The concept of the multiverse is having its fifteen minutes of fame. From the blockbusters of the Marvel cinematic universe to the foreign indie gem Everything Everywhere All at Once, the once-obscure science fiction concept of branching, interlocking universes captures everything, everywhere, all at once. How might the multiverse apply to gentrification?
N.K. Jemison’s recent fantasy novel The City We Became answers this question in a fascinating way. She presents a multiverse where, across all realities, when a place reaches a certain threshold of population density and identity it becomes a city at the multiversal level: all versions of the city merge into one cross-universe megalopolis. The process of this quantum leap involves a representative individual taking on the city’s power and identity. We might say they are possessed by the spirit of the city, but they also possess the city themselves – characters in the book are Sao Paulo and Hong Kong.
The City We Became tells this becoming story for New York City. But New York’s process is multiversally unprecedented: each of the five boroughs births its own avatar to go along with the whole city’s collective embodiment-person. They have to find each other, form a team, and fight together against an enemy trying to sabotage the city’s becoming.
For some in the multiverse resist this process whenever it happens. They don’t want cities to have specific, localized identities. Everything everywhere should be the same as everything everywhere else, they think; the multiverse should be a universe. In New York, these homogenizing forces show up as Whiteness, literal and figurative: white tentacle-monsters under the leadership of a menacing, shape-shifting White woman in white. The white saboteurs have the most influence around Starbucks and other chain stores, and around banks and financial institutions. The boroughs team draw their power to fight back from places and people who have hung onto the traditions and identities of their places.
So, in Jemison’s speculative fictional world, universalizing external influences are evil. Localism is good. She never includes God or the gods in the book – I don’t think she ever even mentions a church as she describes the fabrics of these communities. But what if she did? I’ll make it more specific: where would Jesus show up in The City We Became?
Image by Daniel Sunkari, with Midjourney
This question introduces its own branching, multiversal options:
Universe 1, the critical branch. Many postmodern skeptics would, without hesitation, assign Jesus to the side of the white saboteurs. What is a “universalizing external influence” if not the Church? The Church baptized colonialism imposing “civilization” on indigenous peoples, and today blesses greedy capitalism and the monoculture it fosters (they say). Wouldn’t it turn the same eye to the white saboteurs in the novel?
Universe 2, the faithful branch. Others, speaking up for the Church, would point to congregations and Christians fully embedded in their communities. We incarnational urban ministers of Servant Partners, for instance, commit ourselves to our neighborhoods to become internal rather than external influences. An avatar embodying our community would have to include the Church too. Some churches, maybe most, would align with the gentrifying enemy, but we faithful few would stand with the locals.
Universe 3, the radical branch. As you may have noticed, I’ve mostly been talking about the Church and where it would show up in The City We Became. But my original question was about Jesus. Through most of the book, the borough-champions are searching for New York, the ur-avatar who encapsulates them all. What if he was Jesus? Or, better yet, what if the new process of boroughs having their own representatives that add up to a city was the multiverse preparing for a grand addition when all the corporate city-personae sum up as a representative, and that was Jesus? But the cities maintained their locality, just as their members retained their personality. He would be standing with the locals, incarnating as one of them, beating the universalizers at their own game.
If I were to write a fanfic follow-up to The City We Became, I would follow this third branch. Thankfully, Jemisin has written her own sequel: The World We Make just came out.
Andy co-leads the Servant Partners site in San Jose, California and is Editor of SP Press.