Portal fantasies and anticolonial uprisings

 C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia books are perhaps the most recognisable portal fantasies there are--The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) is the first book Farah Mendlesohn mentions when she explains the concept of the portal fantasy in Rhetorics of Fantasy, and I've found that I tend to default to that example as well when I try to explain the genre.

It's also my default example when I try to talk about my research into spatiality in children's fantasy after empire. Because apart from being portal fantasies, the Narnia books are deeply rooted in ideas of colonialism and portrayals (both positive and negative) of colonizers. In the first book, published three years after the loss of British India and the independence of India and Pakistan, a group of British schoolchildren travel to a foreign land, discover that the natives are desperate for them to rule them, due to their unique racial background (they are human), and depose and replace the existing tyrant. In this sense, it's wish fulfillment; on the other hand, the White Witch is a colonizer who (unlike these children!) does not have the mandate of the indigenous people--in some ways the book is about natives overthrowing a colonial government that oppresses them. (There isn't space here to document the multiple instances in this book, and across the series, where Lewis seems to be referring to specific historical colonial actions, so you'll have to take my word for it.) The Narnia books dramatize a conflict between what seem to be two opposing and yet equally firmly held convictions--that colonialism is bad, and that indigenous people are inherently unfit to rule themselves. 

This is definitely the case, only more so, in Prince Caspian (1951), the second book to be published in the series. In this book, the four Pevensie children return to Narnia, centuries after their previous rule (time doesn't quite work in the same way across the two worlds). In the intervening years, the country has been victim to settler colonialists from the far-off land of Telmar (they are later proved to be human, and therefore at least genetically fit to rule Narnia); the indigenous population has been drastically reduced, and gone into hiding, so that the Telmarines believe them to have been completely wiped out; the trees, which were previously alive, have become dormant. The current ruler, Miraz, has come to the throne by killing his brother, acting as regent for his young nephew, and then attempting to kill the nephew, the titular Caspian, as well. Caspian flees, and finds himself among indigenous (or "old" Narnians) who rally around him, setting him up as a valid king in opposition to his uncle. The children from our world have thus arrived in the middle of an anticolonial rebellion, and immediately find themselves thrown into the war for Narnia's freedom, where "freedom" is "rule by a less genocidal Telmarine". 

One issue inherent in the portal fantasy genre is that the agency granted to the outworld protagonists is usually not available to the indigenous peoples of the secondary world. The Narnians of LWW can't put together a successful resistance movement until the outside forces of the children and the divine power of Aslan step in to help them. The Old Narnians of PC may already have organised before the Pevensies arrive, but not before Caspian did.

The reason that Prince Caspian is interesting, however, is that all the Old Narnians are not cringingly grateful towards Caspian, closely related to their oppressors, for his help in their struggle. Their attitudes range from servile, to skeptical but pragmatic, to outright hostile (though Nikabrik, the dwarf who takes this position, is revealed to have connections with other evil creatures). This aspect of the story is mostly lost in the 1989 BBC adaptation, definitely geared towards very young British viewers, but the otherwise dire 2008 Disney adaptation of the book does emphasise this ambivalence towards Caspian's role within the resistance. 

I kept thinking back to Prince Caspian when I reread Tamora Pierce's Trickster duology recently. Published in 2003 and 2004, Trickster's Choice and Trickster's Queen are continuations of Pierce's Tortall series, and set shortly after the end of the Protector of the Small books (1999-2002). In these two books, Alianne of Pirate's Swoop, daughter of Alanna (knight, hero, etc of earlier books in the series), frustrated by her mother's refusal to support her in her chosen career as a spy, runs away and finds herself iinvolved in the revolutionary politics of the nearby Copper Isles. This island nation is ruled by white skinned "luarin", who conquered the country some a couple of centuries ago, oppressing and often enslaving the native, or "raka", population. Alianne falls in with a family descended from the royal lines of both the current luarin rulers and the deposed raka and, at the behest of the god Kyprioth, who has "chosen" her, sets about the process of destabilizing luarin rule and putting her queen on the throne. Alianne doesn't travel between worlds, but in the sense that she finds herself in an unfamiliar space, with no way to get back and only limited sources of information about the world she is now inhabiting, this is very much in the tradition of the portal fantasy. 

In the Copper Isles, unlike in Narnia, the indigenous people do have both the skills and the knowledge to organise a rebellion, with or without Alianne. And yet the narrative requires her to be there as the reader's entry point into this world--somehow we're not trusted to follow the whole story from the perspective of those who live here. (This story, from the point of view of Dove, the younger of the two girls whom Aly has been sent to protect, would be fascinating.) As a result, her presence becomes increasingly uncomfortable to me, and I find myself scrutinizing her every action with a "could none of the raka have done that?"

A few years ago, presenting a conference paper on Diana Wynne Jones's Dark Lord of Derkholm, I expressed some discomfort with the ending of the novel, in which the oppressor from another world is finally defeated with the intervention of the gods. Though the plot to overthrown Mr Chesney is the work of people within this world, particularly the wizard Querida, the gods imply that they've been waiting for these people to organise themselves; the implication is that these formerly colonised people are to blame for not freeing themselves sooner. And I wonder if this too is a function of the portal fantasy, that the genre is intrinsically hostile to tales of anticolonial resistance, because it requires that power and agency belong to the outsiders. It would explain much of what feels so uncomfortable about Pierce's two books--and would definitely suggest that aspiring writers of anticolonial uprisings pick a different structure to work with.