In previous columns, I’ve explored how intercultural communication works in the first and second trilogies of CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series. In the third trilogy (Destroyer, Pretender, Deliverer), the focus is mostly on politics, and there’s not a whole lot of linguistic content to comment on. Bren spends the first book on the run, the second getting to Shejidan, and the third chasing a missing person. And somehow, all of this takes place in about a week! But we get our first real atevi POV: Cajeiri, Tabini’s 8-year-old son, and through him, we gain a lot of insight into atevi culture and man’chi.
This set of books starts out with Phoenix returning from Reunion with a number of refugees, but rather than the bustling station they expect to return to, they find dead quiet. The shuttles aren’t running because Murini (who we met earlier as an adversary) has overthrown the government and ousted Tabini. There’s no communication between station and planet, at least on the atevi side. They can get some news from Mospheira through satellite links that the ship set up.
But before they arrived at home, Cajeiri wanted to have a birthday party, because his human associates had them, and he thought it was a wonderful practice . So, grudgingly, Ilisidi agrees to let her grandson have his party—which he doesn’t get to enjoy, unfortunately, because the day it was scheduled turned out to be the day they arrived back in system. Because eight is a very infelicitous number in their culture, atevi use various circumventions to avoid saying he’s eight, and Bren has to explain to the parents of Cajeiri’s human associates that, no, it’s not a joke that you don’t say he’s eight; you say he’s “completely seven.”
This highlights one of the recurring themes in this series very nicely: People who have never interacted with people who aren’t *exactly like them* are incapable of imagining that people can have other ways of being. This is obviously a huge obstacle to successful intercultural communication, whether it results from well-meaning naïveté or from outright malice (“the only right way to be is the way I am, and they’re Wrong and need to change.”)
On the ship, as they returned from Reunion, Cajeiri was bored and lonely—there were no atevi of his own age group with them—and he started playing or spending time with a small group of humans. The human kids, according to Bren, secretly think of young Jeiri as a “friend” because they don’t understand about the War of the Landing, and this could eventually pose a problem as big as that war, eventually. But the kids are also better able to grasp the cross-cultural differences, because they’ve spent so much time with atevi and are trying to learn Ragi, so they see these differences in action: “They want to learn why Cajeiri frowned at them, and he doesn’t understand why they’re so bad at math.”
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Ilisidi says only that Cajieri will learn why this sort of association is a problem, and when he gets back to the planet and among his people, he’ll understand properly and start feeling appropriate things for atevi, rather than humans. Eight is a difficult year for atevi, not only numerologically. It’s the time when they enter their puberty analogue, during which phase they start feeling man’chi and developing bonds with people.
Bren is the first paidhi to have such a close view of atevi society and culture, and he is able to make a lot of observations that his predecessors couldn’t, because they didn’t have access to the atevi at an emotional level. One of these observations is that the words atevi use for emotions should have separate meanings (dictionary entries) for use inside and outside one’s man’chi.
He also makes other notes on Ragi, as we’re used to. One part I thought was really cute was how Banichi translated “through appropriate channels” as “accomplished down appropriate and secretive waterways.” This gets the connotational aspect so nicely, I think.
We don’t get a Cajeiri POV scene until Deliverer, and it has a link (in the epub version; it may just be a footnote in print) to a footnote from Bren’s dictionary about atevi terms in Mosphei’. They have to create specific terms like “familial respect” and “aiji-respect” when using Mosphei’ to convey the shades of meaning of the word and to imbue it with the emotional resonance a human might feel.
Cajeiri has spent two of his formative years on a starship, where he was around mostly other atevi until he made his little aishi with the human kids. He’s conversant in Mosphei’ and ship-speak, and he can use kyo as well as possible under the circumstances. He can easily switch between the languages, and, because he’s so young and has been in an extremely sheltered environment, he doesn’t fully understand why it’s so hard for other people to make associations with humans. Ilisidi and Tabini have an association with Bren, so why shouldn’t he have an association with his humans? He also has to learn the critical distinction between what Bren feels and man’chi. Isn’t what Bren feels similar to man’chi? Isn’t it close enough?
This isolation from his peers (remember, the only atevi on the ship are his great-grandmother, her bodyguards, household staff, and Banichi and Jago, who aren’t the right age for association forming, plus their man’chi is already directed elsewhere) makes him worry that he won’t ever feel the right way toward his own people, even though Ilisidi tells him that he will. Cajeiri is further isolated because he can’t explain to people how he feels about his human aishi. He thinks about the word aishimuta, which means “breach of association,” and says, “There should be a worse word for losing someone you could never explain to anyone.”
He is capable of making the mental transition between atevi and human societies, even if he doesn’t want to do it. He knows, because Ilisidi taught him, that there are proper ways for atevi to do things, so he replies to her very formally on paper to accept the invitation to a dinner he doesn’t want to attend. He understands numerical significance, and we get to learn more about that from Cajeiri’s POV. He doesn’t understand, however, why atevi don’t have connected computers like the ship so they can message each other quickly. Bren does, however—it would be disruptive to proper atevi society, something Tabini also understands. The reasoning for this is explained more deeply in the next set of books.
Cajeiri also makes metalinguistic comments, mostly about idioms from Mosphei’/ship that he particularly likes: he’s not going to sit on his hands, they shoved it right in their faces. He also says that he thinks sometimes in a mishmash of Ragi and Mosphei’.
It will be interesting to see where this goes later in the books (I’ve read the first five trilogies for sure; not the seventh, I’m not sure about the sixth, and I’ve forgotten a lot of what happens) and whether Cajeiri and his posse eventually form a bridge between human and atevi society that was previously believed to be impossible. Discuss theories and predictions in the comments, but please don’t give any spoilers!
CD Covington has masters degrees in German and Linguistics, likes science fiction and roller derby, and misses having a cat. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 and has published short stories in anthologies, most recently the story “Debridement” in Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke. You can find her current project, a book on practical linguistics for writers, on Patreon.
I feel like Cherryh may have lost an opportunity by making Cajeiri the first-born and heir. He’d make one heck of a reverse-Paidhi that could bring Atevi culture to Mospheira and the ship folk, but that role won’t be available to the Aishi as an adult.
The insights into a maturing Atevi mind in the later books have been very illuminating. I’m not sure how much of a prodigy Cajeiri is, because Cherryh has not provided any other Atevi children for him to interact with.
OTOH, ISTM that Cajeiri being who he is means that he gets taken a little more seriously — adult atevi, almost all of whom owe man’chi to his father either directly or indirectly, may be less dismissive than they would be of any other 8yo atevi. This may be a human reaction; OTOH, several books later there’s a moment (which has enough of the climax of “We Also Walk Dogs” in it that I think Cherryh must have been aware of the parallel) that creates an important cultural bridge — and that could not have happened if Cajeiri were ignored.
That feels broad to me. There are related themes in a lot of Cherryh, but ISTM what’s going on here is how people can miss that what seems trivial to them is not trivial to someone else — a theme which has present-day applications. Imagining radically other ways of being (do human living in this system have SF?) is easier than getting how people much more similar to onesself than others one has met can still have critical differences.
I wonder sometimes how much Earth history the Mospheira residents and the stationers study when young, or at least have available; even a few highlights like the Asano incident would be useful to emphasize the variety found among their own ancestors. (One would like to think that every ship, no matter what its mission, carries a lot of stored knowledge as part of its emergency kit — but I don’t recall seeing a sign of that in any Cherryh book.) I do wonder (wrt your statement) where stationers and Mospheira residents, while not as narrowly focused as the ship-based humans, would be less tunnel-visioned if they weren’t so isolated from the rest of humanity — although we see later that just one person who has no interest in understanding (not even xenophobia or power hunger) can cause a lot of friction.
The inter-cultural issues are mostly Cajieri diving into Atevi challenges not feeling sure because of his human and Bren-focused training (such as his bonding with the two Taibeni youths and not paying sufficient attention to security advisements from Bren’s ashid – again because he was confident in his technical skills gained on the space station) and Bren learning about them through observation.
@Joel – Your comment had me doing the dog-head-tilt thing, because I think that would be very interesting. I’m not sure it’s likely, because iirc atevi need to be with other atevi or they go a bit crazy, but it would certainly be an interesting move on the aiji’s part!
@chip – They talk about The Archive a lot in the first 6 books, but it sort of drops off after that. They were missing a piece of it (coincidentally the piece that had all the spacefaring stuff) on Mospheira because their town hall was bombed in the opening of the War of the Landing, and they’re excited to get it back when Phoenix returns. They also are insistent that they need to destroy the archive on Reunion so the kyo don’t have access to it. This is where Cajeiri’s favorite human films come from, after all.
You make a good point about the thematics, and I don’t think we disagree at the core. I would argue that she shows there are people who go into interactions naïvely but meaning well (the initial human colony, Cajeiri’s ship-aishi and their parents) and those who show no interest in the other groups’ idk mentality or cultural background (Hanks and the Heritage Party, the Pilots’ Guild on Reunion, the more conservative Eastern atevi). The first group is no less dangerous than the second, she argues, because without understanding that people from different cultures think differently from you, your well-meaning intentions can go horribly awry (the War). It’s part of human nature to project yourself onto others, and we have to learn (i.e. be taught) not to do that when we encounter people from different cultures (and, yes, even our own. This absolutely has present-day parallels.). This theme crops up again and again throughout this series. It’s not the only theme, by any means! but it’s the one I noticed the most on this read-through.
There’s a lot we don’t know about Mospheiran culture, now that I think of it. We know they have TV, but we don’t know what’s on it. I think Bren mentioned terrible films about the War and atevi, but we know more about atevi TV than human (machimi plays, new dramas where humans swoop down with death rays). Do they have an entertainment industry? Are there musicians and movie stars? What about novelists? I can certainly imagine the initial wave and first couple generations focusing exclusively on survival (the original passengers of Phoenix were technicians and scientists), but it’s been 200 years. They have ski resorts, so why not novels? Maybe we don’t know about any of this stuff because Bren isn’t interested in it. idunno.
@robm – yeah, I agree. Cajeiri is learning his way around Being Atevi (and even more so in the next trilogy; watch this space, lol) and having difficulty understanding why Ilisidi doesn’t want him to have ship associates or why atevi don’t have instant messaging and email. It all seems normal to him because it’s what he got used to at a pretty formative, young age (6-8 years), and he just doesn’t get it. He has the wiring to get it, though, unlike the humans, so Ilisidi and company have hope for him. (There’s a scene in the next book or the one after where Banichi shrugs and says “aiji”, basically “what can you do?” when Cajeiri does something they don’t expect.)
I think he’s uniquely suited to be a bridge between the worlds, so to speak, especially once he grows into his atevi-ness. Book 13 is next in my queue, and iirc we have the long awaited party at some point in this trilogy, so that will be interesting to see.