66 pages • 2 hours read
A Reaper at the Gates
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Background
Authorial Context: Sabaa Tahir and Diversity
Sabaa Tahir is a Pakistani American writer, well known for her YA series An Ember in the Ashes and for her novel All My Rage, published in 2022. Tahir grew up in a small town in the Mojave Desert, where she was often subjected to racist comments from her peers. While working at the Washington Post after college, she noticed that a majority of the stories were about people of color and their suffering as victims of atrocities. She was particularly taken by a story written by Emily Wax about Kashmiri husbands, brothers, and sons being disappeared by Indian security agents.
These experiences shaped Tahir’s writing. The first book in An Ember in the Ashes starts with Laia joining the Scholar Resistance, hoping to find information on her brother, Darin. The second book, A Torch Against the Night, and the third book, A Reaper at the Gates, were heavily influenced by the global refugee crises that were occurring in the wake of the Arab Spring at the time of Tahir’s writing. Influenced by these events, A Reaper at the Gates focuses heavily on The Duality of Oppression and Resistance, the brutality of war, and The Danger of Revenge as Motivation.
Genre Context: History and Folklore
Tahir uses historical events tinged with folklore as the basis for her work. For the An Ember in the Ashes series, she was inspired by the Juleo-Claudian era of ancient Roman history, as well as Middle Eastern folklore and mythology, which can be seen through the inclusion of supernatural creatures such as the jinn, wights, ghouls, and efrits in the series. The hierarchical organization of the Martial Empire is based on ancient Rome’s social hierarchy while the brutal military school of Blackcliff is based on Sparta.
In ancient Sparta, boys had to begin training at age seven, entering a system of rigorous education called the agoge, which went on until they reached adulthood. While in the agoge, children were sent out into the wild to fend for themselves, beaten, starved, and compelled to fight against each other. The agoge system was concerned with creating soldiers who were loyal to loyal to each other, and loyal to the city-state of Sparta. Tahir also wanted to ensure that the characters’ names had a significant meaning behind them, as is often the case in folklore and myth. She used Roman-inspired names for the Martial characters, Arabic-inspired names for characters from the Tribes, Hindi-inspired names for Scholar characters, and West-African inspired names for Mariner characters. These diverse cultural and historical sources ground the work’s fantasy and make it an allegory for present-day conflicts.
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