A children’s book featuring Crake, Toby, Snowman, Zeb, and others!
Author: Linda Luu
Crakers for Kids: A Final Project Reflection
Beyond its ecofeminist critique, the Maddaddam trilogy is about language and storytelling (not that these are mutually exclusive concepts). Atwood constantly plays with narrators and narratives within books as well as across books. The stories themselves are about characters and groups of characters (e.g. Snowman to the Crakers, the God’s Gardeners, the Maddaddamites) that are defined by the way in which they interpret the world around them and share their beliefs, a basic form of storytelling. I think that our group’s decision to make a children’s book about the Crakers and their origins is thus a natural one. A children’s book follows the passing on of writing from Toby to Blackbeard at the end of Maddaddam. We imagine that this book would be created a few generations after Blackbeard as a way for Crakers, Craker-human hybrids, and/or humans to explain their origins to their children as well as tell cautionary tales or important lessons.
Each person in our group was responsible for a character to write a story about. I wrote about Snowman/Jimmy, in particular his role in relation to the Crakers. The process raised a lot of questions about what aspects of the story to distort. For instance, I chose to sugarcoat the relationship between Jimmy, Crake, and Oryx and describe them as best friends because this is how the Crakers would have liked to think about them. The story is titled “Snowman’s Sacrifice” because Jimmy/Snowman is portrayed as an endlessly benevolent character, constantly making sacrifices for the Crakers. We know from the book that his feelings towards the Crakers are far more complicated and even negative, but once again the Crakers perceive him to be an intermediary between themselves and Crake and Oryx. His relaying of the words of Crake and Oryx as well as his decision to “look” after the Crakers becomes an act of good will. This process of blurring or even warping the plot felt similar to what Atwood does throughout the novel, particularly in “The Story So Far” section in which Atwood summarizes previous books or the way the narrative changes depending on different focalizers. In many ways, I found this project to be an exercise in focalizing and understanding the function of stories in collective culture. It reminds me of my favorite line from The Year of the Flood, “We’re sitting around the fire…The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too…” How we understand characters differs depending on where the light shines and who it shines for and I think the Atwood meant this line to be about storytelling, especially as its around a fire like people telling campfire stories. I also wanted to note that for the most part our group wrote our stories separately and it was interesting to see motifs emerge across them. Specifically, we all used the “clearing of the chaos”/the flood as a turning point or temporal marker. Events and ideas became defined as pre-chaos and post-chaos for all the characters.
The trilogy ends with Blackbeard picking up language and I think that if we follow this trajectory, it is not unlikely that generations after him would create books for the purpose of explaining ways of living to their children, especially given the way the Crakers seem to want an explanation for everything. This was the other challenging part about the project- imagining what the future for Crakers/humans. Some questions that we grappled with were what would society look like after the mating of Crakers and humans? Would there be a fine line between Crakers and humans? Would a hierarchy emerge? What technologies would this new society develop? What symbols would they know? We did not jump to any assumptions to this questions, but rather picked up from where the books left off. Even if these stories became dated to new generations of Crakers, there is something about fairy tales and fables that preserves the past and is even otherworldly/othertimely.
Mostly, I really enjoy the different directions that our class took this project in and the variety of digital forms that these three books will now take on. In particular, I am really excited to see how folks constructed a calendar and conceptualized Craker-time because I can see many overlaps with our project and how we defined time (pre-chaos/post-chaos, visually through phases of the moon) and ideas about what does time mean given the Craker lifespan. I feel like this project has been a really tangible way of seeing how creative works lend themselves to one another and build a body of work and knowledge.
Suggested Reading List
Corr, Charles A. “Bereavement, Grief, and Mourning in Death-Related Literature for Children.” Omega-Journal of Death and Dying 48.4 (2004): 337-363.
I was wondering how to discuss death and violence within my story and decided after reading this article that these topics raise important questions for children to grapple with. Especially with the shorter lifespan, I assume Craker kids will need to become familiar with death, so I chose to address it pretty explicitly.
On the function of children’s literature.
Understanding the Circular Narrative in Atwood’s MaddAddam
I’m going to return to our many discussions about choices in narrator/narrative to open up a general discussion about what Atwood’s ending means. The narrator in “MaddAddam,” particularly towards the end of the novel, is constantly shifting and being handed off and picked up. We go from Zeb telling his story to Toby to Toby telling it to the Crakers to Blackbeard telling it to the Crakers. In a story which ultimately ends in mating between Crakers and humans and the recreation of “civilization” post apocalypse, this narrative style mimics the way in which one generation leads to the next and one society gives way to the next as mapped out in the novel. In fact, many aspects of the story itself are come full circle in this way, such as how the Crakers and humans return to “Egg” they were created in for a final battle which decides how they will continue existing in this world.
By the end of the novel, we see the Crakers and humans rebuilding many of the fundamental aspects of our society. They are using religion, commemorative rites, and other cultural symbols. They are using language and writing to record. They even practice law in the form of the trial. What does Atwood mean by all of this? Why is the choice to reinhabit the earth, and with so many of the same cultural practices and institutions? Is this cycle of destruction and restoration hopeless? I am hesitant to say it is human nature to turn to these ways of living and meaning making and to center our lives around institutions like gender and religion. But, I am confused as to why Atwood would present all of the problems and violence that comes from a society which has taken it too far just to create a society that looks like it might head down the same path. Even as Blackbeard is recording written history, he is choosing the narratives that are the happiest and the most hopeful, which is not particularly useful for learning from the past which is so often painful, as Toby makes clear (“Will this be a painful story? It’s likely: most stories about the past have an element of pain in them, now that the past has been ruptured so violently, so irreparably,” 451.) I’m curious as to how others made sense of the end of the trilogy!
Amanda Payne’s Vulture Sculptures: Art as Social Commentary
The Year of the Flood returns to a character from Oryx and Crake, or rather, introduces her appropriately for the first time. Echoing our discussion last week on the influence of Jimmy’s narration, we meet Amanda in Oryx and Crake as Jimmy’s artist girlfriend. Both she and her art are belittled. The way she sees in images is described as a “tribute to [Jimmy’s] talents” (244). Jimmy sexualizes her body and “tries to sound interested” in her mind (247). However, in The Year of the Flood, we get a very different characterization of Amanda. We learn more about her past, her family, and her art. We begin to understand her more fully and how she contributes to the God’s Gardeners.
Amanda’s art projects take on a number of names, including the Vulture Sculptures and The Living Word. The idea consists of creating letters and words out of cow bones, fish guts, toxic-spill-killed birds, toilets from building demolition sites—essentially, dead objects, killed by humans in some way, either micro or macro. Amanda then invites these parts to be either eaten by vultures or covered in insects as this process is filmed from above. In her eyes, this process brings these objects back to life. She is highlighting the ability of the natural world and natural processes of life to make use of decaying, dead, or seemingly useless and unwanted materials. In a way, it does not matter what word she chooses to write out with the materials. The vultures and insects will always tear it apart or cover it up just the same. If we take language to be a marker of civilization and civilized society, a system of signifiers, what does this say about the hierarchy between the natural and constructed world? These pieces are great examples of ecofeminist art.
What also fascinates Amanda about these projects is the way things are able to move and grow and then disappear. We learn that this fascination is tied to her identity as a, likely illegal, refugee from Texas. Beyond her art providing a way for her to feel both visible and invisible, I think there is also a connection to migrant and refugee bodies. Migration is often a risky and dangerous process in which people die. Bodies are found on the border, in bodies of water, and perhaps there is something comforting about returning to the earth and to the world through vulturizing. I hope we can share our thoughts on what Atwood is trying to say either about Amanda or about nature/civilization, ecofeminism, migration, or beyond through these art pieces.
