Stand Strong, Stand Proud: Earth Kingdom Resilience and Identity (1 of 2)
Culture in Avatar: The Last Airbender Series:
1. What It Is to Be Free: Aang and the Spirituality of the Air Nomads
2. We Can Do This, Together: Community and Change in the Water Tribes
3. Stand Strong, Stand Proud: Earth Kingdom Resilience and Identity
4. Burn for My Belief: The Fire Nation and the Courage of Conviction
5. Subcultures and Conclusion
The Earth Kingdom is a vast place. If you take a look at the map of the Avatar world, the Earth Kingdom takes up like two-thirds of the inhabited world and likely more with the destruction of the Air Nomads. Similarly, nearly two-thirds of the story of Avatar takes place in the Earth Kingdom, since much of Book 1: Water is about Aang and his friends traveling north through the Earth Kingdom.
What is there to say about the culture of such a big and diverse place? It's kind of like trying to sum up the culture of "Asia," "Africa," or "the Americas," when all these continents are actually home to numerous different cultures and histories. A Japanese city-dweller has little in common with a Mongolian nomad, though they are both nominally Asian. And in fact, the Earth Kingdom is clearly modeled on the different peoples of Asia. Kiyoshi Island takes greatly after Japan; Song and her village resemble Koreans during the Choson period (15th-19th centuries); Ba Sing Se is a spitting image of Qing period of China when it was under Manchurian rule; and much of the Earth Kingdom countryside looks like rural China in Han-majority areas. The sandbenders of the Si Wong Desert and the waterbenders of the Foggy Swamps have distinct subcultures of their own, as do the Fire Nation Colonies. (I will discuss these last three subcultures in more detail in the fifth and final installment of this series.) Perhaps the only accurate statement to make about such a sprawling, varied continent is that its peoples have distinct and diverse identities.
Therefore this discussion about the culture of the Earth Kingdom won't be about the individual regions but that diversity itself, and the strong sense of identity that led to the Earth Kingdom communities maintaining such diversity. These qualities can manifest as both resilience and its flip side of rigidity. For better or for worse, this national character has shaped the Earth Kingdom and its struggle against the Fire Nation. It is also reflected in the many characters who hail from the Earth Kingdom, whose stories I will also examine as I go along.
Like a Rock: The Strength of the Earth Kingdom
Toph gives some important insight not only into earthbending but Earth Kingdom culture when she tells Aang the following in "Bitter Work."
You've got to be steady and strong. Rock is a stubborn element. If you're going to move it, (pushes Aang) you've got to be like a rock yourself. . . . There's no different angle, no clever solution, no trickety-trick that's gonna move that rock. (shoves Aang) You've gotta face it head on.
Make your point today by shoving an airbender!
This is a bending philosophy, but it's also a window into Earth Kingdom culture. The thing about earth is that it is the least movable of all four elements in the show. Air and fire have their own movements and water is fluid and flexible, but soil and rock left to their own devices will simply sit there. And due to its mass and resulting inertia, the element earth will not move until you make it--as Toph explains it, with will as unmoving as the earth itself. Forget freedom or fluidity or passion, the only way to move earth is sheer force of will.
But wait, doesn't being like a rock mean being unmoving rather than having the will to move? Exactly: Earth powerful because it doesn't want to move. The very mass and inertia that keep it stationary are also what make it unstoppable when it does move. And that is what I believe are the two sides of the Earth Kingdom's strength: The power to make movement happen where it seems impossible, and the patience to wait for the moment. This tension between moving and unmoving, motion and stillness, aggression and passivity defines Earth Kingdom culture and the story of Avatar.
To return to earthbending philosophy, in this vein Bumi in "Return to Omashu" didn't want to be rescued, and also wanted Aang to find a teacher who waits and listens before striking. The old earthbending master was exercising the option of neutral jin, when he directed his energy toward doing--nothing. While this is counterintuitive in a fight, he calls this waiting stillness the key to earthbending. This is because an earthbender must be like a rock: Moving with terrifying force when the moment calls for it, but first watching and waiting for that moment no matter how long it takes. Bumi showed himself to be a master of this concept when he waited in captivity for months before hitting upon that precise moment when he could strike with devastating force during "The Day of Black Sun," as recounted in "The Old Masters." Bumi knew stillness was as much a part of earthbending as movement, and so retook his city with minimal force and sacrifice.
To show this concept in the actual act of earthbending, enter one Toph Bei Fong. The moment Aang sees her in action he realizes this is the earthbending teacher Bumi would want for him, and no wonder: The defining aspect of Toph's fighting style is her economy of movement. When you look at the actual movements she made in her match with The Boulder, they consisted of swiping a foot along the ground a couple of times and one small gesture of a hand. And that was more than enough to defeat this big flashy guy with his big flashy movements. She showed similar restrained, minimal movements when she fought the entire Earth Rumble to free Aang.
Big flashy moves, in fact, characterize much of the Earth Rumble and it's not hard to see why. It's show biz, after all, and the sheer power in all that speed and mass is all too seductive. But Toph, who learned from the very source of earthbending, sees through to the essence of the art and knows that her finely-tuned senses and the willingness to wait for the moment are as important as the showy parts. Throwing rock around, while impressive, means nothing if it is not thrown at the right moment and the right place. The only way to know that is by stopping to listen.
"Listen and I won't have to hurt you, honey."
Just to make it clear, this patience doesn't necessarily mean slowness. That's why it's particularly instructive to compare Bumi's retaking of Omashu and Toph's Earth Rumble match. Both worked on the same principle of watching before striking, but where Bumi took months Toph's listening style in the heat of battle was far from slow; in fact it was so quick the viewers had to be shown the process in slow motion. Later, when Toph's earthbending is shown in real time, you can see how fast she is. Long-term or instantaneous, the important factor is not the timeframe but the emphasis on watching for the right moment to strike for best effect.
When you see the story of the Earth Kingdom and its denizens through their rock-like nature, you start to see the tension between waiting and motion everywhere. Take Toph's own story. She was unhappy for most of her life with parents who refused to see her as she truly was, and a stifling home where her life was circumscribed by her blindness. Yet she was initially reluctant to go with Aang, due to her ties of affection, of course, but also because the inertia of her life resisted change. She had found an outlet for her true self, albeit incompletely, through the persona of the Blind Bandit, and she was willing to live with that compromise. It was only after the combination of Aang's steadfastness and her father's disregard for her abilities budged her that she overcame that inertia and moved with determination and decisiveness, with an unstoppable force that would ultimately help change the world.
On a group scale you also see the same tension in the story of Haru and his village in "Imprisoned." Haru's father Tyro wanted to ride out the Fire Nation invasion by keeping docile and cooperative in the earthbender concentration camp, thus avoiding unnecessary sacrifice. Katara thought the time had come for the earthbenders to act, now that they had the Avatar on their side and also the means to fight back against their captors. Tyro was still reticent, but Haru, a member of the younger generation like Katara herself, agreed with her and set the resistance in motion. Once on its way, the earthbenders became an irresistible force that swept away their captors. Like a rock, the captive earthbenders' long silence was not despair but incredible power just waiting to be unleashed. It was just their wardens' mistake that he thought of them as savages whose will had been broken, and did not see through to their patience to their strength.
On the scale of the entire Earth Kingdom, this patient resilience formed the root of the Earth Kingdom's ability to resist the Fire Nation's invasion for a century. In general, there seemed to have been more passivity than aggression on the part of the Earth Kingdom communities before Aang's arrival. Ba Sing Se fought largely to defend itself, while Kiyoshi Island stayed neutral at first, and regions like Haru's village also stayed quiet under Fire Nation rule. (There were also pockets of active resistance like Jet's Freedom Fighters, about whom I will have more to say in the final essay of this series.) In a very real sense, Aang's arrival in these places was the catalyst for setting the resistance rolling, converting their long stillness into unstoppable motion. Ba Sing Se started to take active action against the Fire Nation before it was undermined from within, the Kiyoshi Warriors played a part in the war, and occupied territories started fighting back.
Of course, it is important to note that not all waiting is the kind of watchful vigil that Bumi kept during his captivity. We see also the negative part of being "like a rock" in Toph's and Tyro's reluctance to act, and perhaps the quiescence of many parts of the Earth Kingdom in the face of war. Their unwillingness to accept challenge the status quo was on some level simple refusal to accept change rather than the patience to wait for the right moment to strike. This is the shadow side of the Earth Kingdom's soul, its stubbornness and rigidity. While unshakable will has served the peoples of the Earth Kingdom well, they also risked becoming set in their ways to the extent that they couldn't make necessary changes. This kind of rigid thinking took on a particularly malignant form in the case of Ba Sing Se and its failure to face the issue of the war, as discussed in the earlier politics essay.
This is similar to my analysis of rigidity in Water Tribe culture, but subtly different. In the case of the Water Tribes, social rules arose from the need to give order to community and adapt it to different situations. In the case of the Earth Kingdom culture, the cultural ideals of strong will and patience posed the danger of locking groups and individuals into old patterns. Despite the nuance, however, it's true that these are similar situations. The cultural characteristics, after all, are not mutually exclusive but rather overlap and interact in fluid ways. Thinking about these characteristics separately serves to help identify them and to see how they interact, but should not separate them into inflexible groupings. I will have more to say about the interrelationship between cultures in the last essay of this series.
And now that we have examined the combination of stillness and motion that make the Earth Kingdom so powerful, it is time to examine its weaknesses. Why was such a giant of a kingdom so vulnerable to the Fire Nation, to the extent that they had to put up with the invaders for a hundred years? The answer to that question, I believe, lies in their strong sense of identity that prevented them from becoming a united whole. This theme of identity is present in many Earth Kingdom characters' stories, too. But I make the argument that this strong sense of self could also be a source of strength in giving the Earth Kingdom peoples dignity and a reason to fight. The next part of this essay discusses identity as another core Earth Kingdom cultural value, and how it affected the stories of the characters and the Kingdom at large.
1. What It Is to Be Free: Aang and the Spirituality of the Air Nomads
2. We Can Do This, Together: Community and Change in the Water Tribes
3. Stand Strong, Stand Proud: Earth Kingdom Resilience and Identity
4. Burn for My Belief: The Fire Nation and the Courage of Conviction
5. Subcultures and Conclusion
The Earth Kingdom is a vast place. If you take a look at the map of the Avatar world, the Earth Kingdom takes up like two-thirds of the inhabited world and likely more with the destruction of the Air Nomads. Similarly, nearly two-thirds of the story of Avatar takes place in the Earth Kingdom, since much of Book 1: Water is about Aang and his friends traveling north through the Earth Kingdom.
What is there to say about the culture of such a big and diverse place? It's kind of like trying to sum up the culture of "Asia," "Africa," or "the Americas," when all these continents are actually home to numerous different cultures and histories. A Japanese city-dweller has little in common with a Mongolian nomad, though they are both nominally Asian. And in fact, the Earth Kingdom is clearly modeled on the different peoples of Asia. Kiyoshi Island takes greatly after Japan; Song and her village resemble Koreans during the Choson period (15th-19th centuries); Ba Sing Se is a spitting image of Qing period of China when it was under Manchurian rule; and much of the Earth Kingdom countryside looks like rural China in Han-majority areas. The sandbenders of the Si Wong Desert and the waterbenders of the Foggy Swamps have distinct subcultures of their own, as do the Fire Nation Colonies. (I will discuss these last three subcultures in more detail in the fifth and final installment of this series.) Perhaps the only accurate statement to make about such a sprawling, varied continent is that its peoples have distinct and diverse identities.
Therefore this discussion about the culture of the Earth Kingdom won't be about the individual regions but that diversity itself, and the strong sense of identity that led to the Earth Kingdom communities maintaining such diversity. These qualities can manifest as both resilience and its flip side of rigidity. For better or for worse, this national character has shaped the Earth Kingdom and its struggle against the Fire Nation. It is also reflected in the many characters who hail from the Earth Kingdom, whose stories I will also examine as I go along.
Like a Rock: The Strength of the Earth Kingdom
Toph gives some important insight not only into earthbending but Earth Kingdom culture when she tells Aang the following in "Bitter Work."
You've got to be steady and strong. Rock is a stubborn element. If you're going to move it, (pushes Aang) you've got to be like a rock yourself. . . . There's no different angle, no clever solution, no trickety-trick that's gonna move that rock. (shoves Aang) You've gotta face it head on.
Make your point today by shoving an airbender!
This is a bending philosophy, but it's also a window into Earth Kingdom culture. The thing about earth is that it is the least movable of all four elements in the show. Air and fire have their own movements and water is fluid and flexible, but soil and rock left to their own devices will simply sit there. And due to its mass and resulting inertia, the element earth will not move until you make it--as Toph explains it, with will as unmoving as the earth itself. Forget freedom or fluidity or passion, the only way to move earth is sheer force of will.
But wait, doesn't being like a rock mean being unmoving rather than having the will to move? Exactly: Earth powerful because it doesn't want to move. The very mass and inertia that keep it stationary are also what make it unstoppable when it does move. And that is what I believe are the two sides of the Earth Kingdom's strength: The power to make movement happen where it seems impossible, and the patience to wait for the moment. This tension between moving and unmoving, motion and stillness, aggression and passivity defines Earth Kingdom culture and the story of Avatar.
To return to earthbending philosophy, in this vein Bumi in "Return to Omashu" didn't want to be rescued, and also wanted Aang to find a teacher who waits and listens before striking. The old earthbending master was exercising the option of neutral jin, when he directed his energy toward doing--nothing. While this is counterintuitive in a fight, he calls this waiting stillness the key to earthbending. This is because an earthbender must be like a rock: Moving with terrifying force when the moment calls for it, but first watching and waiting for that moment no matter how long it takes. Bumi showed himself to be a master of this concept when he waited in captivity for months before hitting upon that precise moment when he could strike with devastating force during "The Day of Black Sun," as recounted in "The Old Masters." Bumi knew stillness was as much a part of earthbending as movement, and so retook his city with minimal force and sacrifice.
To show this concept in the actual act of earthbending, enter one Toph Bei Fong. The moment Aang sees her in action he realizes this is the earthbending teacher Bumi would want for him, and no wonder: The defining aspect of Toph's fighting style is her economy of movement. When you look at the actual movements she made in her match with The Boulder, they consisted of swiping a foot along the ground a couple of times and one small gesture of a hand. And that was more than enough to defeat this big flashy guy with his big flashy movements. She showed similar restrained, minimal movements when she fought the entire Earth Rumble to free Aang.
Big flashy moves, in fact, characterize much of the Earth Rumble and it's not hard to see why. It's show biz, after all, and the sheer power in all that speed and mass is all too seductive. But Toph, who learned from the very source of earthbending, sees through to the essence of the art and knows that her finely-tuned senses and the willingness to wait for the moment are as important as the showy parts. Throwing rock around, while impressive, means nothing if it is not thrown at the right moment and the right place. The only way to know that is by stopping to listen.
"Listen and I won't have to hurt you, honey."
Just to make it clear, this patience doesn't necessarily mean slowness. That's why it's particularly instructive to compare Bumi's retaking of Omashu and Toph's Earth Rumble match. Both worked on the same principle of watching before striking, but where Bumi took months Toph's listening style in the heat of battle was far from slow; in fact it was so quick the viewers had to be shown the process in slow motion. Later, when Toph's earthbending is shown in real time, you can see how fast she is. Long-term or instantaneous, the important factor is not the timeframe but the emphasis on watching for the right moment to strike for best effect.
When you see the story of the Earth Kingdom and its denizens through their rock-like nature, you start to see the tension between waiting and motion everywhere. Take Toph's own story. She was unhappy for most of her life with parents who refused to see her as she truly was, and a stifling home where her life was circumscribed by her blindness. Yet she was initially reluctant to go with Aang, due to her ties of affection, of course, but also because the inertia of her life resisted change. She had found an outlet for her true self, albeit incompletely, through the persona of the Blind Bandit, and she was willing to live with that compromise. It was only after the combination of Aang's steadfastness and her father's disregard for her abilities budged her that she overcame that inertia and moved with determination and decisiveness, with an unstoppable force that would ultimately help change the world.
On a group scale you also see the same tension in the story of Haru and his village in "Imprisoned." Haru's father Tyro wanted to ride out the Fire Nation invasion by keeping docile and cooperative in the earthbender concentration camp, thus avoiding unnecessary sacrifice. Katara thought the time had come for the earthbenders to act, now that they had the Avatar on their side and also the means to fight back against their captors. Tyro was still reticent, but Haru, a member of the younger generation like Katara herself, agreed with her and set the resistance in motion. Once on its way, the earthbenders became an irresistible force that swept away their captors. Like a rock, the captive earthbenders' long silence was not despair but incredible power just waiting to be unleashed. It was just their wardens' mistake that he thought of them as savages whose will had been broken, and did not see through to their patience to their strength.
On the scale of the entire Earth Kingdom, this patient resilience formed the root of the Earth Kingdom's ability to resist the Fire Nation's invasion for a century. In general, there seemed to have been more passivity than aggression on the part of the Earth Kingdom communities before Aang's arrival. Ba Sing Se fought largely to defend itself, while Kiyoshi Island stayed neutral at first, and regions like Haru's village also stayed quiet under Fire Nation rule. (There were also pockets of active resistance like Jet's Freedom Fighters, about whom I will have more to say in the final essay of this series.) In a very real sense, Aang's arrival in these places was the catalyst for setting the resistance rolling, converting their long stillness into unstoppable motion. Ba Sing Se started to take active action against the Fire Nation before it was undermined from within, the Kiyoshi Warriors played a part in the war, and occupied territories started fighting back.
Of course, it is important to note that not all waiting is the kind of watchful vigil that Bumi kept during his captivity. We see also the negative part of being "like a rock" in Toph's and Tyro's reluctance to act, and perhaps the quiescence of many parts of the Earth Kingdom in the face of war. Their unwillingness to accept challenge the status quo was on some level simple refusal to accept change rather than the patience to wait for the right moment to strike. This is the shadow side of the Earth Kingdom's soul, its stubbornness and rigidity. While unshakable will has served the peoples of the Earth Kingdom well, they also risked becoming set in their ways to the extent that they couldn't make necessary changes. This kind of rigid thinking took on a particularly malignant form in the case of Ba Sing Se and its failure to face the issue of the war, as discussed in the earlier politics essay.
This is similar to my analysis of rigidity in Water Tribe culture, but subtly different. In the case of the Water Tribes, social rules arose from the need to give order to community and adapt it to different situations. In the case of the Earth Kingdom culture, the cultural ideals of strong will and patience posed the danger of locking groups and individuals into old patterns. Despite the nuance, however, it's true that these are similar situations. The cultural characteristics, after all, are not mutually exclusive but rather overlap and interact in fluid ways. Thinking about these characteristics separately serves to help identify them and to see how they interact, but should not separate them into inflexible groupings. I will have more to say about the interrelationship between cultures in the last essay of this series.
And now that we have examined the combination of stillness and motion that make the Earth Kingdom so powerful, it is time to examine its weaknesses. Why was such a giant of a kingdom so vulnerable to the Fire Nation, to the extent that they had to put up with the invaders for a hundred years? The answer to that question, I believe, lies in their strong sense of identity that prevented them from becoming a united whole. This theme of identity is present in many Earth Kingdom characters' stories, too. But I make the argument that this strong sense of self could also be a source of strength in giving the Earth Kingdom peoples dignity and a reason to fight. The next part of this essay discusses identity as another core Earth Kingdom cultural value, and how it affected the stories of the characters and the Kingdom at large.