Svaha is, according to this book, an Amerindian word¹, meaning the pause between the lightning and the thunder, and the feeling that you get during that pause.

Svaha shares some of the themes that DeLint visits in his other books: the intersection between the native peoples and the immigrants of Canada and North America; a parallel spirit world where sometimes beautiful / sometimes scary things happen; a miscellany of people who believe that the world doesn’t have to be a selfish, violent place; and a driving force of selfish, violent people who want to bend the world to their will. A woman who becomes hunted, through no choice of her own; and a strong man, who is expert at violence but avoids using it where possible. And a wandering Native American god, a trickster, who keeps the main characters on their toes.

At the same time, Svaha is unlike many of DeLint’s other books. It’s set in the future, a post-apocalyptic time. It has enough Yakuza and Tongs and Triads that Wolverine or Elektra would feel at home. And it leans heavily on science fiction themes and aboriginal futurism.

Love the premise: in the late 1990s, a Lakota musician becomes more popular than Taylor Swift is now – and just as rich. He devotes his wealth towards educating the young people of his tribe, sending this off to STEM programs at top notch universities and then underwriting tech research programs for them afterwards. He sends other young people off to law school, and they eventually bring suit and win back the traditional lands of the Lakota. And the Navaho/Hopi. And two South American tribes; and one in Africa, two in Australia, and one in Siberia. After reclaiming these lands, inviting their people back, and evicting Outsiders, they use their technology Wakanda-style to block out pollution, disease, and fallout; and create areas protected from climate change, areas that become like little heavens on earth. While these Enclaves communicate with and travel to each other, they hold the rest of the world at arm’s length, declining to share their tech, and remaining out of it, while Russia and the U.S. destroy each other, food famines sweep North America, and Japan, Korea, and China sweep up the mess.

The Outer World consists of a series of city/states, sheltered from fallout, with artificially purified air, and towers of apartments and corporations, interconnected by subways. These cities are surrounded by slums where those unwilling to pledge allegiance to one of the clans scratch out a living, a hive of burnt out buildings, junkyards, clubs, and bars. Further out still, lie the wastes, inhabited by cannibals suffering the results of nuclear fallout. Even in the cities, the technology is unstable, good only for keeping the city up and running, most of the time, with some spillover into the slums that keep them from devolving into wastelands. As you can imagine, there is some resentment – fueled by the media – against the Native Americans for keeping the “good parts” of the world for themselves and not sharing their technology.

When one of the Enclave’s ships crashes in the Outer World, the Enclave worries that the Outsiders might hack their technology and infiltrate the Enclaves. The lead character, Gahzee, is sent out to find and destroy a microchip that controlled the ship and explains their tech. It’s a one-way trip for him: once he is exposed the diseases of the Outer World, he will not be able to return to the Enclave and will be doomed to live out his life in the violent outside world. He is sustained against this sentence by his continued spiritual connection to the Dreamtime, a spiritual dimension where he speaks to his ancestors and receives advice from the Manitou.

There are two other main characters: a young woman, Lisa Bone, who lives in the fringes, acting as a courier, a “rat” she calls herself, scurrying from one shadow to another. Lately she has been scurrying more than usual because she had gotten mugged while carrying the microchip from the lost Enclave ship from one member of the Yakuza to another. She hadn’t known she was carrying the chip – and it’s questionable whether the two people who mugged her knew she had been carrying it, or just lucked out – but, since she didn’t die in the mugging, the guy who should have received the delivery is suspicious that she took it herself and plans to resell it. He’s hunting for her to torture her to find out where his chip is. At the same time, word has gotten out that the missing item was a chip, so everyone else is hunting for her, too. Luckily she runs into Gahzee, who rescues her body and opens her mind to a different way of thinking about the world.

The third main character is a security man, a bladerunner-esque cop, who works for the company that owns what is left of Toronto. All he wants to do is avoid an all-out war between the hair-trigger factions that are determined to dominate each other. Throughout the book, his illusions of friendship and loyalty and honor are tested – especially as he finds himself falling in love with the Yakuza’s lawyer, a dragon-lady who is trained in both Geisha and Ninja skills.

When I bought this book, I remember it sat on my shelves for a long time. I like DeLint’s writing but this one just sounded so out of his usual wheelhouse, I was leery of it. When I finally brought myself to read it, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. And then it went back to sitting on the shelf while others of his work get re-read often. What I generally like about DeLint’s writing is that it is set in the now, in a world that I understand, a world that – as Lisa Bone says in this book – people spend their whole lives waiting in the Svaha, having seen the distant lightening and waiting, hoping, for the thunder to follow. His books often feature young women who are stalked by violence, encounter another world, and have to figure out where they want to live. But what I like about those books is their grounding in the world that we all see and know – and the post-apocalyptic setting of this book takes that away.

The excessive violence and the Japanese and Chinese characters also make it read a lot like a graphic novel. Or a John Wick movie. Or Kill Bill. There’s always violence in DeLint’s books – unnecessary violence serves as his differentiator between good and evil – but the body count in this book is staggering. The violence against other clans, against each other, against themselves hangs over them like a Sword of Damocles. Or perhaps a Svaha.

For all that, it’s worth reading for the hope that the futurism holds for Native Americans. During the Pandemic lockdown, I became very interested in futurism. Afro-futurism is having a moment now, made cool by the Black Panther movies, but I watched an IFTF webinar about some interesting work being done with Indigenous youth in Toronto. And this fits nicely in that sphere.

But the point of this book is not that a dispossessed and repressed people can rise again to live an idealized life, separate from the post-colonial world. It is that, no matter who you are or where you came from, you cannot use wealth and power to live in a world separate from the rest. While it may work in the short run, in the long run, you owe it to humanity to lift all boats.

My husband likes to watch YouTube videos of what I think of unattainable houses. Huge, overly spacious mansions on manicured plots of land overlooking Southern California or Hawaii or the shorter buildings in NYC or sometimes Dubai. 10,000, 30,000, 50,000 square feet of empty space – and I can’t watch them. They make me furious. These are second or third homes for the wealthy, spaces that could easily house ten or twenty families. And don’t. I don’t envy the people who live in these places – I don’t aspire to live there – I don’t dream of winning the lottery and buying one of these monstrosities. These buildings and the people who live in them just seem like a waste of resources. When the crash of 2008 happened, I remember sitting with friends: This is it, we thought, Now they have to realize that what we’re doing isn’t working. Now change will happen. And it didn’t – instead, the stock market dropped, working people lost their jobs, and then the stock market went back up and kept going up. We keep seeing the indications that things need to change, and waiting for the change to come.

Svaha.

1. I say, “according to this book” because Googling it only brings up the South Asian meaning of the word and, after a few pages of results, this book. ↩︎