No emotional attachment

 I’m reading my way through NK Jemisin’s How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? short story collection this week.  And it’s got me thinking about why I identify with stories, and why I can’t care about some.

This collection of stories is written by a black woman, and it features people from her own culture, and their future equivalents.  That doesn’t pose any barrier to me in reading the stories.  I may be a white woman, but the issues and dreams involved in those stories are universal.

I can absolutely identify with the very bright schoolgirl who is being pressured by her mother not to stand out, and to get pregnant and fit in.  Yes, the setting is a backdrop of war, and in effect, the character’s family are living on a future version of an indigenous reservation.  They are cut off from the wider world beyond.  The story’s a little more complicated than that, involving a plot about AI merging with humans and becoming the majority, but the issues the girl faces are universal.  Does she show her talent, take the bullying at school from jealous girls, or does she do what her mother wants and conform to stay safe?

This story really resonated with me, and I realised it was because it had personal relevance to me,  In many ways, it echoed my own life story.  And I’ve realised that, in order to identify with a story, in order to love it, or even just to remember it when I’ve finished reading it, I must have some emotional attachment to a story.

That emotional attachment is driven by my beliefs and values.  I run a mile from any story with the word ‘dark’ in its title or description.  The same goes for ‘bloody’ and ‘violent’.  There are some SFF writers who seem to delight in writing violence into their work.  I have, against my better judgement, read a few of them, largely because I didn’t realise just how violent and bloody they were.  And for the record, one of the bloodiest narratives was sold as a young adult novel.

My spirit recoils from reading about violence, and I think that’s why I remember not a word of those narratives.  I think my values prompt my brain to delete memories of those stories.

The stories I do get emotionally attached to are stories which have a basically positive tone.  They’re stories of people carefully building things up, picking up the pieces after a war, or someone struggling to escape a restrictive background, or some injustice.  I can get emotionally invested in those stories.  They’re the characters I can root for, and the stories I remember after I’ve finished reading them.