I have, to my surprise, a Master of Arts in Global Interactions from Cleveland State University here in Ohio. Which is basically international relations but make it sound less intimidating so people will sign up for the degree without realizing how rigorous it is.

As one would expect, this degree covered political theory, international political economy, international trade, risk assessment, international crime, global treaties, and intercultural awareness. During my studies, I volunteered at a refugee services center, which was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

I also wrote my thesis on international human trafficking, which meant months of reading about the most depressing things in existence. Please don’t make me talk about Thai fishing boats.

While I do not expect my readers to follow along with things like international political economy, global trade treaties, or tariffs, I do leverage my education to inform the themes, which become more apparent starting with What Is Cannot Be Unwritten. Most of this has less to do with political theory and more to do with the realities of living in a multipolar, global society. Let’s take a look.

Sina demonstrates how easy it is to turn a narrative against a nation.

I knew that my storylines were working when my brother told me that he thinks all Sinans are evil and irredeemable, despite the fact that we have not met a single Sinan until What Is Cannot Be Unwritten.

Everything we hear about Sina comes from Bremish people; namely, Uileac Korviridi and Orrinir Relickim. They, themselves, do not meet Sinans face-to-face anywhere but the battlefield until the fifth book, Absent All Light.

And we, as readers, only get their perspective. We are pushed to sympathize with these characters because they are decent, well-meaning people even with their flaws.

We hear over and over again that Sina has killed thousands of innocent people, that they have tried for centuries to overtake Breme, and that they will stop at nothing until they conquer the whole country. More than that, we hear absolutely nothing about their culture, beliefs, cuisine, holidays, or literary traditions.

Why wouldn’t we assume the worst about Sina and everyone in it? Sinans have been portrayed as a faceless, evil horde who won’t rest until everyone in Breme is dead.

And this, of course, was entirely on purpose so that Mordrek’s sympathetic characterization comes as a surprise. Readers have spent three books hating Sina because the narrators told them to. Now they must revise their understanding as they come to like and appreciate Mordrek.

We also see how easy it is to minimize unpleasant facets of one’s own country by pointing out another country’s sins.

Many of the ugly parts of Breme are called out and glossed over on purpose. In 9 Years Yearning, we are following two child soldiers in the most intensive ROTC program of all time; we’re also told that the military accepts children as young as six for indentured servitude.

Parents literally give up their children with the full understanding that they will become soldiers and likely die for their country. That’s pretty messed up.

In Pride Before a Fall, Orrinir nonchalantly mentions that criminals have their hands chopped off as punishment, and they are not allowed to have prosthetics so everyone always knows what they did.

Later, in Funeral of Hopes, Uileac tells us that his parents were illiterate because formal schooling is a luxury. He also shows his casual racism against the country’s native tribes when his friend Tshumanu says the Bremish Council uses pikes to force the tribespeople back from the settlements. His only comment is that he hopes the guards don’t hurt the horses.

Mordrek gives us even more salacious details about Bremish society in What Is Cannot Be Unwritten. He tells us that some tribes extensively scarify women so they can be identified if stolen by other tribes; that even petty criminals get tortured and burned as permanent symbols of their crimes; and that rapists are neutered in punishment.

Yet the Bremish themselves show absolutely no concerns about these horrible details. These are all blink-and-you’ll-miss-them references throughout the books because to the Bremish, these aren’t problems and aren’t even worth discussing.

Not only does this reveal how acculturation warps one’s reality, but it demonstrates how nationalistic indoctrination can make anything justifiable. Instead, the Bremish point all their ire toward the Sinans and excuse their own societal issues as irrelevant in the face of their greater threat.

Mordrek shows us that governments are not their people.

Something feral comes up in people when they decide they don’t like a certain government. In short, they start to assume that every person of that nationality is a representative of the government and can all be judged according to that government’s actions, despite the fact that the everyday person has little influence on international politics as a whole.

I did not vote for Trump, nor have I ever said anything, in any way, that ever implies I support any of his policies. I voted for Jill Stein, who is essentially the opposite of everything Trump stands for.

Indeed, I voted for her specifically because I could not stomach supporting a candidate who wasn’t committed to stopping the Palestinian genocide. My conscience would not allow me to ignore that glaring issue with Kamala Harris’s platform.

Yet, again and again, I have come across people claiming, directly or otherwise, that every American supports these policies, has a direct role in forming them, and can be judged by the actions of their leaders.

I’ve also seen people say that non-Americans should boycott every single American company, product, or individual, just because of where they come from. Essentially, they think it’s fine to punish self-published authors, indie artists, and musicians solely because they don’t like the American government.

That’s pretty shitty once you think about it for more than two seconds. My self-published books don’t enrich the government’s pockets other than the taxes I pay on royalties. I’m not a government employee, nor do I have any influence at all in political discourse. I’m just a normal lady.

Indices like the Democracy Matrix and the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index show that Americans have far less influence in their government than other countries like Denmark, the United Kingdom, Australia, Iceland, or the Netherlands. In short, we have been held captive by oligarchs, and the institutional actions you hate likely had nothing to do with the typical American.

Does this mean that Americans have not benefited from colonialism or that our society wasn’t built on genocide and racism? It does not. But the typical American person isn’t getting rich on the backs of others abroad, nor do they hold the same cartoonishly evil principles as their worst leaders.

Before you believe I’m just defensive because of my nationality, I would say the same thing about boycotting every brand from any country, many of which have absolutely nothing to do the actions of their leaders.

Chinese people aren’t all evil spies; Russians don’t all agree with Putin; everyday Iranians aren’t stockpiling nuclear weapons in their fridges; the typical North Korean isn’t just a brainwashed puppet who slavers for American blood. This is because, again, millions of people are not hive minds programmed to think just like their leaders.

Mordrek is technically a government employee, but as a spy, he stands in a liminal space between the everyday populace and the elite. He was born in poverty and spent his life wandering the rough streets until his freedom came to an abrupt end after a bar fight. Unlike the royal family, he has seen the evil that comes from power, and he lacks the dynastic loyalty that motivates Queen Susuma and her children.

Through him, we get to see how everyday people feel about the government – including that most of them do not necessarily agree with or support the queen’s decisions.

Our upbringing and life experiences prejudice us against others unless we work to unlearn these beliefs.

It’s completely reasonable that the Bremish, Uileac especially, would hate Sina and all it stands for. Uileac lost his parents to Sinan soldiers; Orrinir was raised to hate them; and both of them have spent years being indoctrinated against the “evil” country across the Rimuk Mountains.

But this is stereotyping based on their own bad experiences. The Bremish people are Othering the Sinans by presuming all of them are exactly the same, with the same motivations and desires. The Sinans have become the “out” group, lacking individuality and personality.

It’s much easier to do this if you never meet someone from that group and get to know them as a person. This is why so many people find their assumptions crumbling when they encounter a person from the stereotyped group.

I did not meet a Muslim person until college because I lived in lily-white, homogenous suburbs. As a Millennial, I heard all about the “evil Muslims” who caused 9/11, who made us go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq, so on and so on. Americans of a certain age have heard this jingoism our whole lives. (Most of which aren’t the least bit true.)

So it was a pleasant surprise to get to step outside of my bubble and meet new people with completely different life experiences than my own. Going to college also imploded the many lies I’d been fed about said people.

In my classes at University of Illinois-Chicago, I met orthodox Muslim women who wore burqas and had male chaperones – and always had the sharpest and most insightful comments about Greek tragedies. I worked with a Muslim woman while interning at a sexual assault nonprofit, and she invited me to mint tea at a local restaurant. Delicious.

I’m proud to say that I co-wrote my Masters thesis with an incredible Iraqi Muslim woman. She’s so kind that she brought me back a green keffiyeh and snacks when she went back to visit her family in Iraq, even though we were only casual friends at that time.

I also worked with many Afghani refugees during my MA internship, who would affectionately call me habibi and indulge in the glowing, over-the-top praise that typifies Arabic greetings. And of course I’d let them sneak a cigarette off me during Ramadan, no questions asked.

All these experiences made me such a better person and opened my horizons; I came to understand that truly, everyone is more alike than they are different. They also made me painfully aware of how easy it is to hate someone you’ve never met and don’t understand.

As such, I wanted Mordrek and the rest of the Sinan cast to be examples of how crucial it is to unlearn these prejudices, to look past what we’ve been told and see people as who they are. Mordrek and Haniya, certainly, open their hearts to the people they’ve been told hate them – and are pleased to be loved in return.

Nationalistic biases can prevent us from engaging on a deeper level with others unlike ourselves.

A pivotal part of my decision to write the Eirenic Verses came from what I call the Electric Showerhead Incident of 2023. I was once part of a private Discord server with a Brazilian woman, who had stated on multiple occasions that she hates Americans and believes we are all ignorant racists.

While I did my best to just roll with it and acknowledge that this came from the terrible history of US-Brazilian relations, the issue exploded when I said that I was scared of electric showerheads because getting electrocuted is my greatest fear.

The Discord user blew up on me, saying that I was implying all Latin Americans are “savages” for using a technology I’m afraid of.

I, of course, never said anything of the sort.

Sorry to break it to you, but someone isn’t a racist because they don’t want to install a bidet or ride in a tuk-tuk or use a rice cooker or utilize any other type of technology from another country.

These are just personal preferences, and while it may be due to unfamiliarity, it also doesn’t imply that they hate the people of that country. Thinking otherwise is likely more due to personal beef with said nationality, which in and of itself is more prejudiced than having preferences.

I do understand where said ex-friend was coming from. It is easy to get stuck in resentment about what certain governments have done and project that onto random people who happen to be from that same country. It is also easy to paint every person of a certain nationality with the same brush and claim that “they’re all like that.”

We see this happen later on in the series, particularly in Absent All Light and Perseity. Both Sinans and Bremish show they don’t see one another as equal; they believe there is some unresolvable cultural barrier. Only through being forced to confront this, again and again, can the characters can grow as people and connect with others on a deeper level.

I am sure people reading this will claim that it’s okay to hate Americans, encouraged even. That it’s fine to hate people of certain countries because they are privileged, and therefore it’s “punching up” to mock, deride, and insult them.

You can believe that if you want to; you can hate me for where I was born if you choose. I can’t stop you, and it’s not really any of my business. But you may be depriving yourself of fantastic experiences with people who share much more in common with you than you realize.

Every culture has something valuable about it, even the most corrupt and perverse.

In Perseity, Mordrek stays a line that perfectly sums up my own feelings.

“Sina has its problems – many problems, in fact. But so does your country. There’s problems everywhere, my love. That doesn’t mean those places aren’t worth saving.”

I think about this quote a lot when reflecting on the many challenges that America faces right now. Year after year, people threaten to leave the country – or are told to do so by bigots. Indeed, my own mother has suggested we move somewhere else and give up on America as a whole.

I’ve lost count of how many times people have told me, a natural-born American citizen, to leave because I dared to claim that it’s possible to make this country better.

But I, just like Mordrek, will not do that. Ohio is my home; no amount of terrible politics will change where I belong. If I left the Great Lakes region, I’d miss it forever because I simply cannot envision myself anywhere else.

When I go on vacation, I always get excited when I cross the state line back into Ohio. It’s not even that I’m eager to get home in the building sense, but that I’m happy to be home in the geographic, cultural sense.

I grew up near the Great Lakes, and I will make damn sure I die beside them, too. I am far more loyal to this geographic area than I am to the United States, which just happens to subsume my true homeland.

Even if a civil war breaks out, I’m not leaving. I’d rather die instead.

This is a feeling that may be hard to explain for those who don’t feel a deep sense of belonging in their current environment, but those who do understand will feel it deep in their bones.

There’s a reason that refugees long to return home after war and why people refuse to flee a conflict zone, why people stay to rebuild once the bombs stop dropping. It’s not necessarily nationalism, though for many it is that too, but a love of that specific land and its people. No amount of bad governance or politics can change that. If you’re home, you’re home, no matter who is in power.

While Mordrek does briefly leave Sina for Breme later on in the series, he always returns because, like me, he is tied to the land where he grew up, where he first fell in love, where he made his worst mistakes and his greatest triumphs.

It is because, to him, Sina is worth saving. Just like America is worth saving to me.

Like all fiction, the Eirenic Verses is intricately tied up in the author’s experiences, education, and upbringing. I hope that through infusing my work with these themes, my readers will look at things a little differently when they open up the newspaper to see what the hell America is up to now.