Maintaining religion in a post-apocalyptic setting – Jewish & Hindu Emphasis
A lot of the signs of Jewish devoutness are things you can totally do in a postapocalyptic setting. I mean first of all, you can break any rule to save a human life, so if you’re not supposed to kindle a flame on Shabbat but you have to light a fire to not die, then you’re fine.
But anyway. Shabbat is about rest and renewal, so your character can take one day in every seven, starting at sundown (Friday night if they have a way of knowing what the days of the week were in the Before Times!) to rest, say the special prayers – if they’re devout enough to be “devout” as you said in your question, they’ll know a lot of this stuff by heart – and refrain from the kind of work you do on weekdays. Like maybe if they’re a posthole-digger they don’t dig any post-holes on “Saturday” morning.
Not eating pork, shellfish, rabbit, the back end of beef, and bugs is another thing – but again, people did wind up eating all kinds of whatnot in the Warsaw Ghetto – these rules aren’t meant to be dying over. If they know when Passover is in this world they can leave off eating bread for a week and maybe even cobble together a makeshift seder from memory.
If you have a married woman and she’s Orthodox she can still cover her hair. If she’s not Orthodox this is probably not an issue.
If they have any way of knowing when Yom Kippur and Tisha b’Av are, and it’s safe to do so, they can fast.
Especially if they’re Orthodox, they can start the day with the morning prayers. If this person is Orthodox and menstruating, and there’s water in which to do so, they can say the mikveh prayer while taking the bath after their period is all finished. (I’m Reform but I find comfort in this kind of thing, too.)
If we’re talking about someone who wasn’t raised in the normal world – I was assuming the apocalypse in this was recent, but I mean if they’ve never known normal-Earth – then they might have learned all these things by rote from parents or community instead of from going to temple.
This, plus living up to Jewish values like tikkun olam (healing the world) and tzedekah (justice) and all that – that’s all it takes to feel like good/satisfying rep to me.
–Shira
As I’ve probably mentioned before, the term “Hinduism” is kind of a misnomer, as it implies that there’s one such thing. If Christianity or Islam are families of sibling belief systems that share obvious commonalities, “Hinduism” is a huge family of distant cousins, groups of which often don’t seem to have much of anything in common and you just have to take their word that they’re related. If you look hard, there might be a family resemblance.
I often think about this when confronted with the question of how I’d live my life in a post-apocalyptic wasteland (and this is something I consider with alarming regularity these days). Which are the parts of my upbringing that are actually important? What of it have I already jettisoned by choice or changes in circumstance and what more would I? And what of it is silly garbage that’s going to get me killed by the next band of water bandidos marauding the blasted hellscape that is New New York City?
Anything that you might broadly categorize as a religion has aspects that range from the ritualistic to the philosophical so of course Hinduism is no exception. I’d posit that extreme ritualism and extreme navel-gazing are both things likely to get you shanked by bandidos so in the interests of survival your character is probably going to want to tread a middle path. Any rules against eating beef are probably out the window (unless it just makes them sick regardless). So is strict adherence to doing a morning prayer or yoga, or meditating so deeply you don’t notice the bandidos coming. On the other hand, there may be good reasons for maintaining dietary restrictions (e.g., you can’t trust that any food grown outside the Safe Zone isn’t deadly). Meditation can relieve stress and you could probably use some stress relief after the apocalypse. However, arguably these markers are matters of culture rather than belief (that is, not all Hindus eschew beef or practice meditation; those that do do because they were exposed to the concept somewhere).
This is a hard question to answer because it would really depend what kind of Hindu background this character comes from and how (if relevant) they related to their culture “before the fall” so to speak. They may identify with one particular deity due to their circumstances (for example, Vishnu, to preserve the world they do have; Shiva or Durga, as a reflection of the destruction that presumably brought about said apocalypse, and from which there will hopefully come renewal; or Ganesh, to remove the obstacles they surely encounter every day). I should note that were it me in that position, any identification with or invocation to a god would probably be extremelysarcastic: the gods didn’t prevent the apocalypse, why the hell would they help me now? Again, it depends on the character’s personal outlook.
You might also consider some of the relations elemental factors have to most Hindu rituals and how that might change in this environment. For example: water, light, fire, and food are all typically revered or at least valued greatly.
– Water is a life-giving resource and many Hindus revere rivers. In a wasteland, protecting clean and safe water might very well have sacred significance as a matter of literal life and death.
– The divine is often thought to dwell in food and sustenance and gods receive offerings of food at festivals. You may not be having very many festivals but the value of food may be thrown into stark new focus.
– Does this world lack for sunlight, warmth, or energy? Orthoprax Hindu priesthood often revolves around keeping a sacred fire. In a world where flame is the power source of a community, for example, the person who keeps the fire going could very well think of it as a sacred ritual, and maybe that’s a connection to the beliefs or practices they or their family held before. You can even abstract it a bit more. What if a postapocalyptic community runs off some relict solar panels? Some character might see that as very literally depending on the sun for their survival.
If there is one thing that unites most flavors of Hinduism, it’s the notion of dharma, which is hard to translate, but loosely means “order” or “duty,” or more generally “that which is established or held firm.” So, what about this character holds firm? I’d say in such an extreme circumstance, devotion or religious practice is more than just throwing out the names of some gods every now and then to remind people of your roots (especially if you keep praying for help and it never comes). It’s more about how you conduct yourself in relation to the world, and when you reach back into those old virtues ingrained in you by your family, how you exercise them relative to nature and the people around you when literally may not be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow. It’s not easy but the apocalypse rarely is.
Are there any works in the post-apocalyptic genre with post-apocalyptic librarians? People who worked in the public library and after the Bad Thing decide to stay and keep the library clean, safe and available for anyone who needs it. People can’t remove books from the premises anymore, because they’re too precious, but you can stay as long as you want and read them or copy them out–the librarians encourage making copies, so that the information can circulate beyond the physical boundaries of the library.
After a while it becomes an unspoken reality of the post apocalyptic society that you Just Don’t fuck with the library. You don’t fight there, you don’t steal from it, you don’t allow harm to come to librarians when they have to leave the building for supplies.
People donate food and books and paper with no expectation of reciprocity, because the librarians don’t ask for anything when you need a place to hide or information or, fuck, to read a schlocky crime novel because you need to escape reality in some purple prose.
Also consider: a library has a duplicate book, and wants to hire mercenaries to transport it to a library that doesn’t have a copy of that book. The most well known mercs in the world show up to volunteer for the job because they haven’t read that one yet.
… this may be the prompt that gets me off my ass and writing again.
It’s not librarians, but Dies the Fire by S M Stirling has as one of it’s power city-states the City of Corvallis, centered around Oregon State University.
This is also a series where a group of Wiccans face off against the SCA for power in Oregon.
I had an interesting series of thoughts at work today.I started off thinking of a solarpunk zombie apocalypse story – society has collapsed, survivours rebuild from the ashes with solarpunk tech and the like while dealing with zombies, marauders, bandits and other threats. I was enjoying the idea until I realised something:
The post apocalypse genre is inherently ableist.
How often do you see disabled people in post apocalypse fiction anyway? Not very – off the top of my head I can think of Eli from The Book of Eli, Tomonaga Ijiro and Joe Muhammad from World War Z (the book) and Davis, Jodie and Jennifer from Dead State. Everyone else, able-bodied and neurotypical, with nary a chronic illness in sight – anyone who isn’t 100% mentally and physically “normal” is left behind or dragged along with reluctance and openly considered “dead weight,” with no consideration given to that person’s skillset or other qualities they might have that could come in handy. Even people with PTSD – a perfectly understandable thing to have after the apocalypse – are often looked down on as being “weak” or “unable to handle it” and are rarely given any decent help or support from those around them.
The entire genre feels like it’s designed with this ableistic outlook in mind and while I acknowledge there is limited realism to it – a lot of people with chronic illnesses or disabilities do need support to work at their best ability, and most post apocalypse settings won’t have anything like this in place which will put many of them at risk – that doesn’t mean we have to drag it all along in our stories with no questioning of why. Just because some may not make it through doesn’t mean every single person who has a condition that isn’t 100% curable is going to vanish with them.
We can do better than stories that tell disabled people that they’ll be better off dead so they don’t drag everyone else down; that tell people with chronic illnesses that they are worthless; that tell people with mental illnesses that they are a drain on resources; that tell the neuroatypical that they are nothing more than liabilities. Even people that stay behind to care for their loved ones who have such a condition are seen as noble but naive and generally condemned by the narrative as unfit to survive unless they leave the person “holding them back.”
Given that (in my opinion) post apocalypse stories are about how we’d like to rebuild society if we had to start over, the fact that disabled and neuroatypical representation is so rare in the stories across this genre says so much about society, and none of it positive. Neuroatypical and non-able bodied people aren’t all magically going to go away just because society has, and their absence in your story just says more about your attitude than about any “harsh realities” of the setting you’ve created.
This is such a great observation, and I definitely think a big part of the appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction for a certain kind of reader and writer is that you get to wipe out huge swaths of human complexity with “They all just die but it’s not eugenics because the zombies did it.”
But I don’t think it has to be that way, and I think a solarpunk approach could be a great way to bring that out. It would be harder to write, sure, because if the nature of a setting is to say “any shortcoming is a justification for letting someone die,” then it’s got to be a much bigger deal to the protagonists to resist that kind of thinking.
But that also makes it a great kind of story to showcase exactly the kind of values it’s often used to condemn: to show a group retrofitting their friend’s wheelchair with a solar powered motor and all-terrain wheels, or using precious power and backpack space to keep a supply of insulin refrigerated, or all learning sign language to accommodate their deaf teammate.
You could show people not failing because they chose compassion over pragmatism — maybe even succeeding because of it. All three of those accommodations have advantages, too: the group member with a powered wheelchair can probably carry more than other group members,* if you’re hauling a fridge you can refrigerate more than just insulin, and sign language is a valuable silent form of communication if you’re in a world filled with hostile zombies.
The important thing is to show groups choosing to stick up for their disabled or neurodivergent** members and not be punished for it. Those group members don’t need to ultimately be the climactic key to success — in fact, that’d probably be a problematic way to take it, because it would end up re-emphasizing the idea that their value comes from their ability to be useful.
But showing them as fully realized contributing characters in the story, whose teammates care about and support them (and vice versa), and showing them all make it out alive, flies in opposition to the ableist nature of apocalyptic fiction.
Of course, fiction where the world as it exists doesn’t have to end for things to start to get better is also important. But I can see a lot of value in post-apocalyptic fiction that isn’t a thinly veiled excuse to start gleefully describing the tragic deaths of everybody not optimally equipped to serve the new libertarian/military grim utopia.
* I’m not actually sure about this point — if anyone reading has personal experience with the physics and practical concerns of using a wheelchair re: carrying capacity, and wants to correct me, please do.
** I know I don’t actually have any examples of neurodivergence in the post. I’m gonna keep thinking about that aspect of this but I don’t have anything atm.
This is all spot-on and speaks to an understanding of the genre I’ve developed, having formerly been part of the problem.
I used to be really into post-apocalyptic fiction, especially zombie-apocalypse settings. I actually had discussions with one of my coworkers about the suitability of our workplace for survival during such an event (conclusion: too many windows, we were probably screwed). From the perspective of where I was in my life at the time, it seemed like a good bit of fun and, hey, if it did happen, at least I’d be ready, right?
Then I became medication-dependent. Now, when I thought about the logistics of survival in a post-apocalyptic situation, I had to consider where the hell I would be getting my anti-androgens and estrogen from. I didn’t think about it before, even though I knew I was trans, because I didn’t realize how fundamentally I needed to be on the right hormones. These meds doesn’t exactly grow on trees, and I’d hardly be the only trans woman who needs the stuff and, well… suddenly it’s not as fun as it used to be.
Moving from one category to the other really soured me on the genre. I still watch it, read it, hell, I even write it, but it doesn’t have the same appeal to me that it used to. I think that’s the problem, really. Cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical people don’t think about this sort of thing because it doesn’t affect them personally, just like I didn’t think about it when I didn’t think it affected me. To them, survival is a bootstraps thing — if you’re HARD and MAN enough (but not TOO MAN, as Walking Dead’s perfectly shaven ladies helpfully illustrate), you are rewarded with continued life. At least, until the writers decide there’s too many black men on the show and whoops, time for one to get bitten. If you’re not HARD or MAN enough? Well, that’s your own problem!
If we could get post-apocalyptic media to a less relentlessly heteromasculist and individualist place, I think that would improve things immeasurably. Right now it basically exists to soothe the fears of men that they are not, in fact, HARD or MAN enough, and if the world would just give them the chance they could prove it. I don’t think this is the cause of the ablism in the genre, but it sure feeds into it.
All this to say that an inclusive community-oriented solarpunk post-apocalyptic setting sounds amazing and I would read the hell out of it.
Self-reblogging to add that there’s an anthology about this very subject!
“Defying Doomsday is an anthology of apocalypse fiction featuring
disabled and chronically ill protagonists, proving it’s not always the
“fittest” who survive – it’s the most tenacious, stubborn, enduring and
innovative characters who have the best chance of adapting when
everything is lost.
In stories of fear, hope and survival, this anthology gives new
perspectives on the end of the world, from authors Corinne Duyvis, Janet
Edwards, Seanan McGuire, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Stephanie Gunn, Elinor
Caiman Sands, Rivqa Rafael, Bogi Takács, John Chu, Maree Kimberley,
Octavia Cade, Lauren E Mitchell, Thoraiya Dyer, Samantha Rich, and K L
Evangelista.”
It’s going to be out on the 30th of May (two days from now) and you can get it from Twelfth Planet Press or Amazon.
Steel Phoenix Studios 