by Gracia Hernandez Rovelo and Ilgiz Khisavov

Thursday March 21, 2024

It’s a sunny day in Dolores Park in San Francisco’s Mission District, and Eman Abdelhadi is soaking up the warm spring sun and enjoying the pleasant March weather – a marked difference from Chicago, where she has flown from. Abdelhadi is sitting for an interview with Forum Magazine, sharing stories about her book Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072.

Later today, Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O’Brien will be speaking at CCSF’s Ocean Campus, at an event sponsored by One College, One Book; Associated Students; Women’s Resources Center, Project Survive; and CCSF’s Women’s and Gender Studies department. The CCSF community has been reading and discussing the book since fall. Tonight, students and faculty will engage in breakout discussions, a gallery walk and a discussion with the author about the future of humanity.

But right now, the park is lively, with colorful flowers adding to the picturesque scene, and Forum has questions:

Before starting this project with the book, was your life similar to what you’re describing now? Were you already focused on the same things that inspired this collaboration with another writer?

EA: This collaboration was something we did for fun. I mean, the book – it was my co-author M.E. O’Brien’s idea. She had written a fictional oral history for an online magazine. It was the Kyla Pawan interview, which initially she had published in an online magazine that no longer exists. She said to me, “Do you want to do a full novel of these fictional oral histories?” It made total sense, because I do oral histories for my academic research. You know, I sit down and interview people about their lives. That’s the main form of research I do. She and I have also been best friends for like 10 years, living a block from each other in Brooklyn. We know each other very well and share the same politics. So, it made sense to do this project. Also, as a fun note, she had run this role-playing game set in a world similar to the one in the novel. She said, “Oh, you can write up your character from the game.” One of the characters in the novel is based on my character from the game. Yeah, so I was like, “Okay, I could do that.” The funny thing is, I think we signed our contract in 2019. So, we ended up doing the bulk of the writing under lockdown in the pandemic. I think that’s inflicted in the novel, you know? There’s a big pandemic in the novel, but also a sense of like, it was very healing for me to exit the world of 2020 America and enter this post-revolutionary future through writing. Eventually, there were moments where I would leave my desk and be like, “Oh, man, that’s not where I live. I don’t live in liberated Palestine.” Actually, not yet. Yeah, like, I actually live in Chicago. So, that’s how it came about. At the moment, because of the pandemic, my life was much smaller. I was much more focused on my academic work. But, you know, I think the novel has opened up a new dimension of my life.

The book has an optimistic tone while a lot of speculative fiction is more dystopian. Can you speak to why you decided to envision a better future?

EA: I believe that both M. E. and I have dedicated significant time to social movements. It’s easy to feel pessimistic given the current state of affairs, as it seems very hard to imagine a way out of all of this. However, I think there’s a political imperative to imagining winning in our social movement struggles. In these spaces, we often neglect to engage in envisioning what freedom and liberation truly entail. It’s essential to ask ourselves, “What if we won?”

I think the reason the book has struck a chord is that it doesn’t just place us in a utopian future without acknowledging the dystopian reality we live in now and where it’s headed, right? We want it to do something that actually imagines a plausible transition, not just placing us on another planet where everything is good. Then you read it, and you’re like, “Wow, I wish I lived there,” close the book, and move on.

Why did you decide on the oral history format? What opportunities does this create in storytelling?

EA: I think, similar to what I was saying, oral histories do a good job of balancing between individual characters’ agency and the global structures of change. That’s why people use oral histories as research; they’re about looking at individual lives in social structures. We’re able to do that and go beyond New York and a specific timeline by staggering the ages of the respondents.

How realistic did you intend the book to be? How do you balance the futuristic and aspirational aspects of the story with the need for realism?

EA: I believe the book would not have been as effective if people didn’t find it somewhat plausible. I think we did think a lot about that. We had sketched out a version of the intro, like the version of the intro that has this sort of global timeline. We had written that and then wrote our characters and then realized, “Oh, wait, this doesn’t work.” Because as we wrote out the characters’ lives, the timelines didn’t make sense. We went back to the intro, and like, we rewrote it every workday. We wanted it to have plausibility, and I think that’s the power of the book, ultimately. The idea that there is a plausible way out of this particular mess, that ends somewhere better.

Many of the people interviewed in the book talk about traumatic events and even grapple with PTSD. How did you go about writing these moments in order for them to feel authentic?

EA: It helps that M.E. is a psychotherapist. I think that they wrote some of the more traumatized characters in the book, or she did. I think you can see some of the basic symptoms, especially with someone like Connor Stevens. I think having done a lot of interviews—M.E. used to run the Trans Oral History Project at the New York Public Library and has done dozens of interviews. I’ve done a lot of interviews as well, for my research, probably close to 200.

The book takes a global approach in some chapters. How did you decide which regions to focus on? To you, why was it important to have a perspective beyond the US?

EA: There’s an element of political theory there, and there’s an element of personal interests. I’m Palestinian, so to me, imagining a future world means imagining a free Palestine; that was my first instinct. But I think also where we place the chapter, there is a bit of political theory there, because the core macro theory of the book is that capitalism falls because there are too many crises for the state to manage. The proliferation of crises weakens state infrastructure until it eventually crumbles. It made sense to start in a place where the state is already weak. The Levant is an area with a lot of failed states like Syria, Lebanon, soon to be Israel. Inshallah, it’s in full self-destruct mode right now. It made sense to start there; it makes sense for the revolution to start in an area in which the hold of the state on day-to-day life is already very tenuous.

The West is where counter-revolution is, and it has the strongest states. Those are not unrelated things. It made sense to us that the last places to revolutionize would be places like the US or Europe. It felt important to start a global revolution elsewhere.

Are there any aspects of writing speculative fiction like this that are particularly fun or interesting to do? What are the hardest things about writing speculative fiction grounded in reality?

EA: The whole thing was fun. I mean, the hardest thing was to resist the impulse to answer every possible question. It was hard to allow a lot of ambiguity, the way we do in the book. It’s interesting because I’m actually a huge novel, I’m a huge fiction fan. I’ve read a lot of fiction. And, I like the traditional level, right? So it was hard to be like, okay, but this is not that. And that’s okay, you know? I think the difficulty is just like we’re writing many characters. So it’s very hard to have multiple characters feel authentic. There are moments even now when I reread parts of the novel, or it’s like, oh, I would have rewritten this paragraph to make it sound more conversational or whatever, you know, just because I think it’s easy to slip back into the mode.

What do you think are the priorities we must take now to avoid experiencing the chaos and collapse depicted in this book?

EA: Listen, I’m gonna give you the honest answer. I don’t think we can avoid the chaos and collapse. Like, I really just don’t. I mean, I think we can do a lot to protect each other and to set up communities of care right now. And I think we’ve already been doing that; the book is an ode to all of that, right? To the protest kitchens, to the mutual aid groups, you know, all the things that we actually have been doing to take care of each other, despite the fact that capitalism and the state push us to do the exact opposite. But I don’t, I don’t think I can really see a way forward that completely evades the collapse. Because this is untenable, right? This is a system that’s built on the hoarding of resources by a tiny and ever-shrinking group of people. And their incentive is to destroy everything in order to continue to hoard the wealth. And we’ve seen that, right? They’re destroying our planet, they’re destroying our communities, they’re destroying our liberties, and they’re increasingly making it clear that our lives don’t really matter when they get in the way. I mean, we’ve watched 30,000 people get killed in five months, openly on Instagram; you can just pick it up and watch atrocity after atrocity after atrocity. Yeah, and we’re experiencing one of the largest anti-war social movements in American history, probably since Vietnam. And they’re very arrogantly, like, “We don’t care what you think.”  I mean, what precedent does that set before us, right? It sets the precedent that this can happen, that the ruling class can decide that an entire population can just be ethnically cleansed. And so I think we fool ourselves if we think that it can’t be us, you know? I don’t know that we can avoid the collapse, but I think that we can create ways to care for each other through the transition. And I think we have to keep fighting and keep setting up the infrastructure of care that we want to see and wait for history to create the opening. But complete avoidance, I don’t think the state, I don’t think capital are going without a fight. Sorry to be so bleak.

In one of the later interviews, the interviewee asks O’Brien to describe something from the past. Can you speak to this choice? Why did it come about in this section and on this topic?

EA: I think M.E., and I’m totally speculating here because I actually haven’t heard her answer this particular question. I think she was trying to. And it’s true that when you do some interviews, there are people who push back, like, “Well, who are you?” You know, so it is kind of a plausible thing to have happened in an interview. But I think there’s a sort of hint about the author, right? Like, it’s sort of a looping back, I think. By the end of the book, you almost forget that we’re there as the interviewers. And for me, as a reader reading that part, it was like, “Oh, this was a nice sort of callback, especially towards the end of the book, to the fact that we as writers are also putting ourselves in this future, that our lives are also at stake, you know, in this world that we’re building.” And I will say, I mean, this is kind of tangential to your question, but I will say that I think one of the interesting things about writing this novel is to imagine a future in which we’re not the heroes, right? We’re not the heroes of this future. We’re two little old ladies who are like, I mean, we’ve both played our parts in the way that, I think, this is also a future without heroes, right? I mean, I think everyone is a hero. But, you know, we’re not the movers and shakers of this revolution. And so I think there’s a sort of, yeah, that felt important to write in a way.

For those who want to build a better future, what advice or next steps would you suggest? How can people bogged down in our current system make meaningful contributions to a better future?

EA: I would say, stay in movements, you know, stay fighting for the things that you care about. Continue to build communities of care. And yeah, keep visioning. You know, keep visioning a way out of this. Like, it’s enough that capitalism has such a huge hold on our lives. It doesn’t need to hold our imaginations. We can wrestle those back.

I think organizing, being very engaged in one’s local community and one’s kind of local politics, I think every social movement moment, every act of protest is a vision of the future. It’s a form of speculative fiction. I’m not the first to say that. I think the worst thing that one can do right now is to just feel totally resigned to all of this. And for me, you know, I’m a person of faith. I’m a practicing Muslim. And, you know, it’s helpful for me to be like, “Okay, all I can do is do my best with the resources that I have.” Right now, my resources are, I can organize this, I can go to this protest, I can fight for this thing,  and the rest is up to history or God or whatever your version is.