Fantastic Metropolis

Layers of Impossibility

“The Tawny Bitch”, Nisi Shawl

(In Mojo: Conjure Stories, edited by Nalo Hopkinson, Warner Aspect, 2003)

“To hold intercourse with you, even through so attenuated a medium as this, will give me strength to endure whatever trials lie ahead.”

So writes Belle, an imprisoned quadroon heiress, to her schoolmate lover, in Nisi Shawl’s gothic thriller. But it is really through the agency of the tawny bitch—the manifestation of the spirit of Belle’s mother—that Belle receives her strength and succor… and, ultimately, her means of escape.

Or not. Belle’s epistolary narrative, written in urine on scrap paper, ends abruptly. Filling up the silence that follows, an anonymous (and clueless) commentator describes the circumstances of finding the letters, and his or her (failed) attempts to verify the people and places mentioned in them.

Belle’s schooling has filed off the texture and interest of her mother’s Yoruba culture, in which “the barrier between life and death was but a thin and permeable membrane”, leaving her with only her late father’s worship of Reason. In reclaiming the former, the anonymous commentator believes Belle has fully abandoned the latter… that the tawny bitch is a delusion, and that Belle has, in fact, been driven mad.

Shawl’s story slyly challenges belief—both in Belle’s story, and in the fact of her letters having been found (and recognized) at all.

Story as witchcraft

“The Fool’s Tale”, L. Timmel Duchamp

(In Leviathan Three, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre, Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2002)

“As is always the case with any text, whether the tale is truth or fiction, readers will have to decide for themselves.”

Pieced together from a set of hidden documents, Duchamp’s sharp and entertaining faux-scholarly work centers on the ladies of the court of James I, and on the conflict between ideal and reality for women in matters of love and marriage. This conflict is brought into focus by a court performance of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”, in which certain men and women of the court are (not always flatteringly) reflected.

The fool of the tale, Xaviera Cristiana Morley, is a dwarf (and presumed issue of the devil) whose talents include shape-shifting and magical storytelling. For the benefit of Queen Anne and the other court ladies, she opens the way to the imaginary Illyria, where they can see for themselves whether Olivia’s and Viola’s stories end happily (as the men of the court assert they must) or unhappily (as the women believe). There, they find Olivia unhappily married, while Viola, still dressed as a boy, awaits the fickle Orsino’s completion of his love-test—the recovering of her maiden weeds.

Cristiana writes down the tale of the journey for the Countess of Bedford, who is shrewd enough to know that admitting the reality of its magic would be perilous in the court of a king obsessively fearful of witchcraft. And yet story is, itself, a form of magic.

“The Fool’s Tale” is a pleasure from beginning to end, scholarly writing (complete with footnotes) bracketing and commenting upon Cristiana’s narrative. The author (appearing as herself in a neat bit of verisimilitude) chooses to believe the better story, that Cristiana’s magic is real, and brings the power of that magic full circle.