REVIEW: Heaven is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
Musings on place and space as a settler colonizer in the US, as a woman in the world, as a utopian writer
“When we think about what is treated as possible under capitalism, it seems that, invariably, evil is possible. If that is our option under the current paradigm, then why not become utopian dreamers? Why not insist on the dream?”
I’ve always had an interest in communal living and have spent a few years doing it myself (see Bread and Roses Cooperative, Golden Rule Farm Commune, NCCC, Sunflower House Cooperative). Learning to work and live with people outside your family while experimenting with different styles of community building and communication is an experience I think everyone should have (at least once before retreating back to the Western norm of being isolated in your capitalistic cave with a glowing box- which I have now, with mixed results).
What I absolutely loved about this book was how Shirk uses memoir and travelogue form to ask and try to answer big questions related to intentional communities versus modern capitalistic isolation. She uses a gonzo journalism style as she moves through different communities and her own life which is what I try to do in my own writing. Because, why do I write these book reviews? They are a place to come back to to make sense of the larger whole of my life.
I learned more about the politics of anarchism and Kropotkin and mutual aid. I’ve been reading Emma Goldman’s biography over the years, but to get a modern context for what anarchism can look like in intentional communities is always exciting for me.
While I think Shirk could have done a much better job going in depth and speaking with intentional communities that are not mostly white and Christian (and there are a lot of intentional communities in the US outside the WASP arena), I also appreciate her investigating her own identities within these contexts:
“How can I take seriously the idea of utopia in an American context, where the spirit of world-building and the clarion call of “more perfect” immediately made known its imperial aims by expelling and exploiting a whole universe of peoples who were already there, or who were forced from somewhere else to bring that vision into being? It’s difficult to prevent immediate foreclosure on the subject of utopia in America…with all its attendant optimism and escaptism, and often whiteness, at least as far as the history-keeping goes.”
She makes that observation that:
“…[what] we call American utopias, was more or less a paltry mimesis- consciously or not- of the kind of life that North American Indigenous people had been living on that land for centuries and were, at that time in the mid-1800s, defending with their blood and bodies.”
However, she doesn’t investigate any indigenous communities’ intentional living styles in the books, which reads as erasure. The book as it proceeds though is less a cataloguing of intentional communities in the so called US, and more of a making sense of her own utopian project of a marriage and separation. Quoting from Irvin J. Hunt’s article “Planned Failure” she relays that:
“To imagine isn’t to see a better world; it’s to see the world better”
This book led me to realize many things, one of which being that instead of just searching for an intentioanl community to join, anyone can just expand the concept of the communal in all we do in Western society, and that is radical in itself. Monthly potlucks are a start, and could lead into a more organized writing and activist space. You are allowed to something a name before you think it has achieved that status, maybe later the project can live up to its name. Shirk calls the land she lives on now the “Mutal Aid Society,” whatever its current manifestation is. This book brought home that life is still to be created, regardless of the age we are. Some of us are just dreamers and experiementers. The cautionary tale of this book is to constantly reflect on how privilege allows one to break free of capitalistic mainstream norms, and if you’re not careful you can not only isolate yourself away from the real struggle of those without the same privileges in society, but also potentially continue to perpetuate the disastrous consequences for others in the name of finding “better”.
If this peaks your interest, give the book a read and a meditation. We need better than we have, but we must learn from the mistakes of the past, most especially those of us with white privilege in society.
