Briefly, the fictional dystopia Atwood creates is a violently patriarchal Christian right who have taken power in the US. The tale follows the unnamed Offred (belonging to Fred) as a handmaid, effectually a slave, forcibly removed from her own family and providing the womb for the powerful elite in a world where fertility has become rare.
This is dystopian fiction, an imagined future. Perhaps a moot point here but what has irked me (for many years) about Atwood is her inability to accept that she writes science-fiction. Early in her writing career she irked a legion of fans by stating the difference between science fiction, which “has monsters and spaceships” and speculative fiction which “could really happen”. For any fan of the genre her snooty disregard of what she terms "talking squids in outer space" is a . Her motivation for this is clear - despite being awarded the very first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987 - she writes 'important' literary fiction and wants that to be clear.
The first reading of The Handmaid's Tale was perhaps only two years ago, I was busy with a new baby and missed the sparse sentences that reveal what has happened to brown and black people in Gilead - there are only white characters. Blink and you'll miss it too. Apparently The Children of Ham, as POC are referred to in the novel, are being resettled, apparently to "farm".
In this novel, depicting enslaved white women, in which the white supremacists have taken over you aren't going to dwell on this for even a page? Or consider the impact of white supremacy on the rest of the Gilead, bar white women?
Or perhaps try viewing this from a different angle. The handmaids own children are snatched, their reproductive organs enslaved, are banned from reading, renamed, and then the horrific public lynching. Has there been a collective memory fade or has everyone failed to recognise that each and every transgression against the handmaids are the suffering under which black slaves in the US, especially female slaves have endured? Hasn't Atwood simply copied and pasted a monstrous and very real past onto a highly improbable future with barely any recognition of this fact?
Reading again her introduction from my recent edition, Atwood makes a myriad of political and historical links (too many to list here) - unusual to do so in a work of fiction. I don't recall 1984 beginning with an explanation of which historical events inspired Orwell. There is a contradiction in which she attempts in this novel to avoid the "tendency to sermonize", but seems to pose her own loosely veiled political ideas in the same space.
One focus of the novel is quite clear, Atwood's spotlight on the reproductive rights of women. However, this history in the US is fraught with reproductive violence against black and brown women, not just slavery but after abolition: eugenics, forced sterilisation, and fear of the growth of black populations (consider the very large womens chapter of the KKK). There is also long history of a white supremacist problem in the suffragettes and pro-choice movement (link to a detailed article below).
In essence, my issue with The Handmaid's Tale is that it has no concern with POC (both past and present oppressions) and yet has achieved a collective female paranoia of WHAT COULD HAPPEN (but never will) to white women. THT is white feminism, and I have no further time or chai for that.
More reading:
https://medium.com/the-establishment/the-handmaids-tale-a-white-feminist-s-dystopia-80da75a40dc5
https://afropunk.com/2018/05/the-handmaids-tale-and-the-reproductive-rights-movements-white-supremacy-problem/
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