Futures
What can we learn from the past in order to dream a new future? When writing my novel Memory Piece, I used this question to guide me as I moved my three main characters from their 1980s childhoods and 1990s young adulthoods into an imagined version of the 2040s. I was accustomed to writing against something—a mainstream history, a limited vision—but for Memory Piece, I wanted to write toward something: love. I challenged myself to write a visionary future for my characters—not an idealized, utopian, fantasy future where all our problems have magically gone away, but a future that made space for both reality and possibility, heartbreak and joy. Through writing the novel, I hoped to not merely explore my fears of how bad things could potentially become, but develop an antidote from being frozen in those fears, to imagine living, nonetheless.
In the 2040s section of the novel, three lifelong friends, now in their seventies, are growing older in a world where resource scarcity and technofascist surveillance has intensified. The novel’s future may seem dystopian, but I think of it more as a continuation of today’s status quo, with the government and police working to protect the assets of the rich and powerful. On many fronts, things are worse in this fictional future than they are now. Yet, the characters continue not only to survive, but also to do work that is meaningful, from creating large-scale art projects to forming neighborhood support groups. They share, plan, and remember. They build homes and chosen families. There is political repression and instability, as well as parties, meetings, and laughter.Capitalism wants us to distrust and compete with one another, but they stay connected.
Writing this future world for my characters helped me to prioritize these connections in my own life. Again and again, I return to this: being in community is the antidote to feeling dread, despair, and powerlessness. It doesn’t make our problems disappear, but it reminds us that we’re not alone in having them and allows us to envision something different. Collective action might take the form of a group of people working to instate a policy, strike for higher wages, or apply pressure to institutions or elected officials. Collective action can also be as simple as doing things together, whether it’s pooling funds to help a neighbor pay bills, sharing tips on living with illness, or learning a new language.The state may be abandoning us, but we don’t have to abandon each other. The act of gathering people, the joy in sharing a meal, a conversation, the vulnerability of acknowledging our fears, worries, and truths—how we’re really doing—can be a bulwark against denial, against the numbness of “normal.” To connect when so much is invested in keeping us separate is a constant practice, and when we are open to it, we can feel how close we are, the thin membrane between past and future, between all of us.
Present
We are living in a time of interlocking crises, yet expected to pretend everything is fine. Doing great! Getting lots done! It’s the American way, cognitive dissonance with a smile, the obligatory complacency of “going back to normal,” to a version of the past that never existed, an acceptance of mass death and inequity as inevitable. We’re taught that other countries impart their citizens with propaganda, while we are a civilized, moral democracy. This, of course, is our propaganda, an attempt to silence the wars we have continually waged, domestically and abroad. Americans do violence. Violence is done to us. We turn that anger and fear and grief on ourselves and one another in our own slow civil war.
There are crises we haven’t fully processed, like the pandemic, now approaching its fifth year, but which the ruling class has worked to “simply disappear from public perception.” There are the global and domestic wars live-streamed on our phones as the world’s powers consolidate to tell us it’s not happening; the increasingly cataclysmic cycle of storms, floods, and fires; the decreasing ability to afford adequate food, medical care, and housing thanks to growing wealth disparities, rising costs of living, and disinvestment in public services.
Despite the US government declaring the pandemic over, thousands of people continue to die from Covid each month, with tens of millions around the world affected by long Covid. Despite state repression and institutional censorship, hundreds of thousands continue to organize against the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the construction of “Cop City,” a military-grade police training center in Atlanta, and for better working conditions. Yet many of these mass actions—including worker victories—have barely registered in mainstream media. This silence contributes to a manufactured reality, a false narrative written in real time, laying tracks for a future history that erases not only the violence and oppression in the present, but also the love and care involved in its opposition.
The dissonance and disparity between what we witness and experience and what we are told we are witnessing and experiencing grows larger and more absurd as the truth becomes harder to not see. On social media, I see photos of mass graves in Gaza and videos of cops killing people at traffic stops, while news headlines showcase celebrities at galas. I log onto a conference call where meeting attendees are chatting about movie awards and restaurants. Everyone has been sick for months, but no one seems to know why. To exist in this fracture, to be told that the fracture isn’t happening, is nauseating and destabilizing at best. We kill parts of ourselves to exist in denial. Underneath “normal” is a high-pitched terror, so high we can barely hear it.
Past
Have we been here before? We rewrite the past as a protective mechanism, to soften painful memories. We participate in selective amnesia, though our bodies may find it difficult to fully forget. The skies are on fire in June; in September the hurricanes arrive, flooding the subways and highways. I feel surprised when it happens again, months later, and swear I’ll be better prepared next time. My friend and I pass the corner where for years a PCR testing van was open seven days a week, then five, then three, and one day we never saw it again. “Remember that van?” I say. “I think so,” they say, and for a moment I wonder if I’d made it up. The 1918 flu epidemic devastated the world, then seemingly vanished from history. In the future world of Memory Piece, memory has become a liability, and my character Ellen is forced to forget details about the past. She also chooses to forget, struggling to recall the purpose of her work as a housing activist, questioning if any of it—the years of collective living and running community gardens and food distribution networks—really mattered.
Rewriting the past is often nefarious, a politically motivated effort to destroy collective history and control the future. One weapon of warfare is epistemicide, the systemic destruction of rival forms of knowledge through the physical dismantling of cultural, educational, and record-keeping institutions, and through the regulation of knowledge production itself, like recent bans in the US on teaching Black history—going so far as to espouse the benefits of slavery—and limiting classroom discussions on gender and race.
As a writer, a library school graduate, and former archives worker, I think about whose stories are missing in our dominant narratives and whose stories are prioritized. Newsrooms are shuttered, web publications and social media platforms purchased and rendered obsolete, leaving a trail of dead links in their wake. A 2013 study found that fifty percent of web links in Supreme Court decisions are already broken. Perhaps the use of analog modes of recording and sharing information, paper instead of digital, can be an aesthetic throwback choice as well as a deliberate one, controlling the ownership, preservation, and distribution of our words instead of their survival being contingent on tech companies.
In spring 2021, I facilitated a workshop on writing about the past pandemic year, a time that was already being rewritten and has been rewritten since. The workshop was open to frontline workers and organizers of mutual aid networks that distributed food and other essential items in New York City neighborhoods in the absence of government assistance. It was a heady, tentative time; vaccines were finally available, but access to them was lacking, and on weekends I joined a local group to help sign people up for appointments in laundromats, barber shops, and bodegas. In the workshop we wrote our memories from the past year, our hopes for ourselves and our communities, creating a time capsule for our future, and I wonder what I would no longer remember if I hadn’t written it down. Similarly, when Ellen retrieves her memories through old friends and newer ones, she can see both her fears and hopes more clearly. The past becomes a source of strength, a way to become unstuck in the present and find a way forward.
Pretending that everything is fine might seem like an act of optimism, but if we can’t admit what’s happening around us, the fact that the world has changed and will continue to change, that we, too, will continue to change, then how can we adapt and create our own dream futures? Sometimes, speaking the truth can be the most optimistic thing of all.
What does it cost us, what does it benefit us, to name it? To say: yes, things are burning. And yes, we are also here.
