He, She, And Apocalypse

Marge Piercy on the end of all and a better (Jewish) future.

Marge Piercy’s 1991 novel He, She, and It isn’t exactly a post-apocalyptic novel; her future world doesn’t end, and doesn’t necessarily seem like it’s about to in the near term. Still, there are a lot of little apocalypses scattered around in it—small scale disasters, of perhaps mildly more intensity than those you can see anytime you turn on the news. The greenhouse effect has pushed temperatures up worldwide; the sky is no longer blue, and going out into daylight without protective gear is potentially fatal. Plagues, famine, and infertility caused by toxic waste and radiation has reduced the earth’s population by half. Most dramatically, a nuclear terrorist attack and subsequent war utterly destroyed Israel and most of the Middle East.

In a post on The Hooded Utilitarian, Jimmy Johnson pointed out that most mainstream apocalyptic visions ignore the existence of indigenous people, and, therefore, the existence of prior apocalypses. From the perspective of Native Americans, the European invasion looks a lot like the end of the world—and not less so because that end, with all its violence and humiliations, has been grinding on for 500 years and counting. Fury Road, The Walking Dead, Y: The Last Man, and other big apocalyptic narratives often reference or nod to this colonial past—The War of the Worlds explicitly mentions England’s colonial adventures, for example. But indigenous peoples, or for that matter the oppression of marginalized peoples, is mostly ignored, erased by the giant whomp of one-size-fits-all-world’s-end. Everyone on earth is flattened in the same way; the earth becomes one, united in despair and disarray by an end that doesn’t play favorites, and so is unable to assimilate all those ends that did.

He and She and It‘s more heterogeneous apocalypse has a little more give. Most of the main characters are Jewish, and a parallel narrative links the city of Tikva, under siege from multinational corporations in the future, to the violence directed at Jewish ghettos in Europe in the past of the 1600s.

Less central to the story, but significant, is the fate of Israel itself. Though everyone assumes that the nation was utterly destroyed, it turns out a small group of people still live there. Nili, an assassin from the new Israel, explains:

We are a joint community of the descendants of Israeli and Palestinian women who survived. We each keep our religion, observe each other’s holidays and fast days .We have no men. We clone and engineer genes. After birth we undergo additional alteration. We have created ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land. Soon we will begin rebuilding Yerushalaim.

In his essay, Johnson suggested that an apocalypse for the colonizers might look like salvation for the colonized. That seems to be exactly what Piercy has imagined. The old order of occupied and occupier was wiped from the earth, and in its place there is, not a two state solution, but a single feminist utopia, obliterating the distinctions between Jews and Muslims, and obliterating too the hoary trope of indigenous misogyny. The mistreated women in their burqas who the west supposedly must save? They’re cloning themselves without men now in vats, and coming back, perhaps, to save you. More, many of the surviving Jews are dark-skinned, since, as Malkah, a Jewish grandmother and cyberneticist explains “the black Jews from Ethiopia had a higher survival rate in the catastrophe than any other group. They remembered how to manage in utter disaster.”

Apocalypses are often about appropriation of indigenous experiences; the Martians invading England as England invaded America, the totalitarian nightmare of 1984, built, surely, from Orwell’s experiences being the totalitarian police in Burma. He and She and It, though, doesn’t appropriate other people’s experiences. Instead, it picks up the Jewish history of diaspora and oppression,and tries to imagine a future that honors that history rather than Israel’s current, ongoing colonial infliction of apocalypse.

Honoring the history of oppression means you have to remember the history as oppressor, too, though. Malkah talks about reading “a poem by Mara Shliemann that everybody but the Orthodox use these days, about the heritage we share now of having had a nation in our name as stupid and as violent as other nations: a lament for a lost chance, a botched redemption.” If the Holocaust was an apocalypse, echoing the pogroms in Prague, the Israeli occupation is another. Both are part of Jewish history now, the novel says, no matter what disaster befalls. And that means that any disaster for Jews has to be looked at in at least two ways, and any utopia does as well.

Malkeh journeys to Israel at the end of the novel in the hopes of having her sight restored; the Jewish/Palestinian Israel is behind the rest of the world in some things, but it has made great advancements in artificial enhancements, including eyes. After the apocalypse, we may see better what difference offers. One apocalypse is a disaster, but if you’ve got enough of them, some may be opportunities. As Karmia, a woman who may be Jewish or may be Palestinian, tells Malkeh, “If we can love a date palm or a puppy or a cyborg, perhaps we can love each other better also.”

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This first ran on the Hooded Utilitarian.