In 2018, Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes called for a “radical reimagining” in how we respond to harm, writing, “It’s time for a jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible.” A new book of speculative fiction, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, is one such jailbreak.
O’Brien and Abdelhadi imagine themselves as researchers in the future. Their future selves interview 12 fictional characters who played different revolutionary roles, including sex workers as well as scientists, student organizers, freedom fighters, or students. In the future world, money and nation-states are gone. Instead, people organize themselves via communes, councils, and free assemblies. It is beautiful.
It’s not that there are no problems in this future — characters talk about long-term effects of trauma, an incident of physical violence toward a child, tough ethical questions resolved in ways not everyone agrees with, and the ongoing disaster of climate change. However, people can now respond to these challenges in ways that are creative and collaborative, interdependent, caring, and compassionate, rather than being isolated, greedy, or punitive. People thrive when they build relationships with one another in the absence capitalism and colonialism.
But if you come to Everything for EveryoneStay for the writing and the politics. Barring Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire, I can’t think of another author who uses an academic form to achieve a literary result so successfully. Interviewees and interviewers have a completely unique and authentic voice. The book is as plausible and authentic as the archival project claims it to be. However, it also tells compelling stories and slips in details that will delight sci-fi lovers (e.g., a space elevator in Quito!). Sentient algae-based AI! Augmented reality implants for dance parties).
I have worked with both O’Brien and Abdelhadi in the context of different political projects over the years, so I was delighted to get the chance to put together this exclusive TruthoutInterview with them about why and how they came up with the book. Everything for everyone What they are currently working on.
Gabriel Arkles: This is a very hopeful vision for the future. Everything for Everyone. You see, things get worse before they get better and many people are killed. Then, this new world emerges as people around the globe defeat police and military, fascists, and the ultra-wealthy. They create new ways to do things that are infinitely more conscientious, collaborative, compassionate, and equitable than those that are hierarchical, exploitative, alienated, and opportunistic. Why did your desire to offer a utopian and not dystopian vision?
Eman Abdelhadi:One of the greatest violences in our current moment in history is the extinguishing of hope. Many of us feel like we are living in the end of the world and cannot imagine a better future. Many are debating whether it is ethical to reproduce a new generation of human beings. Our book restores hope as both an ethical right and a political obligation. It is possible to do this in unique ways through its fictional and speculative form. Our imaginations are free to conjure a better world for us and our readers. We imagine how it would feel to live and love without the rat-race, without nuclear families, without the constraints imposed by gender as we know them, and without material scarcity. We thrive as individuals and communities without these constraints!
M.E. O’Brien:Many people struggle with despair, despair, and feelings dejection. Everyone must find the inner peace and possibility that the world could be better in order to forge the collective emancipatory movements that we so desperately need. This sense of revolutionary possibility, of positive aspiration, is something we all need to feel, both within ourselves and between our relationships. I’ve found that sense in moments of mass insurrection that I’ve been a part of in my own life. Everything for EveryoneIt is designed to encourage people to look for revolutionary vision in all aspects of their lives. I hope you enjoy the book and get inspired to write your own!
I hadn’t read many radical works set in a hopeful future that comes after further breakdown in our current world order. But when I think of other examples, I’m mostly thinking of books by Indigenous authors from Turtle Island/North America, like Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning, or various authors in Joshua Whitehead’s Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction. I’m curious whether and how Indigenous work informed your thinking in Everything for Everyone? What other authors and thinkers have contributed to the creation this book?
O’Brien: It sounds great, I’d love to see it. I read and appreciated Hope Nicholson’s anthology of LGBT Indigenous science fiction, entitled Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time. I have learned a lot from the works of Daniel Heath Justice, Kim TallBear, and Lou Cornum, my Pinko co-editor. In my thinking about settler colonialism and the white family, Indigenous theorists have been a great help. As I was writing my sections, that research was always in my thoughts. Everything for everyone I think it would be difficult for me to list all my influences. My current thinking is influenced in part by current work on trans liberation and social reproduction, communization, and racial capital. A few prominent contemporary family abolitionists or critics are Hortense Spillers (or Sophie Lewis), Jules Gill-Peterson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jules Gill, and Jules Gill.
Abdelhadi: My writing was influenced most by the Palestinian struggle. Palestinians see liberation every day, and we are part of both the lineage as well as the future of struggle. For those of us who are critical of capitalism and the nation state, a common saying is, “The Palestinian flag is the only one I would ever raise. And the day Palestine is free, I will stop raising it.” That is, we understand nationalism as a temporary necessity forced upon us by the system in which we currently live. The second chapter of Everything for EveryoneFor a day, you can drive or take a train from Beirut to Jerusalem, which is the liberation of Palestine. This means that we see Palestinian liberation as intrinsically linked to liberation from both the nation state and capitalism.
Are there any current political projects you would like to discuss, especially if they are a prelude to the future? Everything for Everyone?
O’Brien: In Everything for everyone We present a new social institution that is the basis of daily life: the commune. People live in communal communes that are made up of many hundred people and spread across several buildings. They eat together as one commune, make big decisions in large meetings, and most of their daily care is provided by the commune. People can still form families — or “family together,” as one character puts it — but these families are not an economic unit and not the sole close social relationships. If a family chooses to separate, it doesn’t have as massive an impact as it might in our world.
Importantly, I don’t think what we call today’s communes could be used to prefigure this society. Today’s communes rely heavily on wealth and property ownership for their stability, much like the normative families. It can be difficult for communities to live together without it. In a capitalist society, it is very difficult to treat others well. The basic features of racial capitalism — like racist state violence, or the pressures of reproducing ourselves through paid work — all create contradictions and conflicts within households, even within the most radical communities.
I would rather point out examples of insurgent social reproduction, moments in which people, caught up in mass rebellions, collectively address issues such as food, sleeping, safety, education in radical new ways. I am referring to protest camps like Standing Rock, which opposes the Dakota Access Pipeline, and brief moments in Occupy Wall Street urban camps. And mass urban uprisings, such as the Oaxaca Commune of 2006. Because they are directly in conflict with the capital and state, these are always temporary and precarious. These are my thoughts of the beginning of new social reproduction practices.
The interview with Connor Stephens regarding the fall Colorado Springs was in many ways my favourite, even though it was difficult to read. One thing I’ve come to understand in my work as a lawyer is that I have a professional and cultural expectation that people will relate their stories in a linear, chronological way. But that’s not really the way most people tell their stories. You showed Stephens resisting the chronological framework O’Brien wanted, and some tension between them. I’d love to hear some about why you chose to include those moments of tension, refusal or critique of the approach your future selves took to the interviewing process? Then, conversely, tell me why you included moments of connection or alignment like the one between Abdelhadi, Kawkab and Hassan about liberating the Levant.
Abdelhadi: For my academic research, I am a Muslim American who mainly does oral histories with Muslim Americans. I have lost the fantasy of being a neutral interviewer because of this experience. Social sciences like to believe that everyone can access the same data using the exact same methods. That’s simply not true for this method. People tell me things they would not be willing to tell someone who wasn’t also Muslim or Brown or a woman. The people I interview matter a lot to me. I tried to write these fictional oral histories with that in mind, thinking about the interaction between the interviewer and interviewee — about the moments when the interviewer would be drawn into the story and when they would be more of a receiver of it.
O’Brien: I tried to write Connor Stephens’s interview closely based on both my reading of Indigenous oral histories, and from research into how trauma shapes narrative. Each of these have had different influences on the final text, but it reflects them all. Oral history is a rich form of oral history because it allows for contradiction, misremembering, and agency by the narrator. I have coordinated the project for three years. NYC Trans Oral History ProjectI discovered that the best oral histories are not packaged and clear, free from contradictions. Interviews that were rich in information were those where people were discovering something new and surprising about themselves. This meant that we had to question our assumptions about narrative and truth.
I read After the RevolutionRobert Evans shortly after I read your book. I found it interesting that both included a white character assigned female at birth who at one point really believed in and advocated for a Christo-fascist state (Sasha in Evans’s novel and S. in yours). Both stories show that the person eventually rebelled against that society partly due to the violence they saw towards other white women at birth and partly because outsiders helped to question their beliefs. I wonder if you can reflect on S.’s role in your book, and why other authors might also find these sorts of narratives interesting to explore in this moment? These narratives are interesting to me partly because I am a white woman assigned to a female role at birth and held some conservative beliefs that I no longer hold.
O’Brien: S. is a non-binary white character. They grew up in a fascist Christian cult that took over Staten Island, and S. was eventually involved in a massacre of the cult’s patriarchs. This rebellion was made possible through an ongoing online conversation with a Black revolutionary who became their spouse. S. spoke out about how trauma has shaped their sexuality, and their relationship with love. The current moment is one of rising fascist threats. Sexual violence, attacks upon reproductive freedom, and the imposition narrow family and gender norms are all part of the current fascist threat. [are some of the ways]Fascist social relations are a way to organize power and authority. The book explored many possible paths that might lead our narrators into revolutionaries. In S.’s case, this was based on facing the violent gendered contradictions immediately around them.
I’m interested in how you made choices about what to make explicit and what to leave implicit at various points. Miss Kelly was interviewed on Hunts Point’s insurrection. You discussed how she and others transformed sex work, the distribution, production, consumption of food, and how she and other women navigated tensions with organizations that initially had problems with them as transgender women. And while race seemed very present in that interview — Miss Kelly refers to uprisings against police murders, for example — you chose not to explicitly name and explain in that interview ways Miss Kelly dealt with anti-Black racism or how racial dynamics shifted with communization. And in other interviews, while there was careful attention to the impact of emotional trauma and the type of support people give and get around that, there wasn’t as much discussion about how people in the post-revolutionary world support each other around physical disabilities, including those acquired through traumatic injury. Can you tell us how you made the decision about what to make clear, what to leave behind implicitly, and what you would cut?
O’Brien: Eman and me are both the primary authors of the interviews where we each present ourselves as the interviewer. What you are pointing to is my limited thinking and experience. This is an inherent part oral history interviewing, even if the interviews are fictional. My experiences and identities as an interviewer influence what people share and where the conversation goes. As a white interviewer who interviewed BIPOC individuals, I found that racial violence was always present in their stories, but it was rarely discussed directly. It was clear that this was tied to my being white and the way I listened, asked for questions and held space. Similarly, in my years working with people dealing with a variety of disabilities in the AIDS movement, a lot of my attention was more focused on mental health and trauma, and I likely wasn’t listening as deeply around other kinds of disabilities. These experiences of listening — as a therapist, and as an oral historian — then shaped my writing, in both good and problematic ways.
Abdelhadi: Gabriel, thank-you for pointing it out! The book’s limitations are definitely the question of physical disability. One of the difficulties of writing a polyphonic novel is that we have to inhabit multiple characters’ psyches. The problem is how to do it given our individual positional limitations. M.E. As M.E. We have had to empathize and listen to people with multiple identities that don’t overlap with ours, and I think that we both benefit from that. These experiences are, however, limited in nature. I think it’s important to acknowledge limitations such as this one and own up to them. We hope this book inspires more optimistic speculative fiction. I hope that others more knowledgeable than we will fill in the gaps.
I have to question: The book mentions multiple times that there is an even larger oral history project that will also be available in other ways, but not in print. Are there any additional interviews that you will make available online? I can see fans wanting to create their own interviews.
Abdelhadi: The allusion to more interviews was mainly a stylistic choice to convey the world of an oral history project. I imagine that such a project would contain many more interviews than can be printed. I love the idea that fan fiction could generate more interviews, or even a second volume down the line. We’ll see!
O’Brien: I hope this book inspires others to create revolutionary speculative fiction. This is not a plan or a guide. It is an effort to imagine and think that can be shared, transformed and shared by others. I have many more interviews I can easily imagine writing in this world, and I hope to have the support to do so one day.
I was considering sending this book to some prison collaborators. But then I realized that, with all the talk about liberating prisons, this book could be seriously censored. Do you have any thoughts on how best to share some of the ideas in the book if we’re prevented from sharing the book itself with our comrades on the inside?
O’Brien: Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated! I can only imagine that you know more about this subject through your legal advocacy than I do from my occasional correspondence with political prisoners.
It’s tough — that’s part of the whole point of prisons, right? To suppress dissent and keep people apart. I would still try to send the book — it might get through in at least some systems. Another option I’ve seen used is reprinting excerpts in newsletters that go to people in prison, being a bit selective about what is excerpted to avoid censorship of the whole thing. People can also discuss other parts via video, phone or in person. But because all of those conversations are recorded, it’s important to make it obvious you’re talking about ideas in a work of fiction, you’re not actually planning a prison break or armed uprising (especially if you might like to).
You wrote your publisher and yourselves seamlessly into the story — you each play the role of interviewers documenting an oral history 50 years from now. I’m curious what it was like to write your future selves?
Abdelhadi: Since 10 years, we have been friends and comrades. We used to joke that we were just waiting for the right time to be little old ladies. It was fun for me — and maybe even a little selfish — to write a future I could plausibly live to see. There was grief in the temporal placement as well — knowing I likely wouldn’t be the hero of these events. In such desperate times, it was amazing to think of getting to the other side. People are reading the book and most often say that it gave them hope. Perhaps that is because we can be so close to the events. Our readers can feel the same way if we are close.
O’Brien: Overall, writing with Eman was a tremendous pleasure. It was both a pleasure to write the book and its format. I am not really a beach person, but being queer in NYC I’ve ended up at Riis many times, a well-loved queer beach spot easily accessible from Brooklyn and Queens. Walking through the immense decayed parking lot at Riis, I’ve always had a grim image that it would be a perfect place for the military to detain people. This was my unfortunate trauma, so I wrote it into the book. Even such terrible details are kept in the book as a testament to joy, possibility, and hope.
What are you currently working on?
O’Brien: Just finished a draft for my next book. It’s a nonfiction exploration into revolutionary efforts to rethink family. Family Abolition: Capitalism & the Communizing Of Care It will emerge from Pluto in Spring 2023. It is a close companion text. Everything for everyone This article aims to provide a brief overview of some of the basic principles that underlie social reproduction in a more free and post-capitalist society.
Abdelhadi: I need to get tenure at work! I wrote this book as a weekend project to combat pandemics. My academic research continues, and I am currently working on a book manuscript for an academic publisher. The working title of the manuscript is Impossible Futures: Why women leave American Muslim communities while men stay. Keep watching!
