The Fifth Season

The constant threat of apocalyptic natural disaster informs almost every aspect of life and society in the Stillness. Humans have evolved the ability to “sess” (sense) vibrations that indicate a coming earthquake, comms are equipped with “shake-sirens” and stockpile resources in preparation for the possibility of a Season, and even architecture (outside of Yumenes) has developed with maximum stability in mind. However, the most significant effect of the extreme precariousness of life in the Stillness is perhaps the value Sanzed culture places on survival as an end in and of itself.

Sanze prides itself on being—at least theoretically—the only civilization to have survived multiple Seasons. Although Sanze has adapted when doing so was advantageous, it still largely operates as the empire it was at its founding: For instance, while Yumenes found that devolving some power to local comms was “more efficient in the event of a Season,” it continues to collect taxes from its tributaries, which “still follow Imperial systems of governance, finance, education, and more” (464). To accomplish this, however, Sanze has prioritized survival over all else, including any moral considerations. The most obvious example of this is the enslavement and abuse orogenes suffer in the name of community safety.

When Syen, for example, first learns the fate of node maintainers, Alabaster explains that in Sanzed society, “Even the least of us must serve the greater good” (139). Sanzed stonelore is similarly cold-blooded in its insistence that individual human lives only matter to the extent they’re “useful”: “Judge all by their usefulness: the leaders and the hearty, the fecund and the crafty, the wise and the deadly, and a few strong backs to guard them all” (243). This attitude not only works to uphold Sanze’s rigid and oppressive social hierarchy, but also justifies the exclusion of those who serve no clear societal function, which (as Essun notes) amounts to a “death sentence” during a Season (79).

At its most extreme, the prioritization of survival directly leads to murder, with those who are powerful or strong enough resorting to cannibalism as other food sources grow scarce. Nevertheless, the idea of survival as paramount is so deeply embedded in Sanzed culture that most people never even question it: When Syen remarks that the proof of Sanze’s “rightness” lies in its ongoing existence, Alabaster points out, “Survival doesn’t mean rightness. I could kill you right now, but that wouldn’t make me a better person for doing so” (124).

The issue of survival therefore intersects with the novel’s interest in oppression; Jemisin suggests that a society that survives only via exploitation probably deserves to go extinct. However, just as the apocalypse motif permeates both Jemisin’s depiction of the Stillness at large and her depiction of her protagonist’s life, so too does the question of whether survival should be one’s ultimate goal apply to individual characters. In this case, however, the issue tends not to be whether survival at any costs is justifiable, but whether it’s even worthwhile.

For orogenes in particular, survival in Sanze means leading a life that’s empty of almost everything conventionally held to be meaningful about human experience. At worst, orogenes are imprisoned, lobotomized, and drugged to function as node maintainers; at best, they aren’t allowed to choose their own sexual or romantic partners, make decisions about whether or not to have children, parent children they do have, or simply live free of the fear of (often apparently arbitrary) violence. Given all of this, Syenite ultimately concludes that the kindest thing she can do for her son Coru is to kill him before he can be taken to the Fulcrum: “Better that a child never have lived at all than live as a slave […] Alabaster will hate her for this, for leaving him alone, but Alabaster is not here, and survival is not the same thing as living” (441).

With all that said, The Fifth Season isn’t so much condemning survival as it is a particular idea of what survival entails—specifically, the idea that surviving means continuing to exist unchanged. In fact, this is part of what distinguishes Essun’s perseverance from that of Sanze as a whole, since she adopts new and often very different identities as circumstances around her change: “You think, maybe, you need to be someone else […] Previous yous have been stronger and colder, or warmer and weaker; either set of qualities is better suited to getting you through the mess you’re in” (172). In other words, it’s not Sanze’s preoccupation with surviving but rather with surviving in a particular form that proves so destructive; because it equates any kind of change with death, it brutally suppresses anyone or thing that challenges the status quo (ironically jeopardizing its own long-term survival in the process).

The idea that survival can involve radical changes in form also helps explain why cyclical apocalypse is a prominent motif in the novel. As Jemisin depicts it, apocalypse isn’t so much the cessation of all life as it is an extreme but sometimes necessary form of transformation: When violence, subjugation, and self-destruction are essential components of a society, the only way to build a fairer world in which humanity can truly survive is by entirely overhauling the world that preceded it.

The Fifth Season begins with a mother mourning the sudden death of her son—an event so devastating she feels as though her own life has ended. The storyline that follows traces Essun’s single-minded efforts to find her husband, avenge her son's murder, and recover her missing daughter. In this sense, the novel seems to subscribe to a traditional view of motherhood as the most defining experience of a woman’s life. Even Essun’s relationship to Hoa stems (at least initially) from maternal feeling:

When you rose the morning after he joined you, he was already awake, and playing with your tinderbox. […] This is why you’ve decided to keep him with you, even though you think he’s lying about not knowing where he comes from. Because. Well. He is a child (107).

The novel as a whole, however, presents a more complex view of parenthood. For one, the realities of life as an orogene make the decision to have children a fraught one. In fact, it’s often not a decision at all, since the Fulcrum regularly pairs off orogenes in the hopes of creating more and more powerful orogenes via selective breeding. It’s not surprising, then, that the thought of having children made Essun unhappy back when she was Syenite: Doing so was a reminder of her powerlessness in the face of a system that treated even her body as a tool for pursuing its political agenda. What’s more, the fact that orogenic abilities are hereditary means that parenthood, for an orogene, entails bringing a child into a world where they’ll likely be vulnerable to abuse, murder, and enslavement. This helps explain why Essun repeatedly blames herself for Uche’s death, saying at one point that she “killed [him]. By being his mother” (60); when she reproaches herself for having had Uche in the first place, the implication is that it’s immoral even to give life to orogenic children given the state of Sanzed society.

A similar line of thought eventually leads Syen to do what would normally be seen as the ultimate betrayal of her role as a mother: kill her son Coru. In context, however, her decision to do so is clearly an outgrowth of her love and desire to protect him:

Coru is crying. She puts her hand over his mouth and nose, to silence him, to comfort him. She will keep him safe. She will not let them take him, enslave him, turn his body into a tool and his mind into a weapon and his life into a travesty of freedom (441).

Syen’s actions in this passage hearken back to what Alabaster tells her when she worries that Innon thinks she’s a “terrible mother”:

You’re just not the kind of mother Innon wants you to be. You’re the kind of mother our son needs, though. […] Corundum will be strong, someday. He needs strong parents (414).

In other words, given the conditions in which orogenes live, the conventional view of mothers as endlessly nurturing and softhearted may not simply be stifling for a woman like Syen, but outright impractical. This is an idea Jemisin develops further in the sequels to The Fifth Season, when she reveals that the need for secrecy regarding her children’s abilities has at times led Essun to behave harshly towards her daughter.

Jemisin’s ambivalent depiction of traditional motherhood is also demonstrated by her decision to personify the earth as male rather than female, substituting a “Father Earth” figure for the more common “Mother Earth.” Given Western gender norms surrounding parenting, the effect of this is to downplay the idea that the earth is necessarily caring and life giving (i.e. maternal). Of course, the people of the Stillness have good reason to feel that the earth isn’t a benevolent god. What’s particularly noteworthy, however, is the rationale Sanzed mythology provides for Father Earth’s hostility:

Earth our father knew He would need clever life, so he used the Seasons to shape us out of animals […] The people became what Father Earth needed, and then more than He needed. Then we turned on Him, and He has burned with hatred for us ever since (115).

Jemisin eventually elaborates that “turning on” Father Earth involved exploiting his resources and, ultimately, “destroy[ing] his only child” (revealed in sequels to be the moon) (380). In other words, The Fifth Season depicts the earth itself as, like Essun, a grieving parent seeking revenge against those who hurt him and his child.