The Word for World Is Forest

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Selver is a very introspective character, who turns to violence in desperation: he is aware that those actions are toxic to his people's nature, but cannot find another way to protect and preserve his culture. He knows he is doing the wrong thing for the right reason, that now his people will know murder, a concept that had never reached their consciousness before, and he feels this burden on his shoulders.

Behind abbreviations these peaceful non-industrious people are used as slaves to facilitate the exploitation of the planet by the 2.000 odd settlers. The casual cruelties, like ignoring their natural sleep rhythm are especially poignant, as is the coercive manner how non-humanisation makes it so easy to use the natives. We follow Davidson, a psychopath like military man, Lyubov the anthropologist send to document the indigenous population and Selver who after being abused by Davidson turns into a rallying point for resistance against the humans. Crucially, though, what Le Guin makes clear is that it is the colonizer is the one dehumanized by what he does in the process of colonizing. Again, this point reminded me of another work that I had read recently, Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire. Selver’s way of phrasing it is particularly interesting and beautiful: The story focuses on a military logging colony set up on the fictional planet of Athshe by people from Earth (referred to as "Terra"). The colonists have enslaved the completely non-aggressive native Athsheans, and treat them very harshly. Eventually, one of the natives, whose wife was raped and killed by a Terran military captain, leads a revolt against the Terrans, and succeeds in getting them to leave the planet. However, in the process their own peaceful culture is introduced to mass violence for the first time.But the Athsheans’ existence proves that nature directly impacts people, regardless of their species. The Athsheans live in harmony with the forest, and their lives are inextricable from the nature that surrounds them: Athshean homes are built into the roots of trees, and their people are defined by the trees in their area. ( Selver, one of the novella’s protagonists, belongs to the “Ash” people.) At one point, the human anthropologist Raj Lyubov reveals that the Athshean word for “world” is also their word for “forest” (hence the title of the novella), which speaks to the interconnectedness of Athshean society and nature. Beyond their society’s structure, Athsheans’ customs and culture are also tied to nature. They spend large chunks of their day in a dream state, and their dreaming is frequently compared to tree growth. When Selver became unable to dream after experiencing violence, he worries that he was “cut off from his roots”—and after Selver introduces this violence to his people, Lyubov notes that Selver has changed “from the root.” In other words, Athsheans’ lives are so intertwined with the forest that any violence against them is likened to violence against nature.

As polarized as the characters' views are, Le Guin does a skillful job of getting inside the head of each. Still, though she fleshes them out well and makes them believable, they're not particularly engaging or likable. Lyubov, the lone Athshean sympathizer, is weak and ineffectual; he never comes up with a course of action more ambitious than bemoaning his own impotence. The Athshean Sleverin is too remote, too much of an exoticized native to be relatable. And Davidson, the human antagonist, is an abhorrent embodiment of arrogant machismo and genocidal hatred. They're effective characters for driving the plot forward, but none of them are particularly enjoyable to spend time with. edit: The world lost an absolute literary giant today. If you haven't read Ursula K. Le Guin, do yourself a favor. She's fantastic. Speaking of evil men, I think Davidson bears some exploration. Another of the criticisms I’ve seen leveled at this book is that the characters are one dimensional compared to Le Guin’s usual characters. To be sure Davidson is wholly and irredeemably despicable, but I do have to say that it’s hard to see him as an unrealistic character after reading the book that I mentioned previously, King Leopold’s Ghost. In its account of the conquest of the Congo it described the role of men like the explorer Henry Morton Stanley and a number of colonial officials and administrators, and the kinds of tyrannical violence and brutality they engaged in are not far off from what Le Guin represented in fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many awards: Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud, etc. Her recent publications include the novel Lavinia, an essay collection, Cheek by Jowl, and The Wild Girls. She lived in Portland, Oregon. He was always disagreeably suprised to find how vulnerable his feelings were, how much it hurt him to be hurt is best rendered. Davidson is the epitome of toxic masculinity and self aggrandisement, even slightly shunned by the author herself as possibly to one dimensional, but somehow instantly made me think of Donald Trump his positioning and showmanship, showing that however modern we think we are sexism is still definitely a thing.

Credits

Le Guin's father Alfred Louis Kroeber and mother Theodora Kroeber were scholars, and exposure to their anthropological work considerably influenced Le Guin's writing. [1] [2] Many of the protagonists of Le Guin's novels, such as The Left Hand of Darkness and Rocannon's World are also anthropologists or social investigators of some kind. [3] Le Guin uses the term Ekumen for her fictional alliance of worlds, a term which she got from her father, who derived it from the Greek Oikoumene to refer to Eurasian cultures that shared a common origin. [4]