Contemplating dystopia in 2020, part 3
In dystopian fiction — indeed, in any fiction — I am interested in the act of surviving itself, not the triumph we hope it’ll lead to. Sometimes characters won’t win, and that doesn’t make their fight unworthy. The same is true of our real lives.
I’ve long felt this way, but I didn’t fully grapple with it until reading Ta Nehisi Coates’ essays about the Obama years, collected in his book We Were Eight Years in Power. If you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend that you do — the essays and commentary are incredible, and not just with respect to what they specifically address. They recount parts of history not taught much in schools; they explore Coates’ strikingly wise way of navigating the world; they are beautifully written in a way I can never hope to emulate. Go add this book to your Goodreads list right now!
One particular idea stood out to me, shaping how I’ve understood all that 2020 has thrown at us:
“Resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the lifespan of the resistors, almost always fails.”
We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Some people might find this demoralizing, but in truth, making it through rough days and terrible events is in itself demoralizing. Protests are long slogs that move progress very slowly. The people of Portland were out in the streets for more than a hundred nights and are still not victorious — and, of course, the racial justice issues that sparked those protests are generations in the making. If you can’t bring yourself to believe in the power of the actions themselves, it will exhaust you.
He goes on to declare something even more revelatory.
“The larger story of America and the world probably does not end well. It is a tragedy.”
As in Shakespeare, the main difference between a tragedy and a comedy is the ending. We can’t know how it ends, and ultimately, in the moment, it doesn’t matter. But our hearts will be less frequently broken if we let ourselves experience the comedy of the moment in spite of the impending tragedy rather than relying on a future happy ending to feel okay each day.
Because, as he says, “There [wil] be no happy endings, and if there [are], they [will] spring from chance, not from any preordained logic of human morality.”
We cannot force our own success or even our own survival, but still they might come. And we need to be ready to receive them if they do.
In an interview in 2017, he added, “Every human life ends badly. But we accept this and the decision we make as human beings is that it matters what happens in-between.” To me, there is nothing more beautiful than that.
Whenever I read a book about a dark period of history, like World War II, it’s comforting to know how it will end. But at the time, people didn’t know whether it would work out. They didn’t know if they would survive to see peace — or survive until the next day — and yet they had to keep living. This is, of course, obvious, but I find myself marveling at their resilience and ability to get through each day in the face of perilous uncertainty over and over again. When things are dire, the future feels even less tangible. There’s no comforting routine to project forward, like a hallucination, into the coming days. And yet people keep moving anyway.
We never know if we’ll succeed. In fact, most of the time we won’t — the peak above us is probably a false summit; reaching it will only reveal how much further we still have to go. But that doesn’t make the struggle futile. We often are making progress, even if it is invisible. And even if we aren’t in fact progressing, our efforts are still worthwhile. Sometimes, resistance is itself the point. Sometimes you’ll lose over and over again, but that’s okay. In the grand scheme of human history, there have been more losers than winners, but there was dignity and worth in their fight.
I want to remember this always, and I want my stories to feature characters who learn this or embody this. Humans survive; it’s what we do.