Syl Anagist Was a Garden: Food and Vitalism in The Broken Earth

Syl Anagist is the massive empire at the root of the problem in N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy – its apocalyptic self-destruction has shattered the world, leaving a planet rocked by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. As characters travel through the last days of the present-day Sanze empire, where nothing can grow on the Earth’s surface beneath a sky full of ash, their movements are motivated primarily by the search for nourishment. The novels’ central preoccupation with food, rare in science fiction, is enriched by a conception of nourishment that encompasses flows of energy between people, plants, and minerals. The Broken Earth envisions a world where climate disasters have made human survival so tentative that the only way to live is through cooperation with life in all its forms, organic or inorganic. Jemisin’s novels reckon with the long history of humanism, critiquing the ideas about nationhood, scientific racism, and vitalism that supported and encoded the imperial desires of Enlightenment-era Europe – ideas that still lie beneath the world today. Behind The Broken Earth’s vision of empire is a rich material history of food production and consumption practices at the dawn of modern empires in the eighteenth century, especially in idealised landscapes and, I argue, tablescapes.