The current issue of the pro-environment, anti-capitalist, power-to-the people periodical Adbusters does what they do so well:
- Co-opt/appropriate mainstream advertising campaigns and bomb them with anti-consumerist or just non-sequitur text;
- Cut & paste snippets from op-eds and books to deliver potent social commentary
- Present investigative think pieces that horrify you at what governments and corporate fat cats around the world are doing to the earth and its citizens
- Give space to first-person essays that really drive home just how personal the geo-political is.
It’s that last item that really sings in the current issue (May/June 2015; headline: Manifesto for World Revolution).
The first-person essay is, potentially, one of the most powerful tools in any writer’s arsenal. But it has become a hackneyed go-to item in which the wounds of personal traumas and dramas overwhelm critical distance and substance. From entertainment journalism to “hard” news, we are now drowning in navel-gazing that is passed off as urgent reading fare.
There are many reasons for that, but one of the most obvious is the widespread push across disciplines and arenas for individuals to create and tend their personal “brand” (a true tooth-grinding concept and practice) and thus mine their own lives for “content” (more teeth grinding here.) The writer is the product talking about… whatever.
That’s why it’s so refreshing, low-key subversive, and ultimately fitting that Adbusters, with their fierce commitment to celebrating humanity and dismantling the various global apparatuses that dehumanize us and our world, be an outlet for first-person essays that tap the specific in order to get at things that are universal in scope or meaning.
Tucked in between lifted and bitingly re-tooled ads of actor James McAvoy hawking Prada and literary giant Joan Didion glaring for fashion house Celine, is a powerful piece by Pedro Inhoue, who works as a designer for Adbuster. Writing from Sao Paulo, in the piece titled “In the darkness, Sao Paulo, February 2015,” Inhoue gives an intensely personal tour through the lived aftermath of hybridized government corruption, corporate malfeasance, environmental devastation, and crumbling infrastructure.
Related: The Life and Art of Renaissance Man Amiri Baraka
The piece begins simply, “I am writing by candlelight.” Its penultimate two-sentence paragraph is: “My wife comes to me and in a low voice asks what we are going to do. ‘I don’t know,’ I reply.”
In between is this stark, gorgeous writing:
It started with an irony that may well be the perfect metaphor: the largest city in a country that holds 20 percent of Earth’s fresh water supply ends up without any. A combination of climate change, years of deforestation, privatization and a badly managed and corrupt political system have come together in a perfect storm to throw my city into one of its darkest crises ever. We now face a reality of four days without water and two with. We might as well call it what it is: a total collapse.
Imagine a megacity like São Paulo as schools are forced to close, hospitals run out of resources, diseases spread, businesses shut down, the economy nose dives. Imagine the riots, the looting … what the police force, infamously known as one of the most violent in the world, will do as this dystopian scenario engulfs us. One of the great modern, rising capital cities of the world suddenly falls apart.
And this:
This is personal … it’s about everything I love. And you have no idea how terrifying it is. It’s the kind of fear that you have no control over, that makes you grind your teeth at night while you sleep. There’s no language to describe this feeling of dread. No way to fix it. No time to fix it. This is the future that science warned us about. The new normal. And the truth is, I never realized it could happen so fast and that my friends, family and I would be forced to live through it, suffer like this.
Read the full essay here.
