The age of reading
When I was a child, children’s books and adult books were not as neatly segregated as they are now. Or maybe it’s children who were not so neatly segregated. Children’s books were the ones bought for us or the ones we (sort of, mostly) borrowed from libraries. Books were the ones we found on the shelves when nothing was left, which was about four days into the summer holidays.
There were weighty clothbound hardbounds that we struggled through in times of desperation, and much more excitingly covered James Hadley Chases and Harold Robbinses that we zipped through. I wonder now if having not been so carefully apportioned to our parts turned us into different kinds of children. A little overenthusiastic about adulthood, imaginatively traumatised and prone to ageing and regressing with lightning speed.
For all that, I managed to read The Wizard of Oz as a child, and Gregory Maguire’s Wicked as an adult. I remember almost nothing of the Wizard, of Oz, or even of the excitingly named Cowardly Lion. I remember dust and a tornado, which was not even Oz. But I liked that about it, I felt it as a grubby book, with lingering dust on everyone’s skin. Maybe Kansas sounded better to me at that age. I read Wicked when I was somewhere between college and the world, which is around when you think you’re an adult.
This is a surprisingly linear progression, for all that unsupervised reading. I loved Wicked, and I would’ve loved it as a child. I would’ve remembered at least one character for the rest of my life.
Green, she’s green
Born out of an unwanted encounter with a green bottle and a random stranger, to a charmingly unencumbered mother, Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, is green. Green, with little pointy shark teeth. Green and pointy. The kind of baby that could snap prodding adult fingers off. The kind of baby that causes muttering, pointing, superstitious threats and social ostracisation. The kind of baby that is its own threat, and in a way its own protection.
Image: Priyadarshini John
I was captivated by the greenness of Elphaba. That she wasn’t some half-assed paleish greenish tint or green when the light changed. It is a rare thing, to encounter an anomaly that isn’t pussy-footed around. Unlike other examples of oddity in fantasy, Elphaba isn’t strange because her world is strange. She is an oddity in her own world. A difficultly loved child, because, like Pandora, she brings troubles. Not to mention being hard to feed.
In spite of it all, Elphaba grows up to be a perfectly normal teenager. Moody, sullen, oversensitive and inclined to sound smarter than everyone else. Because what else do you do, when you can’t hide behind your own skin because it shines forth like a beacon? Her father, a sort-of preacher, takes his family off to something like a missionary foray into the wild, thanks to a sort-of threesome relationship with a Quadling, whom you could call a member of a disenfranchised tribe because this is the kind of book which would use that kind of language. There are politics and politickings going on all the time. The Yellow Brick Road is a sign of exploitative development, the Quadlings are perishing, the Munchkinlanders are in-betweeners, the sentient Animals are in danger of being wiped out altogether or enslaved by having their sentience denied.
The kind of things that happen in Human countries, spoken of in the kind of language that is used by young humans of my age, at that time. Oz is shadowed by the rule of a mysterious Wizard, and his invisibility for most of the book turns out to be the most interesting thing about him. There are also dwarfs bringing portentous performances, puppet-robot assassins, puppet-administrative-head witches and Friends.
Elphaba goes to college with a gloomy certainty of being disliked and isolated. She shares a room with Galinda, soon-to-be Glinda, soon-to-become a Witch. But through a series of misadventures and machinations and cross-connections, she develops companions, who stay together long enough to be friends. Galinda is genuinely a friend, which is something you might recognise after a few years of suffering friendships. Elphaba deals with it by telling herself that she doesn’t really have friends and that underneath it all she’s as isolated and unloved as ever. She focuses her energy on babysitting Nessarose, her baby sister, someday to become the Wicked Witch of the East.
But this book is still about the life and times of Elphaba, and she is still green, so the tone of fatalistic isolation remains. The Green Years of Solitude.
Growing pains
Things happen. Elphaba becomes a gloomy solitary wannabe assassin with a group of other possibly disenchanted radical slightly-more-than teenagers. She meets up with an old college not-friend, who becomes a lover. Fiyero, with his blue tattoos, and Elphaba with her green skin, make a wonderful sexy couple with whom you barely get to spend a couple of pages before Fiyero gets killed. His death is accidental, in a way. You could say that Elphaba was the wrong place and the wrong time.
In an introductory essay to Tess of the d-Ubervilles, the writer says that when her baby born of rape is born, Tess shifts from the cosmic pessimism of a girl, to a woman who has known real suffering, and has earned the right to call her baby Sorrow.
When Fiyero dies, Elphaba steps out of the cosmic shadow of gloom and falls right into the pit of grief. In fact, she falls right out of the world, and spends almost a year in a coma, and gives birth sometime in between to a boy she doesn’t claim as her own but allows to tag along.
I guess you could say at this moment that her isolation is no longer a game of potential. There is a part of her that never returns. She wanders on from her temporary refuge to her former lover’s wife’s home, with a penitential air that never really rings true because she can’t really be buggered with anyone though you might say she isn’t really in a position to choose loneliness. But she does. Fiyero’s home is a castle in a wilderness of cliffs, and why not? I think of this time as Elphaba in the Tower of Isolation.
Eventually she becomes a witch, Nessarose becomes a witch, and Glinda, out of all three, is the most established witch. Three witches. Before Dorothy comes in and accidentally kills two of them.
Witches
The book is titled Wicked. The witch is titled Wicked. There must be some discussion of goodness and badness to follow. There are many discussions in Wicked, more than there are witches, but they are hamstrung by the fact that goodness and badness are not easy to identify in an adult world, and Wicked is far away from both Kansas and a child’s world.
There is no discussion of rightness and wrongness, which would’ve been a lot easier to identify, which might’ve made for a very different kind of book.
From the perspective of older age, which is a lot different from fake adulthood, I can identify four witches:
Elphaba
Elphaba in her growing years doesn’t even qualify as a witch. She doesn’t study witchhood. I think of her as a Heartbreaking Witch. Animal-child. A dragon without wings, that cannot blow out tongues of flames. An idiot, in her wannabe-assassin years. Can ye not tell the difference between right and wrong? A creature in pain. A small monument to and of isolation. But somewhere between Fiyero and Kiamo Ko, Elphaba’s isolation becomes a cloak of darkness. Pain wraps itself around her like dragon’s wings and tongues of flame.
Image: Priyadarshini John
When she was a child she had a wonderfully persistent family that did its best in the face of absolute oddity – and that’s not just the kids. When she was a teenager she had enough difference to interact with to keep her sullen but loveable. I watched her slip higher and higher up the Tower of Isolation with so much sadness, because I needed her to stay in the world and stay green, because it matters that the greens can also shine their tepid light in the network of interaction. Not cute enough to be wicked, too sad to be evil. Witch of Loneliness, Despair and Loss.
Glinda
Glinda’s what I’d call a Pragmatic Witch. Witch of the world. Not good, not bad. Charming, sensitive, warm. She has the capacity to politick, to evade both darkness and the vulnerability of too much light, or being overlit. She knew how to stay alive to the end of a novel where people were dropping like flies, into death or darkness. She learnt, eventually, how to be a friend. She had a capacity for forethought which hardly anyone else seemed to, least of all Elphaba. I liked Glinda. When I read the book I wasn’t old enough to value the capacity for staying alive, which now seems to me a very practical kind of magic in its own right.
Nessarose
From the moment we encounter Nessarose’s beautiful face in a college dorm, we know that we’re looking at something perilous. The unmistakable signs of someone who has captured the art of perfect victimhood. Born without arms, she has just the right amount of frailty to garner sympathy and just the right amount of strength to make her way around the world and cause havoc or harm, whichever is the need of the moment. She’s the kind of witch who wouldn’t be caught dead in a cloak of darkness. Let there be light, lots of light, enough for people to see that she’s there and give her what she’s entitled to, which is everything. Witch of Snakehood that Would Eventually Eat Its Own Tail Because Nothing Would Ever Be Enough.
Dorothy
Now I know that technically Dorothy is not a witch. She’s a child who wandered into a strange land and accidentally killed two people. But she killed two witches, one squashed under a house, the other melted into a puddle of water. She was magically transported into this land, and very quickly met a despotic wizard ruler, a pragmatic witch, and carried around the political symbol that was Nessarose’s shoes. She is a child but a very big child like that giant doll that could crush every other toy in the playroom, just by taking a few steps, or like the giant baby in Spirited away. Not old enough, but big enough to kill, albeit accidentally. But accident is ending. And a fatal ending is enough. Witch of Well-Meaning Accidents. Witch of Fatal Unknowing.
Death by stupidity
Nobody’s really crying when Nessarose dies, but Elphaba is raging. One more loss in a life that is a sum of losses. She picks on the shoes as an object of rage – can you picture Elphaba in silver shoes? But can you even picture the wizard in silver shoes? The shoes have power but their power is meaningless, especially to someone who has almost lost touch with the world outside the window. But Elphaba, locked in her prison tower of isolation, has lost the capacity to watch her life from the perspective of her life, which is absolute detachment from the world, one old book and some monkeys which she’s training to fly, which they don’t do very well.
By this time we have all had treatises on Oz. The power dynamics, the tyranny of despotic rule by an outsider who doesn’t care and doesn’t know and just does some shit because he can. The ramifications of building brick roads. The disappearance of tribes, the damage done to native ecology. I enjoyed all of it, the colours, the conflicts, the nitty-gritty of a land. The landscapes, the loved places, the hated places. This is barely a surface-level scratch of how deep you need to dig before you decide to become the despotic ruler of a strange land, or a killer of local witches. Not that either the Wizard or Dorothy did it or cared, but this is entirely a creation of context. One massive laying out of backdrop, lasting an entire book, just for us to know where, and on what, Dorothy landed her house. It gave me pleasure to read it, because any landscape, social or physical, must be touched with care. With detail and attention. Tracing the contours of stones.
Image: Kristian Al Droubi
The general agreement about Dorothy, among all the people who’d met her before her second killing, was that she was a nice kid who believed everything she was told. Now, believing everything you’re told sounds like you were a good child. Because, after all, we’re brought up to do what we’re told. The person who believes what they’re told does what they’re told. I think about the act of telling. This is what food writer AA Gill says a restaurant menu tells you:
A restaurant menu tells you what the pretensions of a restaurant are, who it wants to attract and what it wants you to assume about it and, by extension, yourself.
This is what all conversation tells you. I don’t think, for a moment, that it is not valuable information. The opposite. It is vital information. What it doesn’t tell you, though, is whether the food is good, whether the cook scratched his ass before he mixed the dough, whether the teenaged waiter snorted into your pasta, whether the fish was more than ten days old, or whether you are going to collapse after eating what’s on your plate. These are things you’ll have to learn without being told. This is even more vital information, because it has an immediate impact on your health, well-being, and happiness at least for the evening or the next three days. Learning is mapping what comes out of varying sources of information into something at least remotely comprehensible. Doing is what comes after. And it could be any number of things. Walking out. Waiting it out. Eating. Taking a bite and pushing your plate away. Running like hell after nearly coming to blows with the waiter.
Believing what you’re told leaves you with one choice. Eating. The stakes are higher when you’re told to attack, harm or kill. There is a saying: God save us from well-meaning idiots who believe everything they’re told. If there isn’t one, then there should be.
Dorothy, though a well-meaning child, has accidental power. Power enough to accidentally kill. Plodding through Oz, she makes her way to Elphaba, not to kill her but to ask her forgiveness. Elphaba, watching Dorothy from the prison darkness of her mind, is enraged by everything about Dorothy, including the potential of a mirror. But I think this was sentiment, on the part of the writer. There is really nothing they have in common, or had in common. Sometimes you want a neat circle but you hold out your arms and try to make them fit but they don’t. Elphaba was the opposite of a believing child and Dorothy was the opposite of green and unloved.
Moving on. The stage is set, Elphaba flies into a rage, and instead of bursting into flames or breathing fire she just sets herself on fire, as she is wont. Dorothy, in a rush of helpfulness, chucks water on her and that is the end of Elphaba.
Dorothy didn’t know that water would kill Elphaba. Elphaba may not have known it herself. Nobody knew. The only thing we knew about Elphaba’s fear of water was that she had a fear of water. Probably, that’s all she knew. The instinctive knowledge of a firebird. Born out of a green bottle, the semen of an alien wizard, and the laughter of a wayward mother, she could be anything. Magic-seed. Dragonspawn. She knew enough to keep herself alive but not enough to stop herself dying.
Death by stupidity is tragically final and comically avoidable. I can imagine the last speck of Elphaba, still manically bursting into flames of rage at the very thought of it.
Towers of isolation
I watched Elphaba die with great sadness. I also watched her life, her growth as a power, with great sadness. Tower upon tower, war upon war, mostly directed against the self. A non-recognition of better realities. Never taking the option of pleasure, not even when it landed on her doorstep. A constant avoidance of joy, though it was so close, close enough to touch through the veil.
Her life mattered to me, because towers of isolation are familiar to me, and because she stayed green throughout, she never changed colour. It was important to me that what was green would stay green, that it would learn to live in the world and the world would learn to live with it. Nature’s first green is gold…
There are many reasons to climb into a tower, lock your door and throw away the key:
- You think it keeps you safe.
- You can allow your thoughts to take flight, because outside there is nothing but sky.
- You can embody Ted Hughes’ jaguar, and feel the soft vital power of your paws, the world rolling beneath your feet.
There are many reasons to get the fuck out of your tower:
- It is the least safe place in the world.
- Your thoughts eventually tire of flying and start to make circles around your head, instead.
- Your powerlessness is as pure, as complete, as absolute, as the world rolling beneath your paws.
- Outside is beautiful. Landscapes, like people, people, like landscapes, are a thing to be known, slowly, their contours traced.
Elves and witches
When I picture Dorothy’s encounter with Elphaba, a very different encounter comes to mind. There is one point of connection. It has something to do with age, and also with life. Granny Weatherwax meets the Queen of the Elves, in Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies. There are two meeting places.
One is at a time of not-youth but youngness. A watchful teenager meets an ageless queen. She is behind a circle of stones, but she sheds glamour like a heat haze that makes its way through. She invites Esme Weatherwax to step into the circles. She makes promises that a budding witch might find attractive. Power. Eternity. But Esme Weatherwax is not Dorothy. She waits until the tone gets just a little too hungry. A little too desperate. You can’t step outside the circle, can you? And before you know it, the queen is gone, and the girl stays on the other side, outside, alone on a hillside.
The second encounter is an all-out battle. Claws bared. The queen, like the doll, is unchanged. Granny Weatherwax is old enough to be called Granny. This time there are no offers from the queen, only threats. Solitude, loneliness, misery, loss. You threaten me with that?! I, who am getting old?
Eventually, the battle is won, the elves leave, there is silence on the hillside and everyone heaves a sigh of relief. But the battle was won with help. Granny Weatherwax was not alone. Though she was old. She had:
Nanny Ogg, witch and best friend.
Magrat, also-witch, soon-to-be queen, coven-member and receiver of brow-beating.
The village of Lancre and all its parts.
Bees
Wizards
An orangutan
A couple of books later, just before a big battle with vampires, Granny Weatherwax sits in her rocking chair, thinks black thoughts, and slowly makes her way up the tower in her mind. They didn’t invite me, she tells herself. Because she couldn’t find the invitation to Magrat’s baby’s naming ceremony. (It was stolen by magpies). She thought she was alone (Magrat had named her baby Esmeralda and had added extra gold lettering to the invite). Later, unsatisfied with metaphorical distance, she goes off into gnarly ground, a place where the geography is both physical and magical. She settles into a cave.
Image: Priyadarshini John
A little while later, Nanny Ogg, Magrat and baby hunt her down and pry her out.
Nanny Ogg, above all else, is the thing Granny Weatherwax had that Elphaba didn’t. Best friend, close friend and climber of towers.
Nanny Ogg
Nanny Ogg is also a witch. Not a Glinda, not an Elphaba, and nothing like Granny Weatherwax either. She has a face like a happy apple. She is much-married, though all her children and grandchildren carry the name of Ogg. She has the power of connection. Connections. She can rustle up an angry mob at will, just by knocking on the door of her eldest son. She can gather all the grandchildren of the Ogg tribe to shut every rooster in Lancre up, just so that a spell can be finished before cock’s crow, which is of course the real dawn. She has humour. She lives in the heart of the village, in a well-furnished house, which is regularly cleaned by daughters-in-law, visited by sons and bombarded with drawings and sculptures by grandchildren.
You know that part of you that would like to dance naked in the rain? Asks Agnes, of Nanny Ogg. I don’t know, I’ve always been that part of me. The trick is to remember where you left your clothes.
Nanny Ogg lives in a web of gossip, a network of interaction, a world of noise. And somewhere underneath the chaos is a real power. She also knows how to be a friend.
Thunderbolt
I have dipped or rather climbed in and out of towers many times. When I want to go down, I call upon the part of me that is Nanny Ogg. Sometimes, I call upon the part of me that is Granny Weatherwax, that can admit to having a friend, or friends. But the warmest escape route comes from this part of you that is naked, though maybe not literally dancing naked in the rain. The trick is to find an unpeopled place with rain, and that is not easy.
Image: Priyadarshini John
But the part of you that lives in the heart of a village, that knocks upon doors, that asks for help, that dismissively pets babies and can tolerate a horrible-smelling cat. When I think about Elphaba, locked in her gloomy pride, I am grateful for the part of me that calls incessantly, chases after people, that whines, that takes pictures of scabs to send to friends, that feels no shame, that admits to wanting to be loved.
You can wear your cloak of darkness, all you want, but eventually you need to take it off and dance, clothed or naked, depending on your circumstances, in the rain.
