The Primordial Mother City - "Writer's Block" by Vitasta Raina

“What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences and dragged her down”
– Jim Morrison

Cities are the future. Already, more than half the world’s population is urban-based and it is predicted that this figure will rise to almost 5 billion by 2030. Mumbai-base architect Vitasta Raina is well-placed to comment on the phenomenon. Writer’s Block casts a satirical eye on the fictional mega-city Chalet via a series of Joycean epiphanies centred on the alienated inhabitants of its eponymous literary ghetto.

The tale’s dystopianism evokes antecedents such as J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and M. John Harrison’s In Viriconium. The city is a physical reproduction of the society which creates it; class structures reified and set in stone. Civic planning has become the new totalitarianism as its Orwellian acronyms (helpfully listed at the start from “C-PUE” to “RUMP”) indicate.

Writer’s Block portrays a caste system based on material wealth; “Elegants”,”Indigents” and “Parasites” occupy distinct zones of the city, with the rich literally rising to the sky. Misguided attempts at encouraging social mobility have been frustrated by the mechanics of the property market as homes become multi-owned investments and status symbols.

As “Refined Indigents”, the “educated but not moneyed” inhabitants of the eponymous Writer’s Block play an interstitial role in the hierarchy. This affords them the dubious cachet of outsider status and an intellectually privileged but fundamentally powerless view of the city and her looming apocalypse; “We see the impending nightmare ready to explode. We see fat Chalet ready to erupt.”

Yet the human eruptions, when they arise, are minimal. Forced relocation of the Parasites to a floating ghetto leads to a night of rioting, but resistance is quickly crushed and life returns to normal. Fatalism is restored and polite indifference to injustice maintains the civilised facade. Quiescence is the human condition; as one character remarks of the Parasites “We know we’ll say “go” and ninety nine percent of them will”.

Yet Nemesis cannot be forestalled forever. It eventually takes the unexpected form of mechanical dysfunction, induced by the anthropomorphised entity of Chalet herself. Appalled by the concrete ravishment wrought on her by unrestrained development, the city takes revenge on the upper echelons of her human tormenters. It takes very little to disrupt and invert their fragile spatial hierarchy.

Writer’s Block is, at its heart, a tale of the Fall. A section near the centre gives voice to the megalopolis as she recounts her origins as a cluster of fishing villages, enjoying a symbiotic relationship with the simple inhabitants; “I belonged to them as they did to me”. Imperialism imposed its grandeur and yet harmony was still maintained. Final loss of innocence came with post-war industrialisation; “They built and destroyed and built again and destroyed again, again and again and again till I was made of nothing except cold reinforced concrete.”

By offering a fantastic solution to the problems of the City, Raina seems to be implying that one in real life is not imminent. Her protagonists occupy a sub-section of society where imaginative withdrawal is an option. Rebellion takes the form of a self-parodying artistic movement; “My Avant-Garde Angst”. Disjointed in time and space, their idols are Western counter-cultural heroes of the 1960s; Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, Robert E Heinlein and Philip K Dick. These are the children of globalisation, indicating perhaps that a simple return to the past is not a viable solution.

At the same time, however, one of the characters questions whether the past is actually over; “Even in the thickest of urban slums you see glimpses of rural villages… look around you and you will see how slowly the city is being taken over by ruralisation.” Could it be that the city is just a passing phase in the history of humanity?

The novella concludes with a magical-realist radio interview in which Chalet herself plays the role of chat-show host. After apocalyptic events, a bizarre form of normality returns. We become conscious of our status as passive consumers of reality. Through the media, the whole life becomes a staged event in which we all can step back and discuss our roles. And what is fiction but a medium?

With the globalised metropolis being the destination of the human race, it is the role of speculative fiction to explore the ramifications of this so we can create a liveable world. Writer’s Block provides no simplistic answers but invites us to explore a future (or could it be the present?) in which creativity is ghettoized and the mechanistic hierarchies of capitalism are reproduced in the physical environment. Showing that such deviations from the organic union of humankind and nature are unsustainable, it suggests that hope lies not in dreams of mass rebellion and resistance, but in the small details of everyday life and in the fabric of reality itself.

Writer’s Block is a short work about a vast subject. I left it feeling that there must be many more stories to be told about Chalet and her inhabitants, and hoping that one day Vitasta Raina might apply her pen to these. As it stands, it is a notable work by a first-time writer and very much recommended.