In the artist’s own words, “his life’s work embodies the message(s) of self-awareness, acknowledgment, strength, and radical presence.”
Our world is governed by a web of overlapping, interconnected social constructs, many of which are left unspoken and are instead perpetuated by the slow, inexorable molding of our selves through our parents/caregivers and our peers and our elders. Gender is one such social construct. Many people believe that gender is black and white – or rather, pink and blue. A growing number of people have come to understand that gender is indeed a spectrum.
This revelation is not a new one by any standards. Having additional gender identities beyond the binary of male and female is not uncommon in the history of humankind. A number of indigenous populations in the Americas have been known to respect the gender of two-spirited people. The Lakota call them Winkte, the Zuni call them Lhamana. The Mohave have four genders, male, female, Alyha and Hwame. The Navajo call two-spirit individuals Nádleeh. Examples of more than two genders being woven into the cultural fabric of a society are found across the entire world, on every continent with the exception of Antarctica.
However, the Western world has historically recognized only two genders – male and female. The difference between the sexes seemed biologically self-evident, and intersex babies were promptly assigned a role inside the gender binary. This state of affairs is slowly improving for those who fall elsewhere on the gender spectrum. The studies of anthropologists can confirm gender is, in fact, a spectrum. It is not merely pink and blue – it is all the colors of the rainbow.
In the artist’s words, found on the biographical page of his website, Mkize hopes his work “carries with it an intention to communicate ideas that he finds most important in his life, the most prominent of which is preserving the African identity.”
Gender as a social construct is one of the major themes that An Unkindness of Ghosts addresses. From the first page, a gender-neutral child, Flick, who is referred to with they/them pronouns is introduced. One of the primary power struggles in the novel is between the Surgeon, Theo, and the Sovereign, Lieutenant. Lieutenant often tells Theo that if the Surgeon is the ship’s Mother, and surely he is their Father. “It’s time you stop being a woman about these things,” (247) he says in one of the pivotal scenes, once the tension has reached a breaking point on the ship.
Towards the end of the novel, Theo confesses that he does not feel like a man, and Aster replies, “Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling… Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body.” (308) This line sums up her experience grappling with gender, and assures Theo that he is not alone in feeling discontented with the gender identities sanctioned by their leaders.
On the Matilda, the concept of gender is continually reinforced by the Sovereign and the hierarchy he maintains on the ship. On certain decks, like the one Flick originated from, children are assigned gender-neutral pronouns and identities. Aster “was used to the style of her own deck where all children were referred to with feminine pronouns. Here, it was they.” (10) This refusal to bow to the gender norms of the ship and instead take a different approach to the gender binary is, I believe, a form of subtle rebellion, among many other instances and forms of dissent undertaken by the enslaved lower decks of the Matilda, containing only those with darker skin and savage guards that keep them subjugated, afraid, and disempowered.
Gender is one aspect of our identities as humans living within a society. In many ways, social norms shape and inform who we are. We have a limited amount of power and agency over how others perceive us. Their perceptions constitute a significant part of who we are, and how we self-identify. The concept of interpellation suggests that we internalize society’s ideologies and norms about who we should be, and that this, in turn, informs who we think we are. This continuing dialogue between our self-identity and the way others identify us shapes and molds our identity. No human is an island, or so the saying goes, and our place and purpose in the web of society are determined by a variety of complexities, identity among them.
An Unkindness of Ghosts addresses this aspect of society not merely for the richness it adds to the text, but also as a commentary on our own society. The cogs of society are often slow-turning. Changes in social norms rarely happen overnight. It is the duty of the writer and the literary scholar to shine a light on these matters, so that forward motion may be achieved. An Unkindness of Ghosts illuminates many such pressing topics, including that of gender-identity, gender-queerness, and transgender people. It makes a statement on the damages incurred when a gender binary is rigidly fixed in any given society, and in turn, implies that the implementation of a gender spectrum can be deeply healing to those who feel trapped by the gender binary.