The March On Babylon, a meta-analysis
The March on Babylon, published by Neon Dystopia, is a post-apocalyptic survival story told from the point-of-view of Azi, an Iranian-American scavenger with a deep distrust of others. Azi’s encounter with Darius, the professional wrestler she once admired, sets her on an exploration into the old world to find unexpected treasures and enemies forged in hate. In the face of true terror, can she rely on the person who turned on her people? Before continuing, please click the link above to read the complete piece.
Genre:
Babylon was a first-time exploration into numerous genres at once, including sports writing, post-apocalyptic science-fiction, and eco-punk. Set after the fall of society, our story begins in a potential near-future with only ordinary tech and the presumption that ongoing climate change will result in a catastrophic event, along with emerging ecosystems and climate refugees that come with.
A place like Denver, Colorado might change very little to the eye because of ongoing drought conditions and large swaths of infertile terrain, but the impact will be felt and eventually new conditions for sustaining life will form. Where this would fall on a scale of eco-apocaplyse might be between Jake Gyllenhaal’s The Day After Tomorrow and Kevin Costner’s Waterworld, at a point where the worst of the environmental impacts has come and gone, but the environmental takeover of human constructs isn’t completed. However, paired with a health crisis, the population could be even more greatly reduced. Like coronavirus, the Omnivirus is meant to be a global epidemic, but paired with a climate event, it evolves to the point of mass human extinction. Together, these are catastrophes we should be better preparing for due to their inevitability, and this story illustrates what will happen should we fail.
The use of professional wrestling was first inspired by a question: given my experience of the post-apocalypse (primarily film and video games), what would be an interesting profession to carry over that has some unique advantages? Something that I have always been interested by, both in the stories and in the culture itself, was professional wrestling. Without spending too much time validating my interest, professional wrestling illustrates the duality of good and evil at their most fundamental, not unlike how Zoroastrianism’s relatable concepts influenced brand name religions. Paired with half-naked athletes performing theatrical violence and you have a formula for entertainment.
The role wrestling takes here, like in my own past, is one of nostalgia, reflecting on what I liked, while being careful not to dismiss what is left to be desired. When I was a boy, wrestling brought my brothers together every Monday and Thursday night. My white half-brother, twelve years my senior, had an infatuation with the Undertaker, so from early on I was watching the pay-per-view specials, Hulk Hogan videos, and playing all the popular wrestling games. My all-time favorite babyface (a hero archetype) was the Rock, whose finisher, the People’s Elbow, was a relatively inane move but given all the flourish of a much more spectacular feat. And it was the highlight of every match. When choosing moves for Darius the Great, I intended for the titular March on Babylon to be as iconically theatric.
The medium of sports writing, primarily through letting Azi step into an announcer voice when the action sets in, allows for the drama to unfold as it’s seen on professional wrestling programs. It steps up the pace, setting actions and events in the story in present tense to build momentum into the denouement. The freedom of voice here also allowed me to illustrate what Darius’ strengths in the post-apocalypse would be, which would be his actual physical strength, and gives permission for Azi to be surprised and even in awe at his prowess.
Darius could have taken all three of the raiding party, in theory, but presenting him against a single foe in the wrestling narrative gave him more room to use grappling attacks that are much more fun to describe. The wrestling was meant to complement the overall narrative, not crowd it, and posing multiple adversaries against Darius would overcomplicate what became an elegant resolution to the conflict. Given that Azi’s perspective is more practical, it makes sense that she would disable two foes for every one that Darius encountered. Azi, though sentimental, is quick and even relentless. But, Darius is no different in the world after than he was in the world before — despite prioritizing his survival, he’s still a showman and perhaps less aware of his own ego.
Character:
Azi’s inspiration came from seeing the actions of women during the Women, Life, Freedom movement that spilled out from the Iranian streets to become a global human rights push. While she may have been caught off guard, at no point is she threatened by Darius or the presence of the raiders. She’s always ready to fight and willing to die for the right cause, like those that came before. Persistence and resilience are character traits that have come to embody Iranians, but more than anything, Iranian women have shown utmost courage, and these are all things that I strove to create in Azi. She isn’t a perfect survivor though, as the burden of her brother’s death still lingers with her to the point that she’s dishonest about the events surrounding it. While everyone has trauma that sits with them, having one that she feels personally responsible for becomes metaphorical for the trauma we all carry for our personal neglect that should lead to the world in this story.
Darius’ inspiration begins with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who was himself a cultural icon to the Samoan people. Made more Persian, Darius had three identities to consider when crafting his character. First, there was who he actually is as person — a Persian American who watched Detroit Tigers’ games, smoked Marlboro Smooths, and grilled kebab on weekends. I imagine him being played by Kayvan Novak from What We Do In the Shadows in a film. On the other hand his ring persona, Darius the Great, is based on the renowned Achaemenid king who marched on Babylon and through to Egypt to unite all the kingdoms of Persia. The profound greatness of that name, embodied as a wrestler first and a wasteland survivor next, is meant to be connection tissue that resolves Azi to rediscover her community.
Barbarian, on the other hand, is meant to be the opposite. Inspired by the name itself, Barbarian is meant to look how we’re often perceived by white Americans who believe Iran has been reduced to rubble like Syrian cities, that it’s a developing nation, or that Iranians live in contempt of the west. The inspiration for his costume began as something stereotypically jihadist or Saudi, like the costumes worn by the Iron Sheik, but quickly started to take its own shape with the inclusion of the animal pelts, which (while mostly a complement to the name in the vein of Conan the Barbarian) are meant to evoke the savage qualities of the participants of the January 6th riots, as most traits imposed by harmful stereotypes tend to be self-projections.
The characters are meant to reflect changes in my own personal perspectives in many ways, too. For instance, Darius and Azi both represent myself at different stages of a life with relatively few diasporic connections and how it’s reflected in my relationship to the community. While there are hundreds of thousands of us here, our communities tend to be collected in isolated pockets. When my father died when I was thirteen, I was cut off from all Persian relatives because Islamophobia in the form of my maternal relatives had gotten to my mother. It was like one summer I looked up, and everyone I was related to was suddenly just white. Off-putting, to say the least, but my teens and adulthood have been an exploration rediscovering my Iranian-heritage and I wanted different stages of that to be reflected in these characters. In the post-apocalypse while it’s surprising to meet anyone who doesn’t immediately engage in hostility, meeting someone from your own tribe is a different kind of connection entirely.
Still young and wounded by the loss of her brother, Azi is at a point where she’s angry at how alone she has been. I didn’t meet another Iranian until college, and at that point it was only one brief instance after another, separated by months or years at a time. Being the only Iranian I knew in my teens was especially traumatic and difficult during 9/11, when the direct racism I experienced was magnified by the white space I lived in. Naive but well-meaning, my mother once asked if I wanted to change my name, but by then it didn’t matter anymore — I just did not feel white anymore. When I tried to verbalize that, my half-brother would berate and belittle me unless I once again proclaimed whiteness, as if it were some personal affront to him. Later, he would use the same strategy to dismiss my mother when she was reduced to tears after Trump’s election. I think Azi feels the same sense of constantly being on guard that I did at those times. It wasn’t until much later that I realized what traumas could come from a dysfunctional family life, or what a dysfunctional family even was, but Azi is much older than I was and more aware of the hazards of exclusionary tribalism.
Darius is a much more mature perspective. He’s the version of me that existed in college and in the early years of my professional career, where I knew of other Iranians but still hadn’t quite found the language to speak to them again. I’m not talking about Farsi, specifically (since I still can’t speak it and Duolingo is Iranophobic), but in knowing what to say to other Iranians or how I should introduce myself. Even today, I feel like I should have been assigned a codeword so that other Iranians in the know knew I was one of them, so that we may recognize each other in the diaspora among the masses. The fact that he can connect with anyone is a surprise to him, but even more unbelievable is that he met someone he connects with on a cultural level. It’s a frustration at being excited to get to know someone better but being afraid of scaring them off — the same way I feel now whenever I meet another Iranian in the arts.
While these perspectives might be dissimilar in a pre-dystopian setting, in a post-apocalyptic world they would likely surface popularly as the existing diametric realities among any surviving Iranian-Americans. It illustrates a deep cultural loneliness in the apocalypse and how people with only the fragile scaffolding of cultural memory may be desperate to cling to any tangible aspects of their heritage. It’s not as though these characters are going to celebrate Nowruz every spring in the apocalypse or add citrus to every dish, but in a world where even culture itself is ground down to its barest elements, people will cling to any hereditary identifiers that embody cultural legacy to a prop up a withered diaspora. The combination of these characteristics with these protagonists is why they were able to become united in the first place.
Setting:
Though I did a lot of research, many influences drove this story to be set in a grocery store in post-apocalyptic Colorado. In terms of setting, I wanted to create a space that wouldn’t necessarily change in landscape during a climate catastrophe. Colorado’s high-elevation and rolling, clay-colored hills would make it harder be visibly impacted, and perhaps it could be a temperate location in climate extremes when the coasts have risen and lower elevation communities are destroyed. I found myself there during the covid-19 pandemic, having watched my family pick apart the my mom’s legacy after she passed. Her loss hit me hard, and work as a writer and communications specialist was dry. No way left to profit from us now, my brothers invented excuses not to see me when I had nowhere left to stay, so I found myself on the couch of close writing partner and friend, Frankie Migacz in Denver during quarantine, when this story first started to take shape.
The empty streets of Denver and Aurora during the Pandemic were striking. In a way, they both fit and didn’t, because they were so completely defuse of life — dead and empty by contrast to the Chicago I had left only a month earlier, when the pandemic had started to grow to a panic but no one had any idea yet what was in store. All at once, I could see what had once thrived in these now empty newly paved streets at the foot of the mountains, and how it would all be adopted and reused in the aftermath. As things began to open again and the world returned to status quo, that post-apocalyptic vibe continued to be felt in every aspect of my life out there, when I was in exploration of my grief. In many ways, this was the perfect setting to tell the story of these two lost characters, and where I want to tell future stories, too. How would other cultures be presented here? How could other communities be made to flourish? What did other wrestlers do after the apocalypse? These are all questions that I now have time to ponder as I look back on my time out there.
Similar to the Mojave Wasteland in Fallout: New Vegas, the Front Range of this story is one where resources are already scarce. Clean water, if any, needs to be scrounged for, since there are too few natural bodies of water that would remain without upkeep. Already in real life, America’s unhoused epidemic has heavily impacted the region, creating a rise in casual theft around the region. Anything of value not nailed down was finder’s keepers. It was easy to transpose that experience, one I’m seeing grow out of control in every city across America — Denver being especially notable because of how many buildings remained desolate and unoccupied, as if in a real post-apocalyptic dystopia.
Conflict:
“Start from a moment when characters have a physical connection with each other in a meaningful way.” This was the advice that author John Schultz gave me when I sat across from him in his office at Columbia College Chicago, when I studied under him as a student, which is why I start this story with that hair-raising moment when Darius’ knife actually touches the back of Azi’s neck. While the story is genuinely about their conflict with each other in relation to their own culture, the physical threat opening between them set the stage for these characters to interact on a fundamentally deeper level. It also sets the tone for Azi’s perspective, illustrating her distrust from the first moment she chooses to share with the audience, and even as that conflict evaporates it becomes the tenor for the evolution of their connection.
I chose for the most high-stakes conflict of the story to be focused on a white-supremacist group. Turnerites (suggested by the writer, podcaster, and DJ known as Coinops McGillicutty from L0WL1F3) were born out of the Turner Diaries, a racist screed pivotal in the neo-nazi literary canon, which outlines a strategy for starting a race war. Without knowing the name attribution, it might sound innocuous to the ear — even patriotic, as Turner sounds like one of those archaic caucasian names typically celebrated among founding fathers, but I wanted something that would be more menacing upon deeper understanding. This is in the vein of groups like the Oathkeepers or QAnon, with sound more like 90’s alternative rock bands than hate groups.
Exclusionary tribalism is my expectation of what would come after an apocalypse, because it’s been relatively inescapable in the days leading up to one. When separated from other Iranians as a boy, a lot of the discomfort I felt around my white family stemmed from how normal my Iranian family seemed by comparison. Among my white family, casually racist language was as common as discussing the weather. I was only 7 years old when my half-brother taught me the slur for every type of Asian person, well before I had had a chance to learn about civil rights leaders and true revolutionaries. He often compared the confederate army to the rebel alliance in Star Wars, because they were rebelling against what he believed were systems of oppression. In fact, my brothers together were among part of a small, armed right-wing commune in rural Illinois when I left for college in Chicago, which was something I didn’t realize until I was in their absence in Denver, when the capital building had been rushed on January 6th and I saw a man running down Central Park Avenue waving an American Flag. The familiarity of the people on television and documentaries, and how the lives they lived mirrored the world that I was partly raised in, was one that I have spent the last few years of my life coming to terms with.
The turn from the Undertaker being an undead wrestler persona to a motorcycle-driving, American-flag-toting cowboy seemed natural to me, because as my brothers grew older, they too felt more comfortable casually flaunting confederate flag bandanas and even tattoos. They separated people of color into two groups each — their racial identity and then its corresponding racial slur. Some of them were good ones and others were the bad ones. It was fair, according to them, because the same could be said for the whites. There were good whites and there were crackers. A cracker was a white person who “pretends to be Black” according to them, e.g. Eminem, Skrillex, Macklemore — figures they would then feminize or equate with a gay stereotype as a way to demonstrate their own superiority. All the while, my discomfort grew to the point of taking every measure I could to separate myself from their world at the time. The symbol of the American flag, itself, began to read like a threat in this rural Illinois environment, where I wasn’t passing for white and being cornered in convenience stores, as it does for many people of color living in modern America, but I think that would go without question in a post-apocalyptic future.
Throw on some face paint and the Turnerites were born. I borrowed the culture of ranching from the environment to equip them with horses to move around the Front Range, as opposed to the protagonists who move by foot and leave visible trails that lead to the overt conflict of the narrative. Though there was some thought to getting into the specifics of their weaponry, I didn’t believe that Azi had the same knowledge base that they would in such matters, but the intention was AK-47s and military issue weaponry to complement their fatigue-based clothing, which was inspired by a man I met as a teenager who had shown me footage he’d taken of his kills in the Afghanistan without my consent. I thought it was important to show women of their culture too, to show how they interacted. This was a way to illustrate, like the abolition of Roe V. Wade, the limitations on rights that groups like these would impose in an apocalyptic setting. For instance, how one of the characters not shown is referenced as “so blessed to be pregnant.” It isn’t for lack of fertility, but for lack of being allowed any other role in the society which she lives.
The deepest conflict of all to address was Azi’s strong distrust for others. A product of her environment, my expectation is that years had passed since she last had a friend. The consequences of these emotions can be numbing, to the point of rejecting friendship wherever you turn. When my brothers left me alone with my grief, it took a long time for me to trust someone else, too — especially as I came to the realization about so much that was wrong with their world. But unlike Azi, I always had a tribe of incredible friends to depend on, and some among you are definitely reading this right now. Even this story had a silver lining, which is resolved by giving my characters to be vulnerable with each other. That they could depend on each other in a conflict, they became survivors together. There is no doubt in my mind that some people will walk away from this story feeling as if it is polyannaish, but I think in that way, this story is also very Iranian. With time, some wounds do heal.
Continuation:
There are definitely other ways to use these characters or to create different stories within this framework. For instance, what if a half-Persian grew up in Turnerite culture? My younger brother is also half-Persian, but more white passing. He latched on to our half-brother’s life pretty quickly, no longer using his Iranian name and continuing to disassociate from his family. To some extent, I would have been afforded similar entry into their insular white community if I had really wanted it, although I doubt I would have felt all of the the same freedoms. When I became one of the bad Iranians though, that option was closed, though it wouldn’t have made any difference to them whether I was a good or bad white. It’s driven me to watch footage from January 6th very closely since it aired those years ago, checking under every MAGA hat and wondering if I’ll find a familiar face. What kind of Persian character might adapt better in that environment after the world ends?
At the very least, I loved Denver. It’s a beautiful city — one that I would enjoy returning to again, both in writing and visiting. I like this environment, because there’s room for other cultures to find each other, and it’s enthusiastic wrestling community would surely be rife for more storytelling in a post-apocalypse. This region is also where a lot of tech startups continue to appear, military groups are doing trainings, and wind and solar energy is a growing everyday reality for much of the middle class, so I think it would make an incredible place to tell a variety of post-apocalyptic shorts that take the most advantage of what they will leave behind.
Mostly, I really enjoy the characters of Azi and Darius. I think they’re very engaging in different ways. Azi exudes cynicism but has a tremendous heart, and Darius is a showboat who fights well past his prime — something that all creatives of a certain age may relate to. They’re an odd couple of Iranians just trying to get by in post-apocalyptic America, and there’s something endearing about them for it. Do they wander together or do they find a community to settle in? What cultures do they meet along the way? What faces from the past would create the most interesting stories? If they can’t find salvation when all things have fallen apart, can anyone?
Let me know what you think in the comments.
I’d like to give special thanks to writers Frankie Migacz, Coinops McGillicutty, and Scum for editing the story.
