Acquainting Ourselves with Collapse
Building Imaginative Bridges Between the Current World and the One We Want to Inhabit
I graduated from Cairo University in 2008—the year the global economy collapsed. Ironically, at the time, Egypt was boasting exceptionally high GDP growth rates led by a very progressive and technocratic government.
It wasn’t long before that too collapsed and people took to the streets to protest income inequality and police brutality, among other things. There was a lot of momentum and, at one point, the police left the streets and civilians took shifts in the guerrilla checkpoints they created.
I didn’t know it at the time, but these were my initiatory experiences of collapse.
For the years to come saw power cuts, sit-ins, roadblocks, missing people, school shutdowns, and gas shortages to name a few. The arrival of COVID19, leaving supermarket shelves empty, wasn’t our first experience of empty supermarket shelves as Egyptians. And I am sure it’s safe to generalize this for the Global South.
We were already acquainted with the collapse.
The city
I was born, raised, and still live in one of the biggest capitals in the world. I only came face to face with the shapes of modernity when I traveled outside of the city for a longer stretch of time. Daily interactions with modernity meant that I wasn’t aware of its manifestations.
In Cairo, supply chains work, we have a place on conglomerate maps because of our purchasing power, because there’s so many of us. In places of less privilege (or, rather a different kind of privilege invisible to modernity), systems tend to work less efficiently and the government is less interested in making them work. There are a lot of make-shift, grassroot solutions that—in my own humble opinion—actually work. Like a good development economist, I saw it as a symptom of developing economies: informal settlements lining golf courses built in the desert.
One summer, I visited a much richer and more developed country. I visited a (magical) place in the Alps, a village of population ~80 with no cell reception. This was modern day Germany, far more advanced than back home. This happens in border cities in Egypt where reception is intentionally disrupted for security reasons—but I never expected to experience this in the Global North.
But have we considered the different ways collapse could look like? Collapse might mean the collapse of the internet and the global systems that tie us together. We might need to turn to ways of being that don’t come with the promise of comfort that modernity makes.
And still, collapse doesn’t always have to be miserable. I spent my days in the Alps away from my phone, not taking pictures of everything. Instead, I preserved memories of days that I will never experience again by taking them in fully. Perhaps this is the best remedy for collapse: presence.
Community when the world is burning
The world is burning and everywhere I turn, I see communities of support being built. To me, this is hyper-local, where I’m building both community and intimacy with my children. As a single mother, my children mirror both my failures and successes alike. A bit wider would be my relationship with my family of origin. Even wider is my spiritual community and wider still are networks and alliances that I’m a member of.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold defines kinship as “ongoing relations of care and nurturance” expanding belonging beyond our genetic relations. To me, kinship is what happens when you pair intimacy with community. Community alone doesn’t mean that you are unconditionally accepted by members of said community. Unconditionality comes through intimacy and when you add belonging to this, kinship is born.
Philosophical conversations are quite alluring when it comes to the nuance of community, but what we really need are practical solutions.
As a descendent of colonized people, I’ve looked to the colonizer for validation and models of growth and civilization. Now that systems are collapsing, we’re asked to look among and within ourselves—to remember what came before the silos and ivory towers.
Creative kinship: Attuning to the imagination
Creative kinship is remembrance and (of) the imagination. We need to cultivate kinship with the imagination in order to bring more generative futures forth. When working with the imagination, these are some of the assumptions I hold:
Everything is made of concentric circles
All is an experiment
No one is free of prejudices, and we need to be aware of the ones we hold
The world is going to end; we don’t have to be defeatist about it
I come from a people long framed as dangerous. Islamophobia is real and many lives have been lost to it. As I write this, there’s a need within me to also mention that “terrorism and radicalization” are real, too—I have been conditioned that terrorism and radicalization are niche to Muslims, a telltale sign of a colonized mind. In cultivating kinship with the creative, there lies an invitation to view things differently, to open our hearts to see beyond the prejudices we hold. It’s an invitation to imagine.
Closeness
That the world is going to end anyway and we don’t have to be defeatist about it offers an invitation to learn with the land. And here, I invite the concept of mujaawarah, or “neighboring”, a way of learning that is native to my home-region and has been used for over a 1000 years and I was first introduced to it through mo’alem Mounir Fasheh.
My idea of mujaawarah allows us to invite in the land and people we come from as keepers of wisdom and memory who might have input for our dreaming process. In that sense, they’re as important as our descendents and our present when it comes to listening for the future we want to bring forth. As we sit with the land and attune deeper to what is around us, avenues open up for us and our surroundings.
Naming contribution
We’ve been using accountability as a punitive tool where restoration and repair are needed. So instead of accountability, I’m naming “contribution.”
Contribution allows us to hold compassion for the failures we swim in. The only way to learn is to fail. What happens when the failures are too much and affect people unequally? Awareness of our contribution in spaces we belong and to the lives of people we build intimacy with is important.
It doesn’t have to be transactional, but ultimately, contribution has to be generous. Generosity is what comes after reciprocity. And yet, our contribution is not always going to be positive, and that will require repair. But who do we owe repair? Is it people we’re in community with or people we’re intimate with?
In spiritual communities, I find that intimacy and community tend to be conflated and convoluted. They’re not one and the same, and as people who’ve come to discover spirituality through the new age movement, we don’t always know the difference.
We don’t need to agree with everyone we’re in community with and that’s a surprise. As members of the same community, we’re weaving a single story, yes, yet we all have different parts and have different roles and perspectives within that story.
The chaos of desire
Existing within the cracks of present socioeconomic dynamics offers me a different view of things as an observer. I’m not trying to invite people into my little crack, I’m just pointing at things.
I ended up here because I desired a more fulfilling life. I landed head first into the chaos of not knowing what to do with my time or how to “earn a living” without a full-time job.
A similar chaos ensued after the then-president of Egypt stepped down in 2011 even though we got what we had desired, some even argue it was because we got what we desired.
In retrospect, we were building a felt, lived, tried and tested knowledge-bank of how to work together during collapse. It’s fresh in our memories: neighborhood civilian check points, pet dogs doing security checks, and code words to enter neighborhoods.
It had to be chaotic; homogeneity is an imported/imposed construct.
Concentric circles of care
The world that I dream of and the one that I currently live in are vastly different. The desire for something different is very chaotic and very discouraging. We’ve established that we care—what now?
We all strongly believe in at least one thing, and I believe we should expect intimacy with smaller circles within the circles of community we’re part of.
When things fall apart, we’re going to have to do it together. There’s a lot to learn about togetherness, slow living, and patience. What resources do we have available to us that are beyond financial? This is for us to find out and this is why I have this practice of micro-dreaming.
The big dream is there. And we can micro-dream our way to it. In this digital zine (micro-book), I outline the case for micro-dreaming and how to do it, while I also summarize the seas of collapse. Enjoy.
This article was written thanks to my fellowship from the Growth Institute.
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Please make sure you check out the Post Growth Institute website for more about their work. https://postgrowth.org/