We’re not invested in the colonizers anymore, not like we’re invested in the people who are living under their conquest. In The Unbroken, I flip the subject position. And the characters of color were voiceless. It was a world without consequences–they were well and truly fantasies: white fantasies. And these conquerors were always so glorious and few of the writers were interrogating what happened to these gloriously conquered nations. I connected them to their fantasy counterparts: if non-white characters existed, it was in direct opposition to the heroes and their war of conquest or their quest of exploration. But as I studied colonial history, I learned the reality–not the fantasies–of these elegant cities I obsessed over but was never a part of.

It led to an unsurprising and yet surprisingly common obsession with England and France and Italy and all those other European sites that inspire so much of Anglophone fantasy. The Unbroken is a story about the choices people have to make under colonialism. Consider people of color everywhere who must distance themselves from their heritage in order to ‘successfully’ integrate into white society enough to be valid under–yes, under, not within–white capitalism. Consider the forced removal of Black Americans from their own roots. Consider the United States’ and Australia’s treatment of their indigenous peoples. This is not unique to nations that had the formal term ‘colony’ applied to them, either. On the other hand, it often came with the crippling loss of connection to roots–to whole histories and languages. Many of them found themselves with the dubious privilege of an education by or in the metropole, and with their education in the dominant language had the opportunity to reach greater audiences.

Many of those indigenous authors–of both fiction and nonfiction–grappled with the double-edged blade of the language. The Unbroken was largely inspired by my time studying post-colonial literature in English and French. Clark has been thinking about this, and in this Big Idea for The Unbroken, delves deeper into the power and powerlessness of words. What you speak, and how you speak it, and the things you write in the language you speak: All more complicated than you might expect, especially when the dynamics of civilizations come into play.

The unbroken clark