44 pages • 1 hour read
Rebecca RoanhorseBlack Sun
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Clan Versus City: Power Dynamics, Identity, and Place
Throughout Black Sun, characters struggle with the relationship between place and identity. For several characters, this struggle takes the form of their relationships with the place or places they live. The city of Tova, where most of Black Sun is set, contains many multicultural neighborhoods: among them, the major living spaces for each of the four major clans. Each area engages with the relationship between the physical space of the city and the psycho-geographical markers of identity which underpin that clan’s individuality and distinctness.
For most Tovans, their shared identity as a denizen of Tova takes precedence over their other identities, whether that’s clan, culture, class, ability, sexual orientation, or another intersectional axis. However, this is not the case for everyone: some Tovans see themselves as members of their clans first; clan interests take precedence. Throughout Black Sun, the city of Tova exists at a tipping point. Other cities are chomping at the bit to change their power relationships to Tova in their favor; the coup attempt within the priesthood and celestial tower and its attendant subplot exemplify this conflict.
Ostensibly, one place that all Tovans can feel united is on Sun Rock, the site of major ceremonies and public observances. When Xiala goes to Sun Rock at the moment Serapio attacks the members of the usurped Sun Priesthood, she watches the deaths of many Tovans. She sees “a hundred or more people […] running toward her, shoving and pushing to get across the bridge. She watched in horror as the great span tilted, and a woman dressed in a bright blue dress toppled over the edge. Another followed her, a body too dark to identify” (435). In death, Tovans become anonymized: no longer members of their clans, as designated by the color and cut of their clothing, but Tovans and Tovans only.
Strategies for Managing the Fear of Violence Among the Odohaa Sect of the Carrion Crow: Religious Tensions Between the Old and New
Throughout Black Sun, there is conflict not only between different clans, but within individual clans. Intra-clan conflict is most prominent within the Carrion Crow, where various factions align themselves more or less closely with the rest of Tova and with the multi-clan government of the celestial tower and priesthood. The Night of Knives—a genocidal ethnic cleansing carried out by the celestial tower against the Crow—underpins this conflict. Regardless of their personal religious beliefs and practices, some Crow fear becoming the target of violence.
Those who fear becoming the target of violence take myriad strategies to prevent that. One strategy is to target the Odohaa—the believers in a unique crow religion which predates the religious beliefs of the celestial tower. There are some, like the new matron of Crow clan, willing to direct violence from within the clan against the Odohaa in a misguided attempt at protecting the rest of the clan from potential violence. She tells Okoa that She plans to use the Shield, the official guard of the clan—whose duty is supposedly to protect all clan members—to “thin their numbers:” to murder members of the Odohaa or sufficiently intimidate them out of public acknowledgment of their beliefs (213).
Another strategy—the one the Odohaa themselves take—is to arm themselves and go on the offensive. No longer do they plan to wait for the Odo Sedoh in the form of Serapio to return—instead, they will lead the fight themselves. When Okoa is poisoned during the scuffle that the celestial tower misinterprets (perhaps willfully) as Okoa trying to assassinate Naranpa, the Odohaa save him. One of the Odohaa leaders, a trans woman, tells Okoa that “we also must counter violence with violence. We will not let them slaughter us again. We will fight, Lord Okoa, whether you help us or not” (278). They plan to fight against ethnic cleansing by training in weaponry and hand-to-hand combat, even though they do not have many people compared to the power of the celestial tower and of Tovan infrastructure.
Home as a Concept, Not a Place
Black Sun focuses on displacement from home. The relationship between home and self recurs through the character arcs of all four main characters. However, the theme is most prominent in the character arcs of Serapio and Xiala—especially through their outsider status, romance, and burgeoning interest in one another over the course of their journey on the ship.
Serapio has a complicated relationship with his home clan, the Carrion Crow. Xiala ponders his relationship with home when she realizes the depth of his commitment to carrying his mission in Tova through to the end. She thinks that “Serapio, for the first time, was coming home. To a people who didn’t know him, to a house he could never truly live in, even if all he could do was die for them. He would suffer what he must suffer because for one brief moment he would be more than himself. He would be all of Carrion Crow, the fist of his people, the sharp beak and talon of his god, and he would not be alone” (392). Even though Serapio is set apart from the rest of the Carrion Crow by his identity as a vessel for the old crow god, he is willing to die for them because of that shared sense of self. The “house” to which Xiala refers is a synecdoche, or word that that encompasses the entire Carrion Crow clan: the figurative house in which they all live. And in his role as a vessel for the god, Serapio acts on their behalf: not only for all of them, but as all of them. He is returning to Tova to fulfill an obligation, not to see family who he already knows.
Like Serapio, Xiala no longer feels at home anywhere. She explains to Serapio that her mother was abusive and that her mother and aunt “drove me out. Told me that if I ever came back, my life would be forfeit. Banishment is usually a death sentence for a Teek. We don’t do well out in the mainlander world” (355). Although Xiala copes through substance use with her exile, she knows that she will never feel at home anywhere else. In being banished from her home, her mother and aunt have condemned her to life as a perpetual outsider. Xiala meets very few Teek in the mainlander world, and those she mentions are as suspicious of her as she is of them.
Both Xiala and Serapio have no physical place they can call home—this shared lack forms a touchstone of their connection.
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By Rebecca Roanhorse
