The Power

by Naomi Alderman

One had done the thing to a boy because he asked her to: this story holds much interest for the girls. Could it be that boys like it? Is it possible they want it? Some of them have found internet forums that suggest that this is the case.

If the world didn’t need shaking up, why would this power have come alive now?

The camera makes him feel powerful; as if he’s there but not there. You do what you like, he thinks to himself, but I’m the one who’s going to turn it into something. I’ll be the one who’ll tell the story.

Nothing that either of these men says is really of any great significance, because she could kill them in three moves before they stirred in their comfortably padded chairs. It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.

A power you can’t give away or trade.

She wants to hug him, but she knows that’d just make it worse for him somehow. You can’t be the one that hurts and the one that comforts. She can’t give Ricky anything but justice.

“At first we did not speak our hurt because it was not manly. Now we do not speak it because we are afraid and ashamed and alone without hope, each of us alone. It is hard to know when the first became the second.”

Tunde is told more than once that the police here no longer investigate the murder of men; that if a man is found dead it is presumed that a vengeance gang had given him his proper reward for his deeds in the time before. “Even a young boy,” a father tells him, in an overheated sitting room in a western village, “even a boy who is only fifteen now—what could he have done in the time before?”

One of them says, “Why did they do it, Nina and Darrell?” And the other answers, “Because they could.” That is the only answer there ever is.

Or was it just that Tatiana has never bothered to control them properly?

to denounce her would be to denounce everything. If she roots this out, she roots out herself. Her own roots are rotten already.

So I’m giving you the crib sheet right now. Maybe you’ll understand it and maybe you won’t. Your whole question is the mistake. Who’s the serpent and who’s the Holy Mother? Who’s bad and who’s good? Who persuaded the other one to eat the apple? Who has the power and who’s powerless? All of these questions are the wrong question.

You can’t put anyone into a box. Listen, even a stone isn’t the same as any other stone, so I don’t know where you all think you get off labeling humans with simple words and thinking you know everything you need. But most people can’t live that way, even some of the time. They say: only exceptional people can cross the borders. The truth is: anyone can cross, everyone has it in them. But only exceptional people can bear to look it in the eye.

Welcome to the human race. You people like to pretend things are simple, even at your own cost.

You can’t get there from here. She sees it all in that instant, the shape of the tree of power. Root to tip, branching and re-branching. Of course, the old tree still stands. There is only one way, and that is to blast it entirely to pieces.

Convent walls are thick, and convent women are clever, and when Mother Eve warns them that the apocalypse is near at hand and only the righteous will be saved, she can call the world to a new order. The end of all flesh is near, because the Earth is filled with violence. Therefore, build an ark. It will be simple. That is all they want.

Every name we give ourselves is wrong.

But consider this: are patriarchies peaceful because men are peaceful? Or do more peaceful societies tend to allow men to rise to the top because they place less value on the capacity for violence? Just asking the question.

The world is the way it is now because of five thousand years of ingrained structures of power based on darker times when things were much more violent and the only important thing was—could you and your kin jolt harder? But we don’t have to act that way now. We can think and imagine ourselves differently once we understand what we’ve based our ideas on.

Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn’t. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it’s hollow. Look under the shells: it’s not there.