"Seeing Myself as the Villain" by Gracie Bialecki
N.K. Jemisin’s cast of characters in her urban fantasy, The City We Became, is an unabashed mix of gay, trans, Native, Black, and immigrant. When Manny, the personification of the borough of Manhattan, calls himself a “generic, all-American boy (non-white version),” it easily describes his fellow protagonists—they’re your average (non-white) New Yorkers. As Jemisin matches her characters to their borough’s demographics, she creates a narrative that’s closer to reality than the typical white-centric work. Diversity is the norm, rather than the exception.
In The City We Became, when cities reach a certain age, they come to life and choose a human avatar to embody them. During New York City’s “birth” an evil entity attacks and injures the primary avatar. If the enemy succeeds in taking over the city, New York stands to lose itself—its unique, vibrant, city-ness. And in order protect it, new avatars from each of the boroughs join together to protect the injured one and save the city’s soul. As the evil entity continues its assault on New York, it turns its inhabitants into consumer zombies, infests chain stores, and destroys iconic restaurants to replace them with high-rise condos. By speeding up gentrification, it weakens the city, mirroring tactics already plaguing the United States.
Among the personified boroughs, the only white avatar is Aislyn, an Irish-American who was born and raised on Staten Island, which she never leaves, and resists helping the others. This is due in large part to the xenophobia and paranoia which permeate her family. In the first scene where Aislyn encounters the enemy in its human form, she reacts the way she’s been conditioned:
…everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eye patches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear.
The Woman in White, the story’s villain, is so named because it takes the form of a white woman with silvery hair. It’s unaccustomed to being human and ends up slipping between versions of this disguise, sometimes wearing an expensive white suit, other times with hair shifting between “tawny, near-white” and platinum blonde, often “as pale as her outfit.” Simultaneously Aryan and alien, the Woman in White projects an aura of evil, wealth, and power.
In an interview with The New Yorker, N.K. Jemisin discusses how the novel’s themes evolved as a response to the works of H.P. Lovecraft. "This man literally saw the people of New York as monsters,” she says. “That’s what I decided to write against.” Despite being regarded as the grandfather of American science fiction, Lovecraft was also deeply racist. Jemisin explains how this permeates his work:
His biases were the basis of his horror. The monsters came from his own fear of brown people, of immigrants, of Jewish people…Lovecraft spends a lot of time lavish in his description on how terrifying it is to do something like walk through Chinatown, and look at these alien, frightening faces speaking in this terrible language. You feel his fear as you read these passages. You feel his disgust…
Yet Jemisin’s depiction of the Woman in White has none of Lovecraft’s repulsion. Rather, the villain is given its own story and we see that it’s working to save itself. The City We Became isn’t simply a jarring attack on white privilege, it’s a necessary nudge towards reality. When Aislyn befriends the Woman in White, the novel’s antagonists become its two white women. By inverting white savior tropes, Jemisin shows how systemic advantages have weakened cities while diversity remains their strengths.
Over the summer, I cut my shoulder-length blond hair into a pixie with shaved sides. I also dyed it an ashy violet, and of all the characters in the novel, I most closely resembled the Woman in White. The woman who’s turning New York City into a soul-less shell of itself.
When I lived in New York, I worked at an artisanal coffee and kombucha distributor. We supplied sleek expensive cafés—the ones that are telltale signs of a neighborhood pricing out its original businesses and inhabitants. I used my salary to pay exorbitant rent on the border of Williamsburg and Greenpoint and admittedly did little to support the community I’d inserted myself into.
I’ve never lost the wide-eyed feeling of being swooped up in New York’s unique energy, thrown into its whims of glorious or soul-crushing days. But when I lived there, I wasn’t fighting for the city, the way that Jemisin’s heroes do.
For three decades, almost every book, movie, and magazine I ingested had only affirmed my sense of belonging. The characters matched my physique, my skin tone, or my class, and the narratives encouraged me to go forth and continue to be accepted as I am. But I don’t live in a world filled exclusively with slender pale bodies, and continuing to believe in and seek affirmation for this false reality is a perpetuation of inequality. It was striking and inspiring that the characters in The City We Became defy this construct and allow readers who resemble them to be the heroes for a change.
And if that left me in the unfamiliar role of villain, I didn’t feel threatened or wrongly accused. Rather than feeling attacked, I could see my own reflection, however unflattering, and by not affirming my personhood, the novel directly questioned my implicit righteousness.
While the Woman in White is nefarious, she’s human enough to relate to, which is part of the reason why Aislyn claims her as a friend. It would have been easy to brush off a comparison to pure evil, but the small reminders of wrongdoings are harder to deny. The work also made me think of my own fiction and my characters who tend to perpetuate the tropes I now question.
I can’t change my writing overnight—it comes from a barge full of ideas I’ve been hauling for years tangled with new ones I’m still processing. Though I never considered writing fantasy in the past, The City We Became was an unexpected inspiration. Bursting with fresh characters and serious ideas, it showed me how liberating the creation of a new reality can be. Maybe by breaking free of my attachment to fiction, I’ll be able to write a world that’s closer to the one I want to live in.
Gracie Bialecki is an author, performance poet, and co-founder of New York City's Thirst storytelling series. She lives and writes in Paris, France. Her novel Purple Gold is available as an ebook from ANTIBOOKCLUB.
