Photo by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn
Robin Kirk
Robin Kirk: The Bond
Tuesday, Dec. 11, 7 p.m., free
The Regulator Bookshop, Durham
After publishing three nonfiction books on such subjects as guerrilla wars in Peru and the drug war in Colombia—not to mention her three decades’ worth of human-rights work and journalism in South and Central America—Duke Human Rights Center Co-Chair Robin Kirk set herself quite the challenge when writing her first novel.
“I wanted to write a book for young adults about genocide, about how easy it would be to fall into it,” Kirk says over coffee at Ninth Street Bakery. The result is The Bond, the first installment of a planned trilogy, published this month by Chapel Hill’s Blue Crow Publishing under its nascent Goldenjay Books imprint for young adults.
Told in the striking voice of Dinitra 584-KxA—known to her friends as Dini—the novel is set centuries into a dystopian future, after a war between women and men all but wiped out the latter. Now, women are “sown” into life stations through genetic planning, while the remaining men are kept in containment, to be used only for their genetic material until scientific advancement can ensure that “their terrible violence would be eliminated forever.”
We meet Dini on the morning of graduation day at the Collegium, where she and her classmates have been educated since they were six years old. Now, they’re awaiting their first three-year job assignments, which could range from chef to navigator to sanitation worker, unless they preempt such duties by volunteering for the military and boarding one of the shining Legionships for parts unknown.
If this first-person narration in a regimented world makes this sound like a cynical paint-by-numbers approach to young-adult literature, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. In addition to her nonfiction, Kirk is a poet with an MFA in creative writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she did not set out to write a formula.
“I actually starting writing the book in third person,” she says. Laughing, she confronts the stereotype head-on with an impromptu, affected outburst: “Another YA first-person novel—gah! I was having trouble finding the right voice, and so, as an experiment, I tried writing in first person and felt an immediate connection.”
Told in thirty-one chapters of about nine pages each, the novel has a crackling, energetic pace. It also features an essential ingredient that Kirk knew she had to include to make the book work for the younger audience she set out to reach: hope.
“I was in Cambodia, visiting a memorial museum to the genocide, and there were kids, eight or nine years old, and I just had a visceral reaction to that,” she says, explaining that she waited until her own children were older before taking them to similar memorials. “This story is a little less direct—there’s a hopeful side that real life doesn’t often have.” Citing Philip Pullman, she continues, “Some subjects are too large for adult literature. But children are able to grasp these things.”
Earlier in our conversation, Kirk had mentioned an all-too-common Spanish phrase she learned in the course of her human rights work that translates to “there had to be a reason.” Uttered when a neighbor has been “disappeared”—by a government or a cartel—it refers to what Kirk calls the “underlying logic of genocide. It’s the logic of Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Cambodia. It’s people in the abstract that they can hate.”
In her book, Kirk worked to avoid such abstractions, even regarding those we would regard as being on the wrong side of history.
“I hope I’ve achieved a level of complexity of character, not pure evil, not able to be completely written off,” she says.
Kirk says her students at Duke, where she is a lecturer in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, also influenced the novel.
“It’s the way they feel, at times, out of place,” she explains. “They’ve been groomed to be one thing—say, a successful Wall Street financial analyst—and they get here and discover that they really want something quite different. With this book, I want to tell them, ‘You are perfect as you are. You have talents you think are deficits, but are actually your superpower.’”
If the novel sounds like it’s full of lectures and overwhelming dark themes, I can disabuse you of that notion as well. One of the absolute breakout stars of the novel is an enhanced hybrid “battle dog” named 12, and a chapter on Dini’s failures as a student closes with the memorable quote, “I am a furry, carnivorous potato.” Kirk’s warning against the slippery slope to genocide has not just hope, but adventure and humor, too.
