On the eve of the US presidential election, this historical fiction writer has some thoughts.
CW: Racism, medical abuse, SA
I keep thinking about the several weeks this past summer, just before Joe Biden announced his intention to drop out of the US presidential race, when social media became absolutely flooded with appeals for a return to “precedented” times. Even now, type the word “precedented” into any search bar, and you’ll get thousands of hits, all expressing the same mixture of exhaustion and dread: Free us from nonstop whiplash. Give us boring and predictable.
I understand the sentiment. Our particular historical moment feels uniquely dire. But every time one of these posts pops up in my feed, I can’t help but think that all times have been both precedented and unprecedented, that we exist just as our ancestors did and our descendants will, putting one foot in front of the other as we trudge the treadmill of history. The shape of our times, and of our little lives within them, will inevitably be decided by those who outlive us – a hazard of being situated on the inside rather than the outside of a story.
Were we capable of peeking into future history books, what we’d read about the early 21st century would likely surprise and bewilder us. Possibly, we’d barely recognize ourselves – as would our ancestors, were they privy to our contemporary take(s) on them. Just as myths and folklore evolve over eons – as old tales are rewritten, lost, and rediscovered – history changes wildly based on who is telling the story, and when, and for what purpose. Whether times are precedented or unprecedented is not a matter of fact, but point-of-view.
Still, we, the players on that stage, are not helpless. Our work is in the making of those future historians – in the shaping of that point-of-view. Here and now, we decide what truths will be self-evident in the decades and (hopefully) centuries to come.
Take J. Marion Sims, for example: medical doctor, known as “the Father of Gynecology,” immortalized in statues, medical schools, and public buildings all over the United States. For most of the 130+ years since his death, Sims was lauded as a champion of women, having revolutionized a profoundly neglected field and led the vanguard in techniques ranging from fistula repair to anesthesia. It’s only within the last few decades that Sims’ use of enslaved Black women and girls as test subjects for his agonizing experimental procedures – performed without anesthesia, due to his belief (which many in the medical field still absurdly hold today) that Black people cannot feel pain – began to overshadow his previously spotless legacy.
The reason why it took so long is that prior to the 1990s, Sims was mainly written about by white men, occasionally white women, for whom Sims’ well documented anti-abolitionist stance, Confederate sympathies, and medical (and possibly sexual) abuse of enslaved women and girls simply made him “a man of his times.”
It took Black women scholars like Durrenda Ojanuga and Harriet Washington to shine a light on the harrowing stories of girls like Anarcha, a thirteen-year-old fistula patient on whom Sims operated without sedation more than thirty times, often before an audience comprised of both medical students and morbidly curious looky-loos. But even prior to these scholars’ work, Anarcha was not some deeply buried secret in Sim’s story. In his memoirs and diaries, Sims himself had painstakingly – and proudly – documented his own mistreatment of Anarcha and other young Black women.
A self-evident truth in the worldview of Sims, and many – too many – who came after him, was that Black lives mattered less. All Black researchers did was simply ask that Anarcha be given full consideration in the story – that she be treated as a human being, not merely a tool for the “hero” to make use of on his journey to immortality. Nowadays, the women and girls who suffered under Sims’ knife are more frequently depicted as the main characters of their own story, appearing in documentaries, plays, paintings, and even, at last, a monument installed in Montgomery, Alabama in 2021, dedicated to “The Mothers of Gynecology.”
Here’s the point: the history we learn about Sims now, in 2024, is immensely different from what was taught just 30 years ago. The past, obviously, did not change. The way we see and understand the past changed, in large part thanks to a wider diversity of voices involved in the researching and shaping of history, and culture in general. Such has led to a slow shift in the way humanity views itself: a long overdue upheaval of who fully “counts” as human in the Western world.
The infuriating truth of the matter is, we are still only at the very beginning of that revolution in thought. The powerful and privileged still look much the same as they did 30 years ago, 130 years ago, 230 years ago, only a tiny minority of whom have plucked up the raw ore of the idea that humanity is a trait equally and innately shared by all human beings, none more or less deserving than any other, and are puzzling over what to do with it. How does this idea fit into their worldview? What’s in it for them?
[Historical fiction] brings you up against events and mentalities that, should you choose to describe them, would bring you to the borders of what your readers could bear. The danger you have to negotiate is not the dimpled coyness of the past – it is its obscenity.
Hilary Mantel, The Guardian, 2009
I can’t be the only historical fiction writer who is also a disillusioned former academic. In a sense, all history is historical fiction, in that all historians make decisions about what to highlight and what to suppress. But there’s a spectrum between “truth” and “straight-up bullshit.” Whether you’re writing literature or academic history depends on where in the spectrum you land, or at least aim to land, which itself depends (rather a lot more than some would like to think) on who you are and what you believe.
Even the most impartial and considerate historian can rarely ever hope to get much further than halfway from bullshit. Read too deeply into almost any subject and you’ll soon discover that “experts” are frustratingly fallible people, prone to contradicting themselves, repeating falsehoods, confusing conjecture for empirical fact, encoding bias into praxis, cherry-picking their sources, etc., etc. It certainly doesn’t help that the field of History has been so long dominated by men first, white men second, and wealthy white men third – demographics generally adverse to challenging one another in any way likely to disturb the overall homogeneity of their precious worldview.
The Victorians did immeasurable damage in their time, committing just about every academic fallacy under the sun, shoehorning all the terrible and beautiful chaos of human history into prissy parables about the virtues of piety and obedience. It’s frankly criminal that much of the Elizabethan history I studied in school came secondhand from those Bowdlerizing little creeps, forcing me to waste many hours in simply peeling back layer after layer of bias and bullshit in order to reach a kernel of truth, if any had managed to survive. And yet, the Victorians were only “men of their times,” working in the grand tradition of a field developed in service to the moral and martial instruction of aristocratic young boys. “Close your book, Master Algernon, and tell me: what was Xerxes greatest mistake at Salamis?”
Don’t get me wrong – I loved studying history (theatre history, specifically), but decided to write historical fiction instead because I saw a potential in literature to do what scholarship could not: to somehow transcend the narrative imposed by generations of Ivory Tower greybeards and recover the fugitive now-ness of the past, at the point when it was still present. The raw, churning, messy humanity of it all.
Maybe the potential is there, but achieving it is a pipe-dream. Firstly, because books are meant to be enjoyed. For the sake of the modern reader’s comfort (and sanity), the only way to bridge the gap between, say, 1593, when my novel Lightborne is set, and 2024 is to bring 2024 to 1593, and not the other way around. Characters might speak in an approximation of period dialect; certain events might have to be simplified or ignored; the broad concerns of a person alive in that specific time and place will have to be selected based on their relevance to the story and their relatability to the modern reader. In historical fiction, the “now-ness” of the past is an illusion, refracted through the now-ness of, well, now.
Secondly, as I tried to illustrate above with the case of Sims and Anarcha, historical truth is political. Unfortunately, we novelists are as human as anyone else, each of us with our own little agenda, which is often secret even from ourselves. Nowadays we say that “the personal is political,” meaning we are obliged to examine our biases, and correct them to the best of our ability; meaning also that, for some of us, our personhood, our mere existence, is politicized whether we like it or not. Quite naturally, this effects how we write, and what we write about.
Some writers might aim for a neutral view of humanity – a so-called “universality” – but I’m afraid there’s no such thing. Just as true political centrism is a myth, a “neutral” view of humanity presupposes that there is a single, standard, immutable shape, size, color, and kind of human being. Nearly always, this true “neutral” human is presented to us as white, heterosexual, cisgendered, male, Christian, and “middle-class” (another myth).1 When authors and literary critics employ terms like “universal” to describe stories or characters, they are often (perhaps unknowingly) doing the work of white supremacy.
Those awful Victorians owe much of their awfulness to the fact that they lived in a time and place where the definition of humanity was about as narrow as it gets. Worse, as historians, their profession obliged them to be ruthless guardians of those borders. Prior to the egregious intellectual and cultural wrongs inflicted by early anthropology and psychology – not to mention eugenics, whose poisonous influence on the western world cannot be understated – history was the scholarly field most responsible for shaping the way humans viewed themselves. Therefore, it bears enormous responsibility for our still-blinkered view of the past as a string of white men’s accomplishments, in a world utterly devoid of queer, Black, non-European, non-Christian, disabled, and/or women’s ingenuity, innovation, or simple relevance.
Essentially, every human story is political – because politics determine, firstly, who gets to be human.
So much of human history is selecting what to remember, deifying or reifying some aspects and forgetting others. I’m not suggesting the past haunts us, but until one comes to terms with it, the past will be a haunting – something you can’t shake.
Toni Morrison, interview with BRICK, 2003
Two months ago, many of us were shocked and horrified by images of hundreds of books piled high in dumpsters at the New College of Florida, the former contents of its recently dissolved Gender and Diversity Center. But few of us who had been following the US book bans closely, or who know our history, were surprised to see the inevitable fruits of the right-wing war on free speech and free thought. As Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry point out in their excellent article, incidents of mass book removal, disposal, and/or destruction go back far enough to demonstrate a chilling pattern:
Would-be tyrants have been destroying books for centuries, and once you start destroying books, it’s usually not long until you treat groups of people the same way.
As the infamous Nazi burning of the library at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology made terrifyingly clear, it is a remarkably short step between burning books and burning people.2 And yet, for all that the extreme right’s rhetoric has grown increasingly violent and dehumanizing over the past few weeks, major media outlets such as The New York Times are seemingly twisting themselves into ever more Gordian linguistic knots in effort to normalize the, excuse the phrase, utter batshittery of what is being said and done. Meanwhile, even historically “apolitical” types are looking over their shoulders, wondering, Are we at the point of no return yet? Has it gone that far?
Reader, I guarantee you: in 1933, people were asking themselves the same question.
The presumptive architects of an American autocracy have made their plans freely available to read online. Those of us who like to know what our enemies are plotting can now recite highlights from the Project 2025 playbook point-by-point. The apparent goal is to “take back” the United States to some illusory, simpler time, when humanity was uncomplicated and unalloyed, when white was white and black was black and never the twain should meet – a vision not far from that of those accursed Victorian moralists. But the “perfect,” homogenous nation of obedient, pious and patriotic white, Christian, patriarchal households for which the right desperately longs can only be imposed through violence. Humanity was never thus, and never will be. America was never thus, and never will be.3
By banning LGBTQ+ books and the teaching of Critical Race Theory (which is simply uncensored US History), the right is testing our endurance for violence. For the destruction of books, and the denial of the right to an education, are indeed acts of violence. In the right’s perfect world, we will be told what to accept as “truth,” and forbidden to question it. There will be no historical fiction, only fictional history.
… he who has been treated as the devil, recognizes the devil when they meet.
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
It’s no accident that history and literature are often among the first targets of tyrants. Throughout the tumultuous Tudor era, in which my novel Lightborne is set, theatres, schools and universities became political and sometimes literal battlegrounds as each new religious binge or purge rocked England’s foundations. With the country swinging from Protestant to Catholic to Protestant again, artists and educators frequently found themselves caught in the crosshairs for failing to obey the current dogma, whatever it happened to be. Some conformed, but others suffered horrendous fates. Lightborne is, of course, about one of the most famous dissenters of that age: queer poet, possible spy, and accused heretic, Christopher Marlowe.
Marlowe is now often known for the goriness of his plays, but what truly defines him as a writer was his obsession with power: how it was obtained, defended, employed as a hammer against ordinary people; how power, in its fierce need for ceaseless expansion, could crush whole civilizations in its path. Contrary to the ruling doctrine of his day that power was a gift endowed by God upon those most deserving, Marlowe’s plays suggested, rather, that power was a deadly weapon, won not through one’s innate virtue but through greed, megalomania, venality, and bloodshed.
Under the rule of Elizabeth I, who, as both Head of State and Head of the Church, demanded cultish devotion from her subjects, this was an extremely dangerous position to take, and one that may very well have cost Marlowe his life. Perhaps it was his experiences in espionage that “radicalized” him, as we might put it today; or perhaps it was simply his life as a queer man working in the rough-and-tumble world of the Elizabethan theatre – not the glamorous lifestyle we might think of now, but a precarious, marginal existence, likened in its day to sex work. Either way, Marlowe, like so many who came both before and after him, would have often found himself forced to choose between living freely, or simply living another day.
I dearly hope that one day, we’ll no longer have to concern ourselves with the same fears our ancestors faced 400 years ago. I hope for a future with fewer impossible choices in the name of basic survival.
But that hope feels more tenuous by the day. The Tudor monarchs and Donald Trump may bear little resemblance to one another at the surface, but both arise out of the same vicious impulses: to crush dissent without mercy, to villainize the vulnerable, to pander to grotesque wealth, to self-style as demigods, to reward violence and cruelty, to criminalize critical thought, to censor art and education, to undermine fact, to enforce religious conformity, and to make brutal examples of any who oppose them. Different yet equally terrifying tyrants, with different yet equally ridiculous hair.
Now, in our minute and perishing present, we risk becoming the intellectual property of bigots and autocrats, who will ensure the future remembers us as best suits their narrative. For many, this means losing access to our own humanity, a distinction which far too many human beings are still denied. To be Black or brown, queer or trans, an immigrant, non-Christian, disabled, working-class, unhoused, or certainly, Palestinian – to be in any way distant from historical power and privilege – is to be rendered into historical fiction while you are still alive, written out of your own story and into the shadows of some grand, artificial narrative, at best as villains and bogeymen, at worst as silence, as the blank spaces between words.
What greater threat is there to humanity than the desire to erase our history, our curiosity, our creativity, our defiance, our resilience, our joy? What greater evil is there than dehumanization?
And what are we going to do about it, while we still can?
- If you’ll forgive me nerding-out here for a sec, the notion of class universality in literature goes way back as well. Take Everyman, a play printed in 1530 but possibly much older. As the title suggests, audiences are meant to interpret the main character as a universal representation of “man,” although in the play he is clearly depicted as a person of wealth and resources – much unlike the vast majority of people alive in in the 16th century, who existed in a state of indentured servitude. ↩︎
- I’m echoing Heinrich Heine here, whose book Almansor was among those burned, and contained the words, “Where they burn books, they’ll burn people too.” ↩︎
- “No,” you’ll say, “‘America’ is in fact a nation built upon the blood and bones of colonized and enslaved peoples” – but of course, those people were here, and still are, and are more than their suffering. We can care about justice for the dead without being apathetic to the living. ↩︎
HESSE PHILLIPS 