leslie huynh – Feminism & Technology: Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

Crake-lendar

When I initially thought of the idea of a God’s Gardeners calendar, I thought it would be a simple task, y’know, putting together the Saints that were already mentioned in the novels, adding a few, and then just putting them altogether in a calendar. And then suddenly it spiraled into this abyss of lunar cycles and lengths of time and the ridiculousness of the human brain.

This project started off as a “simple” calendar of all the GG’s Saints and Feast Days; the only problem was who to list, when to list, and how long said list would be. It somehow morphed into a Craker calendar that would depict how the Crakers saw time, or didn’t see time, after the Flood and after their beloved two-skin friends started going away, with Blackbeard as its creator. I started off thinking they would be similar but then with even more thinking and frustration, I realized that the many nuances of our own Gregorian calendar were creeping into my ideas and simply wouldn’t make sense to the Crakers. Like the idea of adding days to keep up with the sun and moon makes me tired.

I struggled with the nuances of our own everyday lives–seconds, minutes, hours; days, weeks, months; names; reality versus imagination. I sunk myself into the abyss of the weirdness that is our way of living. I realized that our world and the Craker world, although the same world geographically one could argue, are completely and vastly different (and let’s hope it stays that way). I couldn’t force all of our complications onto these unsuspecting Crakers. I had to rid myself of my inclination to follow the norm, that is, our world’s norms, and put myself in the body of a Craker, who are confused at the abstract but completely content with the physical.

The way the Crakers will inevitably create their own society is so reminiscent of us “normal” humans. Take Blackbeard, who was originally just some little kid curious about Toby and wanting to follow her around. Now, /he/ is the storyteller in his world, having been passed it from Toby from Snowman. He was taught how to make ink, how to write, how to use leaves as paper, how to use these leaf pages to make a book, and the cycle continues. Though Crake programmed the Crakers to be perfect and without flaw, not fussing with trivial matters as tumultuous emotions or questioning, what makes the Crakers truly human is the one thing Crake could never have programmed out of them–language.

In reference to my last blog post written, I was, and still am, very adamant on the thought that Crakers should be considered humans. Their curiosity about objects and words they don’t know and their yearning for learning make them human. Crake might’ve wanted to make them post-human, but if he could not program singing out of them, it must be an inherent part of their nature, just as regular speaking is for us humans.

The calendar I made consists of 5 months, each having 3 10-day weeks. I actually found an article talking about a calendar that was found to be 5000 years older than the oldest one we had known so far from Mesopotamia, and it was from Scotland. That calendar also had roughly 3 10 day weeks, so I designed my calendar after that because I see the Crakers as the very base level of a human society, and I don’t mean any offense by that. I chose 5 months because frankly I don’t understand the lunar year in and of itself, but the 29.5 days for a new moon to turn back into a new moon made sense to me.

And the 5 months fits into my assumption that the Crakers would continue to follow a base 10 system as we do now. I know someone here is a math major, but the debate between base 10 and other ones like base 12 are very controversial, but I’m an advocate for our system, especially for the Crakers. I think they would make the most sense of their 10 fingers, and of the already put in place system there is, and I didn’t think it necessary to try and complicate things further.

The Crakers’ celebrations are on the days of the New Moon and the Full Moon, having 10 somewhat feast days, if we want to refer back to the Gardeners. Now for the actual celebrations, I originally wanted to pick a lot of the previous Gardeners’ saints, but I realized that these Crakers aren’t scientists or religious people, aside from Crake and Oryx, so having these random names, like the ones Snowman gave to them, and these random species they never heard of I thought would be a disservice. So the people, or concepts, I chose for the days of celebration are the days of Crake, Oryx, Snowman, Toby, Animals, Plants, the Earth, the Ocean, Peace, and the Soul.

The only mentions of old Gardeners’ saints are for the Ocean, with Schackleton, Crozier, and Oates, and with the Soul, with Julian of Norwich. I chose people close to the Crakers because I don’t think they would be completely okay with the idea of celebrating a person they’ve never seen or heard of before, but having their creators, Crake and Oryx, and the two people who first told them stories, Snowman and Toby, they would happily and willingly celebrate these days. And of course the aspects of nature appeal to them as they are most active with their physical senses and are one with nature.

However, I wanted to add the concepts of Peace and Soul because I feel like even though they were programmed to not deal with that many nuances that someday, maybe even in their near future, the Crakers will progress into more, say, intellectual beings.

I really liked the idea of Blackbeard writing down the calendar, I think someone suggested this to me so thank you, because really he is the next storyteller, after Snowman and Toby pass away.

Book of Days

“That just makes me a dumb human like you.”

OK FIRST OFF I’M SO SAD. I kind of cannot believe all of these characters died? This feels like the Deathly Hallows all over again.

(Also, can we talk about how Amanda partially names her child after Ren? No, I’m not giving up on them.)

The idea that the Crakers are “post-human” sits wrong with me. While reading this trilogy, I cannot help but want to relate to these pseudo-human-hybrid-humanoid-homo sapiens sapiens. They have the innocence of a child–both the adults and the actual children–, the natural curiosity of the human mind, and seemingly look like humans, albeit more perfect, uniform humans. Though Crake intended them to be a replacement for mankind after the Waterless Flood, I cannot help but see them as unfortunate survivors, just as with the Gardeners and the MaddAddamites.

In MaddAddam, the question of the Crakers’ humanity is often brought up, and the question of what is humanity even more so. Is their ability to reproduce the sole aspect that makes them human? Ivory Bill says yes, “If they can crossbreed with us, then case made. Same species. If not, then not.” Is their naivety and innocence not satisfactory of being a suffering human? Does their ill knowledge of simple concepts make them not human?

Though Crake made them out to be free of faults, at least what he considered faults, the Crakers have progressed, or regressed, into another entity. Even Toby anticipates what will become of society if the Crakers live long enough to see it happen, asking “What comes next? Rules, dogmas, laws? The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret?” They see Crake and Oryx as their gods, their parents. They see Jimmy’s Red Sox hat as a sacred object, one that a storyteller can put on but not themselves; it’s taboo. Crake could not even remove singing from their biology. Ivory Bill says that “Their brains are more malleable than Crake intended. They’ve been doing several things we didn’t anticipate during the construction phase.”

Do the others have a Buddhist view on life–that suffering is what makes a human a human? Some are adamant on not giving the Crakers any weapons, as there is “No point in giving sprayguns to the Crakers, since you could never teach them about shooting and killing people. They just aren’t capable, not being human as such.” Is that what it means to be human–being able to shoot and kill? Or is it the Crakers abilities to grieve, to mourn, to sense pain, and to want to heal that make them human?

If being human meant being able to kill, then what would explain most of the survivors’ denial that the Painballers were people? They committed awful, horrific acts, so “Who cares what we call them…So long as it’s not people.” With the logic that handling weapons meant being human, then the Painballers are human, while the Crakers are not. It is said that “Crakers are nonviolent by nature. They don’t fight, they can’t fight. They’re incapable of it. That’s how they’re made.” This really just sounds like a pacifist human to me.

The Crakers’ names, ranging from Marie Antoinette to Sojourner Truth, are inherently human, because they belonged to real human people. Their singing seems to be another language, maybe even a certain dialect. However, Blackbeard’s voice is considered a “thin boy’s voice. His Craker voice, not human.” Well what is the difference?

It is also kind of amusing that the pigoons are so human-like, what with their ritualistic funerals and their swimming in pools, whereas the humanity of Crakers, who are actual people, is questioned. Is having human tissue all it takes to be human?

I think that what makes a human is the want for knowledge and the ability to pass on that knowledge. As we see at the end, Blackbeard is now an adult, writing down the Story of Toby, for all those who will live after these “original” survivors are gone. “Funny old thing, the human race,” says Zeb.

Now we will sing.

Madam and Eve not Adam and Eve

Throughout YOTF, I could not help but notice Ren’s fascination with, and maybe even love for, Amanda, and from thinking about this, I realized that neither of Atwood’s novels (so far) have included queer relationships. In O&C, Jimmy is woman-hungry, going from woman to woman without any real regard to their feelings, aside from Oryx. The Crakers participate in a 4-men/1-woman “orgy,” but with that ritual being ingrained into them by Crake/Glenn, one can debate that their relationships are not relationships at all. In YOTF, the Gardeners have both single and married members, but those in relationships are in heterosexual ones. (Yes, “straight” relationships could contain queer members in them, but there does not seem to be any evidence to support this claim.) The only relationship, queer one that is, that stands out to me is Ren and Amanda.

Though one hopes Ren’s love to be reciprocated, her adoration for Amanda, for the most part, seems to be one-sided, as even Ren knows that Amanda does not tend to show emotion. In the final scene of YOTF, when Ren and Toby rescue Amanda from the two painballers, Amanda starts crying hysterically, which really threw me off. As Ren says, “it takes more than a lot to make Amanda cry” (420). When they both reunite after the Flood, Amanda tells her, “I knew you weren’t dead…You get a feeling when someone’s dead. Someone you know really well,” (323) and that felt like Amanda letting herself show emotion for someone she cares deeply for.

When Ren finds out that Amanda is dating Jimmy, though in the novel she emphasizes her heart being broken by Jimmy, my ~queer heart~ believes that she is also distressed over Amanda dating someone else. I think the combined turmoil of having your best friend, whom you have a crush on, dating the first boy you ever fell in love with, who also broke your heart, must be tough. When Ren explains her sadness, she says that “It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn’t how it was going to be for me.” (301)

I could not help but think of Jimmy’s perspective from O&C, where a major part of the novel was him whining about Oryx, and so reading Ren’s relationship issues, being from a female’s perspective, was a sort of breath of fresh air. Whereas Jimmy’s problems were rooted in a white savior complex where he needed to rescue the damsel in distress, while also exploiting and mistreating the other damsels he encounters along the way, Ren’s dilemma is very relatable, as a young, queer woman living in a patriarchal society, one that exploits a young woman’s sexuality and uses violence as a means of entertainment and personal gain, just as the Pleeblands do.

It is also interesting how different Ren and Amanda are, and even Ren recognizes it. Throughout the novel, Ren is seen as fragile, by Jimmy, Toby, and even herself. She lays her heart out, not holding back with her emotions, making herself vulnerable to her peers and to the reader. Seeing as Ren is one of the two main narrators, we get a much clearer insight into her life than we do with Amanda, who we have only seen through Jimmy and Ren’s lenses so far. Ren’s inner turmoil with her relationships with others leads her to Scales and Tails, where she feels comfortable in her body and her sexuality, while Amanda, who knows how to use her body in previous trades for drugs, uses art to express herself after departing from the God’s Gardeners. When Ren is trapped in Scales and Tails after the Flood, she creates her own reality, one with Amanda “smart and strong…smiling…[and] singing” (284).