A Light in the Shadows

[bibliogramma]

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

Almost every political activist I know, has experienced the feeling of being overwhelmed by what sometimes seems to be an insurmountable task, feeling helpless in the face of so many struggles that need energy, commitment, voice and action, feeling despair that any progress will ever be made against the massive social, cultural, political, economic structures and institutions that support the status quo.

With her book Hope in the Dark,Rebecca Solnit has written an antidote to all that. This is a book by an activist, for activists, about activism.

Canadian writer/activist Linda McQuaig is quoted on the back cover of my edition of the book, saying:

In this compelling book, Rebecca Solnit reminds us of an important truth we often lose sight of: political activism can - and does - change the world.

After reading the book, I can certainly agree that for activists, and especially those finding themselves teetering on the verge of feeling overwhelmed and burnt-out, this is indeed an important truth that needs to be said every once in a while, and Solnit says it well.

Solnit writes passionately about something we all need a healthy dose of - hope.

...hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. ...hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. ... To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.

She reminds us of the victories that have been achieved, and of the apparent failures that have gone on, unexpected, to create groundswells of action and support that carry the hope of victories still to come. She tells about the countless small struggles that have led to modest steps forward, that when combined with all the other modest steps that have been taken, turn into a slow forward march.

At the same time, she points out some of the ways that activists on the Left have sometimes made the picture grimmer and the prospects dimmer that they are - or might be. As Solnit notes, in a world where news so often means bad news, it's easy to look around and see only the things that are going wrong - and it's tempting to focus on the worst possible case scenario, particularly when there's a chance that the more dire the prediction, the more attention can be won to the cause. We can so easily program ourselves to see only the things that must be done, and not those that have been, at least in some way, been achieved.

The book also contains a gentle critique of certain mindsets that can be found within the Left - the quest for perfection and the reluctance to form working coalitions with potential allies we may not consider ideologically "correct" among them - and that sometimes make the struggle harder than it needs to be.

Finally, she reminds us that so often, the actions that make us despair occur in the spotlight where we can't help but see them and the consequences they bring with them, while the actions that will bring about change are happening in the shadows, where no one is looking.

The grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don't know yet whether they will have any effect, in the people you haven't heard of yet who will be the next Cesar Chavez, the next Noam Chomsky, the next Cindy Sheehan, or become something you cannot yet imagine. In this epic struggle between the light and the dark, it's the dark side - that of the anonymous, the unseen, the officially powerless, the visionaries and subversives in the shadows - that we must hope for.

I know that I'm going to be looking at this book again in times to come, whenever things start to seem insurmountable. Because there's always a need for hope in the dark.