A hopeful post-apocalyptic novel for right now

Eman Abdelhadi is a professor, a sociologist, an activist, and the co-author of a beautiful, deeply imaginative, completely engrossing, totally devastating, and ultimately inspiring book called Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052 to 2072.

This book, a speculative 2022 novel about a post-catastrophe future, is a master class in world-building. Twelve oral histories — little peeks into the lives of 12 characters, who, through shared slang, references to historical events, and casual nods to the social facts everyone in the 2070s takes for granted — together conjure up a complicated and fully imagined global future. It’s the middle of the 21st century, and war, famine, climate catastrophe, and the collapse of the world economy have destroyed the social order. The characters in the book are in survival mode. The turmoil and struggle is in the past — barely. Nothing’s healed yet. But there’s hope.

That’s the feeling you’re left with when you finish the book, and it’s the reason I called up Abdelhadi a few days after the election. The specter of mass deportations, destruction of the climate, attacks on health care, and the targeting of trans people under a second Donald Trump administration felt dark, and I wanted to speak to someone who was steadfastly trying to find the light.

Abdelhadi is Palestinian, and as you’ll hear in the interview, 2024 has been the worst year of her life. She told me she considers this book, which she co-wrote with M.E. O’Brien, an academic and gender theorist, as a gift from her past self to help her make it through and a reminder that nothing lasts forever. The book, Abdelhadi said, is intended to be a glimpse at what things could look like when we get to the other side.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the podcast, so listen to the full version here or in the player below:

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Can you describe this book? I love it so much, but I imagine you’ll do a much better job than me.

It’s a revolutionary speculative fiction novel. My co-author, M.E. O’Brien, and I basically project ourselves into the future. We imagine that we’re little old ladies who have gone through the revolution and are now using our old skills from the pre-revolutionary world, as interviewers and as researchers, to record oral histories with people who lived through the fall of capitalism and the fall of the nation-state. And some with people who were raised in the system that would come to take capitalism’s place, living in much smaller communities with less centralized power. It’s very much a theory book in disguise.

Will you say more about that?

It would be really painful if the state and the market fell. But is there a future beyond them that might even be better? You know, we imagine the effects of the climate crisis, we imagine the effects of overheating, of capitalism, the intensification of the fascist right. But we also rely on our understanding of people as resilient and creative to think about how we’d end up on the other side of that. And that’s really the project of the book: to lead us through the really hard parts of change, in this moment where that change feels like it’s just a matter of time.

Something I love is that the book is set in a moment that we don’t usually see in stories about post-apocalyptic futures. The characters are all past the struggle, but just past it. They’ve made it to the better world. The bad guys are dead. The bad systems are gone. So that’s a relief. But now they have to heal and reckon with all the harrowing things they went through to get there.

Absolutely. You know, we didn’t want it to be something where we just imagined a revolutionary society or utopian society that’s totally disconnected from our own. Because people would read that book and think, “Man, I wish I was there instead of here.” And that would be kind of the end of it. And we also didn’t want to just imagine the collapse, because we didn’t want people to read it and think, “My God, this is all so terrible. There’s no way out. It’s inevitable.”

So instead, we said, okay, so assuming that this train is headed for a cliff — which is how many of us feel — “How do we survive? Where do we end up? How do we emerge from that wreckage? What systems could we build for ourselves? We really wanted to imagine a plausible near-future that people could place themselves in and place themselves as the heroes of a revolution and as the inheritors of a better world.

How did you decide on when to set the book? Because it is not very long from now.

It felt important to put ourselves in the narrative, to have survived the event. So that gave us an incentive to think of these as near-future things.

One thing I thought about a lot is a critique I read of some climate apocalypse film. The critique effectively said something like all of these speculative fictions are reactionary because they always assume that the future is where all the bad things happen. But the reality is the bad things are happening now. We keep putting climate apocalypse in the future when we are in the climate apocalypse. And that got me really thinking about the accelerated rate of collapse that we are in.

And of course, I think it’s not insignificant that we did most of the writing under lockdown. We were watching institutions that we think of as so strong come close to the brink of collapse. And I think we’re going to see that over and over in the coming decades. I mean, within the last year and a half, a third of Pakistan — Pakistan is huge — a third of it was underwater. We have state collapse in Syria and Lebanon and Central America. The US is isolated from some of the epicenters of this collapse.

The book is non-narrative, right? It takes the form of 12 oral histories.

We picked oral history because it allowed us to be somewhat porous in the world that we built. We didn’t want to produce the kind of story where every single question is answered or where it’s all just really tightly woven. We really wanted a looser structure. And part of that is that we wanted people to be able to imagine themselves into it and to imagine a set of questions that it raises for them about liberation and about the future.

And I think that the journey of our fictional characters and the journey of our actual writer selves are similar in that we thought about which aspects of this world we were most excited to imagine, and we kind of structured characters around that. We talk a lot about what folks call social reproduction, the work of reproducing ourselves as human beings. So who cooks, who cleans, who has babies, how do they raise them, etc., you know, all of that is really central to the book because it’s a big part of what we think about. I wrote a chapter, and it was the first chapter I wrote, about the liberation of Palestine because I’m Palestinian and a long-term organizer in the movement for Palestinian liberation. So we really build out this world that we want to imagine and leave a lot of space for others.

It struck me because I’m Puerto Rican, and I was so sad to get toward the end and realize that basically the entire Caribbean had drowned and been abandoned.

I’m sorry! But I mean, I think that was part of the process, right? Imagining some of the worst things that can happen and still imagining a future is really, really hard. But I think it’s our task right now.

Do you have a favorite of the interviews?

The Palestine chapter was the most meaningful one for me to write. I wrote it and then just kind of disappeared for a month because I just couldn’t, you know? I’m Palestinian. I’ve been dreaming of the liberation of Palestine my entire life, and to be able to write that out was so meaningful. And that chapter has had a big life on its own over the last year. There’ve been dramatic readings of it. There’s been a mini-play of it. People read it to each other in sit-ins and protests and encampments. It’s been very, very touching to see it have this life in this moment in particular.

That’s amazing. And the character being interviewed is ...

Kaukab Hassan. Kaukab is this burnout third-generation Palestinian American who grows up in a Palestinian neighborhood in Brooklyn, Bay Ridge. And when she’s a teenager, fighting breaks out in Palestine and she sneaks her way in to join the fight. And she basically participates in this kind of multimodal movement that ends up liberating Palestine, but also we think of Palestinian liberation as the beginning of the liberation of the world. So it’s not a vision where there’s an institution of a new state. It’s rather that Palestine becomes the first place where the state falls and where communes start to rise up and people live in these collectivized communities. Kaukab is gruff, she’s a bit hardened, but she is also very fierce and someone who saw the future before others did and pursued it before the outcome was guaranteed. And so she’s a special person.

I’m a second-generation immigrant and one that was very much fed the narrative of “put your head down, work really hard, climb up the ranks of the society.” I think of Kaukab as the alternative side. She’s post that illusion of the American dream. She rejects all of that just in the moment where its last vestiges are disappearing. So I hold her very [close, but] she’s not me. And that felt important because it was tempting to write the character who participates in the liberation of Palestine as a someone modeled after myself, but she’s not. She has very different circumstances and she’s a very different person. And I think that relates to this kind of broader thing of what happens when you write yourself into the future but you’re old. It’s like we’re not the heroes of the revolution that we write. We’re small parts of it. And in some ways, we wrote a book about a revolution where everyone is a hero.

We’re in the book, but we’re also not the most important characters in the book by a mile.

It was humbling, but for me, I had just gotten my first big girl job after my PhD and it was a way to come to terms with my life and where it’s headed and to be like, I can have a role in liberation, even if I’m not like this grand hero of it.

That really is amazing, though, to be able to write yourself into this world and be a participant in it.

You know, I needed it. I needed this book. I wrote it in a moment where I felt the world needed it, but more than anything, I needed to write it, I needed to believe in it. And it’s interesting because this last year has been the most difficult of my life and the most full of grief and pain and despair and hope and movement and community. But I think it’s interesting that I found myself in a place where people know me for having written a hopeful book. And it’s sort of summoned a version of me into the world, [one] that I’ve come to appreciate.

It’s a hopeful book, but it’s also a harrowing book. And it is just heartbreaking the things that these characters go through — and these characters are like extensions of ourselves and of our future. And it’s a testament that as a reader you come out of it feeling like you have hope and energy. And what you said about this having been such a hard year, that’s also part of it, right? Everybody in the book is past this time of struggle, but the time of struggle happened.

Right. We didn’t just petition our way out. There was no magic bullet. We didn’t snap our fingers and find ourselves on the other side. And this past year, being Palestinian in the world, being Arab in the world right now, there’s just this constant feeling that every day you think you’ve seen the worst of it and then something even worse happens. And that reality is just intolerable. And I keep coming back to this sense that everything does pass, every epoch ends. That’s the ultimate law of the world. And so to know that there’s an end from something so awful is really crucial to surviving.

I think often of this verse in the Quran that says, “Rome was defeated.” And that’s the whole verse. And it’s a verse that I had never thought about my whole life. I just read it so many times and never thought about it. And then I saw it as a painting by this Palestinian artist, Suhad Khatib. It’s a blank white canvas, and just like to the side in calligraphy, she has in Arabic Ghulibat al-Rum: Rome was defeated.

I’ve been thinking about it all the time this year. At the height of the Roman Empire, no one would have thought, “This will end. This will be history.” And yet it did, just like every other empire, just like every other era and epoch. So I find great comfort in that, and our book is a version of that.

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