Zara Zerbe: No real gardening in the wrong greenhouse

Zara Zerbe, why can the characters in “Phytopia Plus” have their digitized consciousness stored on plants when they have 350,000 euros left?

The novel is set in a near future, around 2040, in which the 1.5°C target has been clearly missed. This planet will become uninhabitable for the human species. Like in various science fiction stories in which humanity leaves the earth for space for exactly these reasons. So why look for a new planet when a different, more resilient body could be the solution? When the basics of survival are present, plants can grow even in seemingly unsuitable places. At the same time, space travel is a major hobby for certain multi-billionaires, and as long as we live under capitalism, I cannot imagine that the survival strategy “replacement planet in sight, off to the spaceship” would be equally accessible to all people. It’s the same with “Phytopia Plus”, as the plant storage program in my novel is called: Eternal life in another body – even beyond climate collapse – is possible, but only if you have the necessary change.

Climate change is already clearly noticeable in the novel: periods of drought, extinction of species, sweltering heat, crop failures. The city of Hamburg, where the action is set, is partially under water. Those who can afford it live north of the Elbe in gated communities with their own organic supermarket, while people on the southern bank of the Elbe have to deal with possible floods and empty supermarket shelves. Is your novel a dystopia?

Interview

Zara Zerbe was born in Hamburg-Harburg in 1989 and lives as a freelance author in Kiel. She is co-editor of the literary magazine “Der Schnipsel”. Her story “Limbus” was awarded the “New Prose Schleswig-Holstein 2018/2019” prize and was published by Sukultur-Verlag in 2020. In 2021, the novella “The Oracle of Bad Meisenfeld” was published by Stirnholz-Verlag. In 2022 she was awarded the Schleswig-Holstein Art Promotion Prize.
“Phytopia Plus” (Verbrecher Verlag, 432 pages, hard copy, €25) is her debut novel. In it, she takes a look at a dystopian future in which a company attempts to transfer human consciousness into plants to enable life after the climate crisis. Cost: 350,000 euros, so this procedure is only available to higher earners. Aylin, a temporary gardener at Drosera AG, sets herself the goal of enabling her grandfather to survive and begins to make a profit on the black market with offshoots of the storage plants.

Some elements are of course dystopian, but they are already very real: the noticeable effects of climate change, the catastrophic urban housing policy, the great social inequalities and the free pass of corporations. I often get the surprised feedback that the reality in the book is not that different from our reality. Most people imagine a dystopia as something even worse, more frightening than our present, something between 1984 and The Walking Dead. But it is precisely this same old story about how man is supposedly a wolf to man that does nothing other than satisfy a certain fear of destruction and otherwise keep people in their assigned places. I didn’t see any artistic necessity in putting myself there.

How else to approach this narrative challenge?

Something like how science fiction author Aiki Mira writes in the democratic salon about cli-fi, i.e. climate fiction, and post-cli-fi: that we have been living in climate change for a long time and that collapse is the constant of our present. Post-Cli-Fi is therefore the literary concern of coping with this climatic present, designing possible futures and thereby questioning and retelling our relationship and the boundaries between humans, nature and technology. And what post-apocalyptic storytelling can mean under this premise: writing about “the banal everyday life that we have to live, even when everything falls apart. Tasks that we have to do, relationships that have to be maintained, a post-apocalyptic everyday life in collapse. Although my novel was already in print when Aiki Mira’s text was published, it corresponds to the concept I pursued when writing it: telling a possible everyday life in the ongoing climate crisis.

Plants play a central role in this everyday life. We accompany the main character Aylin not only in her temporary job in the greenhouses of the biotech company that offers the consciousness storage process “Phytopia Plus”, but also when she sells rare house plants via the classifieds platform “Pidgin” or in exchange for fresh vegetables from the exclusive organic supermarkets the gated communities. How did the plants get into the text?

One of my motivations for the material was that I saw a Monstera Variegata cutting on Ebay classifieds for 150 euros. And it didn’t even seem particularly well rooted to me! Nevertheless, someone probably bought it, but the ad was deleted after a few days. I have a lot of plants myself that demand a considerable amount of my attention, and yet I was not aware of one thing for a long time: many popular ornamental plant species came to Europe as looted goods in colonial times and are neither organically nor fairly traded today.

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Today we are at the point where we can set up an Instagram-worthy so-called urban jungle in our own four walls, while man-made climate change outside is causing massive damage to nature and thus a huge extinction of species. Can this be chalked up as “no right life in the wrong place”? I can’t give a satisfactory, reassuring answer to that. Beyond the capitalist, post-colonial entanglements of our houseplants, I also find it exciting to view them not just as collectibles or status symbols, but as independent beings.

The plants themselves have their say in short chapters, similar to a choir in an ancient theater. What narrative possibilities arise from a plant perspective? Isn’t there a danger of anthropocentrism?

From a human perspective, plants may have the disadvantage that, for example, they cannot move independently. But isn’t growth, the dispersal of seeds by wind or other living things, or the formation of rhizomes also a form of movement? In addition, many plant species have effective communication channels and can, for example, use messenger substances to warn each other about pests. If you recognize the agency of plants as such, exciting narrative possibilities arise. I have also implemented this with my plant choir, which recognizes and comments on what is happening around it based on its own physical conditions. And with that, I’ve actually only scratched the surface of what’s possible from a post-anthropocentric narrative perspective. Plants in particular contain a lot of things that could interest us philosophically and politically. I would like to read, write and think more about this.