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Reading Wednesday
Sep. 23rd, 2020 04:17 pm I'm having a not-great day. Well, the morning was good. The afternoon has been a clusterfuck. I can deal with a ceiling cave-in at work but not at home. Let's talk about books instead.
Just finished: Rebellious Mourning, edited by Cindy Milstein. This book was a lot. I had to keep pausing in between essays to catch my breath, check social media, remind me of the existence of the outside world.
Activists like to talk a good game about hope and empathy and solidarity, but the experience of loss is at the core of political action, and one that the left suffers over and over again. (So do all humans, even the right wing ones, but I would argue that the experience is different for death cults than for the rest of us, and that for marginalized people and activists and especially for those in the intersection of those groups, the loss is a lot more likely to be sudden and traumatic.) Loss and grief isn't something that, weirdly, gets mentioned all that much in activist circles, and I haven't seen it confronted this directly ever.
The rage and grief and empathy just leaks off the page. There are stories of parents losing children to cops and death squads, the loss of friends and comrades and lovers, parents, community members, strangers who share a skin colour or identity. There is also the loss of one's own health and position in the community, which for me were some of the most affecting essays.
I don't want to go into huge detail in a public entry—and this is public because I'm recommending that everyone read it!—but I know >0 people either contributing to or written about in this book. One of them is not someone I got along with back in the day. And let's just say that their piece fills in some backstory in ways that I could not imagine. I don't want to overstate my conflict with them—they owed nothing to me and I owed nothing to them, and I only had a handful of unpleasant encounters—but there was stuff going on in their life at the time that I knew nothing about. And, ultimately, it was incredibly similar to some of the stuff that happened to me around getting a tumour, becoming disabled, having to leave activism for a time, and who stands by you and who leaves. I doubt this person remembers me or the conflict but after reading it I wanted to write them and be like, me too, this exemplified so many of the things I went through several years later, and you deserved better.
But I digress. All of the essays were really powerful and you should definitely check this one out.
Currently reading: Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall. This is a brand new one but I think destined to be a classic in The Discourse. It's an examination of (American) feminism from a poor, Black, intersectional perspective. She's sharp-edged and insightful and while there aren't really many surprises in terms of information, she has a gift for explaining her experience and sociopolitics precisely and adeptly. I also appreciate that she has solutions, which so much political analysis tends to lack—really concrete examples of what can be done about the problems of racism, misogyny, misogynoir, and classism, and how the mainstream feminist movement can make itself inclusive and intersectional. As a book, it's a bit rambly in the way that a collection of essays about a huge swath of topics can be rambly, but the essays themselves are tight and to the point.
Just finished: Rebellious Mourning, edited by Cindy Milstein. This book was a lot. I had to keep pausing in between essays to catch my breath, check social media, remind me of the existence of the outside world.
Activists like to talk a good game about hope and empathy and solidarity, but the experience of loss is at the core of political action, and one that the left suffers over and over again. (So do all humans, even the right wing ones, but I would argue that the experience is different for death cults than for the rest of us, and that for marginalized people and activists and especially for those in the intersection of those groups, the loss is a lot more likely to be sudden and traumatic.) Loss and grief isn't something that, weirdly, gets mentioned all that much in activist circles, and I haven't seen it confronted this directly ever.
The rage and grief and empathy just leaks off the page. There are stories of parents losing children to cops and death squads, the loss of friends and comrades and lovers, parents, community members, strangers who share a skin colour or identity. There is also the loss of one's own health and position in the community, which for me were some of the most affecting essays.
I don't want to go into huge detail in a public entry—and this is public because I'm recommending that everyone read it!—but I know >0 people either contributing to or written about in this book. One of them is not someone I got along with back in the day. And let's just say that their piece fills in some backstory in ways that I could not imagine. I don't want to overstate my conflict with them—they owed nothing to me and I owed nothing to them, and I only had a handful of unpleasant encounters—but there was stuff going on in their life at the time that I knew nothing about. And, ultimately, it was incredibly similar to some of the stuff that happened to me around getting a tumour, becoming disabled, having to leave activism for a time, and who stands by you and who leaves. I doubt this person remembers me or the conflict but after reading it I wanted to write them and be like, me too, this exemplified so many of the things I went through several years later, and you deserved better.
But I digress. All of the essays were really powerful and you should definitely check this one out.
Currently reading: Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall. This is a brand new one but I think destined to be a classic in The Discourse. It's an examination of (American) feminism from a poor, Black, intersectional perspective. She's sharp-edged and insightful and while there aren't really many surprises in terms of information, she has a gift for explaining her experience and sociopolitics precisely and adeptly. I also appreciate that she has solutions, which so much political analysis tends to lack—really concrete examples of what can be done about the problems of racism, misogyny, misogynoir, and classism, and how the mainstream feminist movement can make itself inclusive and intersectional. As a book, it's a bit rambly in the way that a collection of essays about a huge swath of topics can be rambly, but the essays themselves are tight and to the point.
