tender apocalyptia
little humanities, revolution poetry, and centering hope and resilience
It’s been a while. This was supposed to be an essay about post-apocalyptic stories, but then between the crunch of my edits on The Dark We Know (so near the end), the melancholy-intimate headspace that book puts me into, and the current headlines, I found myself drifting toward a more personal letter.
I’ve been thinking about holding space, about little missives of lives sent out over the internet. Modern connectivity, you know. Modern connection. Overstimulating and alienating all at once, a unique isolation accompanying limitless networks. I think about proof-of-lifes, of videos carried outward from war zones, of finsta captions and Telegram channels, of random private tweets and other newsletters like this one. I have no bandwidth to check in with friends the way I’d like to. Still, Chris sends his daily vignette from Paris, filled with the usual colorful encounters, ten thousand people, and bad cigarettes. Lae posts about crying-as-obscure-Kim-Addonizio-costume. Haya’s in a blue dress. I read a letter from Jen about muses and time. Ana sends me a picture of being dressed up as Kiki’s Delivery Service. Actually, a bunch of my friends are dressed up. I sit at home, edits spread around me, looking at my calendar and regretting all my life choices, but I take these little pieces of people that they’ve crafted themselves and knit them into my pulse. Passive co-living (affectionate). I wish more of my friends would post more. Maybe that’s my fault—I haven’t been on BeReal in ages. I can’t hate social media at the end of the day.
I wrote a flash fiction called “Icariana” (originally in Baffling Magazine, to be reprinted in Neon Hemlock’s anthology We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2022 (now out) and Android Press’ 2022 Best of Utopian Speculative Fiction) that I describe as tender post-apocalyptia. It’s set in a scorched world abandoned by generation ships, but it’s about the loner and the girl with wings who brings her strawberries, and makes her think that maybe the world is still worth a try after all.
I think I have run out of capacity, or interest, for total doom. I’m a Star Wars girl for the found family, joint resistance, and hope and hope and hope. In the biggest stakes I like keeping track of the tiny things, the things that glow softly (or flare brightly) still with humanity, the things that ultimately make it worth it. A piece of sunlight. Someone’s smile. A new flower. An old coffeeshop. Your mother’s soup. A patch of grass. A handful of strawberries. A poem about listen i love you joy is coming. Bad cigarettes. The same lace-up shoes. A book. Apple tea, two sugar cubes, a blanket on a rooftop, the way the water sparkles under millennium bridge the last night you are in a city. Stick floors, sticky cables, sawdust and paint on your skins. A sauna on Halloween. I think about texture and grounding and what makes life feel vivid. About centering the human, not in an anthropocentric way (I realise definitionally they’re the same but connotatively!) but just in a: in the end this is what we are way. In the end this is beauty and signs of life, in every age.
Post-apocalyptic stories can be cathartic because they free us from the constraints of systems otherwise inextricable and untransformable. So much feels like it would need total apocalypse to reset; the idea of a blank slate is tempting. It’s the stripping back of pretence, the vastness, pent-up things exploding because tomorrow there won’t be anything left and we might as well make the most of it. Or otherwise, apocalypse reminded us of our fragility so we’re going to take what we can and value it.
And yes, realistically, the repropagation of identical systems is highly likely. But in the realm of fiction I like stories that aren’t so much interested in how bleak humanity becomes after civilisation collapses, but that focus on memory, the acknowledging weight of history, human connection, resolve, hope. Not as a chance to expose the repressed darkness, but a chance to try again. To focus on what we salvage and fight to carry on like new saplings. I think of the legacy of art in Station Eleven, episode 3 of The Last of Us, the journeys through left-behind objects in Tsukumizu’s Girls’ Last Tour. There’s something about the juxtaposition of the biggest collapse we can imagine and the humanity of still being able to find wonder and softness and dreams.
I think, at the end of the day, it’s resilience. A spark of life worthy of preserving because it’s life in itself; strip away labels, justifications, delineations. Far from being antithetical, I think figuring out what I love about these post-apocalypses have made me feel fiercer about standing for what we have now. A work in progress. But it never does to consider something already doomed, to speculate sprouts from ashes while ignoring the city currently burning down and the people fighting to save it right now. To treasure life and tenderness and a future is to understand there’s something to fight for. I’ve been trying to resist nihilism and as I was drafting this I saw this tweet:
Free Palestine. But also, I’m thinking these days of picking off new shoots will not stop the spring, a collection of witness poems and essays published a year into the 2021 Myanmar revolution, featuring writers both living and killed. It’s a book I got to work on as an intern, that I’m led to think about often. There’s that well-circulated Palestinian poem where Noor Hindi writes “One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.”, and in new shoots, Maung Chaw Nwe writes, “To wilt is to bloom,/That’s the flowers’ doctrine./You may crush us, we may fall,/But when we die we rise again.” Kyi Zaw Aye writes, “Never once/the world is on our side./We unfurl our own flag/we unfurl our own sail/always against the wind.” Min Nyein Aye writes, “‘What’s next?”/they asked./‘No next’/I answered./For a clue/I will leave this poem/so you can work out/the depth & the breadth/of the country.” In Myanmar so many of the resistance figures are poets, and Min Ko Naing writes:
Go ahead, my friend.
We must stay behind
To heal the best we can
The injuries of the world
Where the stars are falling, one by one.
Go ahead, my friend
We must stay behind
To shield the earth’s wounds
From the many scorching suns
With our bare hands.
Go ahead, my friend.
We must stay behind
To write your poetry’s table of contents
On the world’s vinyl record of grief.
I don’t pretend to be on the frontlines, but I’m thinking about all freedoms being tied to one another. I’m thinking of incredible strength, solidarity, and grief, and witness, and hope. I’m thinking about the weight of words understanding the person who wrote them was killed. I’m thinking about people fighting through revolutions and putting out poetry.
If you’re interested in picking off new shoots, or to read the full poems, the publisher Ethos Books has the ebook for free. You can also consider supporting with a hard copy via Singapore, US, or UK publishers.
(And you can add/preorder my actual novel, also on grief and tenderness, here)