Sixteen years after the publication of The Dispossessed, starting with "The Shobies' Story" (1990), Ursula K. Le Guin returned to the Hainish universe to tell stories set very late in the history of human worlds: after the rise and fall of the League of All Worlds and the victory of the Shing and the ages of chaos, after the reconstruction of the League and its transformation into the Ekumen of known (human) worlds, after the action of The Left Hand of Darkness and the entry of Gethen into the Ekumen (Ekumenical Year 1490-97 [LHD 1; ch. 1]). For the stories in Four Ways to Forgiveness, she went to the planets Werel and Yeowe and to Ekumenical Year 2102 and thereabouts, in the year 5467 by Werelian count (FWF 211; "Notes"); by Peter Brigg's count, some time after 5000 CE ("Chronology" 18).

In Four Ways to Forgiveness (coll. 1995), Yeowe is the third planet out from the sun and Werel the fourth; Yeowe "has a warm-moderate climate with little seasonal variation" and Werel a climate that is "cool temperate," though "severely cold at the poles" (212, 218). There is no indication of "double planet" with an extraordinarily elongated orbit and very long year. This is significant, since "Werel" is the name of the world-if not the True Name of the world-in Le Guin's Planet of Exile (1966) and City of Illusions (1967), where Werel does have a notable moon and an extraordinarily elongated orbit and very long year (PE 26; ch. 2). To me personally and in "An Open Letter to Peter Brigg" Le Guin asserted that she simply forgot that she had already used "Werel" as the name for a planet: "The two Werels are not the same planets, not the same peoples" ("Open Letter" 12). The old Werel of Planet of Exile (Gamma Draconis III) is only alluded to in Four Ways, under the name "Alterra."^{[ 1]}

Since "Werel" means just "the world" (PE 148; ch. 7), setting the four interrelated novellas of Four Ways to Forgiveness on "Werel" and its sister planet Yeowe can be seen equivalent to Le Guin's having set them on planets that the local peoples call "earth" (see, e.g., PE 26, ch. 2; TD passim). "Werel" can just mean "Anyworld," and I wish to discuss it first as Anyworld where relatively low-technology people have been colonized by a high-tech, hierarchical, capitalistic people with imperialist leanings. I wish to take a moment then for my own thought experiment, taking the history of Planet of Exile's Werel (as we learn it in City of Illusions or as I infer it elsewhere) and relating it to the backstory of Werel in Four Ways to Forgiveness, as we learn that story in "The Notes on Werel and Yeowe" at the back of the book in Four Ways to Forgiveness.

The relevant Werelian history in City, very tentatively, would go like this. Not long after our time, the human species on Terra gets even more self-destructive than usual, and had worse luck, yielding widespread famine and ecological disaster, authoritarian government plus assorted geological catastrophes.^{[ 2]} "When civilization became a matter of standing in lines, the British had kept queue" and the cooperative were fittest to survive-but not too many other Whites cooperated, and in lands richer than the United Kingdom "a few had thriven" but "most had died" ("Nine Lives," WTQ 123). So humanity on Terra became mostly people of color. And it was these people of color who sent a colony to a double planet very slowly circling the star Eltanin: Gamma Draconis III, taking nearly sixty-six Terran years for each revolution, each Year (PE 26, 29; ch. 3). The colony wasn't sent to exploit Werel for the sake of Terra. The logistics and economics of such exploitation would be unlikely to start with, and there was a far more pressing purpose for sending the colonists. The Enemy was approaching the territories of the "League of All Worlds," and the Terrans were sent to Werel to gain another ally for the War To Come (CI 132, ch. 7; RW 31, ch. 1; PE 45, ch. 5). But then the War comes, and the Terrans are stranded.

This is the premise of Planet of Exile, which shows the merging of the Terrans with one of the human tribes native to Werel. The Terrans are dark skinned; the local native Tevaran tribe is lighter; and the barbarian Gaal are White (PE 7-9, ch. 1; 101, ch. 12). Significant here, the native tribe is highly sexist and has or knows about customs including ceremonial rape of women and castration for men for sexual offenses, and the Terrans have a highly structured, somewhat aristocratic, mildly oligarchic society: ruled by an elected Council (27, 31, ch. 3; 93-94, ch. 11). The Tevarans quite openly consider the Terrans "falsemen" (9, ch. 1 & passim); the Terrans are usually more subtle but frequently feel an equivalent bigotry (e.g. 115-16; ch. 13). Putting the two societies together-intermarrying, interbreeding, combining evolving cultures-yields "Kelshak society . . . hierarchic, intensely conscious of each person's place on a scale or in an order," ruled by "the achinowao" (CI 157-58; ch. 8), a society that comes to see time and space in "the linear, imperialistic fashion" of the Terrans on Werel-or of Terrans generally in the early Hainish universe. Kelshak culture includes the idea of Rale, an analog to a basic idea in Daoism: "the right thing to do, like learning things at school, or like a river following its course" (CI 136; ch. 7); it also includes old Terran "dreams of domination" (PE 32, ch. 3; 74, ch. 9).

The ship goes on an expedition to Terra, establishing the premise for City of Illusions (CI 134-35; ch. 7).

A historical pattern that is backstory and background in the 1967 City of Illusions is brought into the foreground in Four Ways to Forgiveness. A "mercantile culture" becomes a highly developed if unusual form of capitalism: sensible about technology, particularly brutal in its use of slaves. Our view of "aggressive, progressive" imperial power is presented in narratives that recognize the lives and gives speech to the voices of those the conquerors will see as "primitive peoples."

*

The second section of the "Notes on Werel and Yeowe" quickly moves through the physical aspects of Werel (211-12) and spends only a bit more time on the physical aspects of Yeowe, concentrating on the ecological damage done to the planet by economic exploitation (218-20). Of the eight lines devoted to the Natural History of Werel, three deal with human adaptations including "a cyanotic skin coloration (from black to pale, with a bluish cast) and eyes without visible whites, both evidently adjustments to elements in the solar radiation spectrum" (212). The lack of whites to the eye was seen in the 1960s Planet of Exile and City of Illusions, e.g., when we first see Falk in City (2; ch. 1); with the skin color, there has been both continuity and a change. The dark-skinned high-civilization people in Four Ways are purely local: "4000-3500 years BP [Before Present], aggressive, progressive, black-skinned people from south of the equator on the single great continent [of Werel] (the region that is now the nation of Voe Deo) invaded and dominated the lighter-skinned peoples of the north"-repeating the offstage pattern of the earlier works of dark-skinned people establishing hegemony over lighter people, but switched in the movement of expansion from north to south to south to north. "These conquerors instituted a master-slave society based on skin color" (FWF 212). The Voe Dean master-slave culture has two basic categories, Owners and Assets, subdivided by sex and age, and, among Owners, to some extent by economic class. Master or slave status was entirely matrilineal: if your mother was a slave, you were a slave; if your mother was of the Owner class, you were, that far, a master. Among the Owners, there are the veots, a hereditary warrior caste, and gareots, Owners who may have at most one asset, or none. A gareot who cannot live directly off slave labor might have to work for a richer Owner. Slaves were field hands or other kinds of work slaves (including house-slaves), makils owned by the Entertainment Corporation, slave-soldiers, owned by the Army, or "Cutfrees": eunuchs, "castrated (more or less voluntarily, depending upon age, etc.) to gain status and privilege." Like some of the eunuchs in the Byzantine or Chinese Empires of Terra, some "rose to great power in various governments" and were often influential. "The Bosses of the bondwomen's side of the compound were invariably cutfrees" (212-13).

Basically, then, we see on Werel a propertarian society (as the Odonians would say) with a vengeance, stripped to the basics of race, class, caste, gender, and based upon the most primitive kinds of property: women and slaves. And a very long-established oppressive society: "Voe Dean economics have been based on capitalism and slavery for at least 3000 years" (FWF 212). The most schematic form of the Werelian system would be found on old plantations, called exactly that-plantations. On traditional plantations there is the «great house», usually called "the House," and the slave Compound. The House was divided into the men's side and the women's side (beza), with the degree of division between the sexes varying directly with the wealth of the family. "The compound was divided in halves by a ditch running parallel to the gate wall"-the single gate in the compound walls (214). Children lived with their mothers until old enough to work (ca. 9 years old), and the Owner ideal was that asset "pups" would be produced only by careful breeding (216). Traditionally, on the plantations the grandmothers kept order most directly among the women of the slave compounds under the more final but less direct control of Compound Bosses, the eunuch "intermediaries between the grandmothers and the Work Bosses (members of the owner family), or hired gareots, in charge of the working assets" (214).

The means of production on Werel were in the control of the Owners, but the primary means of production always remained slaves. "Slave labor, whether simple brawnwork or highly skilled, was hand labor, aided by an elegant but ancillary machine technology. . . . Production, even of very high-technology items, was essentially traditional craft of very high quality. Neither speed nor great volume was particularly valued" (224).

The slavery system reinforced and was reinforced by sexism and rigorous patriarchy. Owner women were always at law male property: fathers initially, then husbands; for spinsters or widows, some other male family member. "Most observers hold that the gender division of Werelian society was as profound and essential as the master/slave division, but less visible, as it cut across it, owner women being considered socially superior to assets of both sexes. Since women were property, they could not own property, including property. They could, however, manage property," including slaves (213).^{[ 3]}

The Werelian slave system, therefore, was Roman in its extensiveness and tradition but chiefly like that of the American South before the US Civil War: if the US plantation system had not had to compete with the industrialized North but instead had taken it over, if there had been fewer poor Whites and almost no freed Blacks. The American analogy is completed not when Werelians discover a New World, but when they themselves are rediscovered, by the Ekumen, leading indirectly to a new Werelian age of exploration and expansion. The arrival of the "Aliens" sends the government of Voe Deo and its allies into the "rapid, competitive development of space technology," leading to the incredibly rapid colonization of Yeowe. However, their "paranoid expectation of the armed return of conquering Aliens" is not fulfilled, when the Stabiles of the Ekumen wait patiently for the Werelians to join voluntarily (217). They wait some 300 years, until just before the time of the linked stories of Four Ways to Forgiveness.

During those 300 years, Yeowe is colonized by corporations who own slaves corporately and becomes a world to be exploited, to a great extent as a mining colony. In this subordinate status, Yeowe / Werel "H Anarres / Urras-with a hint or two of Athshe / Terra (in WWF). But the main and obvious analogy is with the New World on Terra, the Americas from the early sixteenth century CE to more or less our present in South America and MesoAmerica-plus the "Third" and "Fourth World" generally in its relationships with European colonizers. Exploitation of Yeowe went from mines to timber to the oceans to agricultural, each area of exploitation run by one great monopolistic Corporation, in league with the government of Voe Deo, but by no means under its control (220-21).^{[ 4]} As on Terra (and later for a short time on Athshe), the exploitation was brutal to the planet and terrible for the slaves. In a long parenthesis we learn that literacy among slaves was criminal. Slaves found reading were blinded with what sounds like a slow acid drip or, more quickly, by having their eyes taken out. Using a radio or similar device was punished with deafening. In a summarizing sentence all the more horrifying for its reticence, we learn that "The 'Fit Punishment Lists' of the Corporations and plantations were long, detailed, and explicit" (223).

Initially, the slaves on Yeowe were all male. As much as they could, they established their own subculture(s): one similar in some ways to my American view of tribal structures under slavery or extreme colonialism, but also a straightforward extrapolation of aspects of the more brutal prisons, all-male labor camps, and some neighborhoods of our world. Change came when "Prices on bondsmen kept going up, as the Mining and Agricultural Corporations in particular squandered slave life (a mine slave during the first century was expected to have a 'worklife' of five years)," and eventually the Corporations brought in female slaves for breeding and other work (221).

When assembly-line production was introduced, the already alienated labor force on Yeowe rebel, followed by a serious liberation movement in the countryside. The Uprising's initial organization is in groups of tribal women joining together to oppose the political/sexual oppression of women (225). And the initial great act of insurrection is the unlocking of the doors to the armory at the Nadami Plantation by a slave woman (226). A thirty-years' war of world-liberation follows, ending in Yeowean independence, but a troubled independence. "No central government was able to establish itself until Abberkam's World Party, defeating the Freedom Party in many local elections, seemed to be on the point of setting up the first World Council elections," until Abberkam and his party are accused, correctly, of corruption, and worse, and the party collapses. "The First Election . . . established the new Constitution on rather shaky ground; women were not allowed to vote, many tribal votes were cast by the chiefs alone, and some of the hierarchic tribal structures were retained and legalised"{sic} followed by tribal warfare (227).

And more or less here, in these contexts, begins Four Ways to Forgiveness.

The first novella, "Betrayals," is a variation on a Romeo and Juliet love story, but one in which the explicit Romeo and Juliet figures are minor characters who break off their relationship (25-26), and, in any event are mere background for the story of two opposed old people who find love. It is as if Shakespeare had written Romeo and Juliet starring the Nurse, and telling her achievement of Friar Lawrence, but a highly politicized, rather more religious-well, a lot more religious-and marriageable Nurse and Friar Lawrence.^{[ 5]}

The second novella, "Forgiveness Day," begins from the point of view of Solly Agat, a "space brat" and a female Mobile of the Ekumen, serving in the old kingdom of Gatay on highly patriarchal and sexist Werel. Her guard is Rega ("Major") Teyeo, a veot vet from the War on Yeowe, and his point of view is brought in later in the story.^{[ 6]} These two very different people do not get along, and end up marrying: Beatrice and Benedick, for another Shakespeare analogy (Much Ado About Nothing), but very much more significant as a "Forgiveness Day" story for Americans. If "Betrayals" shows Le Guin showing her respect for Hinduism and Islam, then "Forgiveness Day" has antiwar activist Le Guin, the author of The Word for World Is Forest, allowing not justice to colonial warfare, but offering compassion and forgiveness for US Vietnam vets and veterans more generally.

"A Man of the People" starts on Hain, in the Pueblo of Stse, and with the family of a youngster of the Yehedarhed family: the relatively short form of his name is Yehedarhed Havzhiva. The village of Stse could be, culturally, one of the communities in the Valley of the Na, among the Kesh in Always Coming Home. The people are communal, matrilineal, traditional, in touch with the sacredness of all things, and outside of history (FWF 93-103). To the consternation of his family, and possible betrayal of his lover, Havzhiva leaves the Pueblo, leaves the People, and becomes a "historian," entering history and service to the Ekumen. At the Ekumenical school he has a love affair, fails to follow his new beloved to Terra, and goes to Yeowe to serve as a Sub-Envoy under "a clever young Terran named Solly," the Ambassador (118)-Solly Agat Terwa, from "Forgiveness Day" (91-92). At the beginning of his assignment on Yeowe, Havzhiva is almost killed by an attacker, but comes to love Yeowe. Havzhiva loyally serves the Ekumen and «goes native» in a very positive way. Havzhiva aids the women of Yeowe in their liberation of themselves, but "not in a rebellious spirit"; that had to be the spirit of the women themselves. His work was "To accept. Not to change the world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in the world. Be rightly in the world." His wu wei-Daoist action through stillness-is very helpful to the cause of women's liberation. Eventually becoming a Stabile, Yehedarhed Havzhiva does not marry on Yeowe-there is no marriage nor giving in marriage there-but he forms a stable partnership and fulfills his life as a Le Guinian hero (140-43).

His partner started life as Shomekes' Radosse Rakam, "That is, Property of the Shomeke Family, Granddaughter of Dosse, Granddaughter of Kamye [i.e. granddaughter of] the Lord God." Her story is "A Woman's Liberation," and it is a slave narrative: a classic slave narrative in its overall structure, beginning in ignorance, ignominy, slavery, and alienation on Werel, and ending in consciousness, freedom, and re-integration on Yeowe. It is also a classic slave narrative in much of its more detailed structure. It begins with a brief statement of the occasion of the account, which is followed by a statement about the lateness of literacy for the Narrator, and the explicit labeling of the story as "my narrative"-followed by a paragraph beginning "I was born a slave . . . " and specifying a place but no date (145). It involves the great moment when, in James Olney's words on American slave narratives, "the paths of literacy, identity, freedom met" (Olney 169).^{[ 7]} It is, though, a mildly science-fictional slave narrative, set finally in a post-colonial world and told from the point of view of a woman under no obligation to produce Abolitionist propaganda (see Olney 166-68), and it was a novella in a series of linked stories, and then a collected novella in a book by Ursula K. Le Guin on the theme of forgiveness. So it is a slave narrative ending in a literal and symbolic Le Guinian marriage, and stressing throughout feminist issues.^{[ 8]} "A Woman's Liberation" features Le Guin's ongoing debate with herself on epistemology and politics, on how "all knowledge is local," but repressive institutions are just wrong; on the (masculine) City as the symbol of civilization and its evils, and "The city as goal and dream" and potential place of freedom.^{[ 9]}

"Betrayals" is told in Le Guin's usual third-person, limited narration, from the point of view of Yoss of the Seddewi Tribe (23). We do not get the point of view of the other main character: Chief Abberkam.

Again, the direct Romeo and Juliet figures, young Eyid and Wada are minor characters with few lines. They are from quarreling families-the Dewis and Kamanners, aspiring to village leadership and squabbling over some land: no feud yet. Whether or not there will be one is not important to the story; one of the betrayals is that the two young lovers break up and do not "Hold fast to the noble thing," as their religion teaches them (25-26)-and as Mahatma Gandhi taught. Le Guin suggested to me "cf. satyagraha," which is the name of Gandhi's doctrine of "cheerful, nonviolent resistance to some specific evil"; more literally translated from the Hindi, it is "the grasping for and holding on to truth."^[10] In terms of the plot and our sympathies, rather more important in the story are Tikuli and Gubu, the foxdog and spotted cat (respectively) that live with Yoss. Tikuli had been given to Yoss by her daughter, Safnan, and his main act in the story is to die, peacefully, of old age (FWF 15), breaking the last link between Yoss and her daughter, who is lost to Yoss in NAFAL flight to Hain (21). Gubu continues a long line of cats in Le Guin's fiction, from "Semley's Necklace" (1964) through the picture books (1988-94) to the great hunting cats of Werel to Yoss's Gubu himself (a small but effective hunter [25]), to Rakam's cat in "A Woman's Liberation" (1990s)

The major events in the story are minimal. Chief Abberkam had been a fighter in the War of Liberation from the beginning: from Nadami, where his brother died," finally "leading a great movement" headed by the World Party "for what he called Racial Freedom," i.e., the total expulsion of everyone from Werel who had not been a slave: Bosses and Owners, however long their families had been on Yeowe, the Aliens who served the Ekumen, however much the Ekumen had helped Yeowe gain freedom (9). Just short of an electoral victory, Abberkam goes down in scandal, primarily betraying an old friend: "A chief could indulge himself sexually, misuse power, grow rich off his people and be admired for it, but a chief who betrayed a companion was not forgiven. It was, Yoss thought, the code of the slave" (10)-and in a story called "Betrayals," we are invited to consider whether or not this bit of slave ethics should be carried into freedom. Christians and some old Marxists may want (re)birth of a New Man, and the more testosterone-poisoned of the Nietzscheans may want that New Man to be a Superman beyond the good and evil set up by bourgeois Christians, following a religion made for slaves. Le Guin holds allegiance in none of these camps. The question here is a real one: what of the morality slaves practiced as slaves is intrinsic to what their culture is or what they want it to be; what is merely servile and to be discarded?

Yoss has gone to a small village to give up the world: to drink water and be silent and learn the holy Arkamye; Abberkam has come there in disgrace. Yoss is happy in Abberkam's fall, or that of any Boss or chief or man of power. Still, one night she hears howling and finally recognizes the cries "as a human voice," howling in pain; and, like Estraven in The Left Hand of Darkness, Yoss responds to that cry, and finally looks at Abberkam "striding and tearing at his hair and crying like an animal, like a soul in pain." And, "After that night she did not judge him. They were equals" (11-12).

The rest of the plot consists of Abberkam's coming down with "berlot," a pneumonia-like disease, followed by pneumonia, Yoss's helping to pull him through, and the foxdog Tikuli's dying. Yoss doesn't exactly come to like Abberkam, but she does come to feel that he listens to her "intently . . . that he was trying to understand" what she said, "like a foreigner who did not know the language" but is trying to learn (23).^[11] For the climax of the story, Yoss builds a wood fire in a fireplace made for peat, and leaves the fire burning when she goes out, leaving her cat locked in. She returns to a burned house, but Abberkam has saved Gubu, Yoss's cat. And then Yoss and Abberkam reach an agreement:

Thus ends a thirty-four page story in the HarperCollins collection. The interest here isn't significantly less in on-stage incident than in, say, Shakespeare's As You Like It or Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters (1901), but, as with those two dramatic works, the linear plot competes for interest with character, relationships, theme, and setting (for a "carrier-bag" sort of story). Again, though, the physical setting is not science fictional and is certainly less impressive than such literally mundane settings as medieval Orsinia or the canyon Es Toch is built over in City of Illusions or even Le Guin's home city of Portland, OR. What is interesting is the social setting. This is not the day before the revolution; "Betrayals" covers perhaps a fortnight in the years after a major anticolonial war.

The story starts with quotations from an Ekumenical book: about the planet O, without war for 5000 years, and about Gethen, where there still has never been a war.^[12] Yoss's world is not peaceful.

And for less exalted causes: there were tribal fights for land in the country-side, and fights for power in the city (FWF 10). Warlords sent their gangs out into city streets by night, and even by day a woman in the city had to be very careful (19). So Yoss asks herself, "What would that world be, a world without war?" And she answers herself, "It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality" (1). So however much a feud threatens because of petty aspirations for petty families, and however stormy we foresee the future relationship between Yoss and Abberkam, in Yoss's sense "Betrayals" is still a story set in a world moving toward reality, moving toward peace.

News reaches them, of "a new war in the eastern province" (27), but Yoss's village is at peace-tentatively-so Yoss and Abberkam and anyone else old enough to strive for wisdom can deal with some major human issues, and therefore issues Le Guin returns to frequently, often arguing at least two sides.

Yoss wishes to let go of the world and come to the Lord Kamye with empty hands, to drink water and live simply and be silent and nurture her soul (3-4). Good things, indeed, in Le Guin, except for the god part-except, again, in these stories of forgiveness, Le Guin, I think, forgives God. At least she allows that slave peoples may need a strong faith to survive, and that such a faith might be shaped into something useful in freedom. Moses may have taken a bad detour in going to Sinai on the route from Egypt to Canaan, but Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Latin American Liberation theologians may have done better.

In any event, Yoss and Abberkam are theists and followers of a religion whose central moment has two god-brothers-like characters out of Indian myth or epic-standing before "the Five Armies." The younger, Enar, holds up his sword and says to Kamye, "My hands hold your death, my Lord! Kamye answered: Brother, it is your death they hold." A true hero, a holy man, and God's younger brother, "Enar dropped his sword": read allegorically on Yeowe to mean dropping desire, and the world (4).^[13]

The phrase "empty hands" implies "unarmed," as when Enar had empty hands after dropping his sword, which is good; but, as we've seen with "Pathways of Desire," there is much to be said for filling your hands with the world, holding fast to life and love, and not letting go. The difference is what you are holding on to. When Yoss tells Abberkam about the brewing feud between the Dewis and the Kamanners, Abberkam replies (somewhat Napoleonically), "Those shopkeepers. They have the souls of owners. They won't kill. But they won't share. It it's property, they won't let go. Never." And here Yoss sees again in her mind "the lifted sword" (6). This exchange comes only moments before Abberkam begins coughing the berlot cough.

The point of "Betrayals" seems to be that one should indeed "Hold fast to the noble thing" as the holy Arkamye teaches, and that one should hold fast to the world: that one should love the things of the world, and even hold fast to a desire to be useful (4, 8, 14, 24). What is a bad idea is holding on to things as property, to be hoarded and not used.

What is a bad idea is to attempt lordship in this life over other people, to take up the sword to kill one's sibling who may have his or her own mission and usefulness.

Giving up the world seems to be a useful ideal and appropriate for Ogion in the Earthsea series, for Handdara Indwellers on Gethen, for the Thurro-dowist "All-Alonio" in City of Illusions (ch. 3). It is only partly appropriate for Yoss and Abberkam. They will do best living a simple life, but a comfortable one, outside of stirring times and history, embracing the world and each other. The story, then, ends like Planet of Exile (1966) in a Le Guinian marriage, but there is no integration of peoples: Yoss and Abberkam are of the same human species, from the same culture.

Where "Betrayals" differs from the earlier works is the sufficiency of difference in this central couple that one is a woman and the other a man, and in having the emphasis on the point of view of the woman. In Planet of Exile's fourteen chapters, five are told from the point of view of the young, relatively fair-skinned, native woman Rolery (1, 5, 8, 11, 13), five from the point of view of the relatively young, Black, alien Alterran Jakob Agat (3, 6, 9, 12, 14), and four from the point of view of very old, relatively fair, sexist, male native chief Wold (2, 4, 7, 10). I.e., Planet of Exile maintains a complex balance among points of view of native and alien, woman and man, young and old, aboriginal, low-technology light-skinned people and colonizing, high-technology people of color. "Betrayals" privileges throughout the view of an old woman: relatively grey-skinned, a former slave and freedwoman (19), definitely native to Yeowe in birth and a "native" figuratively in the sense of one colonized to an extreme. And her final Le Guinian marriage is to an unreconstructed and only somewhat reconciled xenophobe who had fought-by "policy and persuasion" when he could, by force otherwise-under the sign of his World Party: "the curved sword" (10). Instead of the marriage symbolizing the integration of human species and serving as a mâshâl of the integration of peoples on our Earth in our time, the marriage of true minds of Yoss and Abberkam is part of the movement toward peace and perhaps, in the far future, eventual reconciliations following an expulsion.

The curved sword on Terra is a sign for Islam. So to Gandhi (and warriors and warrior-gods from Indian Epics), Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, we have to add as religious liberators relevant to this story Mohammed and his followers. The historian of the ancient Western world, Joseph Ward Swain, wrote that the initial military success of Islam in the seventh century CE "may be best regarded as the triumph of the Orient over European invaders. Almost a thousand years had passed since Alexander [of Macedon, "the Great"] overthrew the first Persian Empire [330 BCE]. During all that time a small aristocracy of Europeans and Europeanized Orientals had dominated a vast oriental population. Orientals now became masters in their own house once more. Except during the Crusades, they remained so until the nineteenth century" (613-14). And in the nineteenth century, the process happened again, with Christian Europeans this time and "Europeanized Orientals" again taking over much of the lands of Islam. Rebellion followed much more quickly this time around: in the twentieth century, successful movements-nationalist and Islamic-have gotten the Europeans and Americans out of such countries as Algeria and Egypt and the Islamic states of the former Russian Empire. Partially out: This drama is still, in production; and the drama of postcolonial Islam, including the treatment of women-strongly including the frequent oppression of women-is one of the referents of Le Guin's fables of Werel and Yeowe.

Yoss's partnering "a while" with Abberkam symbolizes a woman of Yeowe forgiving one of the local big men, a local boss. Abberkam's partnering with her is his seizing "this beautiful chance . . . to hold you [Yoss], to hold you fast." This is a good sign. The most radically xenophobic part of Abberkam's program came because he had lost faith in his cause. He tells Yoss, "I feared the Aliens because I feared their gods. So many gods! I feared that they would diminish my Lord. Diminish him!" If God is God, God is not diminished by competition. Abberkam had not held on to the "one noble thing"-a mostly transcendental thing-and now wishes to hold Yoss, in the immanent world of peace and domesticity (34).

In Planet of Exile (1966), there was integration of Werelians and Alterrans; in The Word for World Is Forest (1972), there was total separation and alienation of Athsheans and Terrans. In "Betrayals," we get something in between. There has been a successful war for liberation and an expulsion of colonists under the relatively good sign of a sword that is to be let go by most of us, a sword that does not (in the old holy book) bring lordship. There's a concluding Le Guinian marriage that offers what we might call a chastened hope for further integration. Peoples may be able to come together; first, though, in a story informed by feminist and postcolonial thought, is the very difficult and problematic movement into marriage of the Le Guinian central couple: one woman and one man, both former slaves.

"Forgiveness Day" is another Beatrice and Benedick story: two unlikely lovers who do not fall in love at first sight but fall instead into mild loathing. The initial point of view character is Solly (Agat Terwa), daughter of an Ekumenical Mobile; Solly goes on to become a notable Observer, Envoy, Ekumenical liaison to Terra, and finally Stabile on Hain (FWF 35, 92). She is half Terran; the other half may be Alterran; in any event, we're told that she is half Terran and that Terran and Alterran are the languages she usually swears in (89). She is described by one of her superiors at the Embassy in Voe Deo as "a bit headstrong. Excellent material, but young, very young" (56). I see her as delightfully direct and vulgar for an Envoy: no lady, but a twenty-five-year old Terran/American woman who has been around the known worlds and is competent in at least one of the martial arts, a woman who can belch and say "shit" in front of a gentleman, a woman who can take care of herself.

Solly loves Werel and the Kingdom of Gatay, and Werelians generally; she dislikes Teyeo: the veot rega assigned to guard her. She translates "rega" as "major" and sees Rega Teyeo as the Major: a thirty-two-year old stuffed shirt (52): "stonily polite, woodenly silent, stiff and cold as rigor mortis" (37). She sees him possessed by "militaristic paranoia" (60), and he comes to represent for her "The Man," in his primevally pure, Werelian incarnation: slave-owner, sexist, militarist, tight-assed, puritan control freak. And so he could serve very well as «the inconvenient third» in a story in which Solly comes to love a man who is her lover for a while, Batikam: a makil slave, a transvestite bi-sexual entertainer-including sexual entertainer-and a liminal and very transgressive person, at least transgressive by the standards of the dominant cultures of late twentieth-century Terra. But Batikam does not transgress Solly's standards, nor those of many of Le Guin's more Leftish readers; Teyeo does.

A little over ten pages into Solly's story, Le Guin switches point of view and gives us Teyeo's story, very completely: she starts with his birth and takes him up to the present, including his brief marriage, the sad death of Emdu, his wife (FWF 48-49), his service on Yeowe, where he tries to kill as many freedom fighters as he can (53), finally his being employed by Esdardon Aya, "Old Music," to help with security at the Ekumenical Embassy. Again, we have a veot veteran: a man who fought on the losing side and the wrong side of an anticolonial war of national liberation, a totally justified war of slaves to free themselves.^[14] "To understand all is to forgive all" is not always a good generalization, but there is much to be said for understanding, and understanding the life of Rega Teyeo is to forgive him and find him, as the slave Batikam does, "a man of honor" (61), and a worthy mate to Solly.

The point of view then returns to Solly for the major plot of the story. A group of Gatayans Patriots trying to free Gatay from Veo Dean hegemony find out about a plot to kill the Envoy during the important ceremony of Forgiveness Day. The patriotic group kidnaps her and must take along Teyeo when he launches himself at one of the kidnappers (67). The rest of the story features Solly and Teyeo, mostly left alone, locked in a room while the story goes out that they were killed at the Forgiveness Day ceremony.

And here the story shifts from a potential Beatrice and Benedick (embedded in a complex culture) to something much more like Estraven and Ai out on the Ice of Gethen (in LHD chs. 15-16,18): the simplest social unit-a prototype Mitsein-of two people in an extreme situation, trying at first to keep away from each other (e.g., FWF 76), then to make contact (77 f.). The first contact is intellectual, ethical. Even as Estraven and Ai discuss the issues central to their lives and situations, so Solly and Teyeo discuss the central issues on Werel. At dead center is Teyeo's status as an Owner. Solly and Teyeo share a small room, but they divide it up more rigorously than a Werelian House or Compound, the only difference being that the door is on her side, as opposed to Gateside being the men's side in a Compound. They share a mattress, but they never transgress the center line. They physically touch in aiji martial arts exercise, but this is only literal touch: "impersonal, ritual" and "a long way from creature comfort." At all other times, from Solly's point of view,

And these thoughts lead into a dialog between Solly and Teyeo on slavery, and its near kin, sexism. Solly tells him she is "trying to understand what it feels like to believe that two-thirds of the human beings in your world are actually, rightfully your property. Five-sixths, in fact, including women of your caste." Teyeo objects that his family owns only some twenty-five "assets"; Solly tells him not to quibble, and he accepts the "reproof." This leads to the crucial problem with slavery as Solly, and possibly Le Guin, sees it: "It seems to me," Solly tells Teyeo, "that you cut off human contact. You don't touch slaves and slaves don't touch you, in the way human beings ought to touch, in mutuality," i.e. in anarchist solidarity, parallel to Martin Buber's relationship ideal of "I and Thou" (see LHD 259; ch. 18).^[15] "You have to keep yourselves separate, always working to maintain that boundary" (77).

For now, though, note the words "separate" and "boundary" in this quotation, contrasted with "touch" and "mutuality" here, and to be contrasted later with the images in the lines, "The idea of the Ekumen was to offer a way. To open it" (79). The rigorously political and mundane nature of this passage in "Forgiveness Day" is important as a gauge to the importance of separateness vs. connectedness throughout Le Guin's thought. As I have noted earlier, the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim said that "sacredness referred to those things in society that were forbidden or set apart," as is suggested by the etymology of "sacred" in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and even Polynesian (Streng 123). In the tradition of the philosophical Daoists, native Americans, and followers of the really old-time religions, Le Guin sees the sacred in connectedness. Slavery and sexism are bad for all the obvious reasons, plus the sheer waste-and because of what Odo called "The creation of pseudo-species" (TD 11; ch. 1): the radical separation needed to rationalize slavery and sexism. Given that pseudo-speciation, slavery, sexism, and patriarchy are social, political, and legal manifestations of a fundamental perversity, a wrong turn. If what people do in life is in some sense sacralize it, then slavery/patriarchy on the level of human society is a wall shutting us off from the sacred. Master/Slave is the ultimate I-It relationship, perhaps the ultimate human disconnection.

Teyeo starts unbuilding the wall between himself and Solly by telling his story, beginning "In the war . . . I was on Yeowe . . ." (78). Teyeo tells her and us that he respected his enemies on Yeowe and gets Solly to think about her own half-Terran heritage: "My ancestors rushed around their planet slaughtering each other. For millennia. They were masters and slaves, too, some of them, a lot of them ...." And then Solly admits the possibility of more personal complicity as an agent for the Ekumen. "Who are we to tell anybody what to do and not to do?" And we readers can realize that Abberkam and Teyeo earlier, when they've seen the Ekumen as Alien snobs and colonizers may-allowing for overgeneralization and hyperbole-have a point (see FWF 89). And here Solly delivers her line about how the Ekumen was to offer a way, openings, not bar peoples because they have practices the Ekumen finds evil and dangerous. Teyeo "listened intently but said nothing until after some while," when he responds with "We learn to ... close ranks. Always. You're right, I think, it wastes ... energy, the spirit. You are open." Teyeo is a man who can really hear what a woman is saying and admit error, and speak seriously. "His words cost him so much, she thought . . . . He spoke from the marrow. It made what he said a solemn compliment" (79).

And then Solly asks about the war, and he opens up to her, letting her know what numbers can mean when they are part of one's life: He served seven years on Yeowe. "We lost three hundred thousand men on Yeowe. They never talk about it. Two thirds of the veot men in Voe Deo were killed" (79).

More of the wall comes down when Solly is starting to lose hope, and Teyeo for the first time calls her by name and gives her two orders: "Be still. Hold fast." She asks him what she should hold fast to when he won't let her touch him (80). More of the figurative wall comes down when they start working out a plan with their captors, and when each gets in touch with her and his anger. Solly is used to anger and has the vocabulary to express it, most effectively perhaps when she reminds the representative of her captors, that they will need to get in touch with the Ekumen and that can be tricky: "You kidnapped an Envoy of the Ekumen, you asshole! Now you have to do the thinking you didn't do ahead of time. And I do too, because I don't want to get blown away by your Goddamned little government for turning up alive and embarrassing them." Rather Genly Ai's political situation in The Left Hand of Darkness (except I cannot picture him calling even an Inspector of the Orgota "asshole"). In any event, in her anger at the kidnappers and Gatay, and perhaps in her anger at having to stop Teyeo from chivalrically protecting her when the guard responds to her "asshole" epithet with an arguably nastier epithet of his own, Solly asks Teyeo "Are you sure your country isn't playing the same game as Gatay?", i.e. going along with the story that Solly and Teyeo have been murdered to help justify destruction of all rebel forces in Gatay. "As he understood her, slowly the anger he had stifled and denied, all these interminable days of imprisonment with her, rose in him, a fiery flood of resentment, hatred, and contempt"-for Solly (83).

Teyeo insists "They would not betray us," meaning the government of Veo Deo, the government he had served so loyally. When she asks him who the "They" refers to, Teyeo comes to an insight, coming to the knowledge "that she was right; that it was all collusion among the power of the world; that his loyalty to his country and service was wasted, as futile as the rest of his life . . . . He put his head into his hands, longing for tears, dry as a stone." Literally dry-they're dehydrated-and symbolically. "She crossed the line. He felt her hand on his shoulder." And then Solly apologizes. She had apologized earlier when it became obvious that Teyeo's "militaristic paranoia" about the Forgiveness Day Ceremony and Festival had proven correct. Here, though, she apologizes sincerely, adding to her being sorry, "I honor you. You've been all my hope and help." And for his part, Teyeo can note, "speaking slowly and formally," that if Solly is correct in her suspicions of Veo Deo they and their captors "are in danger not only from Gatay but from my own people, who may ... who have been furthering these anti-Government factions, in order to make an excuse to bring troops here ... to pacify Gatay" (84) and take it over.

Teyeo doesn't believe Veo Deo could hold Gatay for long, since he thinks, apparently, that any serious violence will trigger a slave revolt. To the question of who on Werel could defeat Veo Deo, he answers "Yeowe. The idea of Yeowe. * * * Revolution . . . . How long before Werel becomes New Yeowe?" His Gatayan keeper is incredulous at the idea of "assets" organizing, but believes completely in the possibility of a Veo Dean attempt to establish complete hegemony over his country, and that the Ekumen might prevent it. Teyeo suggests his plan: contact the makil Batikam, a probable member of the Hame, "the asset underground" opposed to Veo Deo. Batikam can tell the Ekumenical embassy staff "that a Patriot group has rescued the Envoy and is holding her safe, in hiding, in extreme danger. The Ekumen . . . will act promptly and decisively" (85-86).

The plan works, and there is a rescue, quickly narrated. The rescue however, is not the climax of the story, no more than the fall of governments is the narrated climax of The Left Hand of Darkness-though two governments fall-or the killing of the dragon-beast is dwelt on in The Beginning Place. While waiting for the political maneuvering offstage, Solly wishes for some moments of darkness in her cell, contemplates long life vs. short (and the probabilities hers will be very short), and takes the finally step toward removing the wall and achieving touch: "Do you think ... that it would be a mistake ... under the circumstances ... to make love?" she asks. Teyeo responds, more or less, that, under these circumstances, it's a good idea. "They reached out to each other. They clasped each other, cleaved together . . . crying out the name of God in their different languages and then like animals in the wordless voice. They huddled together, spent, sticky, sweaty . . . reborn in the body's tenderness, in the endless exploration, the ancient discovery, the long flight to the new world"-with "new world" alluding to their new relationship and "the idea of Yeowe."^[16]

Shortly after this moment Batikam arrives, and they are rescued. Tying up the story, Le Guin's Narrator tells us that Teyeo's parents die, and Teyeo frees his slaves and sells his family property. And, finally, he joins Solly as she takes her new job as "the first Ambassador of the Ekumen to Yeowe" and later goes on to her illustrious career (91-92).

In the ending of Left Hand of Darkness a war is averted and a new world joins the Ekumen, with the death of Estraven to provide the "blood bond" completing the arch of the novel and sealing Gethen into the Ekumen. The ending of "Forgiveness Day" is more purely comic: a war is averted and Yeowe joins the Ekumen-with no cause and effect here-and we get a partnering. We do not get the standard «magic» of romantic comedy with a new and better world coalescing around a central couple, but we do get Solly and Teyeo moving out into a world that might be improved.

Again, "A Man of the People" begins among the People of Hain, in a pueblo, with a glance at the complexity of pueblo in the original Spanish: "a village," indeed, but also village people and people generally. Havzhiva's town of Stse has its own local knowledge, which can be summed up as, "typical pueblo culture of the northwestern coastal South Continent" of Hain (FWF 109). It's a vaguely Amerindian culture, like that of the Kesh, and Stse is a good place for a Le Guinian Hero (especially a male Hero) to be from.

There is no controlling image strongly associated with Stse, nothing like the Circle of Life symbol in The Dispossessed, nor a Yin-Yang (e.g., LHD), nor anything like the heyiya-if in Always Coming Home. There is, though, an opening image of Havzhiva and "his father," Granite, watching the surface of an irrigation tank, where "Trembling circles enlarged, interlocked, faded on the still surface of the water" (93): somewhat like the ring-trees in Eye of the Heron, but more dynamic, far more ephemeral. It fits in with the knowledge gained by Havzhiva as a young man that any one human life "was one flicker of light for one moment on the surface" of the "great river" of history-a thought he finds "sometimes distressing, sometimes restful" (108), but one which we should find familiar: in Earthsea, Ogion had used the image of the stream in teaching Ged; Ged, as an adult, uses the image of a wave on the sea in teaching Arren (WE 128, ch. 7; FS 122, ch. 8).^[18] Perhaps Heroes like Ged and Havzhiva can make their flickers on the surface into interlocking circles. Note that Havzhiva is told by his teacher here that "What makes the water go that way" is the touch of arahas-small, flying mammals-coming to drink, so Havzhiva understands that ". . . in the center of each circle was a desire, a thirst" (94). Le Guin's Daoist and feminist Heroes perform small, crucial actions, perhaps, producing an enlarging circles of effects. And at the center of those circles is their desire, their thirsts.

Life in Stse is unexciting, traditional, domestic, immanent, and sacralized. The economy is not described in detail, but it is based on the principle that "Wealth can't stop . . . . It has to keep going. Like the blood circulating" (FWF 94); wealth is good but it is not to be accumulated. What is to be produced and by whom is based on traditional divisions of labor (96).^[19] Their technology is sufficient to their needs, but no more, and they keep their material needs simple: they do not collect gadgets among their wealth. Mothers keep their babies and children's fathers are not their biological sires but mother's brothers: maternal uncles or, if the mother lacks a brother, an adopted uncle/father. The men who sired the children might take an interest in them, but they have no parental rights, nor, apparently, is it shameful for a sire to be no more concerned about his offspring than with village children generally. People do marry, but marriage is not intimately related to child-rearing (94).

The people of Stse lived daily among their daily gods and were visited every eleven years by the Unusual Gods; they study their trades and lineages and dancing, and, if they have any talent for it, they study for a long time and seriously their local variant of soccer (96): possibly influenced by the increasing enthusiasm of girls and women for sport, Le Guin is opening up space for athletics. If reality is immanent and not transcendent, the body embedded in the world is as good as the mind and has no transcendent soul to compete with; and in such a world bodies may be allowed, on occasion, to show off. Plus, in a healthy society, sports would be fun.

So is sex, and sex is important in "A Man of the People," both as a synecdoche for desire and as simply sex.

The rules in Stse are straightforward and strict. As Le Guin has shown in The Word for World Is Forest (1974) and thereafter, she is well aware of taboos against «incest» within clans and moieties, but, mercifully, she spares us the details, which can get very complex. As usual in Le Guin (and very strongly believed among the Kesh in ACH), sex is a great «manna,» and virginity "a sacred status, not to be carelessly abandoned" and sexuality "sacred" and "not to be carelessly undertaken" ("A Man of the People" 97). The people of Stse keep their pubescent children heterosexually virginal until about age fifteen, but they are not cruel about it. They allow homosexual sex, but not homosexual pairing, before fifteen, and they allow solitary male masturbation. And as among Denis Diderot's Tahitians (Diderot 64-65), there is a required coming-of-age day among the people of Stse and ritual heterosexual intercourse ". . . everybody must go through 'the twofold door' once," whatever their sexual orientation or desire for celibacy. Heterosexual initiation, however, takes place only after some real sex education, especially necessary because Hainish men and women have the ability unique among Hainish-derived species to control their fertility, by literal self-control, but they must be taught how (FWF 97-98).

For their initiation, Havzhiva is paired with Iyan Iyan; there's really no choice given the clan requirements. Havzhiva and Iyan Iyan "Each saw a stranger" when they approach each other for sex and think that they want to be done with the ritual. "So they touched and that god entered them, becoming them; the god for whom they were the doorway; the meaning for which they were the word." We're told the god was a clumsy one at first, "but became an increasingly happy god." So Iyan Iyan exercises her right to bring Havzhiva home with her. "So he slept with Iyan Iyan at her house, ate breakfast there, ate dinner at his house, kept his daily clothes at her house, kept his dance clothes at his house, and went on with his education, which now had mostly to do with rug-weaving on the power broadlooms and with the nature of the cosmos. He and Iyan both played on the adult soccer team" (99).

In addition to weaving, Havzhiva has another career option. His mother, Tovo, is an important woman, the "Heir of the Sun": a traveler and trader who dealt with strangers, an expert on rituals and protocol (94). Just before the turning point of this part of the story, Tovo offer Havzhiva inheritance of the Sun. "Do I want to? he thought . . .  He knew he liked the work. Its patterns were not closed. It took him out of Stse, among strangers, and he liked that. It gave him something to do which he didn't know how to do, and he liked that" (100). Havzhiva feels himself at a crucial moment in his life, and that moment arrives with Mezha, "the woman who had borne the children Granite sired," and then who "had broken the social contract, done things no woman does, ignored her lineage, become another kind of being"-a historian (100-01).

Mezha tells Havzhiva about the world of Hainish historians, how there she is not a Buried Cable woman but a woman, who "can have sex with any person I choose. I can take up any profession I choose. Lineage matters here. It does not matter, there. It has meaning here, and a use. It has no meaning and no use, anywhere else in the universe." Most importantly, she presents him with a highly arguable proposition important for the rest of Four Ways to Forgiveness: "There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical." When he asks if there are "two kinds of gods," she tells him that among the historians there are no gods. There are "souls," though (if not necessarily the individually immortal variety).

After a moment, Havzhiva replies, "Rocks are the river's bed" (103-04). "Rocks," then, may be literally more fundamental than "the river," but rivers are still all right; shifting out of the metaphor, in Four Ways to Forgiveness lives lead in history are all right. Very differently from many of Le Guin's works, from The Word for World Is Forest to Always Coming Home to Tehanu, these stories allow for a life of action in the world, so long as it is action in the world, without illusions of transcendent vision.^[20]

A short while later, Havzhiva asks Iyan Iyan to have a baby with him, and she declines. Over a year later, she asks him for a baby, and he declines. And, insightful woman that she is, Iyan Iyan jumps to the correct conclusion that Havzhiva is going to leave. He thinks "Nothing is right." And that everything he does he does "because that's how it's done"-a negative conservatism in The Dispossessed (TD 264; ch. 10)-and he is coming to feel that "there are other ways." Iyan Iyan is far more certain that "There's one way to live rightly" that she knows of, which is to live in Stse, which is where she is staying (105). Havzhiva leaves, ending the first of the three parts of the story.

Part two, takes Havzhiva to Kathhad and Ve; he trains to be a historian in Kathhad, and then goes to the Ekumenical School on Ve (the next planet out from the sun). Among the historians, he is called Zhiv, and Zhiv enjoys his new being, where he thinks at first "there are no rules," at least not for sex. Mezha tells him a point dear to Le Guin and just about any student of culture: "There are always rules," especially for sex (111). Zhiv is less liberated than he thinks, intentionally seeking out Alien women to add "exoticism" to what the Narrator gently assures us he saw as "transgression," however much Zhiv described his Alien adventures as "an enrichment of knowledge." He's again ready for love, though, and he finds it in Tiu, who is Hainish but "a child of the Historians as he was a child of the People. He realised{sic} very soon that this bond and division was far greater than any foreignness: that their unlikeness was true difference and their likeness was true kinship. . . . She was what he sought" (111-12).

Lyubov in The Word for World Is Forest looks beyond the esthetic "defect" of "white skin" to see the Hainishman, Mr. Lepennon, as an expert at civilized humanity, living "the social-intellectual life with the grace of a cat hunting in a garden," the Hainish generally being and acting who and what they are (68; ch. 3). Similarly, Zhiv sees Tiu in possession of "perfect equilibrium," which he extends into a figure of walking, "effortless, unself-conscious as an animal, and yet conscious, careful . . . ." In his view, Tiu was "a woman free to be fully human," with "perfect measure . . . perfect grace" (112).^[21] Tiu finds Zhiv appealing and a little scary. She sees how he needs her, wants her, and "had made her into the center of his life." When he comes to her and says "I cannot live without you," she tells him, "Then live with me a while." They live together, and Tiu comes to accept being adored, but "Very gradually, she began to resist the tension, the intensity, the ecstasy" of the relationship; she found it "lovely" but somehow not right. Tiu didn't see herself so lovable to deserve Zhiv's "passionate loyalty. . . . Her self-respect was an intellectual thing. 'You make a god of me,' she had told him, and did not understand when he replied with happy seriousness, 'We make the god together'" (113).

For good and bad, then, Tiu decides to go to Terra as she had planned, leaving Zhiv to follow her in a year. Zhiv does not take the news well. Tiu reaches out to Zhiv, "scared by the darkness in him, his grief, his mute acceptance of betrayal. But it wasn't betrayal-she rejected the word," and we are free to side with Tiu or Zhiv or remain neutral. "Darkness" is a much-privileged word in Le Guin's writing, and we should respect it in Zhiv, but Tiu has a point that she and Zhiv are not children and "must not cling together like children." Romeo and Juliet could not stand to be separated, but Shevek and Takver in The Dispossessed can, and if Takver can wait for Shevek, Zhiv ought to be able to wait a year or a couple of years to follow Tiu (114).^[22]

He is not able to wait, however, and almost wills himself to die. People find him and sing a Staying Chant over him, and he lives, but his love for Tiu, if it doesn't die, at least becomes irrelevant for his actions. Zhiv goes to a hospital where he philosophizes at some length, arguably going beyond the modern, Enlightenment views of the Historian, Mezha-views that allow universal time, universal knowledge-to something more postmodern, poststructuralist, and/or more Daoist. These views privilege the local and immediate, the immanently experiential over the transcendentally theoretical, but simultaneously insist upon "everything": the Dao, perhaps, the cosmos, or, for that matter, the universal quantum field.^[23]

And here he breaks off, but having made some decisions. After leaving the hospital he returns to the Ekumenical School but changes fields of study: dropping social science, Tiu's field-and an abstract one, a temptation to formulate large-scale laws-and instead going into training for Ekumenical field service. He no longer aims for Terra and Tiu and "All that stuff about war and slavery and class and caste and gender"-the stuff of Terran history-but wants now to go to the Werel system where war and slavery are "current events." He had gone to the hospital Zhiv and returns as Havzhiva again. He had seen himself as having "betrayed and forsaken Iyan Iyan, so Tiu had betrayed and forsaken him. There was no going back and no going forward. So he must turn aside" (116).

Havzhiva sees himself as still one of the People but incapable of living with them; he had become a historian but did not want to live among historians. "So he must go live among Aliens." And perhaps he can be useful. There is a beautifully maintained ironic stance here, stressed in the final image in this part of the story. The local medicine man visits Havzhiva for a kind of pre-departure checkup and after a silence asks him to walk a bit. "You're out of balance . . . . Did you know it?" Havzhiva replies that he knows it, that he has "always been off-balance." The medicine man tells him he need not be but adds, "On the other hand, maybe it's best, since you're going to Werel" (117).^[24] Stone Telling leaves the Kesh for her father's unbalanced Condor people, who are trying to figuratively soar over the world and very bloodily make history (and corpses and cripples). Similarly, Havzhiva leaves his Pueblo to study history and then help make it. The second section of "A Man of the People" ends though with another image, one with perhaps more positive possibilities. At very the end of City of Illusions, Falk-Ramarren both leaves home and heads home, in a ship moving "across the darkness" (CI 217; ch. 10). Falk-Ramarren brings important knowledge back to his Werel at the end of City, and the second section of "A Man of the People" ends with Havzhiva's boarding a NAFAL ship and heading out toward Werel "across the darkness" (FWF 117).

Havzhiva doesn't stay on Werel long but gets promptly sent to Yeowe, "a new member of the Ekumen of Known Worlds" (119). The thirty-years' War of Liberation is over, but the struggle for power among the former freedom fighters is still going on, including the struggle over whether to allow agents of the Ekumen to remain on Yeowe. The Ekumenical Ambassador, "a clever young Terran"-or half Terran-"named Solly" sends Sub-Envoy Havzhiva to the Yotebber Region. Havzhiva's trip to Yotebber is only long enough to allow his observation that "History is infamy" as he observes "the ruined landscapes" of this world; and his acclimation time there is just enough to allow some exposition on the development of male tribal hierarchies when Yeowe was a planet-wide slave state, and on how the Liberation "had arisen first among the women in the tribal compounds, a rebellion against male domination, before it became a war of all slaves against their owners" (118-19). And then we get the first incident in this part of the story. Against good advice, Havzhiva goes for a walk in the City Park, and he is almost killed (120-21).

The attempted murder is part of Le Guin's continuing meditation on justice, and it gets the main plot of the story going. Before the attack, we get the excellent observation that "Havzhiva thought of justice what an ancient Terran said of another god: I believe in it because it is impossible" (120).^[25] The "justice" we get to see is the holoscreen picture of the punishment of the man convicted of attacking him: "a thin human body suspended by the feet, the arms and hands twitching, the intestines hanging down over the chest and face" (122). Havzhiva's response is not a philosophical "All knowledge is local"; hence, "Who am I to judge you?" It's the far more psychologically realistic shout of "Turn it off . . . . turn it off!", vomiting, and, "You are not people!" The last in his own language; Havzhiva is still a diplomat on duty.

The plot arrives in the person of Yeron, his nurse. She brings him a message:

Havzhiva asks her if the women are organized, and she responds that they are good at organizing. She doubts, though that they can free themselves on their own. "There has to be a change," primarily in the way men think: the men of Yeowe must stop thinking that "they have to be bosses." Yeron isn't quite sure how to do that, but she knows it cannot be done through violence: "You kill the boss and you become the boss. We must change that mind. The old slave mind, boss mind." It is "a matter of education," with "education" to her "a sacred word," and she asks for Havzhiva's help and that of the Ekumen (125).

Yeron raises the thematic political problem for "A Man of the People" and, later "A Woman's Liberation": If «To liberate is a reflexive verb», as we used to say in the late 1960s, how can outsiders effectively and ethically serve the cause of liberation? If «Liberation requires "outside agitators"», but if , as we will see in "A Woman's Liberation," top-down emancipation can be disastrous-how can privileged people usefully serve? Part of the answer may have been given by Estraven in The Left Hand of Darkness, who claims to have had one and only one talent: "to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act" (189; ch. 14). The "great wheel" is a-turning on Yeowe, and Havzhiva is able to give it a nudge now and then; equally important, as the story is plotted, he is capable of learning about this world.^[26] Havzhiva is well aware of his own insignificance on Yeowe, but he also knows that "what he did might signify" (127). So he does little things. He requests the government to invite women to a reception; when a bodyguard detail is forced upon him, he gets it made up of policewomen; he plants in the mind of the local Chief the idea that "what is called the construction of gender" must be shown to be different on Yeowe from Werel-or the Chief will have trouble with immigrants sent from Werel "to lessen revolutionary pressure" there (127-28).^[27] And he shows up and talks and gets himself in the news at the great demonstration for women's rights. And when his boss-Solly still-calls and asks "What the hell" he is up to, he gets her to encourage the women of Yotebber for showing "Yeowe a model of true freedom for immigrants from the Slave World" and praise the government of Yotebber as "a model . . . of restraint, enlightenment, et cetera." Solly raises the critical questions of what will happen if the Regional Government starts shooting the demonstrators and "Is this a revolution . . . ?" Havzhiva perhaps answers both questions in his response to the second, "It's education, ma'am" (130).

The suggestion seems to be that so long as the movement remains peaceful, and so long as it has a major power for a friend, that long the local powers will refrain from shooting their opponents. The powers that were in A-Io at the beginning of Ekumenical history were quite willing to shoot unarmed civilians in the political climax on Urras in The Dispossessed, but the point may be that there was no friendly Alien power on Urras-not even a real League of Worlds yet-to cause trouble over the atrocity. The Werelian Owners and Bosses and politicians had no qualms about using murder and terror to crush the rebellion on Yeowe, but they were slave-owners who made no claims to kinship with the people they exploited, tortured, and killed. In any event, the key point seems to be the point in Shevek's speech at the demonstration in The Dispossessed, just before the military start shooting down the strikers: "You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or it is nowhere" (242; ch. 9); alternatively: ". . . revolution begins in the thinking mind" (267; ch. 10). What one can do for the revolution, then-always-may be "education," starting with Havzhiva's educating himself within the world of the story, and Le Guin's educating us in our world of the possibility and hope of revolution.

To learn Yeowe culture Havzhiva "must know the plantations and the tribes."^[28] He starts at Hayawa Tribal Village, the original slave compound on Yeowe 350 years back.^[29] In this large and remote district, "much of the society and culture of plantation slavery" remained. The current situation is perhaps symbolized in the first thing in the village the Narrator mentions: a large gate standing open in a "massive frame; there were no walls" (130-31). There have been some changes after liberation-a banquet features meat, the food of the masters-but much remains unchanged: the Elder, once the slave chief, has his own path and walks his "narrow way."^[30] Having been forbidden to waste Corporation time singing-and risking having acid poured down one's throat if heard-the slaves had developed a very quiet music. No "shout of triumph," of freedom, in their songs (132-33). What most remains the same is the utter subordination of women, symbolized in the coming-of-age ceremony for six boys.

The ceremony begins with the fasted thirteen-year olds trying to jump the compound ditch, followed by a "catechism" on "ritual, protocol, ethics." Havzhiva watches and lets his thoughts go "back a long time, a long way. We teach what we know, he thought, and all our knowledge is local." Then the boys are ritually marked, and the elders call them "tribesmen" and "hero." Havzhiva thinks the ceremony is over. "But now six more children were . . . brought into the plaza, led across the ditch-bridge by old women. These were girls, decked with anklets and bracelets, otherwise naked. At the sight of them a great cheer went up from the audience of men. Havzhiva was surprised. Women were to be made members of the tribe too? That at least was a good sign, he thought" (134-35). He thinks wrong.

What happens next is that these girls-two "barely adolescent, the others . . . younger"-are put down by the women accompanying them and then laid by tribal elders: "The elders' bare buttocks pumped, whether in actual coitus or an imitation Havzhiva could not tell." And then it is the boys' turn. Recall that Stse also had a heterosexual initiation, and that Havzhiva was unlikely to be shocked by such an idea. What is shocking to him and to us is this scene and the words of the nice man who had slept with Havzhiva the night before. He assures Havzhiva that unlike the bad old days under the rule of the Corporations, nowadays the girls are drugged so they won't be hurt.

The kind man repeats that now the girls are drugged, and when Havzhiva notes that he had called women "bondswomen" he corrects the slip and apologizes for the old, derogatory term. Havzhiva looks directly into the face of his new friend and notes "that his dark skin meant he must have a good deal of owner blood, perhaps indeed was the son of an owner or a Boss. Nobody's son," Havzhiva corrects himself, "begotten on a slave woman. A son is chosen. All knowledge is local, all knowledge is partial" (136-37).

The political and ethical moral of the initiation sequence is stated explicitly by Havzhiva, speaking into his recording device, in Hainish. "You can't change anything from outside it" Havzhiva says. "Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern." You see "What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving" (137). The Narrator tells us that "This last phrase, was in the dialect of Stse," reminding us that weaving was the trade Havzhiva might have followed in Stse. Readers familiar with Le Guin's earlier work will put Havzhiva in a line of weavers, most relevantly, I think, Faxe the Weaver of the Foretelling in The Left Hand of Darkness, who sees patterns from within them, and only for an instant, and for the purpose of denying all utility to transcendent knowledge (LHD 59-67, 69-70; ch. 5). Faxe: who ceases to be a ritual Weaver when he returns to the world of Gethenian politics.

The fabular moral of "A Man of the People" is reinforced symbolically in a small section ending Havzhiva's visit to Hayawa Tribal Village, balancing the currently ironic symbol of the open gate without walls. Women are making the Yeowean equivalent of a sand painting, "spreading dust, colored earth, making some kind of pattern or picture." One of the women tells him that he can't see it, and he asks if she means he should not be there; she does not. The picture is only a part of some larger pattern. "We make what we know, here," the woman says. Havzhiva asks about the men: "They never see it whole?" And he is answered, "'Nobody does. Only us. We have it here.' The dark woman did not touch her head but her heart, covering her breasts with her long, work-hardened hands." Havzhiva says he'd like to see the pattern: "'You'll have to find a woman to teach you,' said the woman the color of ashes" (138-39).

Havzhiva's last service we see is a discussion with the Young Chief: "the Son and Heir, the Chosen," and (along with the open gate) a symbol of future political possibilities. The key lines are the Chosen's asserting in the words of his religion that they have held "fast to the one noble thing" and have become "a free people." Havzhiva says "You are free men." The Chosen comes back by pigeon-holing Havzhiva as a city man who wouldn't understand tribal women, who, he says "do not want a man's freedom." Among tribal folk, "A woman holds fast to her baby. That is the noble thing for her. That is how the Lord Kamye made woman, and the Merciful Tual"-the Goddess in this culture-"is her example. In other places it may be different. . . . Here it is as I have said." Havzhiva nods, Yeowean style and says "That is so," but then goes on to tell about a picture he has seen. "Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial." And from this it follows that "No truth can make another truth untrue." But yet, as a political matter, some knowledge may deserve privileging. Havzhiva puts the matter either differently or more diplomatically. "All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole" (139-40).

Whatever the epistemological implications of Havzhiva's lines here, the Chosen interprets it politically as a justification to change their traditional ways and, from the male tribal point of view, "come to live as they live in the cities," losing the tribal way of life.^[31] The Narrator notes that beneath the Chosen's "dogmatic tone was fear and grief." Havzhiva replies to the Chosen that the Chosen speaks true: "Much will be lost." However, "The lesser knowledge must be given to gain the greater. And not once only." The Chosen says that the men of his tribe "will not deny our truth," and Havzhiva, sensibly, is sure that that is the case (140).

And then there is a white space for a transition of a number of years: we now have Stabile Yehedarhed Havzhiva, Ekumenical Advisor to the Yeowean Ministry of Social Justice and partnered for eighteen years (to Shomeke, as we will learn in the next story). Havzhiva returns to Yotebber to visit, and we see his visit with Yeron.

The movement has been successful-and we'll have to wait for the next story also for more hints of how-and Yerod greets Havzhiva as a saint. He demurs. She changes the appellation to hero: "You can't deny that you're a hero," and he doesn't "knowing what a hero is," he says with a laugh, "I won't deny it" (143). And he is a hero: not so much any more for Le Guin a bringer of change like Shevek in The Dispossessed or even a translator of it like Selver in The Word for World Is Forest nor even like a midwife in the Marxists' noble image. This hero is more like the purest of Daoist sage, changing things through a kind of spiritual "autoplasty." Mary Douglas tells us that a "primitive" man "seeks to achieve his desires by self-manipulation, performing surgical rites upon his own body to produce fertility in nature, subordination in women[,] or hunting success." This is opposed to our own "alloplasty": "In modern culture we seek to achieve our desires by operating directly on the external environment, with the impressive technical results that are the most obvious distinction between the two types of cultures."^[32] In what I'm calling "spiritual autoplasty" one is the revolution, and that is the crucial thing for achieving true change.

Havzhiva says Yeron gave him little choice in becoming a hero, and she insists that he chose: which is, of course, the central thing traditional heroes do.^[33] Havzhiva responds,

This is an important exchange. It usefully denies some sort of essential maleness and allows for different men coming from different cultures. It also seems to imply that changing one's soul works directly on the world. In one sense, that is obviously true: if the real reality of things is immanent, changing oneself changes the world by definition, minutely, and small changes in oneself can have big effects in a world in which everything is connected to everything else: a connected cosmos in which "trembling circles" of human desire and being and choice can enlarge, interlock, and fade "on the still surface of the" symbolic "water" of life (93). Still, metaphysics is pretty far from practical politics, and I would direct readers toward the very end of the story and the conclusion of the motif of walking.

Havzhiva talks of learning at home in Stse how to "sit still." Being dissatisfied with that, he "learned flying, with the historians"-i.e., trying to stand outside the world and see its patterns. Still though he could not keep his "balance." What he learned on Yeowe was what he needed to learn: "How to walk . . . . How to walk with my people" (144). Here the suggestion is one of solidarity. Walking with one's true people, one can be in balance-a key word with the Daoist Le Guin-and one can get things done. Not utter stillness in the manner of the Pueblo: being removed from history by choosing stasis. And not being removed from history by just studying it. And not being removed from history by trying to get above what history is and trying to change things, godlike, from above and outside. The image here is the small "p" people, united, walking together and making nonviolent history, bringing true change.

Rakam begins her story with how she came to write it at the request of her "dear friend," who turns out to be Havzhiva from "A Man of the People." She ends it, "as so many stories . . . with the joining of two people" and raises the question, "What is one man's and one woman's love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species?" And answers her own question with, "A little thing," but notes that a key, too, is a little thing. Keys unlock doors (much bigger things than keys), and this is an important image to end a collection that has talked of heterosexual intercourse as going "through 'the twofold door'" ("A Man of the People" 98), has made much of Compound gates both opened and closed, and has featured as the liberating event the women of Nadami opening and holding open the door to the armory, beginning the Liberation of Yeowe ("A Woman's Liberation" 193 [& passim])-to say nothing of all those gates and walls and doors from Earthsea through Always Coming Home. Here the key is two human beings in a balanced relationship: not a "marriage of true minds" (in Shakespeare's phrase) but bodies: "it is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery" (208, penultimate sentence of the story).

Rakam's story is her movement from slavery into freedom, a journey both figurative and literal. In "A Man of the People," Havzhiva went from the immanence of the Pueblo of Stse into history and the Ekumen at Kathhad and Ve and ends up among the "dust people" of Yeowe (119). So Rakam on Werel goes from the slave Compound to the House of the Shomeke Family, gets kidnapped «down the river» to the far worse Great House of Zeskra, goes to the City and a moment of freedom on Werel-a time in which she learns and helps make history, flees to Yeowe, and then must go from the village of Hagayot to Yotebber City to find a true freedom, a voice in history, and find Yehedarhed Havzhiva. The pattern is a standard one-the Journey-and stands behind the most factual of slave narratives and some of Le Guin's most extravagantly imagined works: in being one-way, it is the journey of Luz into freedom in the wilderness in Eye of the Heron, and, most relevantly, perhaps, the journey of Irena to the City and Hugh in The Beginning Place. "O, O, Yeowe , / Nobody never come back"-which was horrible for the slaves first sent there but just as well for Rakam and others who have no place decent to go back to.

Rakam starts life as a Werelian asset whose mother serves in the House of the Shomeke family, a family that had been "great in History"; Rakam had been sired by the Owner, making her darker than most slaves and giving Rakam's mother hopes for her. The racial analogies here should be clear to most readers and every adult US reader: it is a simple reversal of US racial hierarchies favoring the "fair"-i.e., those with skins light in color.^[34] Rakam's mother has her dreams and, perhaps, pretensions, and she gets Rakam to promise to be, with significant wording, "tame," not "wild," and gets Rakam accepted at the House (150).^[35] Rakam becomes "the pet of Lady Tazeu Wehoma Shomeke." Her Lady "was gentle, but she was the mistress in love," and Rakam is "her instrument" (152): a good reminder that patriarchy has to do with power more than XY vs. XX sex chromosomes, and that sexual exploitation, too, is primarily about power.

Young Rakam comes to feel superior to the field hands: "We domestics of the Great House were entirely different from them," she thought. "Serving the higher beings, we became like them" (154). Her stay with Lady Tazeu comes to an end in Rakam's fourteenth or fifteenth year when her Lady sends her as a birthday present to her son, Erod. Erod is like a young Lord Byron, if one can picture a chaste, not-crippled, not-too-bright, nonpoetic Lord Byron, with no sense of humor. In any event, he is a radical and a rich abolitionist and a golden-voiced orator. Erod knows that intercourse with a slave is rape, so he won't touch Rakam, but he does speak to her and two male slaves about abolition, liberation, and the on-going revolution on Yeowe (155-56).

When Lord Shomeke, the Owner, is dying horribly of pusworm, the Lady Tazeu shows him the kindness of slitting his throat and then cuts "the veins in her arms across and across"-no «cry for help» but a competent euthanasia plus suicide. Lord Erod's first act is to manumit his slaves, give a rousing speech on the subject, leave them the estate and their freedom papers, and fly off to the capital with two of his male servants, but not with Rakam; he'd never touched Rakam (162). If «To liberate is a reflexive verb», such top-down manumission is a potential problem philosophically, and it proves to be an immediate problem practically: indeed, an utter disaster for Erod's former slaves. With Werel just having lost the war on Yeowe, the local Bosses are not going to allow the gates to the slave compound to remain symbolically open, and the neighbors generally, those potential dangers to every utopian experiment, are going to be upset with Lord Erod's dangerous action. Under the Voe Dean law, Erod's slaves may be free, but the government's «writs don't run» so far from the City, and any laws protecting slaves "meant nothing on the Estates" (168).

The grandmothers and the eunuchs spent all the first night of freedom "trying to make plans, to draw our people together so they could defend themselves." But the young men "ran wild" and loot the House, precipitating shooting and the flying in to the estate of reinforcements for the Bosses. So the Compound gates are locked again, but from the inside this time, as the newly freed slaves try to resist their attackers. In the analogy with Terra, it is Yeowe that is Haiti, the place of a successful slave rebellion, not rural Werel. In the middle of the night of the second or third day of freedom, the attackers "came with heavy tractors and pushed down the wall, and a hundred men or more, our Bosses and owners from all the plantations of the region, came swarming in. They were armed with guns. We fought them with farm tools and pieces of wood." In a few days, the Compound has gone from a prison to a fortress to a killing field. "One or two of them were hurt or killed. They killed as many of us as they wanted to kill and then began to rape us. It went on all night" (163-64). For the first time since, perhaps, Planet of Exile (1966), Le Guin has shown a truly negative example of "unbuilding walls"; for the first time ever, perhaps, in her canon, she narrates a very negative example of men acting explicitly against the law.^[36]

Rakam is kidnapped and taken to Zeskra, to serve among the "use-women" at the Great House (165). There she sees sexual exploitation extreme even in Werel's slave culture, including the murder of a little girl from Shomeke, who dies when a guest at Zestra tightens a knot too much in a sex/strangulation game. This leads to a very important brief passage, when Rakam says she'll speak no more of such horrors: "I have told what I must tell. There are truths that are not useful. All knowledge is local, my friend [Havzhiva] has said. Is it true, where is it true, that that child had to die in that way? Is it true, where is it true, that she did not have to die in that way?" (166)

As Archmage of Earthsea, Ged refused to punish, but that didn't stop him from rescuing Arren from slavers and striking their captain dumb until that captain could "find a word worth speaking," which we may assume was a long time (FS 62; ch. 4). In The Word for World Is Forest, among the rigorously immanent, totally unidealistic Athsheans, the Daoist-style Old Man, Coro Mena, tells Selver he has "done what you had to do, and it was not right" in massacring Terrans (33-34; ch. 2, my emphasis). Knowledge may indeed be local, but it is not so local that a murderer at Zeskra can claim justification through a local value system, nor can even whole tribes claim a local truth in finding true progress in drugging girls before they are ritually raped (136-37).

With the help of the Hame (the slave resistance-movement), and The Community (the abolitionists), Rakam escapes to the City, one of her friends dying in the attempt. Holding onto her freedom paper, she arrives in the City: in this story, a good place for people.

In the City, as a free woman, Rakam gets a room for herself and shuts her door. She comes to feel a good deal of hostility toward anyone, male or female, who looked at her sexually. She was mere body to Lady Tazeu and at Zeskra and even "to Erod who would not touch"-Rakam saw herself as "Flesh to touch or not touch, as they pleased. To use or not to use, as they chose" (171). Having a room of one's own-and with a closeable door-is, indeed, a good thing, and Le Guin strongly believes in times of abstinence; still, there is a potential for a puritanical hatred of the flesh here-Rakam does hate the "sexual parts" of herself-and Rakam's rejection of her body is not a good thing. What is altogether good is her learning to love history (171-72). She had "grown up without any history" and is now learning its importance.

"A Woman's Liberation" is, in part, a defense of history and the life of historians, both in a colloquial sense and in the sense established in "A Man of the People" of studying history and making it, doing in the world, changing things. On worlds where people could talk of "postliterate information technology" (197)-Werel and Yeowe in the far future, Terra in our time-"A Woman's Liberation" is a defense of books and book-learning and book-teaching. And it is part of Le Guin's continuing investigation of politics, including feminist politics.^[38]

Rakam becomes a student and teacher of history, a friend of the Hainishman Esdardon Aya-Old Music from "Forgiveness Day"-and a political activist, allied with, and a thorn in the side of, the Radical Party. Rakam's militant activism causes problems for Radical candidates, but she defends her action by saying "No owner is my candidate!" When charged with egotism by Ahas, a servant of Lord Erod since their days on the estate, she claims "I don't put myself first-politicians and capitalists do that. I put freedom first," which sounds suspiciously like a canned phrase from Abberkam in "Betrayals." Rakam does not go into detail about the politics here, but she makes clear that she was a difficult ally and contributed to one problem. She admits now some truth in the accusation she was putting herself first.

The issue coming up was a divisive one for the Liberation Movement: a social issue. In the "open" compounds in the City, there was a men's side and a women's side and, in a radical move, some apartments for couples. This was illegal given the Werelian doctrine that assets owed loyalty to Owners, not to another asset. Lord Erod and others did not want to take up this issue, feeling it was a matter of personal arrangements and got in the way of the larger issue of emancipation; Rakam and others argued that ". . . the right of assets to live together and the bring up children was a cause the Radical Party should support. It was not directly threatening to ownership and might appeal to the natural instincts of many owners, especially the women, who could not vote but who were valuable allies." The debate moves to basics and an important exchange between Rakam and Erod (FWF 180).

Rakam says there can be "no freedom without sexual freedom, and that until women were allowed and men were willing to take responsibility for their children, no woman, whether owner or asset, would be free." Erod responds that "Men must bear the responsibility for the public side of life" and goes on to make a standard «dual spheres» argument, established by "God and Nature." Rakam infers from this, correctly, that for women slaves emancipation will mean only the ironic freedom "to enter the beza, be locked in on the women's side" of owners' houses (180).

All good points, and taken up by some other women at the meeting, who want the Radical Party to speak for women and to make the political more the personal in the lives of Radical leaders: letting their own wives out of the women's side, letting their own wives become active in Radical politics. Rakam looks at the argument and feels "half-triumphant, half-dismayed." She is seen by Erod and some others "from the Hame . . . as an open trouble-maker. And indeed my words had divided us. But were we not already divided?" Of course they were already divided, and anyone who knows about the rise of the American women's liberation movement out of the New Left and «The Movement» in the late 1960s and 1970s will recognize the argument. Rakam is right in her triumph and her dismay: the radical women and far leftists in the US Movement were mostly correct in their analyses, but yet their truths were divisive and contributed to divisions and backlash. In Rakam's story, however, the theoretical issue must give way to an urgent, practical concern. Esdardon Aya shows up with news that the government of Voe Deo is about to force manumitted slaves to find owner sponsors. And if they cannot-and a trouble-maker like Rakam will have problems getting sponsored-they faced death, a labor camp, or auction back into slavery (181).

It is time for Rakam to get out, and very fast; Old Music can offer her a trip to Yeowe, and she accepts, with gratitude (182-83).

It looks at first that the plot-conflict in "A Woman's Liberation" now will turn toward violence: the ship is attacked by the Voe Dean Space Defense Fleet, but this attack comes to nothing; the true conflict is elsewhere (184-85). Elsewhere appears when Rakam gets to Yeowe and gets her first taste of their version of postcolonial freedom. A teacher and historian, she is sent to a cooperative village to work the rice paddies. So is Tualtak, a chemist, and every other woman to arrive on their spacecraft.

The Hagayot Village in the Yotebber Region is a rural cooperative and not as bad as the old tribal compound Havzhiva observed in "A Man of the People"; it is bad enough, though. The men there fear the Werelian women, "who were not used to taking orders" from men of equal social rank; the village maintains a men's side and a women's side; the men watch the Werelian women "with fierce suspicion and a whip as ready as any Boss's." What the men fear, it seems, is "Bosswomen," their idea of the grandmothers on Werel. The men as a group wish to retain and seek to increase power over women after the Liberation because many of the men enjoy that power in itself and the privileges it brings. Their main fear is fear of losing privilege (189-90).

The men on Yeowe have continued a horrible situation for the women, horrible enough to drive to suicide a woman from the space ship from the country of Bambur, "whipped and beaten by both women and men for speaking her language," a language they do not understand (191). Rakam feels she has to act and her action is teaching: she decides "to teach the village women and children to read." Country-schools were about to be started, and it would advantage the Hagayot boys if they arrived knowing how to read; Rakam finagles permission to teach boys, girls, and women, starting with the Life of Tual for the women: unimpeachable religious training (191-92).

Tualtak wants to just walk away-the valued action in "Omelas," Eye of the Heron, and elsewhere in Le Guin's canon-but Rakam is afraid they will be raped, and she could not stand another rape. So Rakam begins organizing and a little agitating and gets, eventually, payment in cash for the women for their labor-as opposed to local script, worthless outside the village. She gets the local women to shame the men for not paying them. Not waiting to help the women of the village get the vote, Rakam and Tualtak take their earnings and catch a train for Yotebber City (193-94). Tualtak is sick, so Rakam takes her to a hospital and meets Dr. Yeron (Havzhiva's friend in "A Man of the People"), Rakam's entrée into radical politics in the Yotebber district.

Yeron takes her to "a meeting of an educational society . . . . a group of democrats, mostly teachers, who sought to work against the autocratic power of the tribal and regional chiefs under the new Constitution, and to counteract what they called the slave mind, the rigid, misogynistic hierarchy" that Rakam had learned about in detail in rural Yotebber. Her experience is useful to these city people "who had met the slave mind only when they found themselves governed by it." Not surprisingly, the women of the society were the more militant, the men more gradualist: the women "had lost the most at Liberation and now had less to lose." So the women were "ready for revolution" (197).

How you run a revolution when the government has all the weapons is most of the political topic for the rest of "A Woman's Liberation," except that the situation is worse than that. Even granting the power of discourse, "[W]hat good were words" when the established powers control "the net. The news, the information programs, the puppets of the neareals{sic}. . . . Against that, what harm could a lot of teachers do? Parents who had no schooling had children who entered the net to hear and see and feel what the Chief wanted them to know: that freedom is obedience to leaders, that virtue is violence, that manhood is domination" (197).

And at this promising low point, an Alien shows up at the meeting: the Sub-Envoy of the Ekumen, Yehedarhed Havzhiva, bearing books from Esdardon Aya (198). These are a great gift for Rakam: "the books gave me freedom, gave me the world-the worlds." And this leads to the assertion that books are better than the net because the net-privileged in Stse and among the Kesh of Always Coming Home-gives the present; books preserve the past. They are city things, books, helping concentrate and preserve civilization, in this story a good thing (199).

The story quickly presses on to "the great demonstration of women," a kind of general strike featuring 70,000 women lying down on the tracks and stopping the trains of Yeowe (201 [also 130]). And, when the Movement loses some momentum, these activist teachers, with Havzhiva's help, take over the printing house of the University of Yeowe (202). Books "are the body of history" Havzhiva says, and Rakam agrees, and she becomes editor of the new-subtly subversive-women's press, the one free press on Yeowe (203-04).

"A Woman's Liberation" comes to a happy ending. The incidents leading up to this happy ending are the demonstration and the founding of the press, Rakam's returning to public speaking, and her public singing of "O, O, Ye-o-we, / Nobody never comes back" when hecklers tell her to "go back" where she came from. Plus, the very popular Sub-Envoy's Havzhiva's working for the Liberation Movement and his determining that Rakam's cat, Owner (named for "his" dark coat), is not a male but a female (203).

Havzhiva invites Rakam for a walk and then to come home with him, and Rakam accepts. She "had not desired a man or a woman . . . since Shomeke," touching people "with love but never with desire." She had thought, "My gate was locked." Havzhiva opened it, and we have Le Guinian touch. Then dinner, with the invitation to dinner followed by an invitation to make love, something Rakam has never done. She has been raped; perhaps she had had love made to her by the Lady Tazeu; but she has not made love. So they go to Havzhiva's bedroom, "in the beza . . . in the harem." He lives on the women's side, liking "the view" (207).

The final paragraph of "A Woman's Liberation" tells us "The Amendments to the Constitution were voted, by secret ballot, in the Yeowean Year of Liberty 18"-and if you want the details of the "events that led to this and what has followed," we can read them in the newly published History of Yeowe from the University Press." Part of this happy ending is the traditional magic: As We Like It, «They all lived happily ever after in a new and better world coalescing around a central couple.» In a political story like "A Woman's Liberation," that better world includes serious political reform, so if we want the happy ending we'll accept the liberating amendments on faith. Additionally, there is the living proof of Havzhiva as a man who can "live on the woman's side."^[39] Men are not genetically predestined to be sexist; it is a matter of cultural conditioning-and of greed, pride, fear, and individual choice if men are male chauvinist oppressors. The men of Yeowe, we've learned, do have a sense of shame, and this can be used politically: the women of Hagayot Village did finally get paid for their labor in real money (194). The men of Yeowe owe the women a large debt for their world's liberation. And post-slavery, postcolonial Yeowe has much to gain from friendship with the Ekumen, and maybe from making Werel look reactionary, and much to lose from the Ekumen by shooting down activist women. The political logic is that Yeowean men can be accused of gaining freedom in large part for the «freedom» to oppress women. They can be accused of hypocrisy and ingratitude. Such accusations are painful, especially if true-on the occasions the accused have a sense of shame. And the women have shown they can stop the trains and thereby threaten serious economic disruption. If there is not a greater pain from losing privilege, sensible Machiavellian politicians will give people simple justice. The US Civil Rights Movement did succeed in securing rights that cost majority Whites relatively little. The more militant, and majority, liberation movement in South Africa achieved even more. The happy ending on Yeowe could happen. And "A Woman's Liberation" may prove to be an effective mâshâl for postcolonial women's liberation on our world.

Werel: Endnotes 

1 The lead character in "Forgiveness Day" is Solly Agat Terwa; the "Agat" part is our hint that the earlier "Werel" in PE and CI is "Alterra" here.  (So I suggested, and Le Guin responded "yes!".)

2 For near-future (eco)catastrophes, see e.g., "Nine Lives," The Dispossessed, Always Coming Home, The New Atlantis, "Newton's Sleep."

3 For land-tenure and property, cf. Tehanu; for the general status of women, cf. Condor Women in ACH.

4 Slave-holding on Yeowe may seem more familiar if we note that distinguishing between the Corporations and the State on the planet is to make a distinction without much difference.  State ownership of slaves was fairly common in early antiquity (e.g., the helots of Sparta [Swain 1.316]) and later in Roman mining and quarrying ("Slavery . . .").  And the convict lease system under the "Black Codes" of the Jim-Crow US South (1870s f.) has been called "socialized slavery" (Adolph Reed, after Oshinsky—see Reed [46]).

5 For Le Guin's earlier uses of Romeo and Juliet motifs, see above, the discussions of PE and the East Karhidish tale "Estraven the Traitor," ch. 9 in LHD.

6 For those of us who grew up during US military involvement in Indochina, esp. in Viet Nam in the 1960s, a veot who is a veteran of a colonial war can easily come across as stand-in for a Viet Nam vet.

7 For a "Master Plan for Slave Narratives"—with a pun on "master"—in US Abolitionist tracts, see Olney 152-53.  For some details in "A Woman's Liberation," the Narrative of Sojourner Truth may serve as a model: see Lerner, esp. 26.

8 As more slave narratives are studied, it may turn out that domestic relations in slavery and freedom were a common theme.  Please note that I am no authority on slave narratives.  My contribution here will be mostly to identify "A Woman's Liberation" as a slave narrative—if I recognized it as one, it must be obviously one—and to do a close reading of the story.

9 For "all knowledge is local," see the formulation of William Blake, "What is General Knowledge? is there Such a Thing?  Strictly Speaking All Knowledge is Particular" (Annotations to Reynolds 459).  For context specificity as an ongoing issue with Le Guin, note that in Earthsea "A mage can control only what is near him, what he can name exactly and wholly" (47) and that "Rules change in the Reaches" (160); see chs. 3 and 9 in WE, 1968.  For a good introduction to the question of local knowledge in 1990s feminist thinking, see Part II: The Politics of Location in Nicholson's Feminism/Postmodernism, esp. Probyn essay.  See my discussion of ACH for Le Guin's most explicit attack on the City of Man; see Introd. to CI for potentially positive city, esp. LoN (1979): 147.  For "all knowledge is local," see the formulation of William Blake, "What is General Knowledge? is there Such a Thing?  Strictly Speaking All Knowledge is Particular" (Annotations to Reynolds 459).  For context specificity as an ongoing issue with Le Guin, note that in Earthsea "A mage can control only what is near him, what he can name exactly and wholly" (47) and that "Rules change in the Reaches" (160); see chs. 3 and 9 in WE, 1968.  For a good introduction to the question of local knowledge in 1990s feminist thinking, see Part II: The Politics of Location in Nicholson's Feminism/Postmodernism, esp. Probyn essay.  See my discussion of ACH for Le Guin's most explicit attack on the City of Man; see Introd. to CI for potentially positive city, esp. LoN (1979): 147.

10 I quote Encyclopaedia Britannica (1974): Micropaedia "satyâgraha"; Le Guin's suggestion was a personal communication.  For the theme of "hold fast," note the phrase as a repeated motif in EoH (also referred to by Le Guin): a catch-phrase, the name of a significant character, Holdfast, and the last words of Lev Shults's formal speech at the climactic confrontation in that novel: "I speak the conscience of my people.  We will hold fast" (132; ch. 9).  For a negative view of Holdfast as mythic father-tyrant and "monster of the status quo," see Campbell 337 (2.3.3) & passim (and Susan McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World.)

11 Cf. Lebannen's listening to Tenar in Tehanu, "as if trying to understand a foreign language" (146; ch. 10).

12 I'll add that Athshe in WWF, before the Terrans came, had had no war and only minimal intraspecific violence of any kind.

13 Cf. and strongly contrast the god-brothers in the Earthsea trilogy (WE and TA), and the mythic fighting in Le Guin's filmscript, King Dog.  Ellen Wedum (a chemist living in Oregon) notes similarities of the battle of the Five Armies in the Arkamye to the battle fought on the plain of Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata, the epic surrounding the Bhagavad-Gita (26); and I'll note Arunja's throwing away his bow and arrows in the midst of the battle on the plain (Bhagavad-Gita 34).  Cf. and strongly contrast the god-brothers in the Earthsea trilogy (WE and TA), and the mythic fighting in Le Guin's filmscript, King Dog.  Ellen Wedum (a chemist living in Oregon) notes similarities of the battle of the Five Armies in the Arkamye to the battle fought on the plain of Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata, the epic surrounding the Bhagavad-Gita (26); and I'll note Arunja's throwing away his bow and arrows in the midst of the battle on the plain (Bhagavad-Gita 34).

14 See Le Guin's King Dog (7) for her interest in the Mahabharata, and note well for Rega Teyeo that warrior is his literal caste.  I'm not sure how far to push the point, but Aldous Huxley suggests in The Perennial Philosophy that it is unfortunate that the Bhagavad Gita (the Song of God) is part of the Mahabharata, which, "like most epics, . . . is largely concerned with the exploits of warriors" and so "it is primarily in relation to warfare that the Gita's advice to act with non-attachment and for God's sake only is given."  Huxley stresses that "Non-attached slaughter is recommended only to those, who are warriors by caste, and to whom warfare is a duty and vocation"—but "what is duty or dharma" for warriors "is adharma and forbidden" to those of other castes (272-73; ch. 24).

15 "I and Thou" = "I and You, my friend" ("thou" is the informal form).  As always, for "touch" see Remington, "A Touch of Difference . . ."

16 Cf. and contrast the idea of Annares in TD (e.g., 239-41; ch. 9) and Shevek and Takver's reuniting in TD and, in coupling, repeating in microcosm the circling of Anarres and Urras (258; ch. 10).

17 "This slogan was used in Chile and then in many different resistance movements throughout Latin America"—Reed Anderson, Professor in Spanish and Portuguese, Miami University at Oxford.

18 There's also the literal stream the boy Duny enters "Nameless and naked" to cross to Ogion to receive "his true name: Ged" (WE 15; ch. 1).

19 The injunctions are put negatively: Women don't weave; men don't make bricks, etc.  The negative allows more freedom than an injunction to do something (and nothing else) and allows space for people gendered neither male nor female.

20 See below, the disastrous consequences of the altruistic, «theoretic», actions of elite abolitionist Lord Erod (in "A Woman's Liberation"  More generally, note here another instance of Le Guin's fascination with rivers and rocks.

21 For walking imagery, see Tehanu 68-69, ch. 6.

22 Cf. Romantic infatuation in BP as something definitely to be gotten over.

23 Fritjof Capra argues strongly for the unity of "ultimate reality."  "The ultimate essence, however, cannot be separated from its multiple manifestations.  It is central to its very being to manifest itself in myriad forms which come into being  and disintegrate, transforming themselves into one another without end.  In its phenomenal aspect, the cosmic One is intrinsically dynamic, and the apprehension of its dynamic nature"—by no means a transcendent, static, One—"is basic to all the schools of Eastern mysticism" (175; ch. 13).  Capra's point is this ultimate reality is also the relativistic quantum field underlying manifestations of matter/energy in modern physics (e.g., 198-201; ch. 14).

24 See at The Back of the Book in ACH, the last entry among "Some Generative Metaphors"; under the Way as metaphor, we have "Medicine as keeping in balance" (485).

25 I.e., : i.e. Tertullian's "Credo quia impossible est," which my ODQ gives as "Certum est quia impossible est," 'It is certain because it is impossible' (Tertullian was an early Father of the Catholic Church; the ODQ gives his dates as ca. 160-225 (CE) and cites the quote at De Carne Christi 5.

26 The image used in "A Man of the People" is not the Wheel but that "great gods are loose" on Werel and Yeowe (FWF 118).  Cf. and contrast Selver as god in WWF.

27 Cf. the function of Anarres for Urras, Victoria for Terra in EoH, or the Americas in our history for Europe and China.  Eric Hoffer wrote that "Emigration offers some of the things the frustrated hope to find when they join a mass movement, namely change and a chance for a new beginning.  The same types who swell the ranks of a rising mass movement are also likely to avail themselves of a chance to emigrate.  Thus migration can serve as a substitute for a mass movement" (28; § 17 in Part One).

28 Cf. Estraven's saying, "The Domains are Karhide" (LHD 100, ch. 8; see also 6, ch. 1).  Cf. knowing Rer and its environs to know Karhide: LHD ch. 6, esp. 47, 55 f.

29 Even as historically minded US readers should find of interest the time-scale in TD, set some 200 years after the Odonian revolution in a book published two years before the US Bicentennial—even so, in the 1990s 350-400 is the approximate time of enslavement of Africans to labor in the Americas.

30 Cf. the Nation of the Basnasska in CI who "walked a very narrow, a tortuous and cramped Way" (68; ch. 4).

31 On the philosophy and cultural investigation of "Man of the People," Le Guin says "The intellectual underpinnings of the story come mainly from Cl[aude] Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz (incompatible sources!)"—personal communication.  Lévi-Strauss is the French social anthropologist who helped make Structuralism a dominant mode of analysis in a number of fields through the 1970s and beyond; Geertz is a younger American anthropologist, handling "the sociology of religion and the theory of culture" (Encyclopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia. [1974]: "Geertz, Clifford").  If someone hasn't done the essay already—in which case my appologies for missing it—the next round of analysis of "Man of the People" might start from this comment by Le Guin. On the philosophy and cultural investigation of "Man of the People," Le Guin says "The intellectual underpinnings of the story come mainly from Cl[aude] Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz (incompatible sources!)"—personal communication.  Lévi-Strauss is the French social anthropologist who helped make Structuralism a dominant mode of analysis in a number of fields through the 1970s and beyond; Geertz is a younger American anthropologist, handling "the sociology of religion and the theory of culture" (Encyclopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia. [1974]: "Geertz, Clifford").  If someone hasn't done the essay already—in which case my appologies for missing it—the next round of analysis of "Man of the People" might start from this comment by Le Guin.

32 Purity and Danger, 1978 Routledge rpt., qtd. Wolfe [211].

33 See Crow and Erlich, "Words of Binding" 208, 210 and passim.

34 That "fair" means both good-looking and light comes from the idea that dark skin is "foul": so says my desk dictionary and my experience of Renaissance English literature.  The superiority of light skin was originally class-based, not racial—English peasants and other outdoor workers were sunburnt; the upper classes fairly pale—but the idea was readily expanded to include a racist hierarchy.  That "fair" means both good-looking and light comes from the idea that dark skin is "foul": so says my desk dictionary and my experience of Renaissance English literature.  The superiority of light skin was originally class-based, not racial—English peasants and other outdoor workers were sunburnt; the upper classes fairly pale—but the idea was readily expanded to include a racist hierarchy.

35 See ER for Le Guin on dragons in the Earthsea trilogy representing "above all, wildness.  What is not owned" (ER 22).

36 In Tehanu, the crimes brought to trial are committed offstage; the trials are conducted offstage; and we get no details on how the new King's courts determine what is the law.

37 See Le Guin's poem "Tenses," and its line, "Terrible is the cage of the present tense" (Wild Oats 81).  (See "Tenses" also for the theme of the promise [TD]—and for why Le Guin is one Romantic who has refused to romanticize madness.)

38 Whether or not the oppressed/newly emancipated can learn much of use from the books and culture of the oppressors is still being debated.  See Chevigny for even ". . . Algebra as Political Curriculum": a news article with a strong text supporting effective teaching of algebra to poor Black kids and, more generally "strengthening a culture of educational expectations" (19) among underclass African-Americans.

39 Cf. Tenar in Tehanu, "turning her back on all that," the power of men, and going "to the other side, the other room, where the women lived, to be one of them" (30; ch. 4).