Have you
noticed the proliferation of futuristic post-apocalyptic dystopic narratives?
Perhaps it’s just me, because I am a self-identified science fiction fan – not
an expert by any stretch of any social construct, but a definite fan of the
genre, so maybe the pervasiveness of this type of narrative is all in my
imagination, but humor me, and please deliberate on the following list, which
are in no particular order:
Zombieland, 28 Days Later,
Afterworld, Resident Evil (x infinity),
The Book of Eli, Captain Planet, V, Total Recall (original and remake), Twelve Monkeys, Knowing, Independence Day,
Daybreakers, Alien Resurrection, Blade Runner, Terminator (x4), Signs, WALL-E, Firefly, Serenity, City of
Ember, 2012, Children of Men, Sērā-fuku mokushiroku, I Am Legend, Jericho, War
of the Worlds, Madmax (x3 with number 4 in production), AEon Flux, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Day After
Tomorrow, Battlestar Galactica (original and remake), Dune (x franchise), The
Matrix (x3), Le Temps du Loup, Judge
Dredd (original and remake), Terra
Nova The Hunger Games, Revolution, and Falling Skies.
This
list scratches the surface of productions from the last thirty years, because the
only criteria most of these have in common is that they are reasonably well-known
films or television shows. Authors, Ursula LeGuin, Margaret Atwood, and Stephen
King seem particularly obsessed with this sub-genre, considering they’ve all
written several novels that are set in dystopic worlds. E. M. Forester flirted
with this topic with The Machine Stops.
Almost a hundred years later, David Mitchell wrote Cloud Atlas and once again envisioned a world were technological
supremacy fails to solve all problems and ultimately gives way to the natural
world.
End of
the world, general states of global misery that exist beneath the thumb of a
tyrannical super government, or fragmented police states surviving in
conditions of environmental degradation are also settings frequently employed in
graphic novels, manga, and anime. Consider Vampire
Hunter D, Y: The Last Man, The Walking Dead, Jyu Oh-Sei, Darker than Black, Nausica of the Wind Valley, Cowboy
Bebop, and Now and Then, Here and
There names but a few.
So why the fascination? Why the regular return to
narratives that predict the end of our existence, or at the very least the end
of the current existence we so decadently enjoy? I think some of this stems
from fear, and the possibility that we are but a mere blink away from the end
of all we hold dear and comforting. But let me get a bit more psychoanalytical
and hypothesize that the attraction lies not in our world laid to waste, but in
the possibility of surviving that destruction, the illustration of what that
survival might look like, and whether it is truly worth considering.
I know more than a few, on my island home, who hold
fast to the belief that we would be one of the first to go in nuclear conflict,
and that we should be grateful for this particular outcome, because we would
not be around to muddle through in an unrecognizable and inhospitable environment.
Most of the
storylines, of the works already mentioned, do not describe total oblivion, but
stay true to the speculation/hope that the human species does, in some way, go
on. And this is comforting. Maybe. Consider this: would you want to survive in
the un-survivable? Is continuation necessarily the ultimate goal? Biology holds
the easy answer. The need to survive is inextricably bound to our genetic
selves. But if survival holds such a powerful drive over our species, why is it
that we are equally skilled at bringing ourselves to the edge of annihilation
at increasingly regular intervals? When we look at our relationships with each
other and our environments, questions and theories testing evolutionary
assumptions, based on biological imperatives, become more complex and tangled.
For example, which matters most, the continued existence of a single person, a
few dozen people, a few thousand people, a hundred thousand people, a million
people, or a billion people? Now, decide which people should survive. What if
that single person is you?
These fictional visions, and the conjectures they provoke, call
us back to the philosophies of manifest destiny and infinite growth (code name
globalization), and demand a reevaluation. How can any of these ideas work when
we have already found the edge of the world and discovered the foreseeable end
to our infinite resources?
These questions seem particularly pertinent, if you live, as
I do, in a geographically isolated place (2500 miles from the closest land
mass) that is criminally reliant on external food sources. We import
approximately 85% of our food, so at any given time, we are equipped with a 7
day food supply. In other words, if the shipping lines and air traffic were to
stop tomorrow, our population of 1.3 million could survive for 7 days, yet our
islands are home to some of the most fertile lands in the world. For more than
a century, most of these lands have been dedicated to mono-crops, like
sugarcane and pineapple, products that may have been profitable, but crippled
our ability to build sustainable agricultural models. Most of these lands have
yet to be used to feed the people living in Hawaiʻi. E komo mai, to the Zombie Apocalypse.
Imagine 1.3 million people suddenly without food.
These are the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and
economic expansion, which all seem to rely heavily on the idea that problems at
home can be solved by going somewhere else, but what happens when there is
nowhere else to go? This is the fundamental question that serves as the
foundation for these post-apocalyptic dystopic literatures. What do we do when
we have existed ourselves into a corner, and our failures have piled so high,
we can no longer climb over them to find a new territory with more resources
than what we have left behind? What do we do when there are so many of us disease
is uncontrollable; food and fuel sources cannot keep up with the demand; financial
machines and governments collapse beneath the weight of their over optimistic
debt; once habitable environments are unable to support human populations; and we
fight each other over the scraps that are left? Perhaps herein lies the answer
to the question of why we return to these rather depressing storylines, because
really, there’s nothing futuristic about them, and their settings are
recognizable as today, or a tomorrow that is not distant, but sits just around
the corner.
But what does this have to do with poetry, orature, or
literature? Much as I love dissecting the ends and outs of the work I call
home, I must also acknowledge that limiting myself to these discussions is an
irresponsible luxury. Yes, I do embrace art for art’s sake. Why the hell
wouldn’t I? That is what I call fun, which is a necessary piece of the
lifestyle equation, but as an artist, who also works as an educator, and gets
the occasional opportunity to speak with communities beyond the realms of art
and academia, should I not use my toolbox to engage the questions and answers
that impact the place in which I live? In this post-apocalyptic, dystopic,
zombieland frame, restricting my conversations to investigations of metaphor
and process feels elitist, naïve, and even spoiled, so rather than considering
only if we should eat the peach, shouldn’t we also be asking where it came
from, how did it get here, and whether it should be here at all?