The Mulai is a hyper-intellectual, literary work of anthropological-linguistic science fiction, one that’s deeply concerned with problems of translation, and if you’re reading it in English then it is itself a work in translation, so there are layers upon layers. The translator, Julia Sanches, gives numerous footnotes about nuances of Spanish-language wordplay and homophony. These appear interspersed between other footnotes that are integral to the original text. The back cover copy suggests that the book “pairs well” with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), and I’ll just alert the prospective reader right now that it’s helpful to have already read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities before embarking on The Mulai.
The story fits within a classic science-fiction framework of the lost colony that is rediscovered by the home world. At the point of recontact, the culture of the people known as the Mulai has evolved substantially from its origins in what seems to have been a planned utopian project, which brought with it a text known as the Libertarian Codex. Many of their mores derive from deliberate repudiation of norms that would be familiar to readers from the present-day Anglosphere, such as the nuclear family, various body taboos, and the English language itself. The standard relationship format among the Mulai is the “trinomial,” a sort of throuple. Urination, defecation, and sexual activity all take place in full public view. The culture is broadly collectivist, although the reader is warned that such words and concepts may not map well onto Mulai ways of thinking.
Mulai cosmology has developed in the presence of existing, self-sustaining, but imperfectly functioning technological systems. The population occupies a “habitable zone” within which terraforming has been partially successful. Outside the habitable zone, temperatures average sixty-some degrees below zero. Within the zone is a desert-like environment with four “seasons” that alternate unpredictably, lasting hours to days at a time. For the most part, the Mulai remain within the Dome where climatic conditions are controlled, but journeys to another structure known as the Temple are made on specific occasions, including to access fertilisation technology for reproductive purposes. Smaller “domelets” are scattered about, but not all have operational interior climate systems. Machinery in the Dome and domelets is maintained by service robots known as “wolves,” and the Mulai do not clearly distinguish these as being of a fundamentally different nature from the snakes and scorpions that abound in the desert. These latter creatures are edible, in a pinch, though the Mulai have a strong cultural preference for food from cans.
The colonists were accustomed to receiving regular supply drops, but at some point the deliveries ceased. A Mulai woman named Flukeh is said to have made the voyage from Dome to Temple in the year zero a.C. (“after containers”) wherein she experienced a series of revelations—about a god or gods (Mulai language does not inflect for the plural) known as Dog—that have become integral to Mulai understanding. “At times we are grateful for something that no one has done; the object of that gratitude is Dog,” Flukeh intones. Her pronouncements are collected as The Teachings of Flukeh, alternatively known as the First Amendment to the Libertarian Codex. The Mulai also believe in a vital force they refer to as “ionizing radiation” which can be amassed and transferred in ways both physical and, for want of a better term, spiritual.
Our story picks up several generations after the end of the cargo shipments, when a stray transmission from the planet is received Earthside. The message has many confusing and intriguing linguistic features. No one has any knowledge of the colonial mission and its history, so it’s decided to send a small contingent to investigate. When his colleagues depart for home, one of the group of interplanetary visitors, Dr. Nahum Cordovero, stays behind to learn more of the ways of the Mulai.
Dr. Cordovero is referred to as “The Archaeologist,” but his position observing a living society would seem to smack more of anthropology than of the study of dusty artifacts. As an anthropologist, Dr. Cordovero has a lot of Napoleon Chagnon energy (see Yanomamo: The Fierce People [1968] and the surrounding controversy): He’s a bit too eager to participate in the sexual and pharmacological rituals of the people he’s observing, and his interpretations of their language and culture should probably be treated with a degree of skepticism. The book we are reading, though, is mediated through Dr. Cordovero’s lens. Chapters consisting of his personal journal entries alternate with excerpts from his official report on the mission. Other chapters are headed with the names of certain of the Mulai, but would also seem to have been authored by Dr. Cordovero.
One of these central personages among the Mulai is a woman named Faida, a figure contemporaneous with Dr. Cordovero’s visit, and herself a kind of mirror Cordovero. She discovers a historical text, and a set of artifacts at the Temple, which become her obsession as she attempts to translate Spanish into Mulai. This is particularly challenging because, as we come to understand, the Mulai language is not that easy to pin down. In the words of Dr. Cordovero:
… I wrote the first Mulai dictionary. Their language is frenetic, unlike any of ours. It doesn’t change from generation to generation but from one hour to the next. It doesn’t bother the Mulai when they don’t understand what is written. To them, what’s written can always be understood. By the time a Mulai rereads a text they’ve authored, what they read is no longer what they originally wrote. In a way, the same is happening to us; it’s the fate of any language. The only difference is that, while the Mulai find joy in this process, we find nothing but despair.
Not only is the language exceedingly flexible, but the Mulai concept of authorship is rather different from our own. A Mulai looking at written material will happily rearrange the pages, which are not fixed or bound together in any way, into new orders either random or pleasing. This momentary arrangement is a kind of authorship, and the reader-writer may choose to sign the pages with a personal glyph which itself becomes part of the text.
The relationship of the descendent Mulai to their founding texts is therefore a slippery one. Some oral recitations, such as the ones they learned from the “loudhailer” or radio, are mere sounds to them, to be performed as “chants” on ceremonial occasions. (These are, of course, transmissions that, in their original context, consisted of call signs and instructions for operating the equipment.) Other texts, like the Libertarian Codex, have proved perhaps too flimsy a basis on which to build a culture, and so the culture had rapidly creolized into a form that finds equilibrium in a state of perpetual change. One has to wonder how many of our own beliefs and customs are based in unreliable material taken out of context and freighted with new meaning through generations of use.
It’s a truism that all ethnography is really auto-ethnography, and in studying the Mulai we study ourselves. When, in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo speaks to Kublai Khan of his travels he speaks always implicitly of Venice. To speak directly of Venice would be to lose Venice; in speaking of other cities he has, perhaps, lost a little of Venice each time. To speak is to transform into words; to transform a thing is to lose the original. How much more so, then, in the act of translation? To translate is impossible; the translator is therefore an impossible person. The reader, who partakes of these impossibilities, comes to know only herself, and only the self that is made by language. Read, then, and be transformed.