Can the University be a place of both training and transformation?
Sofia Samatar’s slender novella The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is, on the one hand, obviously science fiction. Set in a far future where a drowned Earth has long been abandoned and humanity has taken to the stars as refugees in a fleet of mining ships, the story concerns a woman who is a professor at the University on one of the Ships. The woman brings up a boy from the Hold below as part of a “scholarship program,” to teach him the ways of the people who live in the above. She is the daughter of a man who himself came up from the Hold, and her place within the University, and society above, is precarious: while all people in the Hold are chained to one another for life, some people in the space above are ankleted, subject to their limbs being controlled at the displeasure of their social superiors, and always in some degree of danger of being sent down to the Hold.
On the other hand, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is clearly, painfully, about academia now, and the sometimes farcical attempts to do “diversity work” within it. The boy and the woman are examples of how people of color struggle to fit themselves within an institution that is fundamentally premised on whiteness, the woman mentoring the boy and attempting to remedy the gaps in his scholarship education, all while being under pressure to produce brilliant research that justifies her own place in the University. Of course, she has put her own reputation on the line to restart the scholarship program in the first place. Meanwhile her colleagues, Drs. Gil, Marjorie, Alvin, and others—it is not a coincidence that they are the only people in the novella with names—are quite literally above these minor concerns, as they go about their lives unankleted and free, phones in hand.
The boy struggles mightily in his transition from the Hold to life above, suddenly bereft of his chain gang and without anyone else who understands the social rituals that make life in the Hold bearable for those entrapped in it. When the boy’s experiences and upbringing prompt him to react a certain way to a particular stimulus—upon seeing another person from the Hold in the open air, for example—his uncomprehending professor sees his behavior as disruptive. The woman, Gil, and their colleagues must mobilize credibility and institutional savvy to avoid the boy being sent back to the Hold for what is not even a mistake, but merely a difference. The “disruption” is spun as enrichment for the boy’s unankleted classmates: “While it was true that Alvin had lost class time through the boy’s disruption, said Gil, the students had gained something of lasting value. The regular students, the ones with phones, had received a lesson in difference. It was good for them, Gil said. And the boy had not been expelled.”
“Everything is good for them, the woman thought suddenly. The thought startled her. Its violence.”
I’m not sure whether the painful incisiveness of Samatar’s observations about academia will come through quite so clearly to readers who haven’t spent time there as an academic rather than an undergrad. I have a PhD from a public university with an extremely liberal reputation, but eventually I realized that reputation and reality are quite different—particularly in older, independently funded departments. There were so many quietly vicious asides in this novella that I frequently felt as though I wanted to stop reading and stare at the wall. An interlude about how the woman and her colleagues fought for years in department and committee meetings to rename the Old Knowledge (humanities) to the Older Knowledge, and accounted it a great victory, was a particularly keen shot, but another aside about how the woman was hired on an irregular grant timeline—and so apparently has to make do with a secondhand computer and a printer code that’s only good for the student copy machine—was also wince-inducing.
Academia has convinced itself—or maybe never tried to think otherwise—that committee meetings about diversity work are the same as doing diversity work, that a university can offer a land acknowledgment at every public event and call it a day and be decolonial. This reality underlies a chasm between the woman and her colleagues that she only dimly senses, and eventually she is proved to be as naive as another colleague accuses her of being: unforeseen developments confront her with not only the economic reality underpinning the Ships and the Holds, but also the fact that one of her closest departmental colleagues has never really respected her as a person or as a scholar, and has always thought of her as ankleted, lesser, Other.
The solution that Samatar offers, and that the woman finds, is to expand beyond the confines of the University and the society that structures it. One member of the boy’s chain gang, whom he misses terribly, is a prophet. His stories of a River that is a Sea, of old Earth where people did not look up nor down but rather out—to the horizon that lay between them—eventually help the boy and the woman realize that there are other possibilities. The chain is not just the physical chains around the ankles of the people in the Hold, unlocked only when they die and are taken, hands folded, to the compost train. The chain is also a web of connection between all of us—“So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it,” as Sherlock Holmes once observed.
The woman’s unthinking appeal to the strictures of the University and the false loyalty of her colleagues, when the story comes to a crisis point, only expose the fact that none of them can be relied upon for liberation. The boy, gifted artistically as well as sensitive in unusual ways, in this way emerges as the novella’s linchpin, unwilling or unable to wholly accommodate to the world above as the woman’s father did, and thus showing her how to expand her horizons beyond the University. The real liberation lies in seeing one’s interdependence with others—feeling it, relying on it, mobilizing it to change the world. The Horizon, the Practice, and the Chain is a science fiction novella because of the precise form that these incipient changes take in the story. But its point is applicable far beyond the confines of the Ship, and of academia.