Priya Guns’ debut novel Your Driver is Waiting is a novel of and for Generation Left – a generation who dream of ‘life after capitalism’. Set in the Now of the early 2020s in an undisclosed North American city (on account of the illegality of the content), the novel follows Damani Krishanthan, a driver for RideShare and the text’s first-person narrator. Damani is representative of her generation, over-educated and under-employed, grinding out a living just to survive. But she also has her quirks, not least of which is a passion for weights.
On the one hand, Your Driver is Waiting belongs to an emergent genre of novels exploring the conditions of contemporary labor. As with Help Wanted, it shares an interest in the psychic and material experiences of jobs that are ‘beneath the wage’, to cite Annie McClanahan’s formulation. Tracing Damani’s interactions across a series of shifts, the novel offers a fictionalized version of a workers inquiry, one which is firmly rooted in the practical realities of being a driver: the physical threats, emotional abuse, and ever present need to clean up after clients. Whilst the first-person form lends itself to a certain immediacy, Damani is at pains to relate these affects to their structural determination, to the company’s control of work, in particular the declining rates of pay per ride received by the drivers. An anthropologist by training, Damani, as narrator, both produces knowledge about the relations structuring the gig economy and provides intimate insights into its structure of feeling.
The drivers are not content to passively accept deteriorating working conditions and are actively engaged in efforts to organize themselves. This includes fighting for better pay but also goes beyond ‘work stuff’ to include ‘life stuff’. For Shareef, one of Damani’s confidants, this involves accounting for a surplus which exceeds their narrow definition as a specific type of worker. ‘We are more than just drivers’, Shereef argues, ‘we are the company’, a belief which informs a project to democratize RideShare from below and transform it into a worker run co-operative.
On the other hand, this spilling over of work struggles into struggles over the reproduction of life is mirrored across the city, which is in turmoil. Throughout her shifts, Damani routinely encounters protests and protesters. These range from the digetic disappearance of two hundred refugees from a state-run detention center to timely extra-digetic pressures linked to anti-racism campaigns and climate change. The novel is populated by slogans, by the language of the street, and the demands of the people: ‘F*ck Heteronormativity’; ‘Dismantle White Supremacy’; ‘Boycott, Divest and Sanction Capitalism’; Climate Justice is Gender and Racial Justice’; ‘Refugees are People’; ‘Drivers are Tired of Waiting’.
At the same time, whilst these direct confrontations with the state simmer in the background and disrupt the flow of traffic, Your Driver is Waiting is also a story about a crush. Damani swerves away from her comrades after picking up Jolene, a wealthy and white contemporary (with an excellent rating on RideShare), who she starts an intense relationship with – they are both ‘fucking sexy’. Jolene and Damani click almost immediately and begin to make plans together, such as going away to Jolene’s vacation home. For a novel in which mutual aid rather than violent competition is intuited as common sense, the personal anticipates the political:
‘We share things, right?’
‘Everything’.
In this respect the novel clinches together its scenic registration of the present with its plot-bound transformation of individual lives through the sexual desire for the other, one which strays into neo-exoticism. Here it is not the other of the other side of the political divide but rather the economic and racial other. Yet it is through this process of othering that the novel questions whether the members of generation left do truly share everything. Does communism and commoning mean the same thing for those who already have symbolic and material capital and those who have nothing but debts? The barriers to organizing are not identity politics as frequently demonized by workerist (in a bad sense) intellectuals, but the identities produced through class relations.
Jolene and Damani belong to groups who want to change the world by putting capitalism in its current mode, to death. However, a fracture appears between those whose commitment at times appears like an affect and those for whom communist solidarity is a necessity. Some of this split can be discerned between Jolene and Damani’s favorite hangout spots, an ethical coffee chain called Mademoiselle Ethiopia Café and a squat known as Doo Wop. For Jolene, the cafe is a space to network and fundraise, where capital can be reallocated and redistributed, where people can feel like they are making a difference. Doo Wop, in contrast is something like a prefigurative social hub, a space where people party into the night, but also where community workshops are held, jobs posted, shelter provided. Where making a difference takes concrete and embodied forms. One is transparent and can be seen shimmering from the street, the other underground, accessible through shrubbery, a space intent on establishing the future in a dismal present.
Predictably, the collision of these two worlds goes terribly awry. Damani suggests that there is a cultural dimension to this disaster: ‘The English that Jolene had heard was sharpened with each of our own unique accents and slang, words broken and chopped into a song of a sentence. Our soup of words brewed in a pot shaped by history. Shakespeare would have written a sonnet inspired by our dissident use of language […] As Jolene stood within our circle the multitude of clattering tongues in her ears must have taken her to a foreign place, far from anywhere she’d been to in the city. The horror’.
The references to Shakespeare and Conrad and the twisting of these canonical citations gestures to the estrangement Damani imagines Jolene to have experienced. A cultural inversion and reversal of currents that finds its political corrolary in a milieu who plan to remake the city ‘with a hammer, a sickle and some paint’, as if communism was the self-evident solution to otherwise intractable problems like exploitation and domination.
Perhaps less obviously, whilst these racialized fears turn towards fantasies of heathen terror, they do so through a debate about tactics and strategy, about how to self-organize as workers. Jolene is a character who seems singulary unaware of her own positions, which in turn contributes to a disagreement between radical proposals and her own more liberal vision of enlightened and educated management. A fallout which sees the foreclosure of utopia but also sends Damani swerving back into the people, becoming an anonymous and mythological figure: ‘the Taxi Driver’, who is everyone and no-one, the manifestation of resistance, a cult figure everyone can share.
Thomas Travers 