The novel 'Ours' by poet Phillip B. Williams shows more of a road map than a utopia

Award-winning poet Phillip B. Williams' debut novel, “Ours,” begins with a death and a resurrection. A 17-year-old black boy stands up shortly after he is fatally shot by a police officer, as surprised as anyone else that he is alive. He is surrounded by the neighbors of the neighborhood: “Yes, they had left something to be together on that street, they had prevented them from touching it and they had told them to go back, they had yelled at them as if they were going to have as little as possible. care and consideration for the child like those who shot him.”

From this contemporary opening, Williams takes readers back in time to the 1830s, when a woman known as Saint travels through Arkansas, freeing the enslaved and indirectly killing their supposed masters. She takes them to an area near St. Louis and founds a town called Ours, which she intends to keep safe and hidden from the outside world using her magical powers. She's not sure where those powers came from. There are many things that Saint doesn't know, doesn't fully remember, but what she is convinced of is that to keep the villagers, called Ouhmey, safe, she must keep them physically close and emotionally at a distance, because “If there is anything else surprisingly unpredictable than freedom, is love.

Saint is just one of many characters whose stories unfold throughout this deeply absorbing novel. Others include Luther Philip and Justice, two children born free in Ours, whose intimacy ebbs and flows through changing times and needs; Frances, whose pronouns and gender identity vary depending on the eye of the beholder; and Joy, a young woman with a taste for vengeful violence, who accompanies Frances when the matrons of the boarding house she was staying with in New Orleans are murdered. Some spend less time on pages than others, but they are still important. Luther-Philip's mother, for example, Miss Love, leaves the scene long before her husband, Miss Wife, but her absence and the way it occurred resonates throughout the novel. Many of the characters' conflicts and questions are never fully resolved, but that is because “Ours” is a book that embraces mystery and the unknown, whether found in spells and rituals or the whims of the lifelong relationships.

Ours has a fickle relationship with linearity. (I suspect it is no coincidence that the title of the novel and the name of the city are homophones of “hours”). City dwellers pass by, reject, detour, travel, ignore or waste time. It has been interesting to see, then, how shorthand Attempts to describe The book has leaned toward the idea that ours is an attempt at utopia, a word that does not appear in the book.

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A truism of our times is that dystopia is already here, potentially a riff on a line. attributed to author William Gibson, which says something like “The future is already here. “It’s just not distributed very evenly.” dystopian fiction, John Scalzi wrote for The Times a few years ago, “let us simulate our worst imaginings from the private safety of our own homes, the better to avoid them in the real world.” The problem, of course, is that we have failed to avoid many pitfalls of dystopian fiction: a rapidly changing weather and his assistant human displacement; he raise of fascist ideas and rhetoric; an apparently widening income gap; several in progress genocides; billionaires building bunkers in case of any cataclysmic event worldwide. By many measures, the dystopias we've been imagining for decades no longer seem so escapist or fictional.

It is in this context that I have noticed an increase in recent fiction exploring possible utopias. Allegra Hyde’s “Eleutheria” from 2022, for example, follows her white protagonist to the titular island of the Bahamas and to Camp Hope, a commune trying to address the ravages of climate change by living differently. Last year, in Gabriel Bump's “The New Naturals,” a deeply disillusioned and grieving black couple attempts to create a utopian society in a bunker in western Massachusetts, where they hope to abandon the plagues of capitalism, politics, racism and global warming. . “Yours for the Taking” by Gabrielle Korn, published in December and set in a dystopian near future, presents the disturbing consequences that arise when a white billionaire boss decides to create a feminist utopia by cultivating a society without men, to demonstrate that in their absence, peace and harmony will prevail.

None of these novels end up fully endorsing their various utopias, nor is that their intention. Instead, they raise difficult questions about what is involved in trying to create an ideal society: What exclusionary compromises are made in the name of future equality? What fundamental human realities do we ignore in our fantasies of perfect harmony? What happens when a fundamental ideology works for some but not for others? Perhaps most tellingly, these books seem to conclude that it is largely impossible to fabricate a utopia, which is not to say that the project is totally unworthy, just that curating it will not be the way to achieve equality, security and peace.

I am cautious about codifying literary trends. In part, recognizing a trend often depends on the subset of literature one is looking at. Science fiction writers, for example, have long been interested in both utopias and dystopias, but those Hyde, Bump, and Korn novels were not presented strictly as science fiction. Another reason for my caution is that many “trend” labels emerge from what is essentially marketing language, from book publishers and advertisers, like the one presented to me by “Ours” as about the creation of a utopian city. For better or worse, this framing stayed with me as I read the novel.

Williams writes in his author's note at the end of the book that “Ours” is his attempt “to create a contemporary mythology of blackness in the United States of America.” He says that “his goal was to write an epic that takes place during the antebellum period, where slavery is not the main antagonist without ignoring or disappearing the enslaved.” In other words, the author's own framework does not include the idea of ​​utopia. Even so, his novel ends up demonstrating what a utopia can be.

Ours is a manufactured city, yes, created by Saint for the purpose of providing safety and freedom to her people, but she refuses to be its leader, and when her meddling causes harm, she suffers the consequences and loses Ouhmey's trust. In many ways, our 19th century runs itself, without the need for a mayor or a police force; It's a community effort in which people help each other when and as needed, even when they don't particularly like each other. They come together to protect the city when it is under attack, not because it is perfect, but because it is their home, where they find joy and sadness, love and heartbreak, where they relive the traumas of their past slavery while comforting each other. It is a messy, unpredictable and conflict-filled utopia, that is, human.

The beginning of the novel indicates that the city has changed dramatically in the almost 200 years of its existence, becoming what Williams calls a neighborhood rather than a city, suffering the same police violence carried out against blacks throughout the country, including the infamous Ferguson. Missouri, a real city that, like ours, is located on the outskirts of St. Louis. And yet, their sense of community remains intact.

In 2022 interview, Williams expressed his interest in navigating “the terrain of harsh realities without falling into the trap of valuing them,” recognizing that “rarely are moments simply pure in either direction: beautiful or ugly, peaceful or challenging.” Fictional utopias often fail because they refuse to dwell in complexity, insisting on a moral or ideological purity that ignores the lived realities of human beings and all their pains. In this sense, “Ours”, despite all its elements of magic, fantasy and mythology, is a realistic description of how we can reach utopia: through people who are always trying to become, always finding ways to navigate and survive harsh realities, always seeking moments of joy and intimacy.

Ilana Masad is a book and cultural critic and author of “All My Mother's Lovers.”