Had Catherine Hernandez a less deft hand, her novel Crosshairs would simply be generically dystopian. It is set in an authoritarian near-future Canada which has been taken over by fascists and are rounding up ‘others,’ the term they call the indigenous, the immigrant, the poor, the minority, the queer, as is expected from fascists. The novel is told from the point of view of these ‘others’, primarily Kay, a half-Black half-Filipino gay man and drag queen, as the world collapses around him and joins up with those who also want this new regime dead and gone.
Kay is downtrodden, what would once have been called ‘the wretched of the Earth’. He had never met his father, as he was the product of an intense one-night stand that ignited at a karaoke bar. His mother hated his curly hair, inherited from his father. He grew up in a fundamentalist church, abused by his minder, and then expelled from his house for being gay. He finds solace with his friend from school, and from there finds community and belonging (albeit imperfect belonging) in Toronto’s queer community. He really finds himself as a drag queen, and there achieves something approaching self-actualization. And then, of course, the fascists come to power.
The novel jumps back and forth in time, and to a useful effect. This resistance of necessity comes into being and Kay is thrown into it without really asking, and he meets several people who have joined him in the struggle. Starting with Kay himself, you’ll have a bit of the ‘present’ plot, and then a chapter going back in time, explaining the history of any number of characters, such as Bahadur, a trans Iranian immigrant who is riding, laying down to avoid surveillance, in the same van as Kay. This of course is partially to service character development, and also worldbuilding (and is a sterling example of how K. S. Villoso argued that in speculative fiction character and worldbuilding are best when they bolster each other), but I feel there is a deeper, even more salient point: that revolutions are built by people, and people are endlessly complicated and their actions relentlessly contingent. I’m certain that this dictatorship would eventually fall, but it is due to the combined small choices of thousands of people that it fell in this specific way, rather than another way.
In terms of its plot, this novel is a queer novel of self-discovery, a novel of resistance that brings to mind the likes of the maquis, and also the leftist equivalent of a spy novel. Your ‘spies’ here are not government agents, but rather rebels who sometimes have to pretend to work for the fascist government. It’s a mode of writing I haven’t seen much of but is ripe with storytelling; you are left with the potent question of loyalty to an ideology rather than loyalty to a payroll (let us not pretend the likes of James Bond, for example, are supremely ideologically committed, the blunt objects that they are). There’s a particularly potent bit with a pair of pop stars who at first object to the rising tide of fascism, and then are seemingly co-opted. The payoff to that plotline is both deeply hewed and explosively satisfying. On the other hand, there is a former soldier who is putting the skilled he learned as an instrument of oppression to liberatory ends, but in a way that makes the reader wonder how much of that old training has lodged itself in his mind, and how much he thinks like a soldier even now.
Through much of the latter half of the book there is a well-considered depiction of the different types of resistance, and how each is adapted out of necessity or out of privilege. There is a point when Kay and Bahadur are asked to enlist in a violent struggle by a white gay man who had served in the Canadian Army against indigenous land defenders until having a crisis of conscience. He tells them they will have to risk their lives, and their ultimate objection is that their lives are already at risk day in and day out (they had to take a van, lying down so nobody could see them, to get to this place to begin with), and he has to bluntly reckon with his privilege. However, as events go on, and the discussions between them deepen, the two eventually accept the need to learn to use a gun.
You can tell that this whole thing is painful for Kay, and you get a deep dive into his character through the flashbacks into his life. These bits are some of the best in the book, giving an entry into a fully realized Toronto drag culture, with both wonderful moments of joy as well as enough rough edges to still feel real (he has a racist drag name bestowed upon him at one point, and it takes too long to shake it). The loss of his earlier life plays in resonant counterpoint with the joy he finds here. There is pathos here, and it is moving.
One of the things that makes these flashbacks work is that you are treated to the eerily plausible descent into fascism. There’s a small moment, right in the beginning, that really sets the tone of the worldbuilding: a member of the resistance whose duties are clandestine and peaceful, running an underground rail of sorts, is on her phone listening to a regime-produced podcast that is whitewashing what are clearly concentration camps. That tinge of something very current, a podcast, with something all too miserably common, a concentration camp, is just the right sort of juxtaposition that really sets a mood. The rest of the worldbuilding works because of how little extrapolation actually went on; Canada’s history of settler colonialism, of genocide, of anti-immgrant persecution has been exaggerated only a tad, made the most visible elements of the state to white people rather than simply in the background. Fascism, as Aimé Césaire said, is a ‘return shock’ of colonial practices to the metropole, and that is as true here as it is anywhere else.
Crosshairs is about what the Greeks referred to as ‘thymos,’ what could be translated as ‘spiritedness,’ or the desire to be recognized as a human being with dignity and agency and rights worth respecting. The new fascist government is based on denying the thymos of the indigenous, the queer, the immigrant, the woman. The basic demand of these groups, indeed the basic demand behind all civil rights movements, all resistance movements, is that of thymos, the right to stand as a human being worthy of that name. There is a very powerful scene near the end of the book that involves these people declaring before the world their personhood; it is a scene that made me wish I were one of them. It feels odd and somewhat appropriative to say that; I am a straight man, a mixed Filipino-American, and autistic - it’s my sexuality that makes me perhaps not the target audience for this book, but on the other hand, it was Hernandez’s Filipino background, combined with the dystopian angle, that made me check it out from my local library. It is my autism, with all the discrimination I have suffered because of it, that makes my psyche seek thymos, and that seeking is what made the ending have such massive catharsis for me (and of course it bears mentioning that one of the men responsible for Applied Behavior Analysis went on to have a hand in creating conversion therapy). Target audience I may not be, but I found it extremely moving all the same.
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Reference: Hernandez, Catherine. Crosshairs [Atria Books, 2020]
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
