InsaneJournal

Last Battle pt2


Istanbul Was Constantinople: The Calormene.

One criticism of the book is that it is allegedly racist in its depiction of the Calormene soldiers. It is very hard to argue with that. But would we have noticed this if we’d grown up a different era? Prior to Al Qaeda, prior to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the Gulf War and 9/11? None of the current fans of this series were alive before that, so it is difficult to be able to see the choice of quasi Middle Eastern villains as in any way innocent or unconnected to current conflicts. This is made more difficult by waking up in the morning to see headlines that say things like "Iran says new missiles can reach Israel".

The thing is, though, he probably didn’t mean it that way.

The Calormene might be intended to reference the Ottoman Empire, which slaughtered over a million Armenian Christians in the early 1900s. They trapped the Armenians, set fire to their villages and then started hunting them. You’re not supposed to talk about that, because Turkey likes to pretend it never happened and they’re allies of the West. But I think it’s another one of those historical context things that you wouldn’t think about if you weren’t born back then. Turkey’s city of Istanbul was also once the great Christian city of Constantinople, site of one of the most beautiful and important Christian churches in the world, the scene of battles between Christians and Muslims and Christians versus other Christians. It was the capitol of Eastern Orthodoxy. Rick Steves was in Turkey, exploring the caves that Christians used to use to escape persecution, from Romans and from the Arabs and he showed us one that was basically this Byzantine church carved into the rocks.

C.S Lewis set up more than one neighboring nation for potential conflict with Narnia, but he’d been foreshadowing the Calormene as dangerous all along, even creating a prior conflict with Narnia in H&HB and emphasizing that their society is the exact opposite of Narnia. It is not unusual at all for Western people to feel that way about the East-and vice versa-which is why we keep ending up in wars with each other.

If you’d like to look at this on the religious allegory level, parts of TLB are based on the book of Revelation. Revelation does heavily imply, according to certain interpretations, that the End will involve a political figure from somewhere near Turkey. Which should not be at all surprising because the author of Revelation lived in that part of the world and at the time it was being written, that was the most important part of the world- Europe beyond Italy was seen as tribes of wild, blue painted barbarians. No one would have thought of say, the Irish, as capable of ushering in the Apocalypse. Or the British. Or the Germans (although they would come to change their minds about that soon). Most people had never seen America and did not believe it really existed.

Or maybe C.S Lewis was just being a teensy bit racist. There's always been something a little off about the whole "Sons of Adam" thing.