Bassanda Podcast Ep 6
Welcome to the Bassanda Podcast! I’m Chris Smith.
This is a space for riffing upon history and upon speculative fiction, for world-building, for comedy and dialog and badinage, for bad jokes, historical ironies, and the imagination of a kinder, gentler, richer and more creative universe. Bassanda the mythical nation originates in the fertile musical and ancillary imaginations of my friends Roger Landes and Chipper Thompson (find their links in the show notes). When, as a friend of the General and the Reverend, I was first playing with the idea of a fictional alternate-universe identity for my own TTU Celtic Ensemble, I realized that perhaps I didn’t have to invent a world, if the lads were willing to let me borrow Bassanda. They were, and here we are.
The first speculative fiction novel set in this universe, which is serialized at smithscribe.substack.com, is THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE FOR BASSANDA.
[parenthetical…
This episode, number 6, picks up on–provides some craft-related notes, intentions, and back-story for–Ch 10 and 11 of GTR. As I’ve shared, the principal POV characters in this serial novel are the ethnographer Cecile Lapin, in 1906, and in the 1980s the Vietnam combat vet and graduate student S. Jefferson Winesap. We’ve also met the 1906 heist film-style crew: assassin and bodyguard Ismail Durang; the explorer and writer Algeria Main-Smith; and the Brethren, two long-lived, North American-born Friends of Bassanda: Colonel Torres and General Landes. And we’ve seen these characters in action, during a vicious, but victorious, street-fight with Tsarist secret police assassins in the back alleys of Montparnasse after a party with John Millington Synge.
Chapter 10 is a Note on James Lincoln (later Habjar-) Lawrence, excerpted from the [Bassandan Dictionary of National Biography, 1940] This is that same dossier-of-sources strategy which I got from various epistolary novels–and from some SFF films–but which also shows up in Max Brooks’s World War Z: A secret history of the Zombie Wars, which is much different than and IMO much superior to, because much richer and more nuanced than, the film. Interestingly, this method has seen a couple of heydays, both in the age of hypertext and interactive fiction (with which I’ve worked some in teaching-history settings), but also in the work of some Victorian novelists; and I’m linking to a recent open-access article about this approach)
At the same time, as with all the Bassanda materials, it’s my goal, after my great model George MacDonald Fraser in his Flashman series, that the fictional characters should fit in a historically-engaged and -accurate fashion within the “real” events–insofar as they’re known or knowable–and historical figures. So one of the ways I prepared for the 1906 Parisian setting was to investigate who was there, both French- and foreign-born; to imagine where and how they might have encountered one another, and–very importantly for both characterization and narrative–how those encounters between “real” and created characters might have shaped both parties’ understanding of the historical moment that surrounded them. That means, in turn, that I have to think about who those invented characters might be, and how their invented biographies might best serve the story.
So James Lincoln would almost have to be Anglo, from a moneyed class who could afford to go abroad to Europe circa 1900, and of a family background that would value an international experience and/or education for their offspring. In the new “American” century, that almost mandated that he be from New England money–could have been New Orleans, of course, but the heyday for creoles in Paris was actually the colonial period, up through around the US Civil War. After the war, New England’s codfish, banking, and educational aristocracies definitely predominated.
So I went to my early childhood experience and recollections, and made him a Massachusetts boy, born in 1860, the offspring of sugar traders and shippers, which meant he could also have had family and childhood experience of a degree of transnational and intercultural contact. I had in mind the long line of carefully-preserved mansions, in Salem Massachusetts, of “Captain’s Row,” which were built with their profits from the clipper trade. Though something else that bulks large in my visual imagination for James Lincoln is the wildly heterodox plundered collection of Pacific Islands and East Asian material objects that the windjammer captains brought back from tea trading voyages to the Far East, and which were housed–in my childhood, in Salem’s Peabody Museum, about which I’ve written elsewhere. It could even be possible that there could be ancestors in James Lincoln’s family line who might previously encountered Bassanda, as Algeria Main-Smith definitely had done.
That Massachusetts - Pacific pipeline also meant he could have had some peripheral contact with the Concord-based school of New England Transcendentalists: Emerson, the Alcotts, and preeminently Thoreau: all of them well-meaning scions of (comparative) Anglo wealth and (comparative) intellectual openness. They shaped the consciousness of the Beats, and before them of the composer Charles Ives, who encountered their writings when he married into Harmony Twichell’s family. Here as elsewhere, I was particularly informed by the late Rick Fields’s marvelous narrative history of the encounter between British and North American adventurers and amateur scholars with “the East,” How the Swans Came to the Lake.
If he were born in 1860, into this kind of philosophical and abolitionist progressive tradition, it would make sense that a boy child might have been middle-named “Lincoln” after the young one-term congressman from Illinois who had famously debated Stephen A. Douglas two years before. It would also make sense that in their own rather genteel way, they would have opposed enslavement, but also the brutality and injustice of 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act, and the waves of racist violence that surrounded it: the Chinese had been welcomed into the USA as poorly- paid laborers and strikebreakers in the opening of the American west, and were promptly demonized and constrained once the the Golden Spike was driven in Utah; in fact, after they built Leland Stanford’s railroad, a small group of those Chinese workers were recruited as unwitting scabs to break a strike at a shoe factory in North Adams, Massachusetts, where I live–I once supervised a Chinese scholar’s dissertation on anti-Asian bias in period songs, and, on a break from editing his dissertation, walked down into town to take some photos for him of the factory building where those Chinese workers had been exploited.
The tragedy in James Lincoln’s life is the untimely death of his young wife Lucretia MacPherson, a Second-Sighted daughter of the Scottish Hebrides and, the mother of his four children, at the age of only 32. That accounts for the sorrow built into his character, for his abruptly departing his Harvard lecturer’s post for Paris, for his children’s international and cosmopolitan experience, and for some of the complex personal dynamics between James Lincoln and his friend Algeria Main-Smith.
He’s 43 years old, a widowed professor at the Sorbonne, when he is recruited by the Brethren into the cause of Bassanda.
https://smithscribe.substack.com/p/the-great-train-ride-for-bassanda-9c0
Ch. 11 is a very short one, entitled “Where love finds us.”
This is a short chapter, almost an afterthought or short interstitial scene, which is there not to further the narrative, but to provide a bit of additional, humanizing biography for another character, and for the sake of further diversifying the cast. For my “day-gig” job–a co-authored music history of sound, empire, and enclosure with my friend Tom Irvine of the Sounding History podcast–I’d been reading about the British and American folklorists of this self-same period, and been reminded that a significant percentage of them had been women, non-heteronormative, people of color, or some combined valence of all these. I wanted to recognize those folks–especially the LGBTQ women–for whom folklore had provided an arena of scholarship slightly less constrained by Ivory Tower glass ceilings. But also–though I didn’t know it at the time–I was setting up an intensification, a loss, and a healing, which will come in the last third of the novel.
There are real, inescapable, maybe unanswerable ethical challenges and responsibilities in depicting–and especially of writing from, or about–a racial or gender identity not your own. But, after all, every novelist does that: in fact, it’s part of the novelist’s gig–to think your way into an experience different than your own. Part of the reason that minoritized voices–black, brown, yellow, female, LGBTQ–get left out of novels is because of the racism and misogyny of western society since, at least the Early Modern (not coincidentally, the era of violent exploration and settler colonialism). If your imperial and colonial project depends upon claiming that you–Anglo, cis, male, “global north”–are “bringing civilization to the savages” or “saving souls for God,” rather than “stealing resources and human beings,” then you can’t justify the latter as the former except until you’ve silenced the voices of those from whom you’re stealing. Though state religions have certainly tried, minoritizing people in order to steal from them usually also requires that you silence them.
So empathy, respect, and what I’ll call, in a rather old-fashioned term, “good manners” (see Gary Snyder in The Practice of the Wild), have to be built into the equation at the same time.
But even that is not enough. Because, if you’re dominant culture like men (white, male, cis, “global north,” generational bourgeois), then you can’t borrow those othered voices either–or unless not until you balance that “borrowing” with advocacy and the ceding of space to those voices.
That’s my day job. I work for an HSI, I’m recognized on my campus as an Ally to LGBTQ+ folks, and I still examine my own privilege, and perceptual frames every day. And I still get it wrong sometimes. At least, when you’re writing fiction, you can imagine scenarios in which you try to open yourself, and silence your own inner frames, enough to let those other voices flow in and through you. And–maybe most valuably of all–you can edit yourself, and that self-editing is how you learn new and constructive consciousness.
In this scene, Cecile is dealing with the unexpected, shocking news of a violent death–one of several precipitating incidents which will recruit her into the cause of Bassanda–when Algeria Main-Smith unexpectedly begins to talk about karma. I’ve been an intentional buddhist for a good 40 years, and I would still never claim I “understand” karma, but here’s the way I try to manifest in, in my life:
Life presents us with choices. Sometimes all of those choices cause suffering. The Buddhist way is to minimize that suffering, which may not always involve a path of pacifism or disengagement. There are even bodhisattvas who took on the bad karma of violence, in order to prevent worse violence. But the dharma also teaches that such violence, now matter how conscious or intentional or well-intended, will create bad karma. So the path of the Buddha–Snyder’s “gentle violence”--sometimes means taking on the bad karma of committing necessary violence, in order to prevent even worse suffering. But, as Madame Main-Smith puts it, violence “is always of consequence.” This short scene, from the perspective of a non-POV bisexual woman who herself is not free of karma, foreshadows the inevitability that the violence the Brethren commit is going to carry painful consequences before the story is done.
But Madame’s story to Cecile, explaining the death of Habjar-Lawrence’s wife, also positions him as someone with sorrow in his past, so that he might leave behind his Sorbonne life, may recover or rediscover a willingness–incongruous though it might seem in a bookish scholar–to take up arms, and even to assume the karmic burden those arms might confer. It establishes that people can love one another differently, with or without romance or sexuality–or with a shifting combination of these things, in many different ways, and even at cross purposes. This story will implicate James Lincoln, and Algeria Main-Smith, and Colette St Jacques, before all is done. It’s intended as a small gift to these characters: “a small oasis of tenderness within the maelstrom of history.”
https://smithscribe.substack.com/p/the-great-train-ride-for-bassanda-826
CLOSER:
This is the Bassanda Podcast, a place for riffing upon history, for world-building, for comedy and dialog and badinage, for bad jokes, historical ironies, and the imagination of a kinder, gentler, richer and more creative universe. Each week, we recall chapters in the Correspondence, and we talk with guests, from the Multiverse and beyond, about world-building and imagination. You can find us on your podcast app, and also on Twitter / Threads, and Bluesky: search #BassandaPodcast, send to BassandaPodcast@gmail.com, or find me @ChrisSmithMuso. I’d love to hear from you, and I’ll talk to you again soon.
NOTES for THE BASSANDA PODCAST BP 006
Chris Smith SFF serial fiction: www.smithscribe.substack.com
Roger Landes: www.rogerlandes.com
Chipper Thompson: www.chipperthompson.com
THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE FOR BASSANDA: https://open.substack.com/pub/smithscribe/p/gtr-ch01
The “Dossier Novel” (open access): https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-031-33227-2_3.pdf
Ch 10: Notes on James Lincoln Habjar-Lawrence: https://smithscribe.substack.com/p/the-great-train-ride-for-bassanda-9c0
Ch 11: Where Love Finds Us: https://smithscribe.substack.com/p/the-great-train-ride-for-bassanda-826
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, https://bewildrewild.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Practice-of-the-Wild-by-Gary-Snyder.pdf
SOUNDING HISTORY: www.soundinghistorypodcast.com