Driving through Florida this spring, I reveled in the lush sensory environment. Seven years ago, I left the United States for Germany, and amidst the dulling blandness of my adopted country, I had forgotten how much I yearned for the rich sights and smells of my home state. As I traveled from Miami to Gainesville, I was delighted by the flute-like humming of the scarlet tanager, the lanky sabal palm trees scattered across the eastern coast, the heretical rain pounding on my parents’ rooftop, and the peeping manatees poking their heads out of the water near the Gulf shore. I was thrilled at the fragrant cuisine—the citrus-infused seafood, fried plantains, juicy mangoes, and black bean stews. But passing through the Florida country roads, I was confronted, too, with churches and gun shops—reminders of why, in this place teeming with growth, it felt impossible for me to imagine making a life.

As I traveled through the landscape at once fertile and hostile, I found myself turning to Emily Raboteau’s book, Lessons for Survival, a collection of essays grounded in the author’s perspective as a mother raising children in New York City amidst the intersecting crises of anti-Blackness and climate catastrophe. Well into my second trimester of pregnancy, I had been hesitant to read Raboteau’s book. I dreaded encountering what I already knew: that I was more likely than white women or non-Black women of color to deliver a child prematurely, more likely to die from childbirth, and more likely to have my pain ignored by the medical professionals tasked with keeping me safe. I suspected the book would be a familiar self-help guide, instructing me on how to prepare a child for an impending natural disaster or dolling out tips for delivering «The Talk» about navigating racism. But when I finally picked up Lessons for Survival, what I found was not individuating advice that redoubled the burden on those already most vulnerable to premature death but an invitation to accompany a sweetly soulful ensemble of New Yorkers who, despite being bombarded with «an ominous sign for the Rapture» and stop and frisk policing, or otherwise internally displaced by the forces of capital, practice for a world where they could affirm their right to prevail. This sometimes-joyful, sometimes-painful insistence on forging a life where so much is arrayed against it echoed loudly as I prepared to bring new life into this world, traversing the landscape I’d left behind.

Throughout my pregnancy, I’ve been shrouded by doubts about raising a Black child in a world where they will be misidentified, misperceived, and misunderstood. Nevertheless, I long for a red baby whose principles overpower the narratives that will try to break them—an anti-capitalist ecofeminist. And, given my six-figure student loan debt, the only things I can offer as a parent are my array of contemporary novels interspersed with Marxist literature. Like Raboteau, I want to orient my child (via books and literature) toward principles that soften some of the harsh material conditions of the world as an act of hope, a way to imagine—and, in so doing—to help bring a more life-sustaining future closer. «The pond is part of the place where we live (…). I observe the birds who stop there to bathe: warblers, tanagers, grosbeaks, sparrows (…). Some of them are endangered. A small reparation: I am teaching our children their names.» Raboteau and her husband can accomplish this because of their work committed to honoring their community’s natural life while acknowledging its fragility and resilience. By showing tenderness and care to other life forms, they see how the future of Black life is primarily bound to the preservation of the world.

Working through Racialization

I should not have been surprised that Raboteau’s book eschews the market demand for selling individual answers to structural problems. Raboteau, an essayist and novelist who is also a professor at The City College of New York, has long worked through the contingencies of racialized meaning. In her 2006 novel, The Professor’s Daughter, Raboteau untangles the history of Emma Boudreaux, who, like the author, has an African American father and a white-American mother. Following Emma as she uncovers the past that has haunted her father and brother, the text comprises a rumination on the contours of Blackness and the existential pressures of identity at the sometimes-vexed intersection of social perception and personal affiliation. In her nonfiction, Raboteau inventories the questions that ricochet endlessly in the fraught matrix of belonging: how does she conceive of her community in the United States and abroad? Her 2014 book Searching for Zion stitches this investigation to belonging to questions of place, chronicling Raboteau’s trip to Israel to visit her childhood best friend, a white Jewish woman named Tamar. The text is a reflection on Raboteau’s sense of belonging as a Black biracial woman in the United States, and general queries about what it means to seek a home.