Utopias of the Third Kind Page 2

  But that last night before the action, I was awake for a different reason. My responsibility was to help unleash the webstorm on the internet, an extreme cyber-weather event that would come in like a cyclone, sweeping into other conversations and connections, not by force but by the power of social media and crazy network geometry. I was crazy-network-geometry girl, on deck with my laptop and twitchy fingers, waiting for our tech team to let the drones go.

  The drone lights were dimmed to a barely perceptible glow. We sent them off fondly, with a bottle or two of wine. On my screen you could see the locations of the drones, little yellow blinking lights, the seeing eyes of the world. With a touch of my finger, the Million Eyes Inner Collective around the world woke up in Dhaka and Rangoon, Boston and Vladivostok, Oslo and Berlin. Questions and answers popped on the screen like firecrackers—We can’t see anything! Well, it’s night over there, moron! I see some lights! Is that the rig? No, it’s effing aliens. Of course it is the rig. We go worldwide as soon as action starts in the morning.

  That morning Natalia and I, and Fabio, and Aarne went in the little boat with the banner and the megaphone. In the cold, predawn light, with pink streaks in the eastern sky, the water was very still, as though the world was waiting with bated breath. We could hear, faintly, signs of early morning activity on the rig, and someone on one of the security boats calling out. Our boat was so small they didn’t see us until we were quite close to the platform. We let the banner go. It rose like a ghost while Natalia worked the remote, up and up, until it made contact with the top part of the rig and stayed there. The letters were so huge that you could still see what they said from down below, in English and Russian: TundraSaur: Continuing the Proud Tradition of Destroying the Earth.

  The confrontation is burned in my memory. I had expected the shouted warning, the security boat looming over us. I didn’t expect that we would be so roughly treated. We were courting arrest after all. They boarded us and dragged us up onto the deck of their boat. Natalia was yelling something in Russian. Some brute put a hand on her breast and she kicked him in the groin, and then things got bloody. The man who was holding me pulled my head back by my hair, and twisted my arms around me, avoiding my kicking feet. I looked wildly around me and saw through tears that Natalia was handcuffed, blood dripping from her nose, and Aarne and Fabio were both roughed up. Fabio looked furious; Aarne had a deceptive calm on his face, a hint of triumph. He was looking at Natalia, trying to say something with his eyes, and suddenly there was an answering triumph in her own gaze that she immediately covered up. I realized it then, of course. The nearest drone, tiny, stealthy and barely visible, had video-captured everything. I looked across the expanse of sea to the distant silhouette of our little ship, and saw the glow of the signal that meant: Webstorm Arctic Light unleashed.

  Fabio began to shout for a superior officer. His Russian is pretty good, and it helps that he looks like a bear. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, or Natalia a moment later, but I knew it from our practice sessions. They were talking about the need to respect peaceful protesters’ rights, but also about why we were doing what we were doing. Both Fabio and Natalia are trained in oratory—even our brutish captors stopped in their tracks for a moment. Their speeches, via their state-of-the-art wrist computers, were going out to the world in real time.

  Ultimately some superior personage came and shouted at our captors and brought a doctor to attend to Natalia and Fabio (later I learned they cracked a rib of his—he was orating in quite a bit of pain). Then there was the hustle to get us to cells in the security boat, and finally to a truck on shore that would take us to the nearest big town.

  That’s how I ended up in prison.

  They separated Natalia and me at once. I was shut off from the light, from the sky, from space, cramped into a cell with a woman who stared at me without comprehension. Her hair was tangled around her face—she looked prematurely aged. In all the time I was there, she didn’t speak to me even once. The only noises she made were when she snored, and when she wept. In the dining halls the women laughed at my poor Russian and teased me about the “Natalia” I was seeking. The food smelled of shoe leather, and the steel doors clanged with a reverberating finality. In that cold, dark place, with the roaches and (I swear) rats running under my bunk, I had no space in my head for anything but despair and horror.

  In my third month there, I got sick with a stomach bug that was going around. Tossing in my bunk, or vomiting into the toilet, I longed with feverish desperation to get out, to go back home again, to Fahad Uncle and maybe even college, and never, ever see the inside of a prison again.

  The Indian consulate sent me a lawyer, a pimply fellow with sly eyes who told me my best bet was to claim I was fifteen, not twenty. I could claim, he said, that my older accomplices had deceived me, manipulated me, forced me to go with them. I’d be out of here in no time. For a moment I thought he’d guessed my age, or close to it—I was sixteen, not fifteen—but my fake passport had taken him in. I stared at him—my stomach was still not recovered, and I was queasy. He mistook my sick, dazed, half-starved look for stupidity. He told me we needed to think through it carefully—he would be back next month.

  I lay in my bunk, holding my stomach and trying not to think about throwing up. I couldn’t imagine freedom. My cellmate sobbed inconsolably in her bed. I screamed at her, and she stopped and looked vacantly at me. That was worse than her sobbing. I broke down and cried, and cried.

  An image came to me of the first time we’d field tested one of the drones, over in Northern Canada, before we set off on the Valiant. The camera had captured the slow collapse of a young polar bear onto the snowy tundra where it breathed its last, frosted breaths, all skin and bone from starvation. That’s how I felt now, alone in the world, without hope. There was no point in trying to do anything. My mother had been wrong in trying, and Fahad Uncle, and my friends on the Valiant. The oil barons were too powerful. All I had to do, when the lawyer came back, was to turn against Natalia and the others, as he’d suggested. I thought about how angry Natalia had been with me for insisting I court arrest, and wondered if she’d understand—surely she’d understand—if I betrayed them.

  That night, I lay awake. There was grime on the wall by my bunk, and words scratched out in Cyrillic that I couldn’t read, but I saw for the first time that someone had taken a hard object and made a crude drawing of a mountain range. It was a reminder that there was a world outside, and there were other people who remembered. I tumbled back in my mind to a certain summer in the Himalayas, when I was thirteen years old.

  Imagine me, a small, childish figure standing on an endless field littered with rocks and pebbles—what geologists call a moraine. It slopes up and up toward the ice wall, all the way to the distant white tongue of the glacier. I’m standing huddled in my parka against the unaccustomed cold, kicking at the rock at my feet. Fahad Uncle and his group are moving around and muttering incomprehensibly, the way scientists do when they are out in the field. This was the last glacier my mother visited before the sickness killed her a year ago. She had been determined to measure unrecorded glacier lengths in the northeastern Himalayas, but she didn’t make it. She came back about halfway through the planned trip, because she was already sick. I will always remember how she would look at the sky through the hospital window—the murky, polluted city sky—but in her eyes was the light of the Himalayas, the light of sun on snow.

  This is the first time her team—now Fahad Uncle’s team—is visiting this glacier, locally known as the Nilsaya.

  Kicking at pebbles, I feel suffused with my mother’s presence. The silence here is restful, punctuated only by the muted conversations of the scientists and the distant sharp cracks and groans of the glacier. Then I see, a little ahead of me, a marker, protruding from the mess of rocks and pebbles: a metal stake and a tattered little flag atop it.

  I run up to it, shouting. The marker’s what they’ve been looking for. The place where the glacier’s
front edge was, two years ago, as marked by my mother on that last trip.

  “Fahad Uncle! Fahad Uncle!”

  He’s been in my life longer than my father ever was. He’s got about him a calm, silent air, rather like a mountain. He gives my shoulder a gentle victory punch as his post-doc retrieves my mother’s last marker and hands it to me.

  It’s a solemn moment, because I am holding the last thing she touched when she was still mostly whole. But it is also a bit of a shock for us because nobody thought the glacier would have retreated this much in such a short time. Here, where we are standing at this moment, is where that distant cliff of ice was, just two years ago.

  I hold the marker in my hand, and look at the glint of sun on the glacier so far up the slope. My fears rise around me in a dark wave, and the dam breaks. I weep as though I will never stop.

  Fahad Uncle holds me, says, “Shaila, Shaila.” What they don’t know is that I am crying not only for my mother, but for the whole world.

  That’s when I decide: I will join the fight. That is the moment that will bring me, a few eventful years later, to the Arctic. That’s before I know about prisons.

  The lawyer didn’t come back for two months, and then only because the Webstorm had finally generated enough worldwide outrage. He told me the UN had held a special session about Arctic drilling, and there were protests in the streets all over the world. In India the youth climate movement was taking off as never before—they had stalled three coal power plant projects and were clamoring for my release. My friends on the Valiant were on hunger strike. The lawyer related the news with an air of faint distaste, as though all this was beneath him. The thought that there were people outside trying to get me out made the tears come into my eyes. When the lawyer began outlining his strategy, I decided I hated his sly eyes and his condescension. With a spurt of my old anger I told him to get lost. I was breathing so hard I thought I would pass out. But the anger did me some good—it cut through my despair. How I survived the remaining months I don’t know, but it must have had something to do with my rage and the memory of light.

  Yesterday they let us go. I spent eight months in a Russian prison, and my birthday present was my freedom. I stepped out of the courthouse, momentarily blinded by the brightness of the day. I breathed in great gulps of fresh air. There were red and yellow flowers blooming in the square. And there was Fahad Uncle, unfamiliar in a Russian-style hat, fighting through the crowds toward me, shouting and waving. After the tears and hugs, he handed me something.

  “You should have this,” he said.

  I unwound the cloth from the small bundle he handed me. A battered little metal marker, the tattered flag atop it. My mother’s last scientific act: the stake in the ground, the declaring of a boundary, a catastrophe, a limit. But also, maybe, a gauntlet.

  We began walking together toward the taxi stand. My mobile phone (recently returned to me) beeped: a message from Captain Bill on the Valiant, congratulating me on my release. An unspoken question hung in the air. I thought of the sun on snow, and felt my mother beside me as though she had never left.

  I took a deep breath. I would go home for a while, remember how to live in the world again. And then—

  I’ll be back, I texted him, and followed Fahad Uncle to the taxi.

  Utopias of the Third Kind

  TO WRITE OF UTOPIA at this critical moment in world history—a global pandemic, the worldwide rise of totalitarian populists, the unraveling of Earth’s natural cycles (resulting in ecological disasters of which climate change is one), growing social inequality, abysses of hatred opening up to divide nations and communities—to write of utopia in such a time is surely to invite allegations of pathological escapism, or perhaps some kind of delusional disorder. But could it be possible that certain kinds of utopian dreaming—on which I’ll elaborate below—represent a necessary defiance, an obdurate refusal to cede space, imaginative and otherwise, to the world-destroying world-machine that is our current socioeconomic-political system? The Indian poet Sahir Ludhianvi spoke lyrically of the urgency of dreams, especially in dark times. More recently, scholars and writers such as Frederic Jameson, China Miéville and Ursula K. Le Guin have concurred, while also warning us of the pitfalls of certain conceptions of Utopia.

  As an intellectual vagrant and writer of speculative fiction, I too have stumbled upon (and helped proliferate) utopias of the imagination. But as a physics professor and educator working on a transdisciplinary, justice-centered conceptualization of climate change, I’m also rooted in the real world, this world of ours, with all its marvels and horrors. I’m especially interested in learning how to see differently, to pay attention to and learn from what is pushed aside, ignored, marginalized. How do utopian yearnings manifest in the real world, with its brutal pyramidal power structures? How are these reflected (if at all) in literature now? How, in turn, might literature learn from these, and become part of social change? Can today’s real-life experiments in resistance—distinctly different from those of, for example, utopian societies of North America in the nineteenth century—actually inform new ways out of our current complex of crises?

  Those of us with societal privilege are relatively insulated from the worst aspects of the crises that affect othered humans and non-humans, yet it is the elite who claim to have the solutions to these problems, and the power to effect these solutions. The insularity of the privileged blinds us epistemologically as well. I have been conscious of these issues for a long time, wondering what reality looks like to those we have othered, how they might conceptualize such phenomena as climate change or well-being, and how that might better inform our ways ahead.

  Encounters with Utopia

  In the Spring of 2020, when my sabbatical in India extended due to the pandemic, I wandered, impelled by curiosity, into the virtual halls of the Seventh South South Forum on Sustainability, held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong in July 2020. Here I found accounts—from scholars and activists who serve as bridges between the privileged and the marginalized—of real-life experiments that are, in some sense utopic, or at least demonstrate utopian longings. I was familiar with some of the Indian stories: the legendary Mendha Lekha village in Maharashtra, for example, which had defeated the scourge of alcoholism, protected its forests, and its right to self-determination, and where no decision could be taken without the consensus of all men and women of the community; the extraordinary story of the Dalit women farmers of the Deccan Development society and their organic farming revolution; the resilience of the Dongria Kondh tribals in their struggle to protect their beloved Niyamgiri hills. But I only had the vaguest notion of how resistance and struggle had birthed the feminist Kurdish communities of Rojava, or the brave experiments of the Zapatistas in Mexico. And I hadn’t heard before about the island of La Gomera, where sustainable practices had allowed resident farmers and their animals to become nearly self-sufficient in food, generating energy from biomass and kite technology, and growing organic food. I hadn’t heard about a twenty-first-century rural reconstruction movement in China aiming to bring back vitality and resilience to the struggling countryside, seeking a new relationship between parts and whole, informed by practices such as organic agriculture and ecological farming, and rooted in cultural traditions thousands of years old that sought a healthier relationship with the rest of Nature. There were stories like these from South East Asia, Latin America, Europe, indicating the possibility of microstates of well-being amidst the despoiled social-ecological landscape of our current apocalypse.

  Scholars on Utopia

  After the conference I went trawling through my library and the seas of the internet to see what I could find about utopia and its manifestations. An enormous body of scholarly and literary work exists on the subject of Utopia, from Marx’s critique of the naiveté of the early utopian socialists to recent work on utopian responses to colonialism. Utopia as a concept refuses to die; Even when the word Utopia is not mentioned, it can make its presence felt in the
sense of what scholars have called “collective dreaming,” a yearning for something better.

  Utopia has long outgrown its original conception—the story of that name written by Sir Thomas More in 1516. As scholars have pointed out, the word itself is a pun, a grey zone between “utopia” (no-place) and “eutopia” (good place). The original meaning of a place of perfect harmony where there is no change, has given way to something broader and more complex. A wonderful bird’s-eye view of the elaboration of the idea comes from Barnita Bagchi’s introduction to the book The Politics of the (Im)Possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered, which collects essays from scholars around the globe on multiple utopian imaginaries, from feminist to Indigenous. Like Jacqueline Dutton in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, Bagchi argues that utopia is not limited to Europe or European thought; Dutton advocates for the term “intercultural imaginaries of the ideal” Lyman Tower Sargent, in his essay “The Necessity of Utopian Thinking: A Cross-National perspective,” in the volume Thinking Utopia: Steps into Other Worlds, points out that many countries have rich and complex traditions of utopian literature. In the same volume, Zhang Longxi, detailing the utopian tradition in Chinese literature, quotes Ruth Levitas as saying that a utopia is a social construct, a response to an equally socially constructed gap perceived between the current and the ideal.

  The broadening of the notion of Utopia from static perfection to something more complex, more paradoxical and wide-ranging—a collective desire for a better social arrangement—allows for a proliferation of classifications and categories. Writers too have added to the taxonomy; consider, for instance Le Guin’s yang and yin utopias. Of special interest to me is the notion that the experience of colonialism gives rise to utopian dreaming—including settler utopias, which are, as Lyman Tower Sargent notes, the colonialists’ dreams of a new and better world than the home they left, to be contrasted with the desire for freedom and self-determination that is the response of the colonized people. Sandeep Banerjee, in Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization, further subdivides the latter category, the utopias of the colonized, into anticolonial nationalist imaginings, which may be quite reactionary, and the open, contested, pluralistic space of decolonization. Of particular relevance to the talks I attended at Lingnan University is Anupama Mohan’s work Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literature, in which the village in India and Sri Lanka is examined as a site of both a pastoral utopia and a dystopia. Among other things, Mohan examines village-as-utopia in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, which led to literary, social-theoretic and on-the-ground experiments, anticolonial responses to British occupation. Rather like Banerjee, she divides literary utopias into two kinds: the homotopia, which is a vision of unified collectivity motivated by aggressive exclusion on the basis of some ideology, caste, or religion, and the pluralistic, open visions inspired by Gandhi and Tagore.