Premee Mohamed Reviews Julietta Singh's The Breaks

The Breaks: An Essay. Julietta Singh. Coach House Books. $20.95 CDN, 160 pp., ISBN 9781552454350

Meeting This Devastation Head-On

I confess I went into this review deliberately knowing nothing about the author; I hoped Singh might introduce herself to me over the course of the text. This approach succeeded, I think. She shows all the facets of herself as mother, daughter, partner, traveler, activist, and academic. 

Even the front cover delivers an introduction. The contrasting colours suggest division, opposition. Between them lies a border not straight but uneven, suggesting disputed lands on a map, something drawn by struggle rather than diktat. 

The structure of The Breaks will be familiar to readers who love long-form personal essays, though it is actually both an essay and a letter to Singh's young daughter, presumably to be read when the daughter is old enough to understand the level of language. I'm not an academic, however, and I found the writing accessible and emotional. The quoted works are curated carefully and are always interesting. In fact, the character motivations are more realistic and better illustrated with action and dialogue than some fiction I've read.

The essay covers several areas, beginning with answers to the unspoken question, "How do you decolonize a six-year-old?" Singh describes her daughter's experiences with Western media and white-centric narratives, leading into tricky discussions of conflicting worldviews. In this day and age, who can a child trust? Parents? Other authority figures? And what to do when they're all sharing opposed narratives? How do you parent under those circumstances?

What I might call the main theme of the essay is the idea of ‘progress’ and how we, as a collective, need to grapple with it instead of persisting with the historical definition. Singh says she is “learning to mother at the end of the world” – a world that is changing faster than our reactions. What ‘progress’ means – what ‘civilization’ means – is very different from what we were taught, and it should be different. The essay moves seamlessly from memoir to anthropology as it probes uncomfortable subjects: How do young people now differ from those in the past? Has the past prepared children to live in the future? Has it ever? Can we prepare children for not just the rapid deteriorations of real climate, but also the political, racial, and gender climate?

While I was reading, I kept thinking of the 'apocalyptic residual' discussed by tactical strategists trying to calculate the likelihood of the Cold War turning hot: this idea that you cannot de-program a certain inevitable portion of the population, you cannot reason away their beliefs, you just have to ensure that they never get their hands on something that can cause global catastrophe. Climate change is our new apocalypse, and the difference now is that instead of fearing the actions of a tiny, dangerous group of people or even an individual acting without sanction to set off nuclear weapons, the end of the world is coming because we are all incentivized to participate in that end. The residual now is not even climate denialists; it's the majority of people who say 'Yes, what we're doing is bringing about the end of the world, but nothing we do will make a difference anyway, so we may as well not bother.' When Singh discusses her desire to “abolish the cultivation of innocence,” in children, under supervision and with the goal of building protection using knowledge and facts, I found myself wondering how many of them might succumb to becoming part of that residual despite our best efforts to educate them. To give in to hopelessness, to a 'Why bother' attitude, is something that Singh observes as being tempting both to individuals and to parents. After all, if your child is surrounded by narratives saying disaster is inevitable, or even narratives insisting it's better to not tell children how bad things have gotten (letting them retain their 'innocence'), it's hard work to push back against it at home. And it's work that will have to be done again and again to build a hopeful counter-narrative.

I personally identified with Singh at many points, particularly in her relationship and those of her family to race; she mentions her father being “trained” to desire whiteness in a way that sounded similar to my own. Desirability, assimilation, and proximity to whiteness were never discussed explicitly in her family. And implicit in these discussions not being had was also the idea of progress, civilization, what it meant to be “advanced.” Singh's visit to India was a high point of the essay for me because the curiosity of her extended family about her immediate one was a dynamic I'm familiar with. The questions they ask, like 'What kind of person has your father become?' and 'Why won't he speak to us?' are difficult for a child to answer no matter how old they are. There is a history of personal decisions and traumas that only her father could describe, a history from which she has been excluded.

I also loved the discussions of queer family and its relationship to architecture, property, and the generally heteronormative, amatonormative setup of Western society: the physical reflects the historical, the historical reflects the social. Houses, whole cities, are ceasing to meet people's needs because the past that constructed them was not set up for this particular present.

Overall, the book is hopeful rather than fearful; it highlights and deconstructs the ways the current sociopolitical system deincentivizes protests and community-making. As someone who's childless and observes kids from a distance, I loved the clarity and courage of her daughter's observations about the difficult issues that are becoming commonplace in her life. Sometimes I feel like fear of the future is turning into a kind of ground-level ozone we're constantly breathing in, dangerous and ubiquitous, but Singh's book presents a way to combat that feeling by performing “an intimate, unrelenting experiment in unlearning the world we've inherited.” 

Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She is the author of novels Beneath the Rising (Crawford Award, Aurora Award, British Fantasy Award, and Locus Award finalist) and A Broken Darkness, and novellas These Lifeless Things, And What Can We Offer You Tonight, and The Annual Migration of Clouds. Her next novel, The Void Ascendant, is the final book in the Beneath the Rising trilogy and is due out in March 2022. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus and on her website at www.premeemohamed.com.