On Resisting Binaries

All the gods, goddesses, and godlings that populate N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms are really complex, wonderful characters – but I especially love Enefa, the goddess of twilight and dawn, of balance. When we enter the story, she has been dead for thousands of years, yet she still has a very strong and active presence. Enefa is the grey area in between her brothers – Itempas, god of day, light, and order, and Nahadoth, god of night, dark, and chaos. Her very power is expressed in a grey light, described as both bright and colorless. She is an answer to the binary; she provides a space – both literally and figuratively – for existence that does not follow the duality of light and dark, order and chaos, good and evil, right and wrong:

“They’re places for life to rest, when it’s not being alive. There are many of them, because Enefa knew your kind needed variety…All the places she made, the ones that resonated best with her, vanished when she died. The only places left now are the ones her brothers created. Those don’t fit her as much. “

I really like how Jemisin uses Enefa to subvert ideas about nature, femininity, and the Mother Earth archetype. Typically, the feminine is associated with the natural – with childbirth, and an accompanying innate ability to nurture. The feminine is seen as emotional and irrational, due to these attachments. Conversely, the masculine archetype is the figure of Father Science, concerned only with the discovery of truth. Masculinity is rational and disciplined, detached and clinical. Yet these gender associations, like most, have no basis in biological facts or social realities. Biology is a network of brutally logical, precise systems that are wholly unforgiving of mistakes or weakness. And it’s science that is rooted in existentialism, a deep yearning to understand who we are and why we were put on this earth. Enefa, as a goddess who systematically and methodically created new life, defies the label of Mother Earth, and becomes a hybrid of these two figures: Mother Science. She drafts countless iterations of life and existence herself, and seeks perfection from both. When her creations are not up to her standards, she destroys them without feelings of sorrow or guilt. If she deems her creations worthy, she allows them to grow, observing and monitoring their progress. An example of her scientific detachment:

Sieh: “Naha was the one who convinced her to let me live and see what I might become.

Yeine: “She was going to…kill you?”

Sieh: “Yes, she killed things all the time, Yeine. She was death as well as life, the twilight along with the dawn.”

Sieh is Enefa’s firstborn child; if one were willing to sacrifice her firstborn, I would say she is quite dedicated to her integrity and the scientific process. It is also another example of her encompassing nature, how she subsumes binary thinking – she is life and death, creation and destruction.