By Scott Borchert
The Indypendent
November 17, 2010
Near the end of Terry Bisson’s utopian novel Fire on the Mountain, one character, Yasmin, receives a book of alternative history. Titled “John Brown’s Body,” the story is as absurd as it is unsettling. The militant abolitionist Brown fails in his raid on Harpers Ferry and is captured and executed; after a brief civil war, the U.S. capitalist class unites, conquers much of the continent, and gradually asserts its influence over the entire planet. War, exploitation and oppression follow.
Yasmin’s daughter, Harriet, shivers and says, “That’s why I don’t like science fiction. It’s always junk like that. I’ll take the real world.”
After all, she knows better: Brown and his
co-commander Harriet Tubman didn’t fail at Harpers Ferry in 1859 but
successfully escaped into the Blue Ridge Mountains. There they launched
the Army of the North Star, and night after night, their enormous
bonfires could be seen raging high on the mountaintops, calling others
to join the guerrilla war against slavery. And join they did — from
enslaved Africans to white abolitionists, from Italian and Mexican
republicans led by Giuseppe Garibaldi to English workers led by Karl
Marx. What began as an anti-slavery struggle developed into a war for
independence and Black self-determination, and, eventually, the land
south of the Mason-Dixon line became a new nation, Nova Africa. Not long
after, Nova Africa embarked on the road to socialism. And 100 years
later, in Harriet’s “real world” of 1959, Nova Africa’s neighbor to the
north, the U.S.S.A., has followed.
This is the premise of Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain,
released in a new edition by PM Press. Al-though originally published
22 years ago in France as Nova Africa, it is a book that continues to
provoke questions about how and why our world is the way it is — and how
it might be different.
Bisson relates his alternate version of
history through several perspectives: the written testimonial of a
teenage slave who joins Brown and Tubman’s army; the letters of a white
abolitionist doctor who is radicalized by the uprising; and a
third-person narrative that follows Yasmin and Harriet in 1959 as they
bring the aforementioned testimonial (written by their ancestor) to
Harpers Ferry on the centennial of the raid. Such a structure suggests
that history itself is better understood as a multiplicity of
narratives, generated by the distinct but interwoven experiences of many
people as they navigate the shared, fundamental contours of their
world. Bisson’s technique allows us to glimpse these fundamental
contours — slavery and capitalism, war and revolution, socialism and
national liberation.
In his introduction, Mumia Abu-Jamal praises
the vision of this novel as “one born in a revolutionary, and
profoundly humanistic, consciousness.” Indeed, there is something
revolutionary about re-imagining the past, turning history inside out
and extracting visions of a different world. Fire on the Mountain
does all of this in a way that is engaging and often inspiring — but
this is no mere exercise in radical fantasizing. Rather, by considering
what has been, and creating a narrative of what could have been, Bisson
reminds us that what is yet to come remains unwritten.