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The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends & Others

by China Martens (Baltimore:Atomic Books, 2007)

Review by Katherine Arnoldi

Okay so I did write the blurb on the back: "Search no futher than here for enlightenment. When China Doll Martens, genius, chronicler of truth, zine guru of heaven and earth tells us that here is one mother who will not twist herself or her child to society's slavery, but instead will make another world and welcome us to it, we say yes, yes, it is possible, it is possible, it is!" and I mean every word.

This book is the best: The first issue had photo booth photos of China pregnant and mentions the follies of envy: children want to grow up and be adults and adults want to be children. and ends with the sentence: " I will not put her in slavery." the second issue quotes Alice Miller, and a chapter on "Mother as Middleman of Oppression. " Issue 3 is titled "Anarchist Child-raising" and says that "children are not the property of adults. they need a community to be free." The issues can be read as a memoir, proceeding chronologically illuminating both China and her daughter's life and also documenting what life during the late eighties, the nineties and into our current decade. This is a voice that needs to be heard: the voice of a single mom who is also an artist forging a way around the dominant culture, building a life based on her own values.

Future Generation is a must read for anyone who wants to understand Adrienne Rich's idea of mothering (Of Woman Born) based on the mother's own experience, not the partriarchal definition of motherhood in which mothers must be surveilled, controlled, advised, and punished. For here is an evolution of mothering, a memoir of a conscious mother. Get it. Read it. Pass it on.

-----Katherine Arnoldi