I am a South African writer in Joburg. I’ve been writing for most of my life, sometimes for the capitalism, and other times for myself.
Things changed when I was accepted into Wits’ MA programme for Creative Writing. The MA was an amazing experience, but after I graduated I found myself drifting.
Looking back I can see that the cause was that so much of my imaginative energies were focused on creating some form of post, pre-post and probably even some post-post apocalypse, mixed with a lot of dystopia too.
It was a thing of fatigue that I feel many of us share: That nearly all mainstream speculative narratives tell us that the best we can hope for is a dystopia. Or the fall of modern civilization, and the post-apocalyptic events that take place set up another hierarchy.
But even fatigue must pass, and in my case the resultant awakening and desperate searching led me to the Solarpunk movement, and importantly theory writers like Murray Bookchin and Dorothy D. Lee.
As a writer I believe very much believe in the profound power of human creativity and imagination. I believe that the ideas found in Solarpunk can offer us all a way to imagine a world that is not focused on growth simply for the sake of growth, but one where we can participate freely, as humans who are and have always been irrevocably equal to each other.