BOOK REVIEW: Sympathy for black survivalists

Fifteen-million Americans are actively prepping, stocking up and skilling up for extreme catastrophes. That’s according to CBS News, which reported at the end of 2022 that it was Covid-19 that turned abstract apocalyptic scenarios into a reality, with many more people now spending money on survival materials.

But what does disaster preparedness mean in today’s America?

This question, as well as others about success, and how race, class, and location have an impact on making it in post-Trump US, lie at the heart of Kashana Cauley’s debut novel The Survivalists, published on January 10 2023.

Cauley is a writer for animated sitcom The Great North, and a former staff writer for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. She has also written for The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and the podcast Save America on HBO. So it’s no surprise that her satire on black survivalism, a topic that has not been explored in any great depth, is wonderfully entertaining and scathingly witty. It’s also peppered with moments of pathos.

The novel opens with ambitious black lawyer Aretha standing in front of a mirror, trying to decide what to wear to yet another first date, the third in a week, for which she holds out little hope. For Aretha, “loneliness had a noise to it, a hum like a running refrigerator had settled down right inside her head”.

A resident of overpriced, hipster Brooklyn, she has been striving to make partner at her law firm, but has instead been lumped with protecting their client, an insurance company, from having to pay out claims to people who lost their houses to Hurricane Sandy which hit New York and New Jersey at close to high tide. The result was catastrophic, but the claims are deemed “completely ridiculous”.

When she meets Aaron, the attraction is immediate. They both lost their parents at a young age, their lives forever altered by the tragedy. Ironically, he is a victim of Sandy, having lost his Greenwich Village apartment while his housemate waited out the storm skiing in Aspen, “where breathing costs a couple thousand dollars a minute”.

Aaron is an entrepreneur, owner of a coffee roaster and wholesaler: “Tactical Coffee ... because you don’t want to fall asleep during the apocalypse” the aggressive branding on the bag says. “The guy on the lower half of the bag was sprinting away from something in terror, with a full cup of coffee in one hand and a hunting rifle in the other.”

This should be a warning light for Aretha, especially after she meets his weird housemates: surly Brittany who has built a bunker in the backyard, and former journalist James, fired from the Washington Post and carrying a duffel bag with a pointy end. The house was broken into, Aaron explains, which has freaked them all out. It’s the “fear of calling the cops while black” that has them on edge. As she warms to Aaron and begins to let go of her cynicism, she feels herself “becoming so much less of a clenched fist posing as a person”.

In an interview with NPR, Cauley, who worked as a lawyer, says she grew up in a house that was concerned about disaster. Her parents stockpiled food and had guns. When she asked them why, they cited emergencies where the government couldn’t get to them to help. She started learning about white survivalists and how they could do things such as occupy land without getting immediately killed by the Feds.

The novel tackles the topic black survivalism in New York City, with Aretha becoming seduced by the idea of having control over something, when she has little ability to control any other aspect of her life. As she prepares to extricate herself from Aaron’s life, she finds herself on a strangely thrilling gun run in the boroughs of the city. When her job, and her very existence, is threatened by a wicked new hire at the firm, she is drawn into this dark, underground world of soya protein eaters and weapon stockpilers.

The New York Times Book Review calls it "[a] lethally witty debut”. “One might expect a novel about gun-toting, conspiracy-minded loners to lampoon its key players, but the book succeeds because Cauley appears as curious and empathetic towards the survivalists as she is towards her protagonist.”

As Cauley’s novel moves between reason and chaos, the writing is gripping and her depiction of New York vivid. And speaking of countries that don’t have the infrastructure any more to be able to deal with emergencies in a meaningful way, it’s likely to appeal to a lot of South Africans.