If you remove technology and industry, anything remotely modern about human beings, what sort of animal are we? What is the shape of our heart, after all? To explore these questions, Min Han went back to the Stone Age for August’s Web Exclusive, “Ara’s Man.” We talked with the debut author about telling a universal story set in another world, about the importance of travel, and how bullshit it is that there aren’t more stories where early females occupy the significant roles (that archaeology continues to prove) they held.
Erin McReynolds: The thing I loved about this story right away was that it took a huge risk in its setting: somewhere around the end of the Stone Age. How much research did you have to do to confidently render this world? How did you decide to set this story when you did, before written history?
Min Han: For some time now, I’ve been mulling over the astounding progress mankind has made in science, technology, architecture, social systems, etc. compared to the more ambiguous evolution of our moral sophistication as a species. Have emotions changed or advanced through the ages? From where did certain emotions originate?
That line of thought took me to ancient times and places where the most pressing daily concern revolved around survival. How did people handle grief and loss? How did they approach fairness, revenge, or mercy? I tend to fall into the trap of over-research, but for this story, I did very little. The first line and character came to me one afternoon and the rest unspooled fairly quickly.
EM: One reason sci-fi, speculative fiction, and historical fiction is tricky with the flash format is you really don’t get a lot of time to both world-build and tell a compelling story—usually one or the other is sacrificed. Did you ever run into that while writing this? How do you think you managed to balance the two?
MH: I first wrote the story focused on getting the conflict right without worrying too much about what the reader would think. When I revised, I paid particular attention to the opening. Since the story stayed mostly in the protagonist’s head, I think scene-setting was less important and made the shorter length possible.
EM: You’ve spent a good amount of time traveling and living around the world—I’d love to know what the most inspiring place has been for you in terms of your fiction writing.
MH: Travel generates precious headspace for me to explore internally, sometimes even more so than externally. The further removed a place is from my familiar routines and worldview, the more powerful its role on my fiction.For instance, this story was at least subconsciously guided by a trip I took in 2014 to the South Omo Valley in Ethiopia to visit several semi-pastoralist tribes. The Hamar, Daasanach, Karo, Mursi peoples lived in the same vast grasslands for centuries, preserving their way of life as entire civilizations in other parts of the world thrived, fought, and collapsed many times over.
Being physically in the dust and sun where these people had survived for thousands of years unaware of developments in the rest of the world generated all kinds of questions in me about what it meant to be alive as a human being, in our current time, born into a particular culture and tradition that affected whether we ate raw cow meat in the shade instead of raw fish in a Michelin restaurant.
It also begged a broader question about what made a successful society—the Omo tribes have long outlasted many of our western ones. In that sense, the events in “Ara’s Man” could be contemporaneous with conflicts playing out in New York, LA, Austin today, albeit with a (hopefully) different outcome.
EM: You don’t often see women depicted as hunters in prehistoric tales, and with what seems to be as much power as men (her mate has to tolerate Ara’s man living with them, I suppose because she said so). Was this an actual organizing structure you observed or discovered?
MH: There is no shortage of archeological evidence suggesting that many ancient societies were organized around women, and I could go on all day with examples, historical and mythologized, of women who excelled in activities often associated with men, i.e. battle, governance, archery.
I’m fascinated by the concept of “matriarchal prehistory” that thinkers like Johann Jakob Bachofen, Friedrich Engels, Helen Diner and the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s embraced, which essentially argues that women-centered societies were the norm until around 3000 BCE, after which patriarchal societies began to take over in part due to the rise of property ownership and conflict.
Though the verdict is out over how civilizations were actually organized in these earliest human clans, the prehistoric era served as a liberating period to imagine justice and revenge, and especially given the ample evidence suggesting that such considerations could easily have preoccupied a powerful female community figure as opposed to a male one, it felt natural to write the story from a woman’s point of view.
EM: It’s total bullshit that there aren’t more stories acknowledging early female leadership—do you think you’ll keep working this out in fiction? What are you working on now?
MH: The evolution of this term “leadership” is fascinating to me. The concept nowadays often feels co-opted by gendered stereotypes around taking charge, displaying dominance, holding positions of power, etc. when leadership, in my view, is really about making sound decisions on behalf of oneself and one’s community. I’m exploring the facets of what “sound” decision-making looks like in my novel, which follows the trajectories of a young man and woman navigating a post-9/11 U.S. from very different outsider perspectives.
EM: Did I read correctly that you made your debut in fiction just this year? That’s incredible—your writing sounds to me like you’ve been doing this for ages. How and when did you come to writing?
MH: Yes! Thank you! I love language and had been writing on and off for years, but didn’t seriously explore publication until fairly recently. I took a fiction class in college with the wonderful late Oscar Hijuelos who told me to “see the world and the stories will follow.” I have been trying to live his advice since.
Min Han’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Story, ZYZZYVA, Waccamaw, The Dudley Review and the anthology While We’re Here, among others. She is the inaugural Holden Residency Scholar at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Born in Beijing, she grew up on the east and west coasts before spending her twenties in Africa and Asia with several economic development organizations. Now based in Somerville, Massachusetts, she writes cases for the Harvard Business School by day and is at work on a novel.