
UNBOWED. UNBENT. UNBROKEN
I wrote this about what happened on Game of Thrones last night (the 23rd). They’re some brown thoughts, with some feminist and queer thoughts as well. Spoilers ahead.
A few years ago, I was in a playwriting workshop with a playwright working on a piece set during what is commonly referred to in US schools as the Western Expansion. The playwright and dramaturg posed a question to the group to get the conversation going: who would you be in this play, in a story set during Western Expansion. People imagined themselves as prospectors or frontier schoolteachers, but when it was my turn, I brought up the one character in the play identified as Mexican, and how her brothers died trying to protect their land from Americans trying to steal it. “I’d be one of those brothers,” I said. “I’d be dead.”
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little pleased with myself when the temperature of the room plummeted after that. But I assured the playwright that I was very happy that the story was in the play. Western Expansion, after all, is a term that sanitizes an era of land theft and attempted genocide. I was glad that the play reminded the audience that this was true, but I also said that, as much as I loved the Mexican woman in the play, I wanted her wild, passionate nature to be explained in such a way that it couldn’t be interpreted as the result of her racial identity. A few months later, the play went up: the woman was no longer Mexican, and the story about her brothers was gone. I understood, but I was sad to see them go.
If I were in Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, I would be Dornish, and thank the Seven and the Great Mother Rhoyne, because it’s the only one of the Seven Kingdoms that embraces queer relationships. But it is not my queerness that makes me Dornish: I know Mexicans when I see them, and even more when I read them, and George R. R. Martin cannot bring spice into his famous accounts of Westerosi cuisine without talking about “fiery Dornish peppers.” That’s how I knew. The Dornish, of course, are not Mexican. The book portrays them as a combination of Spanish, Middle Eastern and North African, but, as the casting of the series has indicated, it might be best just to call them “brown.” Oberyn? Chilean American. Ellaria? Indian and Swiss, raised in England. Doran? Sudanese and British. The Sand Snakes? Singaporean Chinese and Zambian English, Maori and Anglo-Australian, Italian American. With this mix of heritages, you might think the Dornish would be difficult to pin down, but the stereotypes that define the Dornish are the stereotypes that define brown people in America. We are passionate. We are angry. We prefer vengeful violence to good governance. We fuck too much and too openly. And we love our spicy food.
I do love spicy food, actually. I am also relatively open about my sexuality. And I know what it is to watch blondes fight for control of a country that thinks of my people as the barbarians to the south. But here’s the thing I really love about the Dornish, the gift that George R. R. Martin gave to me that makes me want to be Dornish: Dorne was never conquered. In the books, the original inhabitants of Dorne were every bit as European as the Starks and the Lannisters, but then a wave of refugees — the Rhoynar — came into Dorne, refugees led by a woman, Princess Nymeria. These refugees brought dark skin to Dorne, but they also brought feminism, so that when Nymeria married into House Martell, they took control of Dorne and made the Rhoynar practice of gender equality the law of the land. First born children inherited land and titles, regardless of gender, so when Aegon came in with his dragons, he faced a Princess in Dorne. This Princess told Aegon and his sisters that they were not welcome, and the Dornish did what no other people in Westeros could do: they brought down a dragon. The Targaryens repeatedly tried to conquer Dorne, but even when they did, they could not hold it for long. The Dornish abandoned cities and hid in the mountains, fighting guerrilla warfare until they could take their cities back. The Dornish hid scorpions in the beds of the viceroys. The Dornish lived up to the Martell words: Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken. It was only when the Targaryens started marrying the Martells that Dorne became part of the Seven Kingdoms. The story of Dorne shakes up — maybe even queers — the story of colonizer and colonized to which we are accustomed, a story that Daenerys, bless her heart, has been living out as the white savior of Slaver’s Bay.
As a proud Dornishman, I am mourning Obara and Nymeria Sand today. I am also mourning Dorne as a place and a storyline on Game of Thrones, and more than anything I am bristling at the “good riddance” attitude of a number of white recappers. Their animosity is not without reason: Game of Thrones pretty much threw out the Dornish storyline in the books and replaced it with an overly simplified one that takes advantage of the fact that they got Indira Varma for Ellaria Sand. In both the book and the show, Princess Myrcella is sent to Dorne, but from there, things split. On the show, Ellaria and the Sand Snakes just want to kill her to avenge Oberyn. In the books, Oberyn’s niece, Arianne Martell, wants to argue that, seeing as Myrcella is in Dorne when Joffrey dies, she is subject to Dornish law and becomes the sole inheritor of her brother’s property, aka the Iron Throne. Arianne’s plans go about as well as you can expect in a novel by George R. R, Martin, but regardless of the results, Dorne in the novels is still, as Oberyn assured Cersei on the show, not a place that murders little girls. For that matter, the deadly Sand Snakes are more numerous and much more complicated in the novels, not least because Oberyn’s sexual appetites were varied enough that his daughters are described as markedly different from one another, with a range of bodies and racial backgrounds (and yes, the actresses who play the Sand Snakes hail from four continents, but they were cast because they looked enough alike). They don’t bicker like they do on the show, and, however willing they are to kill, they don’t take obvious delight in killing their own family, as they do on the show, in no small part because they don’t kill their own family in the novels. The show ups their spitefulness, as though they wanted to show that women could be as cruel as Joffrey and Ramsey.
But unlike a lot of white reviewers, I am not glad to see them go. I hate to see them go, for simple reason that, moreso than any other characters on the show, I look at the Sand Snakes and think that they could be my family. Seriously, Keisha Castle-Hughes may be of Maori heritage, but she could slip into a family reunion, and I’d pretend to know her name when I hugged her. Hell, I could NAME my children Obara and Nymeria and many branches of my family would have an easier time with those names than Megan or Jennifer. When I saw Ellaria and the Sand Snakes, I saw brown women kicking ass. I saw them holding their own against blonde haired, blue eyed white men. I saw them getting told to kiss the ass of the family that murdered their father and doing it just long enough to get some poison lipstick and, more importantly, the antidote to the poison lipstick, because they weren’t dying today. I saw all this on a show where I would guess that maybe, MAYBE a quarter of the characters have dark eyes and dark hair. Where Daenerys — whom I love — has made a career out of getting crowds of brown people to bow down to her on the basis of her being fireproof.
I hated watching the Sand Snakes die last night. I hated that just before we saw them die, we DIDN’T get to see Ellaria and Yara in bed together, having just had loads of sex. I hate that the Sand Snakes were bickering right before the fighting started. But the thing I really hate, I mean hate so hard that I want to put on poison lipstick and kiss some show writers, is that Obara and Nymeria were killed with their own weapons. That Euron — whose unbridled toxic white masculinity is truly laughable, like you KNOW this dude and you HATE this dude and his terrible band and his shitty, overpriced beer and his trust fund — got to kill them with whip and spear and display them on the phallic prow of their burning ship KILLS me. It kills me that the one to survive is Tyene, because she was the only one of the three who was a sex object in previous seasons. It kills me that so many people today aren’t feeling sad, that they are dismissing the storyline as poorly handled and the characters as nitwits. Because maybe that’s true, but it was still one of the best things I had.
The one thing I didn’t hate was the look on Nymeria’s face when she saw Obara killed. That pain, that anger, that desire to kill the man that just killed her sister was everything to me. Yes, the Sand Snakes bicker and call each other bitches, but that’s a whole lot of sisters out there. These sisters fight each other, but nowhere near as hard as they fight FOR each other. That is the Nymeria I care about this morning. Not the dog. The brown woman who died trying to avenge one sister and save another. The brown woman who would sooner die defending what was hers than let a white man take it from her.
I hope Ellaria and Tyene go out like that, except I don’t. What I really hope is that they live. I hope Ellaria and Yara get to have sex. I hope Tyene seduces Bronn and then kills him. And Jaime. After he has killed Cersei. I hope they do things to Euron that would make Ramsey Bolton blush. And then I hope they return home, eat spicy food, fuck who they want when they want, get to the business of good governance now that the business of revenge is done. I don’t hold out much hope for this, but it’s how I want them to live. Unbowed. Unbent. Unbroken.







