APOCALYPSE NOW

Emily Raboteau on mothering during the apocalypse

Lessons for Survival” is a collection of essays detailing motherhood on the precipice of dystopia. Emily Raboteau, author and creative writing professor at City University of New York, scrutinizes cultural identity, historic injustice and current events through the lens of climate change — a topic she follows with obsessive devotion to create a work both personal and global.

Early on, the book leans hard into X/Twitter-based activism circa 2016, repeating the well-known headlines of those who read the news at the time — the same people who might be drawn to this book.

She traverses New York documenting murals of endangered birds, laments the election of Donald Trump, and educates her young Black sons about how to interact with the police. But she follows these topics past this initial familiarity, delving deeper with each chapter.

Readers are dropped into Ms. Raboteau’s life with little warning. On page one, we are already exploring New York’s Audubon murals with a child in tow.

Sans lengthy character introductions, I briefly worried that I only cared about her children in the broad way that I care about all children. It was only later in the book that I realized (rather, Ms. Raboteau’s endless empathy taught me) that I don’t need to know the author’s children, or her friends, or her ancestors, to care about what becomes of them. The novel is a lesson in collective grief, and collective reckoning.

As a woman without children, I also worried Ms. Raboteau’s memoir on mothering wouldn’t be right for me. But her book let me see myself more clearly, as someone deeply fearful of the coming world, too scared to dream of a future, or of children.

A portrait of valor

“Lessons for Survival’’ is a portrait of valor. Ms. Raboteau stares fear in the face rather than turning away. Unlike me, she doesn’t have the choice to avoid confronting some of our nation’s bitterest conflicts; being Black in America doesn’t have an opt-out option.

Following the mural tour of New York City, the scope of “Lessons for Survival” widens as the author travels to Palestine, weaving the highly-political narratives of the residents she meets into broader global conflicts. Natural resources like water and food become tools of the powerful. Arab mothers worry about the violence aimed at their sons and daughters the same way Black American mothers worry about the systemic injustice levied against their children.

Ms. Raboteau doesn’t take the obvious route. She doesn’t delve into the coming water wars of the Western U.S. or spend time discussing carbon taxes or deforestation. The writing shines, instead, in the personal and cultural nuance, and the way they are inevitably intertwined with climate change and its inequality.

She described her grandmother Mabel, who was forced to flee with her children from the Jim Crow south, in passages so delicate they seemed to float: “She loved the song of cicadas, the sea foam at the dark hem of the water, the sharp sea-salt smell in the humid air, the dusting of talcum powder below the necks of the nanans, parrains, old aunties and cousins where they clasped her and held her tight, speaking their long-time love in Creole into her scalp, her temple, the shell of her ear.”

Two-thirds through the book, the theme shifts again, the book now organized into entries akin to a diary. They document conversations about climate change Ms. Raboteau fosters among her academic and international social circle.

These excerpts brought some much-needed, and much-appreciated, levity. A good friend battling an illness, when asked about the climate, is blunt: “Personally, I’m not that into the future.”

A fellow parent named Adam recognizes the shifting ecosystem of his childhood home on northern Long Island, which hasn’t heard frog calls in over a decade. “It’s like a postapocalypse version of my life: ‘Well, once the frogs all died, we shoulda known.’ Then I strap on a breather and head into a sandstorm to harvest sand fleas for soup,” he says.

Ms. Raboteau isn’t arrogant enough to claim to have solutions. Instead, she provides a diagnosis.

“Climate change is a crisis of communion; of our relationships with one another and with nature,” she writes. And what she offers as a provisionary treatment is pragmatic: solidarity.

I wasn’t aware how much I needed it.