Flipping the script on who’s in control
What would happen if women suddenly developed the ability to be stronger than men, electrocuting them? How would this shift the gender roles in our society? That’s what Naomi Alderman explores in “The Power.” The book won the Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction in the U.K. I chatted with Alderman on Skype; our conversation has been edited. Where did the spark (pun intended) for “The Power” come from?
I’ve always been a reader of science fiction, and I have loved a lot of feminist science fiction. Obviously “The Handmaid’s Tale” is the one everybody has been talking about recently. I also love Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy. I’ve always had a real interest in the way that science fiction can portray a world that could be different to our world, which I find really exciting.
Partly it’s that everybody has a kind of snap moment. I think a lot of women are having a snap moment over Harvey Weinstein, actually. It feels like that moment where you pull out everything from that horrible basement that you knew needed to be cleared out for 30 years. You pull everything out and lay it out, and you just go, “Oh, look at all this and look at what it’s covered in. It’s disgusting, it’s gross.” That is the first step to making it better.
I had a snap moment. I got on to a subway train in London, and I saw a poster for a movie of a beautiful woman crying. Something just broke inside me because I was going through this horrific break up, waking up every morning crying, and then going to get on with my day. It felt like that was the culture that I live in going, “Hey, that crying that you’re doing right now, carry on with that, that’s sexy, that’s great. We love it when women cry. We love it when women suffer. Do more of that. Hey, it’s really attractive.” I just started thinking furiously on this Tube train about what I would have to do or what would have to change in the world for me to be sitting opposite a poster of a really beautiful, attractive man crying. The frame of the novel is basically a patriarchy. A male author presents “The Power” as a fictionalized history that he wrote. Why did you choose to tell the story this way, and what does it say about gender roles and norms?
There are a few different reasons. Sometimes I say, “Oh, well, it’s funny.” The novel is fairly harrowing … and then to end it with something funny I felt was a good, nice gift for my readers.
It is also quite obviously a little tip of the hat to “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Margaret Atwood was my mentor whilst I was writing this book, which is just an incredibly fortunate thing.
But also, I feel like there’s something [important in] acknowledging in that this novel does not exist outside of that patriarchal system. This is why it’s people talking about a novel, because novel writing is not like magically immune from sexism. The problems of representing this book, talking about this book in public also have sexism involved in them. There will also be sexism involved in in my career as a writer. There will also have been sexism involved in the way that a book by a woman is received. I’m telling you a story, and even the mode that I have to tell a story to you is not immune from the forces that I’m talking about in this story.
All I can do is to try to write a book that invites the reader to consider what the impact would be in their own life. I’ve had some really amazing conversations with audience members who have said to me, “I come from Afghanistan, what do you think the impact would be in Afghanistan?” I say, “I don’t know Afghanistan, but please tell me.”
The idea of this book is to start a conversation, not to end a conversation. I don’t have all the answers, but if we agree that this [power] would make a radical difference in the lives of a lot of women, then we have discovered something interesting about the world that we all knew but had been ignoring. Which is to say how much of women’s lives are described and circumscribed by the male potential for violence. How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I grew up an Orthodox Jewish girl in North London. When I was 7, at school they got us all to write the story of Joseph and his brothers. I got a bit carried away and wrote 12 pages — everybody else wrote a page. Is there any advice Margaret Atwood has given you that inspires you?
It’s not writing advice, it’s a piece of life advice, but I think it applies to women. “Say no more.”