Strange Horizons, May 6, 2013
“Hear the Enemy, My Daughter” by Kenneth Schneyer
Reviewed by Matthew Nadelhaft
Kenneth Schneyer’s “Hear the Enemy, My Daughter,” while not exactly possessed of the most catchy title I’ve ever encountered, is in almost every other regard a tour-de-force. This story is so good, in fact, that, paradoxically, I don’t want to review it. Everything I say about it, I fear, can only take away from the enjoyment of the reader, who should encounter this story free from preconceptions, able to be surprised by every revelation. On the other hand, not reviewing the story would do it a greater disservice than revealing some of its secrets, and stories like these make me keenly aware a critic’s loyalty is to the stories even more than to the readers.
The story follows a mother and child left bereft by a galactic war. Jabari, Halami’s husband, died in combat against the brutal Sheshash, leaving her with their young daughter, Kesi. Halami is a linguist. While she once served in combat, since the birth of their daughter she now works at translating the Sheshash language – without much success. She is haunted by her husband’s death, of course, and cannot let go of her belief that she could have prevented it had she still been in active duty. These tortured wonderings contribute to an ambivalent, turbulent relationship with three-year-old Kesi.
One of this story’s many strengths is the terrifying alien-ness of the Sheshash. They fight in pairs, individuals so different as to seem two species. When, for the first time, a “fighting pair” is captured, Halami is called up to study them. It is the breakthrough they’ve been waiting for, as Halami finally makes slow, small, but significant progress in deciphering the Sheshash language – and mind-set. And the Sheshash are skilfully drawn, we want to understand them; we want to end the war, and not through genocide.
Halami’s progress with the Sheshash language is one of the story’s first great touches. While assuming the Sheshash communicate with a verbal language we can duplicate may be a bit of an ask, their otherness is still ably conceptualized and demonstrated. For instance, Halami begins her studies by showing the captured Sheshash shapes while speaking their names, getting in response a Sheshash word. But what the Sheshash is telling her, it transpires, is not the name of the object, but the name for the action she is performing with the object. It’s a simple point, but a profound one.
It’s also a relatively minor part of the story, which is chiefly concerned with drawing comparisons between the attempt to understand an alien species and the attempt to understand our own children. And, frankly, that’s as much of the plot as I’m willing to divulge. The “simple and profound” motif, though, evidenced in the noun/verb reveal, is maintained throughout the story, with revelations about the Sheshash language and thought process contributing to an understanding of them – and an understanding that we may never understand them enough to end the war. But all along the war is like a backdrop to the true action of the story, the even-more-gripping personal struggle Halami fights every day to raise a daughter.
The title of the story, which I find rather clunky, seems in retrospect to fit better than I had first thought. It’s like a nod to classic science fiction titles from a story that embraces the themes and techniques of the classic war stories of the genre while reinvigorating, revising and trumping them. Just read the story. And then nominate it for an award.