Book Review: The Word for World is Forest by Ursula Le Guin
THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST by Ursula K Le Guin– REVIEW by Sacha Rosel
“All the colours of rust and sunset, brownreds and pale greens, changed ceaselessly […]. No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Word for World is Forest”
In the foreword to her sci fi novel The word for world is forest, Ursula Le Guin questions the supposedly escapist function of scifi and fantasy explaining how, no matter which genre a book may fall into, a true writer’s motivation always lies in the pursuit of freedom. Conceiving her story in the backdrop of the Vietnam war during the late ‘60s as a member of the peace movement, all the while witnessing “despoliation of natural resources”, exploitation and murder as inherent expressions of a male-oriented war culture, Le Guin thought it was her moral duty to write a book expressing her dissent towards oppression against the Other and her cry for freedom.
Set in the imaginary world of Athshe, a planet where humans from worn-out Earth land to establish a colony and steal rare commodities like wood, The word for world is forest explores both the idea of colonization and the concept of rebellion against colonizers by focusing on three main characters expressing different views on the interaction with nature and with other intelligent species. On the one hand, Captain Davidson represents the typical white suprematist who sees himself as “a world-tamer” and “New Tahiti” (the racist name humans use for Athshe) as “a tangle of trees, endless, meaningless” finally turned into a ‘civilized’ space thanks to human intervention, which to him entails engaging in specific acts deemed to be ‘necessary’ like “voluntary labour” forced on the entire local population and horrific physical abuse against female natives.
On the other hand, Selver the Athshean symbolizes a world focused on a balanced relationship with nature, where everything that dies grows back again as leaves and trees and dreams are the most genuine path to understanding and wisdom. In his world ‒ literally made of forest and linguistically defined as such, hence the title of the book ‒ any form of violence against other species and against natural elements is virtually unknown: no physical abuse, no murder, no war have ever been part of the Athshean way of living, and should never be. Yet soon, because of the close contact with humans, “the un-reined dreams of illness” start moving in his eyes, disrupting his people forever.
In between them stands Ljubov the human scientist, an interpreter of Athshean ways and language for humans and allegedly a friend to Selver. For the sake of science, and because he truly believes in the possibility of overcoming mutual differences, Ljubov has studied Athsheans and their language closely, writing a bilingual glossary with the help of Selver so as to improve communication and understanding between one civilization and the other. And yet, one cannot shake the feeling Ljubov’s ‘friendship’ is yet another form of racism in disguise: his narrative includes disturbing details suggesting his intentions are far from good, let alone totally disrespectful towards Athsheans as people. For instance, we come to know his ‘scientific research’ includes wiring “countless electrodes onto countless furry green skulls”, suggesting a deliberate use of torture. Furthermore, Ljubov displays a paternalistic attitude towards Server (“Ljubov’s love for his friend was deepened by that gratitude the savior feels towards the one whose life he has been privileged to save”, my italics), seeing his job not as an actual way to prevent the exploitation and the extermination of local people but merely as a record of what humans destroyed (“leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature”).
The first three chapters focus on one of the three main characters at a time, presenting facts and their consequences from his personal standpoint. The actual story starts in the aftermath of an attack organised by Selver and a group of Athsheans against humans in a ‘voluntary camp’: everybody is killed but Davidson, despite his violation and killing Selver’s wife. Thele, was the main reason why the attack was organized in the first place. After releasing Davidson and singing over him (an alternative to physical combat according to Athshean customs), Selver retreats into the forest to spend some time healing and pondering over the possible implications of his actions. As he meets Coro Mena the healer, Selver enters the path of dreaming, and everyone comes to see how his people were made to live in pens like animals and serve “yumens” as their slaves, Athshean women crushed as if they were serpents or spineless creatures.
“Can you walk the road your dream goes?” Coro Mena asks, and though the dream leads to a broken path full of death changing their world forever, Selver knows he will walk the new road and make others see the path too. With the vision of humans destroying every inch of the forest burning in his dream, and the knowledge of a new cargo of women coming to keep yumens company. Selver declares all humans must be burned to avoid the destruction of Athshe. “They want the forest for themselves”, so there’s no other way: the evil dream must come forth and infect each and every Athshean alive, until it finally ends in death.
Once the healing is concluded, Coro Mena declares Selver a god, “a changer, a bridge between realities. […] the son of forest-fire, the harvester,” somebody who can embrace fear and turn the dream-time into fire. Many will die, but Coro Mena sees hope too: he has dreamt of Selver walking in the forest, and the trees were reborn behind him, “forever renewed.” The new dream may come from violence, but its fruit will finally burst into rebirth.
The rest of the book is devoted to the inevitable cultural and physical clash between humans and Athsheans, despite the League of Worlds has prevented “Terrans” (people coming from Earth) from engaging with natives any further to avoid any escalation of violence. The dialogue among colonisers (including Terrans, but also other species like Cetians and Hainish) is particularly interesting, especially when it comes to analysing the events that led to the natives’ attack on the camp, most notably Davidson’s physical attack against Thele: as they talk about this act, none of the males define it as “force”, and opt for “consensual unions” with one of the natives. Their words seem to imply it was a consensual act, thus erasing the woman’s point of view completely, perhaps also because male humans come from an overtly sexist society and thus cannot conceive a world where “females” have their say on any relevant matter. Conversely, in Athshe men are devoted to dreaming, while women hold power in their hands. As Ljubov says: “intellect to the men, politics to the women, and ethics to the interactions of both: that’s their arrangement.” Yet, when Selver and his people decide to destroy humans, their main attack is against female women, precisely because their presence would allow the enemy to “breed”, and thus to never leave the forest planet.
Personally, I found Chapter Two particularly intriguing, its poetical language shedding light on the dream culture nurtured and experienced by Athsheans and the conversation between Selver and Coro Mena truly inspirational. I wish Le Guin had included more poetical parts like this in her book, also devoting more attention to the description of the Athshean society. Instead, probably because of the ghost of the Vietnam war haunting her, she seems more concerned with exposing male violence rather than with showing possible alternatives to its display. Also, being the author a feminist and the world of Athsheans based on an egalitarian vision of men and women, sharing labor in equal parts while women are the only ones allowed to rule, having more female characters on the forefront would have made more sense. Instead, we don’t see much of the complex societal structure of Athshe, and all we are left with are native men dealing with human men and engaging in war with them.
I think exploring what having power in the hands of women might mean in a non-violent society would have been much more relevant. As such, the book lacks in a true feminist perspective because of the absence of preeminent female characters: despite Thele’s intense abuse and death by the hands of Davidson being the catalyst for the preliminary Athshean revolt against “yumens”, no woman is given any pivotal role in the story. On the contrary, Thele’s exclusive role as “the violated woman” (her sad violation ‘poetically’ described by Selver as “the broken birch tree, the opened door”) seems to reinforce the idea that, no matter what society they may be part of, women can only function as absence and ultimately as erasure. Actually, with the exception of Ebor Dendep the weaver, all female characters in the book (including human ones) are shown as either dead, abused, powerless or, as it happens with the cargo of human women, nameless cattle. This certainly is a major flaw in the book. Besides, in her focusing on the possibility of friendship between a male native and a supposedly ‘understanding’ and ‘sensitive’ human man, Le Guin ends up excluding women from the possibility of change, dream and power in her story. If told from a woman-centered perspective, The word for world is forest might have been a much more subversive and political book.
If freedom is the actual aim of all true writers, as Le Guin suggests in her foreword citing Emily Brontë, then novels should explain what this freedom might consist of, opening up new dimensions and possibilities for those who might feel diminished, silenced or erased in the real world we live in. Perhaps, Le Guin was more interested in exposing war for what it was back then (and still is today): a self-indulgent celebration of nationalism, machismo and hatred for anything contradicting this macro narrative. As Selver says, finally understanding there can be no real friendship with “yumens”, human nature is the actual problem: “the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the cruelest.” We are our worst enemies. Perhaps, by indirectly taking inspiration from Charles Tart’s tales on the non-violent Senoi people of Malaysia, Le Guin wanted to show us a different path, where dreaming and contemplation could be an antidote to toxic imperialism. “They come out of their dreams with a new song, tool, dance, idea. The waking and the dreaming are equally valid, each acting upon the other in complementary fashion”, she says while explaining how this incredible population managed to live for centuries without the notion of war and murder using dreams to solve both interpersonal and intercultural conflict. Perhaps, she seems to suggest, the tools of change have been there all along, we just forgot how to use them. Or perhaps, as Audre Lorde would say later in 1979, “The Master’s Tool will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” The tools must be changed, and the perspective too. The dream must be explored and walked through, not corrupted by toxicity, in order for us to truly embrace change.
Sacha Rosel is a writer, blogger and reviewer. She writes both in English and Italian.
Her first English novel, My Heart is The Tempest, is a dark fantasy book and part of a trilogy inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Her personal website is www.lunadonna.net, her blog is www.sacharosel.wordpress.com. You can follow her on GoodReads, Bookbub, Instagram (sacharosel8), Twitter (sacha_rosel) and Facebook (Sacha Rosel).
