Ink (Sabrina Vourvoulias novel)

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INK

File:INK book cover.png Paperback edition
Author	Sabrina Vourvoulias
Illustrator
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction; magical realism
Published	2012
Publisher	Rosarium Publishing
Pages	461
ISBN	978-0-9987-0599-6 Search this book on .

OVERVIEW: INK by Sabrina Vourvoulias is a near-future speculative fiction novel set in New York state that imagines how biometrics might be developed to track and monitor immigrants, who bear barcode tattoos color-coded according to their immigration status, and how that first step might lead almost imperceptibly to more and more punitive restrictions until the nation reaches the point of attempting to expel all immigrants. Originally published in 2012 by Crossed Genres Press, INK was reissued in 2018. Critics have noted that what seemed highly improbable in 2012 now seems much more plausible.

Plot

INK is narrated by four different characters: Finn, an Irish-American journalist; Mari, a "citizen ink" (born in Guatemala to an indigenous woman and an American man) who works for the Hastings Population Control Office (HPCO); Del, a carpeting installer and artist, married to Finn's sister, Cassie; and Abbie, a teenage computer whiz. The action takes place over approximately fifteen years mostly in Hastings, NY and Smithville, NY, on Del's land and in the Inkatorium overseen by Abbie's mother. The action begins when Mari tells Finn about newly proposed sanctions in Hastings against the inks, including a curfew and segregated public transportation and neighborhoods. This represents a major turning point in the novel's imagined history of the United States, whose anti-immigration fears had earlier led to the mandatory tattooing all non-European immigrants with a bar code on the wrist color-coded according to immigration status: blue for citizens, green for permanent residents, black for temporary workers. Over the course of the novel additional sanctions are implemented, including unofficial but tolerated kidnappings and border dumps, detention centers (aka the Inkatoriums), an illegal market in white-seeming ink children, and eventually, forced sterilization and mass deportations. Near the end of the novel, "televised images" of shackled children being marched down the streets of Smithville galvanize public reaction against the deportations. By the end of the novel, federal legislation dismantling the entire apparatus of the ink system has been passed.

Characters

Major

• Finn Riordan: an Irish-American journalist, one of the four main narrators. He falls in love with Mari, but it's not until she vanishes that he begins to learn to recognize the extent of his privilege as a white, non-ink. He is murdered covering a performance piece turned flash mob turned riot turned police massacre at a Hastings art gallery.
• Mari (Mariana) Girardi: a "citizen ink" (born in Guatemala to an indigenous woman and an American man) who works for the Hastings Population Control Office (HPCO). When she was an infant living with her mother in Guatemala, all the inhabitants of her village were murdered by a unit of the Guatemalan army, presumably the Kaibiles. She was subsequently brought to the United States by her father. As the only ink narrator, Mari carries a considerable burden, representing the suffering of all the inks. This includes enduring not only the indignity of the tattoo, but also professional restrictions; segregation; being kidnapped, raped, and dumped by members of a white supremacist paramilitary group; incarceration in the Smithville Inkatorium; having her and Finn's child illegally taken and adopted; and living underground. Through the intercessions of Abbie, she escapes the Inkatorium and reunites with Finn and their child, Gus, whose rescue Abbie engineers. Mari is noteworthy also as one of the characters who bears magic, in both her ability to see literally through others' eyes and the presence of a nahual, or animal twin, which takes the form a jaguar who can separate from Mari's body. At the end of the novel, Mari returns to the Guatemalan village where she was born and, with support and guidance from her nahual, hears the testimony of the nahuales of the murdered villagers as well as, quite surprisingly, the Kaibiles/kaibiles who committed the massacre. She thus represents the magical power of story-telling to channel and transform human suffering.
• Del (Delevan) Ellis: a carpet installer and artist. Like Finn, part of his character development involves learning to recognize his own privilege as a non-ink and use it to help the inks. He learns faster than Finn, perhaps because of his own racially ambiguous heritage or because he works closely with, respects, and becomes close friends with two undocumented immigrants, Chato and Chema. When the novel opens, he is married to Finn's sister, Cassie. After they move from Smithville to Hastings he meets and falls in love with Meche, which precipitates a rupture in his marriage. Eventually, Del and Cassie reconcile and have a son, Satchel. Del possesses the magical ability to establish a telepathic connection with the earth, which he uses to reshape the landscape to provide sanctuary for Chato, Chema, and a number of other inks. He attributes this ability to his maternal grandmother who claimed African, Seminole, and French heritage.
• Abbie: a half-white, half-Mohawk teenage computer whiz who lives with her white mother in a trailer park and performs court-mandated community service at the Smithville Inkatorium where her mother is Director. She and her boyfriend, John, help Mari and Meche escape the Inkatorium assisted by a gang, the gavilánes (hawks). She falls in love with the leader, Toño Gavilán. After his death she gives birth to their daughter, Lucero, and in partnership with Toño's cousin, Neto, assumes leadership of the gang. Abbie's magical abilities are somewhat ambiguous, perhaps reflecting her complex racial heritage. Like Mari she seems to possess a spirit twin, a wolf, attributable to her Mohawk heritage, and visible in the fur-like scars covering her body. Vourvoulias also depicts Abbie's programming skills as a kind of magic which aligns her with Mari and Meche and, through Meche, the goddess Yemoja.
• Toño Gavilán: the wealthy leader of the gavilánes, a Mexican-American gang. Meche invokes his help (via Abbie) in escaping from the Inkatorium. In exchange for a considerable percentage of the earnings, he supplies the ingredients needed to make synthetic skin used to cover up tattoos and provide inks with a measure of mobility. After a courtship of about three years, he and Abbie become a couple. He is shot and killed during an attack by a rival gang. He is the posthumous father of Lucero.
• Meche: a wealthy Cuban-American chemist whose formula for "instaskin" is extremely effective at concealing tattoos and therefore in high demand. As a wealthy, blond descendant of European settlers, Meche could have purchased freedom from being marked as an ink, but she chooses to use her wealth and education to help other inks. She and Del fall in love and are separated, then reunited, then separated, and finally reunited at the end of the novel. One of the magic characters, she is surrounded by a swarm of bees which apparently only Del (and other bearers of magic) can see. The bees symbolize her connection and dedication to the goddess Yemọja who is cognate with Nuestra Senora de la Caridad del Cobre (Our Lady of Charity), the patron saint of Cuba. At one point Meche channels the power of Yemọja/Nuestra Señora to help Mari's Nahual defeat an army of kaibiles, magical dwarfs formed of earth and blood who symbolize the source of evil in the world and are cognate with the special unit of the Guatemalan army that destroyed Mari's village.

Minor

• Father Tom: a priest at Holy Innocents, a Catholic church in Hastings, whose congregation is comprised largely of inks. A follower of Catholic Social Teaching, he organizes and maintains an informal network of non-inks to help the inks. At various points he brings Francine, Del, Meche, Neto, and Sarai into his network.
• Cassie (Cassandra): Finn's sister, Del's wife, and Satchel's mother. One of the few characters in the novel who possesses neither magical abilities nor a sense of social justice.
• Sarai: a friend of Cassie and a member of Father Tom's social justice network.
• Francine: Finn and Cassie's mother, a professional folklorist, and a member of Father Tom's church and network. She hides inks in a network of underground tunnels built in the nineteenth century to secretly move African captives from ships transporting them in defiance of federal law.
• Chema and Chato: undocumented immigrants, from San Salvador and Mexico respectively, who work with Del and then befriend him after he leaves Cassie the first time. Like Del, they are possessed of magic, and together the three men re-shape Del's land to provide sanctuary for other inks.
• Neto: Toño's cousin, Abbie's husband after Toño's death, and Lucero's step-father. He and Abbie assume co-leadership of the gavilánes following Toño's death.
• John: Abbie’s first love. He and Abbie manage Mari and Meche's escape from the Inkatorium with help from the gavilánes. Deeply possessive and jealous of her relationship with Toño, he covers her body in scars as a way to mark his ownership of her.
• Gus: Mari and Finn’s son. Like his mother he has an animal twin. Also like his mother and Del he communicates telepathically.
• Satchel: son of Del and Cassie. Like his father, he can manipulate matter.
• Lucero: Abbie and Toño’s daughter.
• The jaguar: Mari's nahual. This character's ability to separate from Mari and move between the physical and the etheric realms implies that Mari may be a shaman.
• kaibiles: supernatural creatures named after the infamous Guatemalan military unit; the novel describes them as "etheric projection[s] of the pure evil we human beings are willing to visit on each other, in every age, every country, and on every layer of reality."

Symbolism

• Ink itself is the most pervasive symbol of the novel referring both the barcode tattoos used to categorize and monitor the immigrants as well as the power of the written word, conveyed most obviously through Finn's career as a journalist.
• Animals. Three of the characters, Mari, Abbie, and Meche, are accompanied by spirit or totem animals that reflect their genetic background and ancestral beliefs.
  • The jaguar: Mari is accompanied by a nahual which takes the form of a jaguar, often associated with royalty among the Maya peoples, a somewhat ironic symbol given Mari's small physical stature and humble origins.
  • The wolf: Abbie is accompanied by a totem animal in the form of a wolf, one of the three clans of the Mohawk people. Although in a very general way, the wolf represents courage, strength, and loyalty within a number of Native American tribes, its specific meaning for the Mohawk peoples is less clear. The attempt to syncretize the wolf and the jaguar deserves more critical attention.
  • Bees: Meche is accompanied by a swarm of bees which symbolize Yemoja (Yemaya), a Yoruba goddess worshipped by African diasphoric people throughout the Caribbean and gradually syncretized with the Virgin Mary and her various cognates across the Caribbean and throughout Latin America.

Genre

Like much of Vourvoulias's fiction, INK defies clear cut classification. Most readers would agree that she is writing speculative fiction, a rather broad category that includes science fiction, fantasy, utopian fiction, dystopian fiction, and horror. Like much of her published work, INK crosses these generic borders. The imagined transformation of the United States of America into a society committed to the overt systematic imposition of horrific suffering on a large part of its population (and the resulting loss of humanity for many of the non-ink population) mark the novel as dystopian. The technology of biometric surveillance that defines the dystopian setting, the development of synthetic skin as a technologically mediated means of evading surveillance, and the importance of computer technology to the resistance all give INK a secure footing in the genre of science fiction. Finally, it can be read as predominately fantasy or magical realism due to the presence of magical beings who exist simultaneously in all layers of reality, who represent good and evil, and who are waging a cosmic battle. For most of the novel, however, the representation magic in INK is neither remarkable nor does it offer a totalizing solution to the systematic oppression imposed by the government. The fact that most of the novel's magic emerges from a continued albeit partly subterranean presence of indigenous myth or faith, specifically animism within a post-colonial setting, seems to push INK closer to magic realism.

Themes

Immigration in the United States

Undoubtedly the novel’s major theme as virtually all the action centers around the biometric marking of immigrants and increasingly stringent restrictions against them, including disappearance, detention centers, an illegal adoption market, forced sterilization, and mass deportation. Three of the six main characters are themselves immigrants (Mari, Meche, and Toño) while the other main characters (Finn, Del, and Abbie) dedicate themselves to helping the immigrants resist and survive.

Latinidad

Although Vourvoulias herself is Guatemalan-American and much of the novel is grounded in the experiences of a Guatemalan character and Guatemalan folk-belief, the communal response to oppression by Latinx characters from a variety of countries, most notably Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico testifies to the theme of Latinidad. Their shifting and contingent intersectional alliances overcome various ethnic and personal allegiance, those for example, between Meche and Toño, Cuban and Mexican respectively, who are also business competitors, but who set aside their many differences to work for the benefit of all inks.

Community

Vourvoulias has repeatedly identified “the power and strength of community” as one of her major themes. The novel’s many examples of cross-cultural intersectionality, especially but not exclusively, Latinidad, contribute to this theme, which is further supported by the narrative structure of the novel. In place of the conventional story of a single protagonist whose point of view focalizes the story and whose heroic struggle anchors the plot, Vourvoulias weaves a narrative comprised of the intersecting stories of many characters: “community is the hero.” This distancing from one of the most common tropes of the western literary tradition has vexed some readers who find themselves distracted by and critical of the novel’s scope.  

Magic

The novel’s treatment of magic distances it from conventional fantasy, which relies on a single focalizing protagonist whose mastery of magical power resolves the central conflict of the narrative. In this novel, as throughout Vourvoulias’s oeuvre, “magic is everywhere” but can only solve immediate, small problems. Del’s ability to communicate telepathically with the earth is one example. He uses this magic to ask the earth to re-shape itself to his and others' immediate needs, particularly to create “in-between places” that help hide inks from the authorities. But the large-scale historical problems the novel describes—injustice, oppression, genocide—require the manifold power of multiple communities willing to act in concert.

Science and Technology

Biometrics as a means of oppressive social control sets the stage for this dystopian science fiction, as does Meche's mastery of chemistry, which she uses to produce instaskin, and Abbie's formidable skills as a computer programmer and hacker.

Privilege

Like oppression, privilege is intersectional, compounding itself of gender and/or race and/or national origin and/or class. At various points, the novel emphasizes gender privilege (as when Finn, Toño, and John treat females character like sexual objects); racial privilege (as when non-inks such as Finn, John, Abbie and others move with almost incomprehensible ease through the social and material barricades that characterize this dystopia); and class privilege (which enables Meche and Toño to function with relative immunity to the authorities and to use their wealth to help others mobilize against the government).

Cultural and Historical Context

The United States

Jim Crow

The increasingly onerous restrictions against the inks reflects the history of the racial segregation of whites and blacks in the United States, especially as codified by Jim Crow laws. These include not only the marking of skin to differentiate inks from non-inks, but also the segregation of public transportation, concentration of inks into de facto ghettos, evocation of the one-drop rule, forced sterilization, and implied government sanction of extra-juridical violence by paramilitary units against the inks.

Japanese Internment in WWII

Vourvoulias herself has suggested that the Japanese Internment in WWII offers a model for her representation of concentration in the novel

Eugenics

The novel explicitly evokes eugenics at several points, once when one of Mari's kidnappers muses on the inadvisability of interracial sex, once when the government begins the forcible sterilization of the inks.

Nazi Germany, the Holocaust

Throughout INK the readers are eerily reminded of The Holocaust primarily due to the tattoos and the Inkatoriums, which function as de facto concentration camps.

Guatemala

Guatemalan Civil War

Vourvoulais pulls from her experiences growing up in Guatemala during the Guatemalan Civil War. These, she has said, allow her to recognize the “really distressing parallels” between what's happening in the US and what happened Guatemala during the civil war.

Aided by the United States, the Guatemalan government was responsible for a ground campaign that massacred many civilians and, in particular, indigenous people. In INK, Vourvoulias depicts one such massacre, possibly the Dos Erres massacre, to establish Mari's background: when Mari was just a baby, her village was invaded by government soldiers known as Kaibiles, and only two children, Mari and her brother, survived. The novel's account has several close parallels with accounts of what happened at Dos Erres, in particular the survival of only one or possibly two children. This accords with the novel as infant Mari's four-year-old brother carries her to safety and subsequently dies.

Guatemalan indigenous faith

Throughout Mesoamerica, there is a belief that everyone is born with an animal spirit or nahual, such as Mari's jaguar twin. These spirits are believed to be tied to the individual's life force as well as their personalities and talents. Only strong individuals have the ability to control their spirit and magic. Shamans in particular use their nahuales to travel between the material and the spiritual realms, a power the novel gives Mari.

Reception

Despite mostly favorable reviews, the first edition of the novel did not gain much traction with readers, perhaps due to relatively poor production values or distribution problems. The second edition has garnered attention in the national press and is being touted on quite a few "best of lists" from common readers. In general, reviewers have praised the characterization, but found fault with novel’s scope, particularly its extended time frame. Opinions about the effectiveness of the narrative strategy and use of fantasy elements vary. The novel has been compared to The Handmaid’s Tale for the way it shows how “people can be lulled into huge, damaging changes to society by adjusting to them in increments” and how it "makes chillingly clear how close beneath the surface of a liberal civil order lies a more oppressive regime willing to quickly narrow the category of the fully human to a smaller subset of those who have traditionally held power in Western societies." Two reviews, Sherryl Vint's 2012 review for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Caityn Marisol Sweeney's for the American Book Review in 2020, anticipate the nascent scholarly focus on the themes of surveillance culture, white nationalism, and the repetition of historical atrocity."

References

This article "Ink (Sabrina Vourvoulias novel)" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Ink (Sabrina Vourvoulias novel). Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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