Q&A with Emily Raboteau

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

 

 

Emily Raboteau is the author of the new book Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against "the Apocalypse." Her other books include Searching for Zion. She is a professor of creative writing at the City College of New York, and she lives in the Bronx.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Lessons for Survival?

 

A: My children. I'm mother to two Black sons. I dedicated the book to them. And children in general inspire me to write. I feel worried about their future because of the climate crisis, which has been described as a "threat-multiplier" to other crises that also endanger their lives.

 

The "lessons" aren't mine. They are lessons on survival I sought from people wiser than myself because I often feel so unfit to protect my kids from external harm.

 

I talked to indigenous people in Palestine and the Arctic. I talked to a woman who lost everything to Hurricane Sandy and now lives in a van. I would describe the book as a series of interconnected essays on environmental and social justice from the lens of motherhood.

 

Q: How did you choose the photographs to include in the book?

 

A: I'm a photographer as well as a writer. The book includes roughly 100 photos I took around New York City while composing these essays. Many of them are pictures of public art. Some of that art is political. I shot a lot of murals, for example.

 

The majority are photos of bird murals in upper Manhattan, representing bird species expected to go extinct by 2080 owing to climate change. Documenting the murals was a practice of contemplating impermanence. Street art itself is impermanent.

 

Q: How were the book’s title and subtitle chosen, and what do they signify for you?

 

A: The book's title was originally its subtitle. I wanted to call the book CAUTION: Lessons for Survival. I had taken a picture of a work of street art by artist Dee Dee Was Here in TriBeCa of a woman's face with her mouth muzzled by caution tape, and wanted to use that as the jacket.

 

To me, the image signified speaking truth to power despite danger. It reminded me of the myth of Philomela, who had her tongue cut out for renouncing her rapist, and was later turned into a nightingale. 

 

My publisher encouraged me to go in another direction. CAUTION seemed too negative a title to them, for marketing reasons. The new subtitle is Mothering Against "the Apocalypse." I like the use of mother as a verb, as an ethics of nurture and care required for these times.

 

I used quotation marks around "the apocalypse" because I don't believe these are the end days. Historically resilient communities have survived existential threats before now.

 

Q: The writer Terry Tempest Williams said of the book, “At a time when the disconnect between the violence and inequities surrounding race and the climate crisis is too often unseen and ignored, Raboteau makes this relationship clear through her moving inquiries and observations.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: I admire Terry's environmental writing and was grateful for the endorsement. A lot of readers equate environmental writing with nature writing. I myself used to do that. But we all live in environments. Even those of us who live in inner cities.

 

Terry's blurb points to the intersectionality of my book. It's a work of environmental writing. I wanted to show that the Black and brown poor living in frontline communities suffer not only first and worst from climate disaster, but from ongoing slow environmental disaster.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I'm on sabbatical finishing a novel about the intersecting lives and problems of the residents of a New York City cooperative apartment building, from the perspective of the building's superintendent. I'm interested in how we are called to come together in micro-democracies to fill the woeful holes in our social safety net. The working title is Endurance.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: For readers interested in learning more about how the practice of putting profit above human life has led to the compound crises we're entangled in now, I recommend Tao Leigh Goffe's new book, Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origin of the Climate Crisis.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb