The Word for Human is Violence
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1972) examines whether violence is human nature or not.
Humans and killing go together like Subarus and Colorado. We kill one another with such frequency that we’ve developed cute little names for all the different kinds—genocide, xenocide, fratricide, regicide, etc. And we can’t forget about the world’s favorite pasttime: war. War for resources, conquest, religion, independence, or glory is so synonymous with human history that it seems no fantasy or sci-fi story can exist without it. We simply can’t get enough of killing each other!
“Killing is the sweetest thing there is”
But why do we kill? Is it hard-wired into our brain, as some research suggests? And why do some of us kill with propensity while most of us are sickened at the thought? Would those of us who find the act morally repugnant have a change of heart if we lived in the Middle Ages, or Ancient Hawaii, when war and killing ran rampant? Would we discover a deeply-repressed lust for killing if given the chance?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, obviously, but I think about them often, as do many of my favorite stories.
The Word for World is Forest (1972) was written at the height of American involvement in Vietnam, when Ursula K. Le Guin, living in London, had no outlet other than writing for her ethical and politcal opinions (in America, she would organize and participant in nonviolent protests). Le Guin wrote in her introduction, “1968 was a bitter year for those who opposed the war. The lies and hypocrisies redoubled: so did the killing. Moreover, it was becoming clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and grainlands and the murder of noncombatants in the name of “peace” was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP, and the murder of the creatures of the Earth in the name of ‘man’”.
“I never wrote a story more easily, fluently, surely—and with less pleasure.”
While the Vietnam War is important context, paralleled in the story by the use of “firejelly” (napalm), guerilla warfare, and deforestation, it would be a crime to reduce The Word for World is Forest to an anti-Vietnam protest. The novella draws on countless indigenous genocides and oppressed cultures and histories, such as Aboriginal Australian ‘dreamtime’, and further serves as a larger commentary on colonialism and the patterns of ecological destruction that have quickly become the greatest threat facing the modern human race.
Source: Guitty Mojabi on Artstation
The Word for World is Forest asks a simple question which Le Guin unpacks with nuanced complexity over a snappy 170 pages: What happens when violent human colonizers clash with a pacifist, peaceful native people?
Le Guin’s story takes place in a future universe in which humans have colonized a large number of planets, including Earth (known as Terra). Their latest colonization project takes place on what they call New Tahiti, though its native name is Athshe. Terra is described by Captain Davidson—a vile man who rapes and enslaves the natives, whom he calls “creechies”, and sees himself as the epitome of human progress—as a “tamed planet”, where “New Tahiti wasn’t". And that’s why Davidson is on New Tahiti: to tame it. Because Terra’s resources have been depleted by this taming, they have invaded Athshe, and are in the process of clearing vast swaths of forest for their lumber, which is sent back to Terra where it is more valuable than gold.
MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD (first half of book - skip next two paragraphs of summary)
Davidson, a representation of everything wrong with the colonial mindset, incites the story by raping and murdering the wife of Selver, the main native Ashthean protagonist.
Selver aptly realizes that the ‘yumens’ won’t stop their conquest and violence, and decides to take a page out of their book, launching a full-scale guerilla attack campaign and killing thousands of humans in the process, including all their women.
END SPOILERS
I’ll spare any further details for the sake of spoilers, but the important thing to note is that the Terrans have induced damage that cannot be undone. They introduced violence and killing to a people that did not know it. At the end of the book, we get a confrontation between Selver and Davidson that speaks to this.
“We’re both gods, you and I. You’re an insane one, and I’m not sure whether I’m sane or not. But we are gods. There will never be another meeting in the forest like this meeting now between us. You gave me a gift, the killing of one’s kind, murder. Now, as well as I can, I give you my people’s gift, which is not killing. I think we find each other’s gift heavy to carry. However, we must carry it alone.”
So, back to the question I posed at the start of this post: Are humans innately violent?
The already complex question is driven to further complexity by the definition of a ‘human’. In The Word for World is Forest, the native Athsheans see the Terrans as the same species—human—but the Terrans do not see the Athsheans as human. They are lesser-than in every way: shorter, covered in fur, uncivilized, lazy, and with customs that appear innately unhuman.
Of course, this rhetoric has been used for thousands of years to oppress indigenous and non-white humans, and likely, the “creechies” are a metaphor for this oppression. But I was also struck by another similar line of thinking that illustrates our incessant need for superiority over the ‘other’—Neanderthals.
We discover from Mr. Or, an offworld visitor on a separate mission, that indeed, the Athsheans are human, much in the same way that Neanderthals are human—only a sub-species of Homo sapiens, adapted to their environment with stocky build and hairy skin. Many of us think of Neanderthals as less advanced, hunched, savage brutes who went extinct because of their inferiority to humans. But did you know that their brains were as large as ours? Did you know that they painted, made art, fashioned tools from wood and stone, and perhaps even had musical instruments and funeral rites (those last two points are under debate)? Did you know that they crossbred with Homo s. sapiens? Did you know that they stood as upright as us; the hunched posture is a common misconception drawn from Neanderthal remains that likely had osteoporosis.
If we are to accept, then, that the native Athsheans are human, what does that tell us about violence? Will the Athsheans reclaim their peaceful ways now that humans have introduced murder, rape, and enslavement? This question is left ambiguous, but it would seem unlikely.
“Sometimes a god (Davidson) comes. He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”
I quite liked Sean Gyunes summation of Le Guin’s message in his Reactor Magazine article: “All of this is Le Guin’s way of saying, perhaps, that colonialism cannot be undone—its effects linger in the heart, in the culture, in the soil and forest, in the stories a people have to tell and the songs they sing. Lyubov puts it this way: colonization brought Death out of the dream-time and into the world-time, unleashing new possibilities for violence, retaliation, and meaning-making. What is real cannot become unreal; what walks the world cannot return to dreaming.”
The United States has an illustrious history of oppression and war—whether direct, like our military involvment in Vietnam, or indirect, like our current military support of Israel. We are not the freedom-loving image that we portray. We are oppressors, we are violent, we are powerful, we are driven by greed and perceived supieriority. We are a land of immigrants that rejects and demeans them.
“Some people say the military breeds killing machines. I say it is only the finishing training”
Our culture of war and violence may or may not be avoidable. It’s hard to imagine isolated societies, such as those in pre-contact Polynesia, independently developing rich histories of warfare without some innate desire for violence.
On the other hand, pacifist societies indeed exist, and we as humans have a responsiblity to strive towards this ideal and to right our wrongs—past, present, and future.
