what author doesn’t, right?) I laughed about that. I knew that I did not always think the same as many around me. So, okay, my ideas were not considered popular. However, I’m happy to see that in the last decade, the fantasy, SciFi, etc. genres have made a real impact and I am so happy that there are many out there that thought the way I did! This, in part, has inspired me to give it a shot.

So many books have influenced me, such as, Cradle and All by James Patterson, City of Bones, part of Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series, Dracula by Anne Rice, The Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer, and of course, the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling. Yes, I am a Harry Potter fan!

However, of them all, James Patterson has to be my favourite author. I have always admired his imagination and his ability to write the books he wanted to write. Although, I also admire JK Rowling. In fact, it was after I saw a biography on JK Rowling that I really pushed myself to give writing a real attempt.

The book I am reading now is The Magician’s Apprentice by Trudi Canavan.

When I write, I write as though I am telling a story aloud, as I hear it in my head.

My first serious attempt at writing started four years ago. That is when I started writing Trinity. Due to some personal obligations however, I had to take a break from writing and it was only after I gave my then unfinished book to someone who’s honest opinion, I valued. Her encouragement gave me the courage to finish. Now I can’t wait to write many more as I have so many more stories to tell.

What I learned from writing this book is, it is not that easy. You may have the idea, know how you will begin and end the story, but it’s filling in the rest and making it a good and interesting read – now that’s the tough part!

About CJ Bolyne:
CJ Bolyne is a first time author and Trinity is her first book.  Born and raised in Southeastern Manitoba, Canada, CJ was an avid reader dreaming of the day she would write her own fantasy / sci-fi book.  When she’s not writing, CJ spends her time on her farm with her husband and multiple pets. She runs a full-time pet grooming business.  Her first book, Trinity, is the first in the series.  Bolyne is also on Facebook.
About Trinity:
Payton thought she had a normal, everyday life. When a mysterious man suddenly appears, he shatters her world telling her that her entire life has been a lie. She is a god with the Guardians having lived for 1000's of years. The Anords know where she is and he needs to protect her at all costs. Payton holds the key to saving humanity. However, a mysteriously familiar woman complicates everything.

Trinity is available on Smashwords, Lulu, and Amazon.

(This post is part of CJ Bolyne's Trinity Blog Tour.  You can find other guest posts here.)
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