The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt. 22: Som Paris

 

Tending our micorrhizal networks

by Som Paris

 Many gardeners who have learned how soil works lay down their deep-dig tools, stop feeding plants with fertilizers, and make a subtle but important shift: they begin to feed the soil itself. This allows undisturbed soil to keep its delicate structures and the gardener can actually tend the micorrhizal networks of funghi within the soil that move nutrients around and network all the rooted in plants. 

 As writer-readers, we can do the same, and this year that is precisely what I have done. If we stop reading just to write that one next book and instead read to feed, heal and transform the deepest parts of our selves, then our books will bloom out of us organically. They will make more authentic sense, bursting into the world with stronger truths.

Colonial capitalism has separated us all from our original cultures, from our ancestors, from everything that used to be understood as vital, essential. This year, in my reading, I have turned back to feed that soil and let those magical micorrhizal connections grow. 

Many of the books that I have read this year will be of limited interest to others, which is precisely what feeding the inner soil makes so interesting: eschewing homogenizing capitalist culture, we become beautifully different from one another once again. Together we create a pluriversal wealth that breeds more creativity. This is not a superficial diversity within an homogenized universality, this is a rich, lavish pluriversality.

 

Books such as the Popol Vuh; A Lo Sucu Sumucu (Raízes Mayas del habla Jíbaro); Decolonial Psychology; or The Myth of Indigenous Carribean Extinction; Cannibal Recipes; might be of limited interest to many. But Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, by Gloria Anzaldua, is a text that I would fully recommend to anyone placed on the margins of society who wants to turn the wounds of colonialism and cisheteronormativity into magic in a way that connects us to all other marginalized souls, just like micorrhizal networks. 

 

I would also recommend I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World to just about every human with a pumping heart. In these political times it can indeed feel like the end of the world for many, especially racialized trans people like the author Kai Cheng Thom. Somehow she holds onto the thin thread of what really matters. How do we continue to choose love, when we are all so scared and wounded? How can our communities be ones of care and strength rather than fear and virtue-signaling?

 

A work of fantasy that fits in perfectly with my decolonial path is the finale to Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between Earth and Sky trilogy, Mirrored Heavens. Rebecca’s work finds an esteemed place within the growing body of literature that roots fantasy into the non- European culture of the writer. Africa is exploding with fantasy steeped in its own mythological roots, like Black, Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James or The Binti books by Nnedi Okorafor, just to pick a couple (that I have actually read) out of hundreds (that I have not yet had the pleasure to read!) 

 

For me, though, Rebecca Roanhorse’s work, drawing from Mesoamerican and Caribbean indigenous cultures, feels like coming home to fantasy for the first time. The politics and conniving intrigues are crunchy and satisfying, and the themes of generational trauma, though imagined in a world without European colonialism, speak to our own generational wounds. The characters are wonderfully diverse in the ways that life has set them in motion with vastly different needs and desires, pushed together to make a truly epic story. Rebecca does well in the way that she simply and without fuss dropped in a trans woman, much in the way that N.K. Jemisin does in the Broken Earth trilogy; she lets you know that our existences are real without turning us into a morbid plot point. I think it’s a great way for cis women to ensure that we (trans people and in this case, trans women) do not get swept quickly up into invisibility by the heavy, persistent domination of cisnormativity that narrates the world as if we never existed. And it does this without fetishizing us or using us as spectacle or plot device. She also manages well to depict cultures with more than two genders, as well as other cultures ignorant of those gender forms, all within the same mesoamerican universe: a realistic and well crafted touch.

 

These are some glimpses into my world of books this year. It has changed who I am, connected me to my own ancestral lines, and transformed how I am in the world. All of that will shine through the books I am writing. I can’t wait to see what next year brings. 

 

Som Paris is the author of Raven Nothing, which Aqueduct Press published in 2020. She was born in Oklahoma to a pair of traveling preachers who carried her on their missions around the world, inadver­tently making her an ardent internationalist. She ran away to Australia after high school and ran out of money studying tropical ecology, eventually surviving by living in a tree. She then moved to England, where she dove into studying history, literature, and philosophy for a BA and MA. More recently, she moved to the wilds of Galiza, in north Iberia. When she came out as transgender, she turned her wild patch of land into a nature retreat for trans and queer people; she can still be found there now.