My life in books

Rebecca Solnit's latest collection of essays - The Mother of All Questions - is comprised of pieces written between 2014 and 2016, before the seachange in American life that followed the election of Donald Trump. It seems ironic to be reading, now, of Solnit's guarded optimism on some of the goals of feminist action, such as this passage from her introduction:

"This book deals with men who are ardent feminists as well as men who are serial rapists, and it is written in the recognition that all categories are leaky and we must use them provisionally. It addresses the rapid social changes of a revitalized feminist movement in North America and around the world that is not merely altering the laws. It’s changing our understanding of consent, power, rights, gender, voice, and representation. It is a gorgeously transformative movement led in particular by the young, on campuses, on social media, in the streets, and my admiration for this fearlessly unapologetic new generation of feminists and human rights activists is vast."

I say guarded, because she does follow this with a comment expressing her "...fear of the backlash against it, a backlash that is itself evidence of the threat feminism, as part of the broader project of liberation, poses to patriarchy and the status quo."

Well, the backlash is ramping up - defunding of Planned Parenthood, insane laws surrounding access to abortion that harass not only women who seek to terminate pregnancies but also those who suffer miscarriages, attempts to deny health insurance coverage to all kinds of women's health issues including childbirth - and so it is the more pessimistic parts of these essays, rather than the ones that look at some degree of progress and hope tor more, that resonate with me in my reading. Maybe some day I'll be able to reread this volume and feel the hope.

The cornerstone of the collection is a long essay on silence - the meanings of silence, who is silenced and when, and why, who does the silencing, who is not silenced. It opens thus:

"Silence is golden, or so I was told when I was young. Later, everything changed. Silence equals death, the queer activists fighting the neglect and repression around AIDS shouted in the streets. Silence is the ocean of the unsaid, the unspeakable, the repressed, the erased, the unheard. It surrounds the scattered islands made up of those allowed to speak and of what can be said and who listens. Silence occurs in many ways for many reasons; each of us has his or her own sea of unspoken words.

"English is full of overlapping words, but for the purposes of this essay, regard silence as what is imposed and quiet as what is sought. The tranquility of a quiet place, of quieting one’s own mind, of a retreat from words and bustle, is acoustically the same as the silence of intimidation or repression but psychically and politically something entirely different. What is unsaid because serenity and introspection are sought is as different from what is not said because the threats are high or the barriers are great as swimming is from drowning."

What follows is a discussion of the ways that the voices of the marginalised - Solnit focuses on women but acknowledges that her observations are true of any similarly oppressed and silenced group - are dismissed, ignored, repressed, and stopped, so that they cannot speak the truths of their lived experience, of discrimination, of targeted violence, of injustice and unregarded pain and suffering.

Other essays in the collection take on a variety of feminist issues, from the prevalence of rape jokes, to the expectation of motherhood for all women to the falsehood of the anthropological myth of man the hunter as the ingrained template of our gender-based social roles and expectations.

Solnit is always readable, and her critiques of misogyny and patriarchy are as always well thought out and expressed. I do, however, find myself wishing for more acknowledgement of intersectionality and the ways that the issues she addresses affect women of colour, queer and disabled women as distinct from 'women' - which too often means white women. But it must also be said that she does make such acknowledgements more often than other white feminists whose work I've read.

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.