“A Song for Dark” at NUP
When I was in school, the English language seemed so easy. Girls were shes and boys were hes and that was all we needed to know.
Then I grew up and went out into the world and met people who consider themselves both she and he, neither she nor he, something else altogether, or out of/beyond a gender spectrum altogether. The simplicity of the language started to feel like a severe limitation. A host of alternative pronouns assailed me: ze and zir, fe and fem–none gaining universal traction, few even known outside the small community of genderqueer folks and their allies. A former teacher of mine said, “I’d prefer to call everyone ‘it’, but people can be so touchy.”
So you can, perhaps, imagine my frustration when trying to write a story whose protagonist isn’t human–or any sort of being we generally think of as having gender. I’ve actually wrestled with this in all of my “Restorying the Sacred” posts. For “Bee and Orchid”, I felt okay using “she” because that is how bee societies work: any bee out gathering “messages” from Orchid would be female. In “S and R Dance On”, you may have noted that I cleverly skirted the issue by avoiding pronouns entirely for S and R.
But now we come to “A Song for Dark”. And I found I simply couldn’t keep saying “Dark” over and over without feeling like I was stuck in a poorly-written soap opera. I was going to have to make a Decision.
“She” or “he” never crossed my mind. I tried “ze”, but that was quite distracting and threw me out of the story–even while I was writing it, which boded ill for people reading it. Plus, to speak of darkness having gender seemed to me to force a complex complex into a fairly limiting framework. So I took a page from my teacher’s book and said “it”, though I worried that that would take away the sense of Dark as a living entity. But, looking at the finished product, I think “it” works. It feels right. This story feels right. The English language lives to fight another day.
“A Song for Dark”, a heartwarming holiday tale about light pollution, at No Unsacred Place.
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