Emily Raboteau—writing from the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood—recently published a new essay collection, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” (Henry Holt & Co., 2024). Raboteau’s essays come face-to-face with questions that demand to be answered—about how we live after the pandemic, the warning signs of climate change, raising Black sons in a country grappling with racism and police brutality, and the ways art both educates and heals us.
As she considers these issues, Raboteau takes her camera on a journey around New York City and documents public artwork that speaks to her concerns. This collection of photographs appears throughout the book and includes several images of murals depicting birds threatened by climate change. Living through what she calls the “polycrisis,” the intersection of simultaneous crises, Raboteau finds hope, joy, and lessons for survival in art, as well as in family members, neighbors, and Indigenous peoples. She finds strength in intentional living, in her connections with loved ones, and with the earth.
Emily Raboteau is a professor of creative writing in the English Department at the City College of New York in Harlem, the author of Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, a contributing editor at Orion magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. I spoke with Raboteau via Zoom, where we discussed the pandemic, our collective exposure to crises in network news, better ways to cope with the madness, and how we can each find ways to help.
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The Rumpus: This essay collection includes the dates each piece was written, or date ranges, providing the reader some context of time for this work. When and how did the idea for this particular essay collection come to be?
Emily Raboteau: It was during the spring of 2020 when George Floyd was murdered. It happened on Memorial Day, the same day that Christian Cooper, the Black birder, had his bad encounter in the Ramble of Central Park with Amy Cooper, [who was] no relation [to him]. She threatened to call the cops on him, knowing that could lead to violence. Those two things got twisted together in the cultural zeitgeist. I wanted to explore, while also talking about, disparities in health outcomes from COVID-19. In our neighborhood and in our city, who was dying the most frequently? No accident, it was those in the same zip codes that have high asthma rates. They face these outcomes because of the poisoning infrastructure. It was in my mind to make some of these connections.
These essays, when put together in the aggregate, give a sense of what it’s like to live now. Parenting in the pandemic was particularly hard too. The pandemic was hard for us all in different ways, particularly for working mothers. I wanted to write about that too—the gender imbalances and inequities that were really magnified during that crisis. We are still not recovered from them. It really shone a light on some extreme holes in our social safety net—we were expected to keep working without childcare of any sort. It was really bad for our mental and physical health. It was in the summer of 2020 that I sold this book of essays. It was at the height of the pandemic, shortly after the murder of George Floyd. In New York City we were protesting—it was a really heady time—and I wanted to reflect on what it felt like to be trying to raise children to thrive under these circumstances. We call this the “polycrisis” now: multiple intersecting crises. I also wanted to pay attention to the beauty and the joy despite all that. I was really calculated, writing these essays to try to be hopeful. All of them end in a space of hope or ambiguous hope, and that was by design. I didn’t want this to be a book that left people despairing but rather aware of the opportunities for connection and community in talking about these issues and trying to work through them together.
Rumpus: The pieces in this collection often depict you looking at your city, New York, and the United States, through some very specific lenses. Did your photographer’s lens or researcher’s eye inform your perceptions or change the way you viewed your city?
Raboteau: It definitely did. Before this book, my last book was essentially a book of travel writing. I’m one of those people who feels most engaged, awake, and in love with the world when I’m traveling. I had two kids and that clipped my wings, in a sense. It rooted me, more firmly, in my homeplace: New York City. Having the kids forced me to turn that wakeful attention onto my homeplace.
For me, the strongest lens was parenthood or motherhood. The bird murals [described in the book’s first essay, “Spark Bird”] caught my attention, but I’d already been photographing other murals in the neighborhood, like the “Know Your Rights” murals. They caught my attention when my kids were really little because they were mostly placed in Black and Brown neighborhoods, like ours, most plagued by police brutality. At the time I noticed the first mural in my neighborhood, it was around the time of Trayvon Martin’s death. Our kids were really little, and my husband and I were thinking, “How do we talk to our kids about the kind of violence they might encounter?” With the pressure and fear of that, [we thought] about how to protect our kids and talk to them about these scary issues, what kind of language we should use. I encountered one of these murals, and it was sort of giving me guidance and also providing beauty in the street. That was a series of murals. I thought, “I’m just going to go visit these and try to engage with them, try to learn about them, and it’s going to help me process this really large, frightening issue that I’m facing as a mother.”
By the time I started noticing the bird murals, there was already a pattern of engagement that had begun with the neighborhood and my environment. These works of public art are gifted, if you notice them, if you’re in a state of wakefulness. To me, they feel like messages, like gifts. It was really important to me that readers follow that journey, visually, as I walked the city.
Then there was another [lens], which was focused on climate signs. When I noticed this public artwork in a park near my job at City College, which is in Harlem, it forced me to start making some connections between the social justice issues I had already been writing about and struggling with, and environmental justice issues, some of which related to poisoning infrastructure. For me it’s not an abstraction—my kids have asthma because they were born and grew up encircled by highways and really close to the George Washington Bridge, which is the most heavily trafficked bridge in the world, and near a public bus depot. It’s affected their health already. Like I said, these are not abstractions for me—these issues are deeply personal and embodied.
Rumpus: You ask, in the book’s preface, “Will my children be all right when I’m gone?” Your children by now are old enough to understand the subject matter of this book and, at least to some degree, the particular challenges they’ll face as adults. How do you and they cope with this question?
Raboteau: I think about that all the time. I think for my generation—I’m Generation X—we’ve been described as the last generation that can really prevent the worst possible outcomes for the planet. It’s a lot of weight on our shoulders. My kids, who are Generation Alpha, have a future that looks very different from our past, and even their present. I think that question I have—“Will they be all right when I’m gone?”—is a question that a lot of parents have now, no matter what your background, if you’re really paying attention. It’s something we really need to be thinking through and talking about with our kids. It’s something I think about. Because they’re still young, we have to be careful about the language we use with them. Mr. Rogers always said, “Look for the helpers in times of disaster or strife.” That’s been my stance with them when I talk to them about the climate crisis. I try to point toward the things that are being done to keep it from being an abstract nightmarishly frightening thing. I point them toward stories of people working toward solutions.
Rumpus: This book, for all its research, is also deeply personal in many ways. Which parts of your personal life were most important to you to weave into this book that in many other ways is very scientific, and why?
Raboteau: In some ways, this is a meditation on survival. Even before I had kids, I described myself as a survivor of domestic abuse and violence. I had been through something hard and come through it, and not only that but I come from, on my dad’s side—on both sides—a lineage of survivors. Survival is a theme and lessons given to me: “Alright, you come from people who didn’t give up, who maintained their humanity through some of the worst conditions possible—and not only that, were able to thrive and love each other and make music.” My dad was a historian of African American religion. He was also a writer. There is a lineage there in terms of survival. Those scenes I wanted to weave in, and, as I thought through social and environmental justice issues, those felt organic to me. I wouldn’t describe this as a book of journalism or science writing—there’s also memoir. It’s a human being walking through history.
Rumpus: You write, in the essay “Caution,” about carrying physical pain or a physical reaction in your body as a result of political and national events. How do you think we should handle these types of stresses and pains when they seem to have become the status quo?
Raboteau: I wish I had answers. The demands of late capitalism—work, work, work—make it hard to slow down. For me, it’s gardening. People who knit, people who run, these repetitive gestures that get us off our screens. Being in nature, spending time in the sunshine, communing with others, sharing food at a table, simple things that are not about labor. Somebody just recommended a book to me: Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. I want to name her book because I think she more explicitly answers this question in ways I’m learning from. It’s hard when we’re so imbricated in a system that insists we continue laboring, despite all of these horrors that are affecting us. I think we need to be really careful about contraindicating those forces that put profit above life.
For me, taking pictures also helps. Taking pictures is a hobby, but it’s also a pleasurable activity. It gets me walking. The pictures of public art that help structure this book are me bearing witness to the signs of the times. That process didn’t make me feel worse, or more scared—it made me feel better. The writing of this book—doing research, talking to experts—helped me. It helped me feel less pain in my body to be alert to it. I hope it helps others.
Rumpus: These essays are full of climate statistics. Each one was a gut punch and left me asking the same question you do in the book: “Why is this not in the core curriculum?” What went into making this book of autobiographical essays deeply educational in terms of environmental science? How important was it to you, as you selected data and stories to include, that this book serve as a wake-up call for the reader?
Raboteau: I started noticing those climate signs that had that chilling effect on me. It felt really alarming. I felt like, “Somebody’s behind this.” The signs were [like the ones] that normally let drivers know about icy roads. It was in a park, and I understood the artist had done the work to try to make me take my head out of the sand. I felt like I was being spoken to directly from beyond the veil. It was uncanny. I knew a human was behind this. I felt chills, like I needed to start paying attention to this and learn more about it. [I needed to] see what is being done and connect to it in whatever way makes sense for my life.
I wanted my book to feel literary, like a story, and I wanted to process it. [I wanted to] have the reader move through the landscape with me as they’re preparing to process it so they have a companion. One of the biggest things we can do about climate change is just talk about it so our policymakers know what’s important to us. Those feelings are less of a burden when we know we’re not alone. There are often things being done that we can connect to, based on our own talents and communities. I’m a writer and a teacher and a mom. Those are the sites of my activism, which help alleviate the anxiety. I teach a climate writing class now. To be able to talk about it and turn to my writing feels like the least I can do.
For those who are ready for a wake-up call, or who need one, I hope [this book] will be that. We’re at a point in time where we’re seeing a lot more climate narratives. You’re seeing people use different types of storytelling to wake people up. I would say I am trying to do that because that had been done to me. and I’m grateful for it.
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Author photograph by Rachel E. Griffiths
