Will We Survive?
Reading Emily Raboteau’s Lessons in Mothering Against Apocalypse
I sat on a long subway ride from my borough of Brooklyn to Emily Raboteau’s home in the Bronx, crying (good tears) as I read the closing pages of Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse,” her closing chapter cracking me open to the immensity of what my own body, and all our bodies, the bodies of mothers and parents and caregivers, have come to contain over these last eight years. Because though this “apocalypse” didn’t truly begin in 2016 with the election of our 45th, for many of us, it marks the beginning of a particular moment, an acute feeling of threat that has continued, unabated, since. When I left that voting booth eight years ago, I had my first child with me, 18 months old. I bought a cupcake from the high school bake sale posted up on the sidewalk outside. And I walked to the playground with the certain knowledge that our country was about to elect Donald Trump as president. Lessons for Survival also begins immediately after the 2016 election. In the second essay of the collection, we follow Raboteau as she crisscrosses the boroughs, seeking relief for a web of pain that the election has woven through her body. This is also one of the only essays in which Raboteau is physically alone, as she moves from one failed treatment to the next, and it is a fitting start to this collection. I remember how alone I too felt in those days, weeks, months after. My child with me. Gathered alongside women I didn’t know (almost always women) in parks and playgrounds and libraries, feeling as vulnerable as one of those aging herbivores on the nature shows who you know are about to get picked off by a predator. And yet I was also the one standing sentry, posted up as Mother, to guide this new person through a day (and a life) safely.
Raboteau is asking in this book, essentially, how do we do this? How do we raise our children into a future in which we cannot be certain of even the planet’s ability to hold them? How do we live full and joyful lives, how do we live ethical lives, in this time of “polycrisis”?
In her quest for answers, this is a book that moves, traversing the five boroughs of New York City, the desert hills of Palestine, the thawing permafrost of Alaska, and then concludes in the very house in the Bronx to which I was headed. After the early pages, Raboteau is rarely alone again. In each essay, Raboteau is in the conversation and company of others on similar quests, seeking out the lessons learned by communities that have long known threat.
In other hands, perhaps, this text could be devastating. It is unflinching, for sure. Raboteau is naming, in no uncertain terms, how dire the moment. And she insists on complexity—taking on the rising waters of New York City, the violence of Israel’s water restrictions on Palestinians, the climate refugees already in migration, the effects of racialized urban planning on the health of black and brown for communities, and then making these themes intimate, demonstrating how global issues also show up in matters as mundane as how we choose a playground for the afternoon.
But I found myself grounded by this book. In part, for me, it was the experience of being told a hard truth by a thinker who was encapsulating the complex interweaving of issues that are with me all the time. To see them charted and laid out was, frankly, intellectually soothing. The sensation in exact opposition to the feeling of being gaslit that is all too common these days.
And also because Raboteau delivers a hope, a hard earned hope, as her travels begin to reveal the same answers over and over again. In this Survival Lessons becomes also a study of care—of interdependence—between all of us as individuals, between us and the land we inhabit (many of us as interlopers and settlers), of the terrors that can reveal themselves when we abandon that care, and the profound solace and relief when we provide it. Fundamentally, Raboteau makes the convincing case that we need only look around ourselves to find evidence of the ways in which we are already delivering that care. Notice, she says, where it’s happening and then do more of that. This is the “mothering” I found in this text, the power of what nurture can achieve.
I discussed this and many other matters on Raboteau’s couch in her Bronx home. What follows is a distillation of that conversation. No surprise, given the text, the last line of the conversation could as much be the start of a whole new topic: just as we are coming to a hopeful moment of local, environmental action, Raboteau reminds us that even that will do harm if we are not mindful of our obligations to one another, to hold strangers as close as we hold our children. – Jade Sanchez-Ventura
When you say to yourself what this book is about, what do you say?
The narrator, who’s a version of myself, is seeking to understand how to parent well, how to parent ethically, in a time of great uncertainty. That’s the driving force behind all of it. That lens shifts to look at different things, but that’s always the lens. So, I may be looking at environmental justice problems, infrastructural issues in the city, the threat posed to the city by climate change, or the question of school choice and in all of those cases I’m very interested in looking at grim asymmetries of power. But again, always from this lens that—not merely do I want my kids to thrive, but I want our kids—our kids—to thrive.
I think that’s a liberationist pose but deeply attached to parenthood, and I would say specifically to motherhood.
In fact, I didn’t want them to put the words “climate change” on the cover even though I think it’s a major theme. Because it’s as much about mothering in the pandemic in New York City. I’m interested in the way all these things intersect in what it’s like to live in a polycrisis era. I wanted to write in the same way Didion wrote about how it felt like to live in the ’60’s. This is a crazy freaking time!
One of the things I wanted to name, that I noticed and appreciated, was you talking about how to “parent well” in these times and then switching that word to “ethically.”
One of the things that started to emerge for me about the text, especially when you travel to Palestine, is that it felt so much deeper because there’s a starting assumption of “I’m not going to do over-explaining about how systemic capitalism and racism overlaps with climate change. I’m just going to state the facts, this is the obvious situation, and that’s going to be the starting point for the discussion.” It doesn’t waste time. I’m at the point where I don’t feel I have time for that anymore as a thinker…
I don’t! We don’t!
I wanted to write it for people who already get those basic intersectional premises. It feels coauthored. For example, I would not have undertaken the climate signs pilgrimage across all the five boroughs of New York City that I took with Mik, who is now my buddy who was not my buddy at the beginning of that story, without somebody else to do that with, because I needed an accountability partner and because it was too hard to really face. It’s a piece about companionship and community.
I’m becoming more and more interested in ways that we can be thinking through problems together. I had this conversation the other day with another mom, and she asked me, “Are you making a case that we need to be listening to the questions of our children and figuring out how to answer them together?” And I answered, “That’s exactly what we’re being called to do right now.” These weren’t the questions we had as children, or the answers we were being given. Me and my brothers were given a version of The Talk [about being Black within the systemic racism of America] but we certainly weren’t given a version of The Talk about the climate crisis because it wasn’t in our parents’ consciousness. It’s a bewildering time to be a parent and we’re called upon to co-parent in new ways. I recognize because of the gravity of our current moment that I can’t parent these two children alone. I need so many parents and I need to be really wise about forging those relationships.
When you talk about the book as being written in companionship, for me it calls forward the closing message in the essay, Gutbucket, when you ask the Yup’ik elder, fundamentally, “What do we do with our anger?”, and he answers, “We take care of each other.” And throughout this book, you’re with somebody as you’re moving through place and story.
I think I’m never actually alone in this book except maybe in the sections where I’m looking for help from doctors.
That is really the only solitude in the book.
Yes, it’s the only solitude. I’m walking alone and certainly feeling alone even in the company of doctors who were there ostensibly to help.
I think in writing books like this, especially as a mother, that there’s a pressure to create a hopeful message. Can you speak about that tension? You often talk about giving the honest answer to your kids without scaring the sh*t out of them, for lack of a better word. I would love to hear more about that dynamic in the book–parenting around this topic of climate catastrophe, and writing about it, and the concept of hope in the midst of it all.
I have come to an understanding that is reflected in this book—that we can only treat this together and I have a growing appreciation for, and awareness of, the importance of community. And regarding hope, in a way you’re asking two things. How do you offer hope to your kids when you’re talking about it, and as my kids have grown the language has certainly shifted. My kids are now 11 and 12 years old and they can handle more truth, if that’s how you want to put it, then they could when they were toddlers. By the same token they have to live into the future, if I’m lucky, beyond me and I have a feeling of responsibility towards being solutions oriented. We’re talking about grieving or being honest, and I think it’s important to talk about the loss that we’re experiencing while at the same time figuring out communally how we’re going to live into the future. That basic premise that the Yup’ik elder told me, is the biggest truth. It really struck my heart when he said it, and I understood it in a very profound way, even though it was so simple, just take care of each other despite it all.
The other part of your question is how to handle hope as a writer, as you’re structuring narrative, and how I figured it out for a lot of the pieces in this book was to make room for all of the feelings. Most of the essays (or chapters, or stories, of whatever you want to call them) in this book I think make space for a lot of feelings, but hope was something I was very deliberate about including and often there’s a hinge moment. For example, there’s a really short essay in there—the one that’s about parenting in the pandemic…
Oh, that one made me cry! “In These Dark Days.” That one broke me open.
And that was communally written too. Some of the articulations in the first half were not mine, they were crowdsourced from Facebook. I asked my mother friends, “What did you find to be really hard?” And people told me and I asked for their permission and wrote it like this. It also happened to be things that I could have articulated too, that could have come from my own mouth, and some of it did, but that was a crowdsourced essay. And then I thought , but wait, I need to hinge. And the second half of it is quite deliberately, I made myself do this, of equal length. I told myself I have to write about the joyful elements of this time with my children while they were small, and also what a gift to be forced to have quality time with them to a degree that I had not been. Like many of us working mothers, in this city in particular, I was in twenty places at once and they were overscheduled. So, it was a beautiful time as well as a horrifying time. And at first, I was struggling to make this section as lengthy as the first part, which was about the negatives—my hair falling out and not getting enough sleep and the refrigerated trucks with the corpses—it was easy to list those. In a sense, it was harder to list the joyful things. Then I recognized oh yes, think of this as a photograph of them as they are now, because even in six months they’re going to be like this anymore—think of the loveliness of their bodies at this age, or the fact that they’re losing teeth. I deliberately hinged toward a loving and hopeful tone out of the tone that was despairing, angry and afraid. And that’s often a gesture that I move toward and reach for in these essays.
I appreciated that the moments of hope were hard earned. When you’re in Palestine, the beauty of the hills is really the last moment. I think the hope you talk about comes in play, fixing the motorcycle, the relationship of Palestinians to their land. Especially given our moment now, it’s a devastating essay, but at the very close of the essay you write about the beauty of the land “yielding itself” to you.
That was hard earned, particularly in that landscape, because as you recall I experienced it as a very hostile landscape. It was a kind of desert I’d never been in before, from my lens I almost couldn’t understand how it could sustain life, it felt so hot and so hostile. Not merely because of the geography but even more so because of the contested territory. I felt unsafe. I felt thirsty and like my body was in the wrong environment. I also felt, I’m here to be a witness to something. I need to pay attention. And when someone tells me this is the most beautiful part of the world and I feel terrified, then there’s something I’m not seeing. So I need to stay in this place until I see it, you know? And I did. And the reason I saw it, it wasn’t about landscape empty of people, it was because of the way people were acting in the landscape. I saw that beauty during Ramadan, it was Iftar, and that man Eid—Oh God, he just was kidnapped, and we were worried that he was going to be executed but now he’s Ok—the one who makes sculptures out of the implements of destruction, he handed a baby goat to my friend’s daughter and the sun was going down, and I just thought, if he can still be playful, he hasn’t lost the light of play, which of course children everywhere know how to do even in Gaza right now. And he was an adult who hadn’t lost the light of play. He was taking bits of his brother’s house that had been wrecked by an arm of the Israeli army and then picking those up and making a sculpture out of them that is like a toy, to me that’s a lesson. To me that’s the most beautiful thing.
There can sometimes be this tendency to think, “The kids are going to figure it out,” these new generations with all of their innovations, and I would love to hear your thinking on this dynamic/tension between our adult responsibility verses the possibility of the next generation.
I’ve been thinking through this partly with the help of the writer/thinker Anya Kamenetz. She’s got a really great newsletter that I’ve been learning a lot from called The Golden Hour which is about ethically parenting in this moment of history and she uses a term, “intergenerational justice.” I’m Generation X, my children are Generation Alpha. We’ve been described as the last generation who can stop climate change, and I don’t like that descriptor because it’s not something we can stop, but it’s also the case that the generations that we’ve engendered are in many cases begging us for their futures and for their lives. In some instances, as we saw in Montana in December where those kids sued the state and won, there’s great power in hearing from young people. Greta [Thunberg] said I’m not going to go to school on Fridays until I’m taught what should be part of the curriculum, which is the most important subject in the world facing us right now, and it created a whole movement and there’s great power in that. And yet I also really respond to youth advocates when they say, this shouldn’t be our burden, it shouldn’t be the burden of children to be begging for their lives and leading the fight. It’s something we need to do together with them. And I think are doing together with them. Those kids in Montana need adults to have the legal ability to help facilitate such a case, it’s not as if they’re doing it without the help of grownups, it’s just that I think more of us need to be really engaged along with them in fighting, in the struggle.
Which in some ways requires for many adults learning another way of being and thinking, in order to be in partnership with young people and I think a lot of adults struggle to be in authentic partnership with young people.
And that’s because they’re trapped in a system of capital and work, and who even has the time? This was one of the things that was so much of a struggle about the pandemic; we weren’t even allowed to stop. We had to keep working while we’re also managing our kids, and their remote learning, and what they’re learning is not even—that was really illuminating for me, like, oh god, this is what they’re learning?
We weren’t even studying environment, health care; we needed to be studying what was happening. What else were we going to talk to these kids about? It was total madness.
Yes. And it continues to be. But I think there’s also great opportunity for honesty and communion and fellowship.
So we’re staring down November, we’re living through the horror of Palestine, and you have older children, could you speak on what this chapter of parenting in hard times is looking like for you or what language that you’re drawing on?
How is the language shifting now? They’re entering puberty, they’re becoming tweens, I can see now, and it’s a little bit bittersweet, that we only have a few years left with them (unless they wind up living with us forever [laughter]. You never know these days, how are they going to be able to afford not to stay here?) I’m shifting and learning and thinking through this. I don’t know that I have a definitive answer to your question, but I understand that these are the years that I have left with them under my roof, under our roof, to prepare them to the best degree we can for being independent while also continuing to affirm for them the way that community is important.
There’s a lot that’s drawing them away from—social media being one of those forces, the pull of screens—how you be in community with others. How do you figure out your talents and what you have to offer the world such that you can also be a joyful worker? How do you understand that you as a cog, or as a worker, is not the most important thing about you? I think a lot of messaging is still in the capital framework, your identity is wrapped up in what you do and I want them to understand the trick here is to find what you love and what you’re passionate about.
I’ll conclude by saying I’m trying to lean into joy for them. You’re going to be the most authentic, powerful being if your actions are extending from what makes you joyful. And we need to encircle you in people who celebrate and understand those traits and qualities and can help magnify them.
And as far as the problems go, I’m also trying to really illuminate for them, in a very local way, what’s being done. In terms of local politics, they’re unburying the stream that our house is sited on. That’s happening, and before they leave this household we will be in this watershed and there will be a daylit brook. To me it’s a great example of what people working together can do. And it’s still messy. Is that the best use of many millions of dollars? And yet, it’s an example of people trying to mitigate some harm that’s been done to the land and working together with government to achieve that. I walked them to see where the brook is going to be, and told them we’ll be able to ride our bikes along this pathway. And maybe it’s going to beautify this neighborhood to the degree that poor people can’t live here anymore.
About the Author
Jade Sanchez-Ventura is a writer and radical educator. Her writing often tackles themes of mixed-race identity formation, female love and sexuality, finding home, motherhood as a social justice issue, and feminist, sex-positive, romantic partnership. Her essays have been published by Seal Press, Slice Literary Magazine, Huffington Post, Kweli Journal, Duende, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, The Establishment, and others. She has been featured on the Bitch Media Popaganda podcast, and awarded by the Mendocino Coast Writer’s Conference, Slice Literary Conference, and Disquiet International Literary Conference. She is the recipient of residencies with the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow and Garden House and is a Hertog fellow. She is a series contributor with MUTHA Magazine. She recently finished writing a literary memoir, Not a Fine Woman. As an educator, she believes a commitment to racial equity and social justice are essential to the practice of teaching and spent twelve years studying and implementing this pedagogical approach with the Brooklyn Free School, an urban democratic free school. She now serves on the leadership team of the Brooklyn Free School Institute and on the Brooklyn Free School Board of Trustees. Though she has kin around the world, she grew up in Brooklyn, New York where she continues to make her home. She is a parent of two, and a devoted surfer of very small waves.
Author photo (c) Ro Agents-Juska
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