Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is artist and author Elaine Ho! Her illustrations, which can be found on her website and Instagram, include “Bones to the Wind” from the eponymous book cover jacket, “Harmony” from the Gen Con 2024 program cover, “Wall of Roses” from Uncanny Magazine Issue 46, and scenes from her debut novel. Her dark political fantasy book released late last year, Cry, Voidbringer, explores “how identity is reshaped under empire” and the question “Why do post-colonial societies perpetuate the same crimes as their oppressors?” I’m excited she’s here today, where she is discussing the latter of these topics.

About Cry, Voidbringer:

In a broken system, do you save yourself or fight for the people you love?

With the godspower waning, the queen of Ashvi has had to find another way to bolster her fight against her imperialist oppressors. The solution: wrenching children of other cultures from their homes and conscripting them into service.

Hammer was one of those children. Now, she’s a jaded soldier waging Ashvi’s perpetual war, thinking only of her own survival. But when she accidentally rescues Viridian, a child with rare and potentially devastating powers, her priorities shift. The girl appears to be the answer to the queen’s prayers—the perfect weapon to restore her kingdom’s ancient borders, even if the colonized cities they reconquer don’t want her version of liberation. Can Hammer protect Viridian from the system that broke her . . . before the girl’s power is unleashed on the world?

Cry, Voidbringer is a gripping saga of how far one will go for freedom and control—and how easily it can all be taken away.

Arguably we live in a post-colonial world. The cruelty of the colonial era is well documented—Amritsar, Mỹ Trạch, the Banda Islands. But those who have unburdened ourselves of European power have a dichotomy of shame and pride when discussing our colonialist past.

There is an anger reflecting on this part of our history. It’s a deeply human part of us: a need to make sense of our suffering, and if there isn’t, then it is unjust. We’ve invented entire religions to exact revenge. We comfort ourselves that criminals will get their due on a spiritual plane beyond human sight.

This anger is wholly justified: a rape of one’s homeland, an invader stealing all and leaving little for us, being relegated to a second-class citizen of the very land we were born in. We learn these horrors and we find community who share this grief with us. We collectively go “never again”, and a national identity is birthed from the spume of this national humiliation.

But shame is a funny thing. It’s an admittance of weakness, and in a post-colonial world where we’re already poor and vulnerable, weakness is an open invitation for further subjugation. To protect ourselves, we erase this part of our history. We pretend this colonial past didn’t happen. We go back to “the good ol’ days”, whatever that is, and one can arbitrarily pick any point in history and romanticize it. Oh, let’s pick 600AD, because that was the era where we were in power before the Europeans came. A great, glorious time, when we had all this land and all these countries, and we were the kings that oppressed others.

What results is a refusal to acknowledge that colonization has affected people, in the way they view themselves in relation to each other, and their relationship to the land they live on. The narrative doesn’t allow for that. It ruins the fantasy that the oppression never existed. To keep this lie alive, we wind up using the tools of our oppressors to construct a memory of a past that most likely never existed. This dream must discard the true cost of war. After all, if your romanticized history meant your country won every single battle, then fighting shouldn’t be too hard, right?

We’ve lost institutional memory in this post-colonial world. War has spawned countless pieces of literature documenting the savagery and fruitlessness of it, and yet we never learn. I see genocide after genocide, war after war, fought over the same reasons as a thousand years ago, but now with better guns and better bombs. We joke that time is a flat circle. It’s true. We fall into the same mistakes over and over again for a simple human reason: we cannot look weak, because someone, somewhere, will hurt us again.

Is there a solution to this? I don’t know.

I’m not holding out hope for it.

Elaine Ho is an award-winning Asian American illustrator and author. She bounces between the US and Singapore, belonging to both and neither. Ho’s work primarily explores themes of identity and home, while also being drawn to the broken and the beautiful. She originally received a degree in psychology before pivoting into art full-time. Find her work at artofelaineho.com.