The City We Became by N.K. Jemisen is an urban fantasy thrill-ride with big social justice heart and a plot that symbolically resonates with current events—the current occupant of the White House, alt-right, and Black Lives Matter. The City We Became is a wonderfully plotted, edge-of-your-seat page-turner.
Brooklyn, Bronca, Padmini, and Manny discover they have been invoked to serve as avatars for their respective boroughs (Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, Manhattan). New York is under attack by supernatural creatures led by a mysterious Woman in White and they have the responsibility to join together to save the city and wake the sleeping primary avatar of New York. Their guide Sao Paolo (the Brazilian city’s avatar) warns them cities that fall become lost forever like Pompeii and Atlantis.
These four boroughs must work together with the fifth—Staten Island—to save New York. But Aislyn Houlihan is the daughter of an Irish cop and has had an upbringing full of racism, misogyny, abuse, and homophobia. She becomes easy prey for the Woman in White, who uses Aislyn’s “fear of the other” to make Aislyn feel threatened so she has immediate suspicion of the other boroughs, who are people of color.
The Woman in White herself is an avatar or representative of a larger, alien supernatural force bent on corruption and destruction of cities. Although this force often manifests as enormous, tentacled Lovecraftian creatures, the real threat to the city is bigotry. The Woman in White leads a growing army of brainwashed zombies, police who are actually monsters, and an alt-right group of artists who work to destroy and subvert culture. Their goal is to gentrify New York City and stir up racial animosity to help kill the city.
Reading The City We Became not only brought the pure joy of entertaining art created by a master storyteller, but was also a galvanizing experience to be reading it during the Black Lives Matter George Floyd protests. Many elements of the story resonated eerily with real world events. (I concurrently had a similar experience bingeing DC Comics’ Watchmen series that opens with the burning of Black Wall Street in Tulsa and which was made available without cost just before the president held a racially-charged rally during the BLM protests in that same city…) Early on in Jemisin’s novel, a homophobic, racist woman in a park wields her cellphone as a weapon against Manny and his roommate, which paralleled a similar incident near the beginning of the George Floyd protests. The Woman in White and her alt-right agents operated similarly to how they operate in the real world, stirring up trouble, breeding hatred, wrapping themselves in the flag or the Constitution. And the alt-right boys vandalizing and taking lighter fluid to Bronca’s art gallery must now remind one of the white supremacists who were burning down and vandalizing stores during the BLM protests. The first villains to appear in Jemisin’s novel are the police, and they are literal monsters. Neither this novel, nor the Watchmen series are prophetic; they are mirroring and bringing to light the sinister undercurrents of America. The City We Became is smart and fast, a delightful and engaging read. Jemisin powerfully engages her reader with transformative art.
