This essay compares Jordan Harrison’s play Futura, with bell hooks’ “Salvation : Black People and Love”, by highlighting the importance of intention, Futura’s character’s motivations, and what a piece of writing loses when context is tossed aside.
Harrison’s Futura speaks to its audience and the ongoing time we find ourselves through the lens of fiction that hits just a little to close to home to blandly state the piece as “simply a work of fiction”, with your chest. Futura and its lessons stick to your ribs like a good stew on an otherwise chilled, foggy day.
Like many good stories, it touches on many contested real-world issues and power structures-such as the developing surveillance state, and different or a singular company’s role in its enforcement and data collection. Even in a perfect panopticon however, there is always hope of a better world in which a nation, city, or building can be better than it is today.
This is the role Lorraine, also known as the professor represents so well.
Pushing for the most viable and realistic possibility of such hope, Lorraine is able to see the value of writing, text, and the physical book’s ability to connect us back to our roots, in order to better understand or contextualize the roots and histories that allowed different authors to share their knowledge with the world.
It is no coincidence that the Professor speaks on this, and more in a heated debate with her recently found husband Edward. Speaking on, and providing a foil between the couple’s different aspirations for the future and a better world, Lorraine shares that “It used to be enough for me that I would die before these things happened… But now that I’m old, it’s not enough- I want to save the future”. I cannot overstate the importance that Lorraine carries to this story past the confines of the pdf I read Futura on.
Although both Edward and Lorraine’s ideal are subject to a fair amount of critique in regards to implementation and organization, Lorraine’s ideals represent so much more for the argument of the importance of contextualization and history of a single author. Whereas Edward now wishes to have the Zero Drive be “edited by everyone”, Lorraine harps on the importance of the “solitary genius” and the “singular mind”. This is not because she wishes to credit the one person who wrote Relativity, or the genius behind a certain play she loves, but to further historicize and ensure that readers know who is saying what. Without this historicization, there lies a disconnect she plans to address “at the source” by building up her library of Alexandria: a collection of at their time ancient copies of physical books made to preserve past authors wills and specific historical nuance.
On the contrary, Edward’s end goal relies on the very structures that have oppressed him and his society so. Believing that if he and Gash were able to knock out enough of the panoptic drives, even at the potential cost of others’ lives as Lorraine pointed out, Edward believes this calculated cost that would be worth it in the end if the Zero drive could once again connect and educate the world. Edward goes on to ignore Gash in this conversation, even when speaking about his and others inability to write in front of him. When Gash states “I’m right here”, Edward goes on to not even address him. Later in the novel, Lorraine takes the young boy into her Library of Alexandria and shows Gash what books are before teaching him how to write. Here we see Lorraine honoring Gash’s humanity in the act of her meeting him where he is at, without judgement. The books, and their merit become more than relics of the past in this moment, and Lorraine’s point rings clear: slowing down with a book written by a specific person with specific flaws and historical circumstances greatly benefits readers and their community in our own time-period. In this she justifiably leaves Edward and his solely future pointing ideals in the past, and for good reason.
Day to day, and an ongoing resistance from the status quo is to be expected, especially in a late, authoritarian future such as the one Futura depicts. Even in these difficult times, the importance of knowing one’s roots in fighting for a better future out of care for community is imperative to understand and embody, for “The transformative power of love is the foundation of all meaningful social change. ” (hooks). It is key to understand the message hooks’ quote cannot powerful without the source material, specific person, and the reason that led hooks to share this with her audiences. hooks, who grew up in Hopkinsville Kentucky, taught across the nation, and even eventually Berea, died in Kentucky. The prominent feminist thinker chose her name to be remembered in lowercase for a reason. Both the b in bell and the h in hooks are to be written as such. As hook’s name stands for a lesson in respecting a curator’s choice, her novels speak upon the importance of community and love in Salvation: Black People and Love. Because the black identity has historically been contested through history of negative and pervasive minstrel caricatures specifically made to further oppress black people, this book was important to be written to other black people as her primary audience. Unedited. Even if I myself- a white student in 2023- can learn a great deal from the messages she wrote to her community, if we erase her primary audience, name choice, demographic or specific relation to her community, the book ceases to be written by hooks herself. Context in this example is imperative to be understood.
Edward as depicted in Futura does not grasp, or seemingly care about this. Unlike Lorraine he is willing to erase people like hooks of their personhood, and starve those like Gash of context and an understanding of how the past continues to shape our world today.
What is more in this vein is that, we can almost assume that Edward has not read those such as bell hooks. One of her main themes in both the above quote and throughout her works is how hooks reminds her community about why she and others fight. It is not simply out of anger, even if anger is not out of the question. Her fight is out of love and the remembrance that she is part of a collective identity that has been purposely misconstrued. Simply destroying collective ideas about blackness is not enough. Building back in a way that centers and considers humanity of the oppressed diaspora she is in community with is an integral part of the work she wrote.
Similarly, Edward’s ideas of destroying the panopticon without the consideration of those like Gash who have been systematically made illiterate to all but the Zero Drive’s writing is but another example of his incomplete theory of change. You cannot simply destroy a powerful structure that pervades so much of Futura’s society without replacing it with something more convincing or powerful. The more we examine his character, the more we can guess just how many books he read after they were edited, instead of ensured to carry specific messages opposing the hegemony their society faces.
It is because of this disparity and obvious foil that Lorraine’s acknowledgement of both history, the future and regard for mortality makes such a strong case to the author and Gash. Showing the reader that she places a higher value than Edward on strangers’ lives, Lorraine is immediately opposed to the potential bombs that could cut off life support by hospitals. As previously discussed, she also is more willing to engage in humanity in someone not as intelligent or as knowledgeable as her. Whereas we see multiple examples of Edward taking after his captors and simply trying to extract things from different people in the play, such as his kidnapping of Lorraine and his grinning at the fact that Gash is not a good liar, Lorraine can be considered an example of someone who has a real community as well as an imagined community: a community of people you may not ever know personally or the names of that one considers and relate to in how one relates to and acts in the world. Through these choices of Futura, and the likability of Lorraine throughout the play, we can consider the making of Lorraine’s character a nod from Harrison to the audience an acknowledgement in the importance of regarding and centering humanity when conducting social change. Lorraine and hooks alike are able to acknowledge this in action because of the fact they acknowledge other individuals and demographics differences and wills past what they can do for them alone. It is through this acknowledgement Lorraine, and hopefully Futura’s readers leave the text more apt to be agents of positive change through a deep understanding of historical context.
Works Cited:
1. hooks, bell. Salvation : Black People and Love. 1st ed., William Morrow, 2001.
