Gentrifiers Invade City From Outer Space

Run for cover: Urban pioneers are returning to New Haven — from a space colony to which they originally fled from riots and flames and eviscerated property values. They’re bringing with them ​“plans” anew for the Model City.

Luckily for us, Tochi Onyebuchi has his eye on them. He has his eye on the ​“stackers” who never left, as well.

Onyebuchi, a science fiction and fantasy writer who lives in New Haven, reports what happens next in a wild ride of a new novel, his seventh, called Goliath (published by MacMillan).

Call it a cross among The Road, The Sellout, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, with Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings thrown into the mix.

Onyebuchi’s novel presents a dystopian future in a city after a nuclear catastrophe and climate change have sent white people to an outer-space colony (an updated version of white fight). The colonists then decide to return to the devastated landscape as a new generation of urban pioneers.

It turns out the city in question is our city. New Haven. Where Onyebuchi spent his undergraduate years and where he has since moved back to live. Ring One Boxing (where Onyebuchi once trained) is in the book. So are the Ribicoff Cottages in West Rock, along with other recognizable sites along Whalley and the Boulevard. Much of it outside protective domes that shield center-city elites from radiation.

While the action takes place in the 2050s, Goliath sounds eerily contemporary.

Onyebuchi set out to predict the future — and ended up in the present as well. The way, say, Gary Shteyngart in his novel Super Sad True Love Story made wild predictions about how social media and technology would transform society — only to see the predictions start to come true and define present-day life practically as soon as the book rolled off the presses.

Onyebuchi started writing Goliath in 2014. Before Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk blasted off into space. Before Black Lives Matter and the killings that spurred the movement. Before the widening use of drones and new police surveillance technology and tech weaponry. Before the latest round of upscale speculation in New Haven. Before the resurgence of white-supremacist militias and Confederacy insurrectionists. Onyebuchi finished his first draft before a pandemic immobilized the world. Before the Jan. 6 insurrection. Before an Eastern European invasion has people thinking again about nuclear apocalypse.

And yet it’s all there in the story.

“I didn’t think I could write an honest depiction of the future” without looking at how law enforcement using technology, he said. ​“It’s not completely outside the realm of imagination. Robot dogs are [already] policing neighborhoods in the Bronx.”

Goliath has already created buzz in its first two months, including a rave review in The New York Times.

“It’s an absolute dream,” Onyebuchi said of the reaction to the book, during a conversation on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

Amid the destruction and despair, Onyebuchi dares to hold out the possibility of hope and redemption, or at least finding shards of purpose amid the rubble.

The book’s central figures, the ​“stackers,” collect bricks from amid the trash and junkie corpses and rubble of newly destroyed abandoned homes, then sell those bricks to colonists in space looking to recreate the architectural styles they left behind on earth.

On one level, Onyebuchi noted in the WNHH interview, they are ​“pillaging their own neighborhoods to satisfy an aesthetic itch” of the oppressor class. But they are also finding a way to survive, to create value and income out of destruction; a reason not just to ​“make it to the next day” but to dream of how to ​“be the fullest version of myself at the end of the world,” as Onyebuchi put it.

Hope appears as well in the form of horses discovered in Stratford and ridden back to West Rock, where the stackers construct stables and inspire kids and parents alike in the neighborhood. Onyebuchi is clear-eyed about his profferred pieces of hope, though; before the book ends, those in power are already considering how to co-opt and commandeer what the stackers have created.

A lot is packed into this book; Onyebuchi’s remarkable resume helps explain how he can tap so many sources of knowledge and inspiration. At 34, he has earned a screenwriting MFA (from the Tisch School), a master’s in economic law, and a law degree from Columbia. He has worked as a civil rights attorney. And he has already written seven well-regarded books, several of them award-winners. He’s finishing up an eighth right now, he said: a fantasy horror tale set at a New England prep school.

Who Tells The Story

It’s hard to imagine a writer more qualified to take on an ambitious book like Goliath, to tackle the mix of economic, public-health, gentrification, social justice, environmental and end-of-days currents that weave through present-day America (including in our city) with a nonstop soundtrack of pending doom.

In the course of tackling it, Onyebuchi weighs in on the question of who gets to tell stories like these in the first place, and to what end.

That question comes to a head in a scene in which Linc, a Black brick salvager (aka ​“stacker”), confronts a white journalist who has been embedding with his crew to write about their lives, including the murder by police of a crew member named Bugs in response to a 911 call by uncomfortable white gentrifiers returning from the space colony.

Following is an excerpt from that scene. (Note: The ​“n word” is a focus of the passage. The book’s text itself fully spells out different variations of the ​“n word” rather than calling it the ​“n word.” That’s part of the point: not just who uses the word, and thus tells the story, but how. Since the writer of this article is white, given current controversies over the word’s use, the word has been changed below to ​“n[ — -]” for each of its various permutations regardless of whether they end with ​“a” or ​“er” or ​“uh,” thus eliminating some of the nuance found in the original text; to fully appreciate this passage and many others, you’ll need to get the book.)

“When you write down what we say, how do you spell it?”

“Spell it?” …

“N[ — ]. How do you write it?”

Twin roses burst to life on her cheeks.

“Do you write it with a ​‘u’? Or, like, a ​‘u‑h’?”

“I … um —”

“I saw sometimes when white writers write Black people they use the hard R. Make it sound like we call each others n[ — ] all the time. Like we say it the same way white people do.” He paused. ​“I saw this one time, someone wrote n– with a ​‘a’ then a ​‘h.’ What the fuck? I couldn’t stop laughing. Please tell me that’s not how you spell it.”

She took up her position oppsite him, her back against the closed stall door, and he grew quiet. A horse’s head swayed over her shoulder. Its coat had whitened with the drop in temperature. It was almost the same color as her, which turned the whole sight of them into something ominous.

“Bugs didn’t go anywhere. It’s too easy. Heaven, Hell, whatever, none of that exists. Do you want to know why? Dying is too easy. N — - spent the last minute of his life coughing blood onto my sneakers, and n — –s is gonna cry and be upset for a week, then we’re all gonna move on. That’s just how it go. But you wanna fuck it all up by making his life look bigger than it was. You couldn’t just leave us alone. You told them about us.” He put his chin on his fists, then shook his head from side to side. ​“But this is what yah do.” Then he was up on his feet. He had the bucket in his hand, not sure what to do with it, but knowing he needed something for his fingers to do. ​“Yah find people who aren’t you, livin’ they lives, and you gotta come and fuck it all up.”

She pushed off the stall door to go after him, but he was already through the front threshold and away from the space heaters, hemispheres that lined the floor at regular intervals.

You told them about us thundered accusation in her head, and she wanted to rebut him, to catch him from behind and stop him in his tracks and convince him of her goodness, her native-ness, but she saw where he was heading. She saw the crew of young white settlers with blankets or thick woolen sweaters draped over their shoulders, leaning on the fence like they were getting ready to climb over. And she saw Linc waving them away like a man several decades older and shouting that the stables were closed for the season, even though the mayor had been talking about a series of spring events and excited murmurs had galloped through the city about this new thing blooming in the park. She saw Linc waving that bucket at those white kids, barking at them, maybe seeing among them the two white boys who got Bugs killed, and she knew then that there was nothing she could say to Linc to convince him she was on their side.

“It’s not my fault,” she said in a white cloud of breath.

You told them about us.

Actually, good news! You can hear Tochi Onyebuchi read this passage aloud, uncensored and as intended! (And read it with great expressiveness.) During his interview on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.” He starts doing that at the 39:53 mark in the above video. You can also watch the entire video above, in which he speaks at length about why and how he decided to tell this story. Best of all, you can buy the book here.