Reading Bodies as Sites of Invention in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy

The essay argues that Frantz Fanon’s and Hortense Spillers’s conception of a disintegrating black body as the site of transformation serves as the theoretical backdrop for studying N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy (2015-17). It foregrounds the degenerating body of the character Essun by discussing bodies engaged in the act of petrification, the conversion of bodies into stones, opening a portal for Fanon’s dépouillement or the shedding of colonized skin. The process creates a possibility for the invention of a new skin and thus, a new world. Further, it contrasts Fanon’s “petrification of the peasantry” (Wretched 65) with Spillers’s idea of a disabled body and how it evokes a posthuman analytic—the Body without Organs (BwO) formulated by Deleuze and Guattari. A BwO here refers to the enslaved black disabled (female) body of Essun, which is free from the constraints of patriarchal femininity because it is ungendered and disordered. Concurrently, the essay draws a parallel between the subjugation and exploitation of the bodies of black women and of Mother Earth in the Anthropocene. The essay concludes by clarifying how Jemisin’s trilogy insists that instead of having to choose among or reconcile Fanon, Spillers, and Deleuze and Guattari, we should embrace all the forms of escaping an inscribed body as emancipatory visions.