Demanding The Impossible: Scales of Apocalypse and Abolition Time in N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth

Abstract

Demanding The Impossible:Scales of Apocalypse and Abolition Time in N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Jesse A. Goldberg (bio) As writer and educator Erica Meiners suggests: "Liberation under oppression is unthinkable by design." It's time for a jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible. —Mariame Kaba1 This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say "the world has ended," it's usually a lie, because the planet is just fine. —N. K. Jemisin2 The prologue of The Fifth Season, the first novel in N. K. JEMISIN'S Broken Earth trilogy, begins with the end of the world. Or, to be more accurate, it invokes "the end of the world" across repetition and revision through shifting frameworks of scale. "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?" the unnamed narrator asks. The reader then encounters multiple endings. First, the reader [End Page 625] witnesses a woman's world end when she sees her dead son, obviously killed by her husband. Next, they witness an unnamed man wielding unfathomable power literally crack the earth's surface. Then the narrative gaze scans upward, from ground to sky, only to be brought crashing back down to revisit the first ending and introduce the protagonist Essun's name. This repetition and revision of the world's end establishes apocalypse as a governing logic of the ensuing narrative economy and as a concept mappable across shifting scales of time and space. There is more than one world in/on the planet, and these worlds happen at different scales of time and space, including the individual body and personal lifespan, the borders of nations and empires and the historical time of Civilization, and the epochal scale of geologic, planetary time. And yet, these worlds overlap, such that apocalypse becomes at once "relative," because it happens to different worlds at different scales, and paradigmatic, because if you place these many scales appositionally you are faced with CHRISTINA SHARPE'S question about catastrophe: "How, after all, to split time?"3 Through shifting scales, The Fifth Season's prologue opens the "event" of apocalypse to unbounded time; that is, it eschews framing the end of the world as a singular moment with a discernible beginning and ending. This essay examines how this opening of apocalypse beyond bounded event-time through such shifting scales orients Broken Earth within what I call "abolition time" and thereby trains readers toward abolitionist thought through the literary emplotment of apocalyptic imagination. I understand abolition as a long tradition of liberatory work grounded in Black radical thought and resistance from the eras of chattel slavery to the present, and here I focus on how abolitionist thought is a kind of apocalypticism. Whether it be the Christian rhetoric of David Walker's Appeal, Angela Davis's imperative to "act as if it were possible to radically [End Page 626] transform the world," or George Jackson's fiery demand for the dissolution of the entire regime of property itself in Blood in my Eye, the abolitionist project carries the demand to, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore's words, "change everything."4 What Mariame Kaba calls "the horizon of abolition" requires a "jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible."5 It envisions a world where carceral regimes of violence and control are rendered obsolete by networks of care and accountability currently unimaginable within the horizon of the law's imagination of retributive justice.6 Abolition is thus a refusal of inherited terms of the possible and a demand for the impossible: to bring a different world into being. In this way, it is both a utopian and a world-ending project. And since, as Sami Schalk writes, speculative fiction can "open up for us new ways of being in the world that may not yet exist, but could," I follow her lead here to ask what Jemisin's Afrofuturist novels can open up for us as we jailbreak our imaginations.7 Broken Earth tells its story through...