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facilitated by Ruby Pinto and Gillian Giles

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Compelling Conversations about Abolition: Inviting Your Community to a Future Without Prisons+Police

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Facilitated by Yessica Gonzalez

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Captured by Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps

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facilitated by Donnay Edmund

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facilitated by Lidwina Bell and Ky'Eisha W. Penn

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Following Young People to #PoliceFreeSchools

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by Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps

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by Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps

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by Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by SOPHIA 菲 LI (@sophfei)

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Graphic Notes by Laura Chow Reeve / Radical Roadmaps

with Shannon Perez-Darby

Accountability is a human skill, not something that happens to bad people. How many times have movements been pulled apart not because of external forces but because of internal conflict and strife? So often we ask how others can be accountable without first looking internally and asking, "How have I been accountable?" Join us to explore the role self-accountability plays in building strong, sustainable movements. We'll discuss how self-accountability-that is accountability with and for ourselves-is essential in building accountable communities and the movements to sustain them.

Shannon Perez-Darby is an anti-violence advocate, author, and activist working to create the conditions to support loving, equitable relationships and communities. With over 15 years of experience, Shannon centers queer and trans communities of color while working to address issues of domestic violence, accountability, and prison abolition.

LINKS

Slide Deck

Video

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Graphic Notes by Laura Chow Reeve / Radical Roadmaps with Shannon Perez-Darby Accountability is a human skill, not something that happens to bad people. How many times have movements been pulled apart not because of external forces but because of internal conflict and strife?

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by adrienne maree brown

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what we give attention to grows. what we pay attention to grows.

i am a commitment to attention liberation and reparations.

i am a commitment to being/shining sunlight on everything i want to see grow.

i am a commitment to divesting from anything that isn't rooted in love.

*

today i am entering a year-long commitment of putting my attention on what i love and want to grow.

i have been heading this way, but still giving too much of my attention to that which i cannot shape, that which i cannot reach. i want to hold my attention as precious sunlight that i bestow on every practice or person or concept that advances the way i believe things should be. i want to affirm that which is done well, and/or is done bravely.

to have enough attention for this focus, i am intentionally removing my attention from those who hurt humanity or the planet, or hurt movements learning and working to protect either of these.

i will practice:

1. meditation.

each day i will practice focusing my attention on my breath through silent meditation and black feminist chanting.

"i am who i am doing what i came to do."
"the world needs to hear her voice."
"my people are free."
"god is change."

2. centering daily in the commitment of attention liberation. i am a commitment to being/shining sunlight on what i want to grow.

3. redirecting what isn't mine. i will direct people to a resource page (link coming soon) for folks learning things that are no longer the best focus for my attention.

i will also disengage from gossip at the interpersonal or 'media' level. "Be the boss of your business or be bossed by those that can't mind their own." - Chani Nicholas

4. find the people already working on the solution.

Wherever there is a problem, there are already people acting on the problem in some fashion. Understanding those actions is the starting point for developing effective strategies to resolve the problem, so we focus on the solutions, not the problems. - allied media network principles

i don't read the news simply to be appalled and then rant about how appalled i am. i stay informed about the world with my attention on (and material support flowing towards) movements and people i believe in. we are the solution.

5. put my attention on growing transformative justice in conflict and grievance. this one is big. and this level of work doesn't happen on social media.

while purely punitive measures can feel briefly sayisfying, i know they do not work outside of a transformative justice process, at worst recreating/proliferating harm, shame, repression, and isolation; at best making people act right without healing whatever is broken at the root.

once light is shed on a harm, i will participate in tj processes where appropriate, or support by mediating or connecting those involved to someone who can help get them to and through a process of resolution.

if that isn't possible (for instance, if both/all parties are not willing to participate in a process in good faith) i will hold and support strong boundaries, wish all parties the sacred work of transformation, and keep it moving.

i will not give attention to continuous case building against people or institutions where i do not see a commitment to resolution and transformation.

6. i will report back on new year's eve of 2018, on what i learned through this practice.

wish me luck, and/or join me.
bonus: emergent strategy mantras
i am no victim of life; i shape change.
we are not victims of circumstance; we shape change.

i practice what i want to become.
we practice what we want to create.

i am a microcosm of all the possible justice, liberation, pleasure and honesty in the universe, and i act accordingly.

i remember that i exist only in relationship to other people and systems.

i accept that i cannot change others, but i can hold standards for my own life.

i willingly engage in and support transformative justice processes for accountability and getting in right relationship.

i create more possibilities in the face of scarcity thinking.

i act from and towards love.

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attention liberation: a commitment, a year of practice

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what we give attention to grows. what we pay attention to grows. i am a commitment to attention liberation and reparations. i am a commitment to being/shining sunlight on everything i want to see grow. i am a commitment to divesting from anything that isn't rooted in love.

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The Social Change Ecosystem Map--created by Deepa Iyer

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Tarul Kode Tripathi, Pharm.D., BCPS (Board Chair)
Pharmacist, Director of Account Management, MedImpact Tarul grew up in the greater Seattle area, as the eldest of 3 siblings. She is a mom of 2 kids, 2 dogs, and caretaker of elders. She and her family are survivors of domestic violence and long-standing friends of API Chaya. Tarul is currently serving as Chair of the Board of Directors. Tarul completed her Doctorate in Pharmacy at University of the Pacific and holds a board certification in Pharmacotherapy. As a senior clinical program manager with over 18 years of experience in healthcare consulting and strategic business planning, she is most passionate about health care equity and access to high quality care. She is also the CEO and co-founder of The Sanaya Set, a venture born out of her passion for social justice, self-care, and giving. As an ambassador for API Chaya, Tarul is focused on transformational leadership, empowering our survivor community, intersectionality, and building bridges to grown our impact to change lives.

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Tarul Kode Tripathi, Pharm.D., BCPS (Board Chair) Pharmacist, Director of Account Management, MedImpact Tarul grew up in the greater Seattle area, as the eldest of 3 siblings. She is a mom of 2 kids, 2 dogs, and caretaker of elders. She and her family are survivors of domestic violence and long-standing friends of API Chaya.

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By Angela Davis

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Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis: 9780394713519 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. “Angela Davis…

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by Dorthy Roberts

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Field Trip to the Museum of Human History 

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Field Trip to the Museum of Human History 

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by Franny Choi

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by Franny Choi
Everyone had been talking about the new exhibit,

recently unearthed artifacts from a time

no living hands remember. What twelve year old

doesn't love a good scary story? Doesn't thrill

at rumors of her own darkness whispering

from the canyon? We shuffled in the dim light

and gaped at the secrets buried

in clay, reborn as warning signs:

a "nightstick," so called for its use

in extinguishing the lights in one's eyes.

A machine used for scanning fingerprints

like cattle ears, grain shipments. We shuddered,

shoved our fingers in our pockets, acted tough.

Pretended not to listen as the guide said,
Ancient American society was built on competition and maintained through domination and control. In place of modern-day accountability practices, the institution known as "police" kept order
using intimidation, punishment, and force.

We pressed our noses to the glass,

strained to imagine strangers running into our homes,

pointing guns in our faces because we'd hoarded

too much of the wrong kind of property.

Jadera asked something about redistribution

and the guide spoke of safes, evidence rooms,

more profit. Marian asked about raiding the rich,

and the guide said, In America, there were no greater
protections from police than wealth and whiteness.
Finally, Zaki asked what we were all wondering:
But what if you didn't want to?
and the walls snickered and said, steel,
padlock, stripsearch, hardstop.
Dry-mouthed, we came upon a contraption

of chain and bolt, an ancient torture instrument

the guide called "handcuffs." We stared

at the diagrams and almost felt the cold metal

licking our wrists, almost tasted dirt,

almost heard the siren and slammed door,

the cold-blooded click of the cocked-back pistol,

and our palms were slick with some old recognition,

as if in some forgotten dream we did live this way,

in submission, in fear, assuming positions

of power were earned, or at least carved in steel,

that they couldn't be torn down like musty curtains,

an old house cleared of its dust and obsolete artifacts.

We threw open the doors to the museum,

shedding its nightmares on the marble steps,

and bounded into the sun, toward the school buses

or toward home, or the forests, or the fields,

or wherever our good legs could roam.
© Franny Choi 2015
After Reading

After reading and discussing, choose a topic from your utopia brainstorm at the beginning-one thing that you're putting into the Museum of Human History. For that topic, brainstorm:

What sensory details (concrete sights, sounds, smells, etc.) come to mind when you think of this topic?

What objects might be on display in a museum exhibit about this?

What are some words that you might have to define or explain to someone who has no idea what this thing is?

Think of a time/setting when you feel free. List some sensory details that might help describe what that's like.

Prompt

After you finish brainstorming, write a piece in which someone who understands this topic is describing it to a group of people who don't. For example, that might be:

An elder trying to explain what it once meant to be "undocumented" to a group of children.

An alien scholar giving a presentation on human binary gender.

A paragraph from a history book describing "Ancient American fatphobia."

(I love Ostrow's suggestion to scaffold by encouraging students to begin with the phrase "In Ancient American society...")

Further Reading

Here are a few other poems imagining alternate worlds that might work well paired with "Field Trip to the Museum of Human History," or to fill out a unit on visionary poetry:

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by Franny Choi Everyone had been talking about the new exhibit, recently unearthed artifacts from a time no living hands remember. What twelve year old doesn't love a good scary story? Doesn't thrill at rumors of her own darkness whispering from the canyon?

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Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction

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Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction

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Making Abolition Geography in California's Central Valley

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Making Abolition Geography in California's Central Valley

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by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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This conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore was recorded on November 30, 2018. Starting from the concept of abolition geography, we later examine its application through the experience she and five comrades had organizing against the construction of a new megaprison in Delano, California in the early 2000s.
LÉOPOLD LAMBERT: I would like to talk with you about the experience you had almost 20 years ago, organizing against the construction of yet another embodiment of racial capitalism: a new state prison in California's central valley; making what you call "an abolition geography." Can we start with this concept of abolition geography?

RUTH WILSON GILMORE: I would like to say three things as a preamble. First: abolition requires that we change one thing, which is everything. Contemporary prison abolitionists have made this argument for more than two decades. Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.

Second: racial capitalism is all capitalism. There was not one minute in the entire story of capitalism that it was not racial. Cedric Robinson teaches us that if, indeed, the capitalism we experience today had its origins and early development in rural England, then the relationship between and among the people in that rising system, all of whose descendants might have become white, was already racial.

Third: the state is a contradictory object and subject of struggle. We should be wary of fetishizing the state. Fascists fetishize the state for a whole set of purposes; and anti-fascists tend to fetishize the state as well. The state does not think and do. People in various configurations of power (including from below) enliven states to think and do.

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Making Abolition Geography in California's Central Valley

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This conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore was recorded on November 30, 2018. Starting from the concept of abolition geography, we later examine its application through the experience she and five comrades had organizing against the construction of a new megaprison in Delano, California in the early 2000s.

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For as long as human civilization has existed, there have been people whose experience of their internal gender does not align with the physical features of their body. The Gala, a middle gender priest class of the Sumerian empire, existed over 4,500 years ago. The Indigenous cultures of North America recognized a third gender far before European colonialism, and still do to this day. Roman emperor Elagabalus (218 AD) insisted on being referred to as Lady rather than Lord, and even put forward a ransom for anyone who could conduct genital reconstruction surgery.

In spite of this, however, the modern understanding of the transgender experience has only existed for approximately 130 years. Even the word "transgender" only dates back to 1965, when John Oliven proposed it as a more accurate alternative to David Cauldwell's term "transsexual" (coined in 1949), which itself replaced Magnus Hirschfield's term "transvestite" (1910).

To be transgender is to have a gender identity which does not match the gender you were presumed to have based on the genitalia you were born with. This can mean a person born with a penis is actually a girl, that a person born with a vulva is actually a boy, or that a person with either genital configuration may not wholly fit either side of that spectrum and is non-binary.

A trans person can come to recognize this at any point in their life. Some children identify it at as soon as they are able to grasp the concept of the differences between the sexes, others don't start to feel anything until the onset of puberty, and still others do not realize that anything is wrong at all until they are fully adults. Many people are simply never exposed to the idea that their gender could mismatch their birth sex, or what that feels like, and thus simply accepted their fate.

Even more common is a perception that even though they have feelings about being unhappy with the gender they were assigned at birth, they believe that this is not the same as what transgender people experience. Some may feel that a wish to be transgender and have transition available is some kind of disrespect towards "real" trans people who knew they were actually boys or girls "born in the wrong body." These narratives of the transgender experience that have been spread by popular media create a very false impression of just what it means to be transgender and what growing up transgender feels like.

This experience of discontinuity between the internal and external self is what we describe as Gender Dysphoria. Every trans person, regardless of their position within or outside of the gender binary, experiences some form of Gender Dysphoria. This is something of a political topic within trans communities, as different groups have their own ideas of what Gender Dysphoria is, how it manifests itself, and what qualifies a person as being trans. By and large, however, this debate is feckless and fruitless, as the definition at the top of this page encompasses the beginning and the ending of how these terms intermingle.

The purpose of this site is to document the many ways that Gender Dysphoria can manifest, as well as other aspects of gender transition, in order to provide a guide for those who are questioning, those who are starting their transgender journey, those already on their path, and those who simply wish to be better allies.

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For as long as human civilization has existed, there have been people whose experience of their internal gender does not align with the physical features of their body. The Gala, a middle gender priest class of the Sumerian empire, existed over 4,500 years ago.

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by Talila A. Lewis

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As my and our collective understanding of ableism is ever-evolving, I hope to offer periodic edits to the working definition of ableism I released in 2019. You can review the 2021 updated definition here.

The updated version is edited for length and clarity. It also names colonialism as central to the construction, conception and application of ableism, and also more explicitly acknowledges reproductive in/justice and productivity. Finally, the image explicitly names Dustin Gibson and Black and other negatively racialized Disabled people as having been central to my understanding of ableism and development of this working definition.

Study and discussion of imperialism and its relationship to ableism is ongoing. . .

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As my and our collective understanding of ableism is ever-evolving, I hope to offer periodic edits to the working definition of ableism I released in 2019. You can review the 2021 updated definition here. The updated version is edited for length and clarity.

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The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977)

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The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977)

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Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

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Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

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by Mark Fisher

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Mark Fisher is highly respected both as a music writer and a theorist. He writes regularly for The Wire, frieze, New Statesman, and Sight & Sound. He is a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University Of London, and maintains one of the most successful weblogs on cultural theory, k-punk (http: //k-punk.abstractdynamics.org)

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Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? a book by Mark Fisher

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After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework.

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Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness

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Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness

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By Da'Shaun L. Harrison

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"This modern classic relishes in collapsing conventional and clichéd orthodoxies. As formative as Harrison's proclamations are, it is Harrison's pacing that gives the book the lingering feeling of the most sensual whisper."
-Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

" Belly of the Beast is written with poise and lucidity. It pushes us to think past the pablum of telling fat folx all they gotta do is love themselves to enacting a movement that addresses the source and ramifications of societal anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Harrison forces us not to look away, reminding us that all too often 'health' and 'desire' are used to annul Blackness. In a 'post bo-po' world, desire and the sheer right to life can be rooted in something other than all the things named non-Black."
-Sabrina Strings, author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

"Da'Shaun Harrison is an insightful visionary, world-builder, and ingenious writer who brings us into deeper understandings and frameworks of the intersections of anti-Blackness and anti-fatness. Belly of the Beast brings us closer to ourselves because it brings us closer to the truth-that anti-Blackness
is the foundation to how violence shapes our relationships to our bodies and each other. Harrison not only intervenes in the terror of white supremacist paradigms but develops the tools to imagine and build a new world. Belly of the Beast eats, and it leaves no crumbs."
-Hunter Shackelford, author of "I am continually blown away by Da'Shaun's ability as a writer to wrestle so deeply and expertly with questions many of us would never even think to ask-whether they be about our world, our politics, our selves, or our bodies. Every page challenges us to expand our imagination and reconstruct the ways we think, talk, and theorize about fatness, Blackness, gender, health, desire, abolition, and more. Belly of the Beast is a gift and a groundbreaker."
-Sherronda J. Brown, editor-in-chief of Wear Your Voice magazine

Get the latest updates from Da'Shaun L. Harrison

And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week.

And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week.

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Belly of the Beast by Da'Shaun L. Harrison: 9781623175979 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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"This modern classic relishes in collapsing conventional and clichéd orthodoxies. As formative as Harrison's proclamations are, it is Harrison's pacing that gives the book the lingering feeling of the most sensual whisper." -Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir " Belly of the Beast is written with poise and lucidity.

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Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

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Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

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by Harsha Walia

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Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

An urgent, global account of the migration crisis and the function of borders across political, social, cultural, and economic systems.

In Border and Rule, one of North America's foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation.

Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, ruling class, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world.

Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial exclusion. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how far-right nationalism is escalating deadly violence in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere.

A must-read in these difficult times of war, inequality, climate change, and global health crisis, Border and Rule is a clarion call for revolution. The book includes a foreword from renowned scholar Robin D. G. Kelley and an afterword from acclaimed activist-academic Nick Estes.

"Harsha Walia doesn't peddle easy solutions or liberal bromides. She has a knack for going to the root of our planetary crises and explaining how we arrived here, and what to do about it. Those of us who have been reading and following her for years expect nothing less. She is not only one of North America's most brilliant thinkers, she is also an organizer who has devoted her life to fighting racial capitalism, colonialism, militarism, xenophobia, patriarchy, and defending the rights of migrants, Indigenous people, women, and the unhoused. This book is a shock to the system." -Robin D. G. Kelley, from the Foreword

"In Walia's expert hands, the planet's sprawling borderlands are exposed as capitalism's gaping wounds, filled with escalating terror and torment as whiteness ferociously seeks to defend its imagined boundaries. This is a book of unsparing truth and dazzling ambition, providing readers with desperately needed intellectual ammunition to confront the inherent violence of borders. An enormous contribution to our movements." -Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

"I was haunted and agitated by this book which is part expose and part clarion call for radical action. Harsha Walia offers an unsparing analysis of the violences of forced migration, borders, imperialism and capitalism. The case studies presented in this book weave a quilt that provides us with needed knowledge to confront current problems that demand an organized collective response. The ideas in this book will linger long after you've put it down." -Mariame Kaba, founder and director of Project NIA

"This indispensable, deeply researched, and beautifully written book is the first and most in-depth global analysis of borders and immigration, wars and displacement, imperialism and western white nationalism. Always with her ear to the ground and paying close attention to the people whose lives are wrecked or lost, Walia demands action and offers real solutions." -Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States.

"Harsha Walia's deeply thoughtful and well-written book makes creative connections that other writers have preferred to ignore. It offers a lucid, insightful survey of the most difficult political issues that we face." "In this exceptional book, Harsha Walia takes us on a stunning and terrifying tour of the Great Wall of Capitalism, the border killing zone where viral fascism feeds on the bodies of the poor and persecuted. Hell is already here." " Border and Rule provides a kaleidoscopic exposé, painstaking analysis, and damning indictment of the border regimes that are generating and fueling anti-migrant brutality and state violence on an international scale. Harsha Walia is relentless in drilling into, detailing, and cataloguing the array of processes, players, policies, and ideologies that uphold systems of border imperialism-while simultaneously mapping-out for us an understanding of how we can disrupt and dismantle them." -Justin Akers Chacón, co-author of No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border

"Building on the thesis of her seminal book Undoing Border Imperialism, Harsha Walia's incisive voice in Border and Rule -- equally rigorously theoretical and lovingly community-minded -- refuses to allow our struggles and organizing to exist in vacuums. From anti-black police murders and carcerality to the fortressing of borders across indigenous lands to the fabricated migrant crises to the exploitations of their labor, and to the racial nationalisms and legal structures that drive these violences, Walia's latest book provides an international cartography of the crisis of global neoliberalism. It is a stunning and horrific elucidation of Ayesha Siddiqi's line that 'Every border implies the violence of its maintenance.' But the narrative Walia deftly weaves is the polar opposite of alarmist political nihilism: it is a clarion call for our solidarities to always transcend the physical and ideological boundaries drawn by empire. This is not simply a book about violence, it is also a book about the potential for care and for freedom." "Timely and topical, Border and Rule will be of interest to scholars, activists, and general readers. Walia connects variants of ethnonationalism across borders and illustrates how a world order predicated on aggression and displacement harms the most vulnerable among us, a category that includes a significant portion of the global population. Her analysis presents clear and compelling evidence that our current trajectory is unsustainable and offers cogent solutions trained on justice for the victims of endless war and colonial accumulation." -Steven Salaita, author of Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine

"Harsha Walia's Border and Rule forwards a clear and incisive analysis of the multiple crises facing migrants today amidst the rise of racist nationalisms globally. Her work highlighs the entanglements between global capitalism, imperialism, and past and present dynamics of Indigenous genocide and anti-Black governance that are at the heart of the border regime. Border and Rule is a must-read, sure to become a classic, for those of us concerned with building a world premised on freedom of movement, against and beyond the logics of the nation-state." "Read Harsha Walia and your understanding of the world will shift. This book is a comprehensive demolition of the borders that divide us and a deft takedown of the myth of the nation. Through a range of case-studies, Walia reveals overarching patterns of exclusion and exploitation, criss-crossing the globe to make a brave, deeply learned, and utterly convincing call for radical solidarity. With cries of "build a wall" ringing out and ethno-nationalism gaining steam, Walia's critical intervention couldn't be better timed." "Confused about how we got to this point? Harsha Walia explains clearly and concisely the multiple forces causing global poverty and displacement--and the resistance and organizing around the world. Walia provides a historical analysis of policies that have cut down people's well-being and driven poverty, violence, terror and mass migration, and highlights the myriad forms of resistance and organizing that are all-too-often invisiblized. An excellent explanation of borders, migration and the exploitative systems that produce both." "Harsha Walia's decades of visionary leadership in border abolition and migrant justice work, along with her relentless intellectual rigor, is apparent in this immensely important book, arriving right when we need it most. As governments lock down borders, mobilizations against policing reach new peaks, economic crisis worsens, and climate change accelerates, we desperately need this book if we hope to build a nuanced analysis of what we are facing and what kinds of transformation are necessary. Walia deftly exposes the inadequacy of liberal responses to the current crises, paving the way for a deeper understanding of the conditions we are facing and meaningful avenues for resistance. Walia's deeply researched, crystal clear text creates a robust toolbox for comprehending the current crises and assessing resistance strategies. This book is invaluable right now, a must-read for anyone working to dismantle prisons and borders, end poverty and war." "As communities and social movements scramble to respond to the threat of a globalised far-right against the apocalyptic backdrop of a global pandemic and impending ecological disaster, Harsha Walia's Border and Rule reminds us of how we got here. With clinical precision, Walia unravels the genealogies and histories of border militarization, incarceration and imperialism, laying bare the webs of domination and exploitation that threaten the poor and vulnerable everywhere, from those incarcerated in Australia's offshore immigration camps to the victims of drone warfare in Yemen. As we struggle with the cruel symptoms of a global disease - incarceration, exploitation, occupation, colonialism, environmental collapse - Walia picks this web apart, exposing the ways in which these crises interlock and overlap. It is a stark but necessary blueprint to understand. This book is also full of hope. It bears witness to the struggles of those who have survived and continue to resist in spite of merciless repression - the Indigenous, the enslaved, the exploited, the dispossessed and the undocumented. It is an urgent and revolutionary call to action that invites us to revisit the problem so that we may dream and fight harder for the world we want." -Aamer Rahman, comedian

"We know that borders are violence. We know that violence numbs our collective imagination. We know that imagination is a muscle that must be exercised daily to prevent atrophy. This book is the workout. Border and Rule works us. With rigor, precision, and care, Harsha Walia pushes us beyond false solutions, rainbow imperialisms, and exclusionary projections. What a privilege to think with her, to build movement muscle for a world free of borders." "Every once in a while there comes a book that makes you never see the world the same way again. Harsha Walia's Border and Rule is such a book. Incisive and rigorously researched, Walia lays bare the border apparatus like no other: its bloody history based on colonial dispossession, Indigenous genocides, anti-Black enslavement, and its contemporary function of maintaining-with militarized enforcement of divisions-a racialized global system of subjugation and exploitation rife with criminal inequalities and ecological catastrophes. Border and Rule is the most important reframing of borders and their enforcement apparatus that I have ever read. It demonstrates that the border is not a passive wall but an expansive omnipresent regime, and that there is no "border crisis" but a displacement crisis. I will be turning to its pages again and again, not only for its analysis but also for its inspiration. Indeed, Walia strips borders of their pretense and justifications in such a powerful way, that after finishing the book it feels like we can tear down the walls, and all they represent, with our bare hands." -Todd Miller, author of Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World

"Walia's intervention is to demonstrate, systematically and across geographies, that there is no acceptable legitimation for border rule, unless your interest is in upholding global capital as the sovereign force determining life and livability on the planet. To show how border regimes function is to reveal that there is no good argument for them." -Natasha Lennard, Bookforum

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No One Is Illegal

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Blood Red Lines

A riveting and unique look at the connections between Trump, neo-fascists, and billionaire donors pursuing unfettered capitalism.

The Border Crossed Us

A compelling argument that re-building unions requires solidarity with migrant workers and opening borders.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us

A reflection on prison industrial complex abolition and a vision for collective liberation from organizer and educator Mariame Kaba.

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Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism An urgent, global account of the migration crisis and the function of borders across political, social, cultural, and economic systems. In Border and Rule, one of North America's foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation.

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by Robin Wall Kimmerer

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A New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post Bestseller
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub
A Washington Post "2020 Holiday Gift Guide" Recommendation
A Minneapolis Star Tribune "2020 Holiday Book Recommendation"
A Book Riot "Favorite Summer Read of 2020​"
A Food Tank Reading Recommendation for Fall 2020
Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the hardcover special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. Beautifully bound with a new cover featuring an engraving by Tony Drehfal, this edition includes a bookmark ribbon, and five brilliantly colored illustrations by artist Nate Christopherson. In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than 350,000 readers in North America have cherished about the book-gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred-and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings-asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass-offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Indigenous, Nature, science, Native American, traditional ecological knowledge, Natural history, Ecology, botany, plants, essays, environment, spirituality, nonfiction, life sciences, spiritual, teaching, wisdom

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Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling collection of essays Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling collection of essays Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer is no stranger to addressing the biggest issues of our times through art. In the...

Join Robin Wall Kimmerer at Door County Library for the Write on Door County Reads 2024.

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A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Bestseller A Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub A Washington Post "2020 Holiday Gift Guide" Recommendation A Minneapolis Star Tribune "2020 Holiday Book Recommendation" A Book Riot "Favorite Summer Read of 2020​" A Food Tank Reading Recommendation for Fall 2020 Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the hardcover special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages.

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by Audre Lorde

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The Cancer Journals a book by Audre Lorde and Tracy K. Smith

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Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. A Penguin Classic First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Aud…

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by Ann Petry

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"Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose."

- Tayari Jones, New York Times Book Review

"A major literary invention . . . A truly great book."

-The Los Angeles Times

"Overflows with the classic pity and terror of good imaginative writing."

-The New York Times

"A powerful, uncompromising work of social criticism. To this day, few works of fiction have so clearly illuminated the devastating impact of racial injustice."

-Coretta Scott King

"A classic of American realism . . . The Street rushes toward its fatalistic climax like a train toward a washed-out bridge."
-Newsday

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the street by ann petry with new introduction by new york times best-selling author tayari jones

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With a new introduction by New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.

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by Margaret Atwood

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The Handmaid’s Tale a book by Margaret Atwood

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It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a Handmaid in the home of the Commander and his wife. She is allowed out once a day to the food market, she is not permitted to read, and she is hoping the Commander makes her pregnant, because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can…

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Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom

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Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom

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by John Mink

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Teaching Resistance is a collection of the voices of activist educators from around the world who engage inside and outside the classroom from pre-kindergarten to university and emphasize teaching radical practice from the field. Written in accessible language, this book is for anyone who wants to explore new ways to subvert educational systems and institutions, collectively transform educational spaces, and empower students and other teachers to fight for genuine change. Topics include community self-defense, Black Lives Matter and critical race theory, intersections between punk/DIY subculture and teaching, ESL, anarchist education, Palestinian resistance, trauma, working-class education, prison teaching, the resurgence of (and resistance to) the Far Right, special education, antifascist pedagogies, and more.

Edited by social studies teacher, author, and punk musician John Mink, the book features expanded entries from the monthly column in the politically insurgent punk magazine Maximum Rocknroll, plus new works and extensive interviews with subversive educators. Contributing teachers include Michelle Cruz Gonzales, Dwayne Dixon, Martín Sorrondeguy, Alice Bag, Miriam Klein Stahl, Ron Scapp, Kadijah Means, Mimi Nguyen, Murad Tamini, Yvette Felarca, Jessica Mills, and others, all of whom are unified against oppression and readily use their classrooms to fight for human liberation, social justice, systemic change, and true equality.

Royalties will be donated to Teachers 4 Social Justice: t4sj.org
Praise:
" Teaching Resistance brings us the voices of activist educators who are fighting back inside and outside of the classroom. The punk rock spirit of this collection of concise, hard-hitting essays is bound to stir up trouble."
-Mark Bray, historian, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook and coeditor of Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader

"Where was Teaching Resistance when I was in school? This essay collection both makes a compelling case for why radical classrooms are necessary and lays out how they can be put into practice. A perfect guide for educators and anyone working with young people, this book vitally also speaks to the student's experience. Even for the kid-adverse activists among us, Teaching Resistance reminds us that kids can be our comrades if we meet them halfway. The younger generations deserve more from us-this is the primer for how to start providing it."
-Shawna Potter, singer for War on Women, author of Making Spaces Safer

"Schools are implicated in the reproduction of inequality in society, but they don't have to be. When educators are intentional about their desire to challenge inequality, when they are unafraid of disrupting the status quo and challenging hierarchies, and when they actively seek to empower their students, schools can be-come a force for equity and justice. Teaching Resistance is written by educators who are currently doing this kind of work and it will serve as a source of inspiration to others. Teachers who are willing to use their power in the classroom to encourage critical thinking and creativity can become genuine allies of their students and the communities they serve, and they can indeed make a difference."
-Pedro A. Noguera, author of City Schools and the American Dream and The Trouble with Black Boys: . . . and Other Reflections on Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education

"In Teaching Resistance an extraordinary collective of educators combines a sophisticated analysis with philosophical nuance and original theorization of radical educational practices. This is a great collection and one that we need to understand radical education at the ground level-and to do so for a wide range of purposes."
-Andrej Grubačić, coauthor of Wobblies and Zapatistas and Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid

"At a time when white supremacist fascism has (re)asserted its ascendancy in the U.S., the putrid effluent perpetually oozing from its gangrenous societal tissues having become a torrent threatening to drown us all, resistance of the most concrete and effective sorts is imperative. In this respect, a book like Teaching Resistance couldn't be more urgently needed."
-Ward Churchill, author of Wielding Words like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995-2005

"This is an inspiring collection of reflections and stories from teachers working on the front-line in a range of both formal and informal educational spaces. Ever conscious of the harsh political and social realities facing teachers and pupils, the authors combine an activist stance with a wealth of pedagogical experience and a commitment to the emancipatory potential of educational encounters, without ever sinking into a romantic optimism or a politics of despair. Including discussions of racism, special education, early years education, prisons, art education and anarchist pedagogy, and ranging across diverse international contexts, the contributors offer an admirable combination of rigorous theoretical analysis and first-person accounts of practice. This collection is a powerful reminder that the radical voices of 'outsiders' and the marginal are crucial in addressing the pressing political issues of our time, and that it is within our educational spaces that these voices must and can be heard and creatively engaged with."
-Judith Suissa, author of Anarchism and Education
About the Editor:
John Mink is a social studies teacher who has worked at the high school and adult school levels, and who refuses to hide his political radicalism from his students. He has been a contributing writer and editor for underground publications and zines including Slingshot, Absolutely Zippo: A Fanzine's Anthology, and Collapse Board. Editor of the Maximum Rocknroll monthly column "Teaching Resistance" and a vocalist/bassist for several internationally recognized punk bands, John lives in Berkeley, California, with his partner Megan March, who is also his bandmate in the truewave/punk group Street Eaters.

See and hear editor interviews, book reviews, and other news on John Mink' s page HERE
Click here for one-page information sheet on this product

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Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom

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Teaching Resistance is a collection of the voices of activist educators from around the world who engage inside and outside the classroom from pre-kindergarten to university and emphasize teaching radical practice from the field.

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The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

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The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

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by Bessel Van Der Kolk

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The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma a book by Bessel Van Der Kolk

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1 New York Times bestseller "Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding and treating traumatic stress and the scope of its impact on society." --Alexander McFarlane, Director of the Centre for Traumatic Stress Studies A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing in this New York Times bestseller Trauma is a fact of life.

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by Yaa Gyasi

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Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, impris…

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by adrienne maree brown

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Pleasure Activism is part of the Emergent Strategy Series .
How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "pleasure activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism. Her mindset-altering essays are interwoven with conversations and insights from other feminist thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Joan Morgan, Cara Page, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Together they cover a wide array of subjects-from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs-building new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own.

Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, adrienne launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!

Praise for Pleasure Activism
"[brown] demonstrates how we can tap into our emotional and erotic desires to organize against oppression."
-Colorlines

"adrienne maree brown...continues to stake her claim as one of our most critical thinkers and strategists by intentionally combining the power of story-telling with practical applications to help readers conjure their own definition of pleasure and how it is inextricably linked to every part of our existence."
- Monica Simpson, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective

"adrienne marie brown is back, again dropping wisdom about alternative ways to live at this deeply fucked-up moment ... Let this book be the best Valentine's Day gift you've ever given yourself."
- Laura Winnick, Vice/Broadly

"adrienne maree brown dives deep, head first, into a fast swirling pool of pleasure-related topics. She swims her way from one end of the pool to the other with some help from her body-wise, experienced, friends. This book is all at once so cool, and so hot, with a rainbow of glorious compleXXXities. Pleasure Activism is bound to make a huge splash!"
- Annie Sprinkle, author of Explorer's Guide to Planet Orgasm-For Every Body

" Pleasure Activism is at heart a deeply personal collection of poems, interviews, artwork, and reflections curated and written by Brown to maximize pleasure and joy within our lives while also reducing trauma-induced pain, guilt, and shame."
- Caitlin Isabella Laughney, Columbia University

"Engaging with politics and social justice issues, whether it's climate change, race, or gender, can feel like work (and it is). Adrienne maree brown makes the case that you can feel good while doing so ... [Pleasure Activism] will challenge you to rethink your approach to changing the world."
- Victoria Rodriguez, Mashable

" Pleasure Activism is an invitation to know ourselves and be in conversation with the desire of our lustful imaginations... [I]t makes our personal liberation irresistible."
- Jasmine Burnett, activist and anti-oppression consultant

"adrienne maree brown elucidates a philosophy of Pleasure Activism to transform individuals and so the world. Her explicit instructions encourage orgasms of the body, mind and spirit. First, in support of our own authentic lives, then so that we can live in loving community with others. It's like a wise and juicy black goddess reopened Eden and said, 'Okay, everybody, let's try this again.'"
- Veronica Vera, author & founder of Miss Vera's Finishing School For Boys Who Want to Be Girls

" Pleasure Activism, as curated by brown, is a fitting example of the collective experience of love and the relationships that define every mass movement and whisper the most ancient wisdom about possibilities for a shared future."
- Lorax B. Horne for Interface: a journal for and about social movements

adrienne maree brown is a writer rooted in Detroit who now lives in Durham, NC. She is a student of the works of Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin. Some of her books include , Emergent Strategy and . Her visionary fiction has appeared in The Funambulist, Harvard Design Review, Dark Mountain, and YES! Magazine.

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Pleasure Activism A New York Times Best Seller! "[brown] demonstrates how we can tap into our emotional and erotic desires to organize against oppression." -Colorlines "adrienne maree brown...continues to stake her claim as

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by Agatha Christie

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5.2 X 7.9 X 0.6 inches | 0.4 pounds

Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a British crime writer best known for her detective novels and short stories. According to Guinness World Records, she is the best-selling novelist of all time, her novels having sold over four billion copies and having been translated into more than one hundred languages. The Agatha Award for best mystery and crime writers was named in her honor.

"Beyond all doubt the puzzle in The Moving Finger is fit for experts."--The Times (London)
"Agatha Christie is in a class by herself. For those of us who write mysteries, there's no better muse, and for those of us who read them, no deeper pleasure."--Mary Jane Clark, New York Times bestselling author

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The Moving Finger: A Miss Marple Mystery a book by Agatha Christie

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In this exclusive authorized edition from the Queen of Mystery, the indomitable sleuth Miss Marple is led to a small town with shameful secrets.Lymstock is a town with more than its share of scandalous secrets--a town where even a sudden outbreak of anonymous hate mail causes only a minor stir.But all that changes when one of the recipients, Mrs.

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by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States a book by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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Now part of the HBO docuseries Exterminate All the Brutes, written and directed by Raoul Peck 2015 Recipient of the American Book Award The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recogn…

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Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism

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Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism

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by Jelani Favors

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2020 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award

2020 Lillian Smith Book Award

Finalist, 2020 Pauli Murray Book Prize

For generations, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black freedom struggle, forever altering the political destiny of the United States. In this book, Jelani M. Favors offers a history of HBCUs from the 1837 founding of Cheyney State University to the present, told through the lens of how they fostered student activism.

Favors chronicles the development and significance of HBCUs through stories from institutions such as Cheyney State University, Tougaloo College, Bennett College, Alabama State University, Jackson State University, Southern University, and North Carolina A&T. He demonstrates how HBCUs became a refuge during the oppression of the Jim Crow era and illustrates the central role their campus communities played during the civil rights and Black Power movements. Throughout this definitive history of how HBCUs became a vital seedbed for politicians, community leaders, reformers, and activists, Favors emphasizes what he calls an unwritten "second curriculum" at HBCUs, one that offered students a grounding in idealism, racial consciousness, and cultural nationalism.

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Shelter in a Time of Storm | Jelani M. Favors | University of North Carolina Press

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2020 Museum of African American History Stone Book Award 2020 Lillian Smith Book Award Finalist, 2020 Pauli Murray Book Prize For generations, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black freedom struggle, forever altering the political destiny of the United States.

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When I Die I Shall Return to My Own Land: The New York City Slave Revolt of 1712

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When I Die I Shall Return to My Own Land: The New York City Slave Revolt of 1712

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by Ben Hughes

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About This Book
The First Comprehensive Investigation of the First Uprising Against Slavery in North America
At 2 a.m. on April 7, 1712, a fire broke out in New York City's North Ward. Unbeknown to the residents who roused themselves to combat the flames, the blaze had been started with murderous intent. A group of at least twenty-four enslaved West African men and women, mostly Akan from modern-day Ghana, had long plotted this moment. Armed with guns, daggers, swords, axes, and clubs, they fell upon their enslavers. In the next few frantic moments, eight Europeans were killed and seven were wounded. The perpetrators were rounded up, jailed, and put on public trial. Twenty enslaved men and one woman were executed or transported for carrying out the plot. As the first event of its kind to take place in the North American colonies, this revolt was the progenitor of those that followed-it inspired, the Stono Rebellion of 1739, the New York Conspiracy of 1741, and Nat Turner's 1831 insurrection.

When I Die, I Shall Return to My Own Land: The 1712 New York City Slave Revolt is the first comprehensive investigation into this major event in the history of slavery in North America. Consulting court records, correspondence, and the minutes of the various colonial councils, as well as a wide range of sources related to eighteenth-century slavery, historian Ben Hughes vividly recreates early colonial New York, the lives of its enslaved inhabitants, the factionalism among the city's Dutch and English elites, and their precarious hold on Manhattan Island in the face of French and Native American threats. Hughes traces the origins of the New York rebels, details how they came to be enslaved, and recreates the shadowy dealings that took place between African polities, European and American slavers, and New York merchants. The forerunners of a movement which continues to this day, the deeds of these original African American rebels have now been all but forgotten. Here, Hughes attempts to redress this imbalance by recovering their story.

BEN HUGHES is the author of a number of acclaimed books of history, including Apocalypse 1692: Empire, Slavery, and the Great Port Royal Earthquake (Westholme 2017) and The Siege of Fort William Henry: A Year on the Northeastern Frontier (Westholme 2011). He lives in England with his family.

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When I Die I Shall Return to My Own Land - Hughes - Westholme Publishing

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The First Comprehensive Investigation of the First Uprising Against Slavery in North America At 2 a.m. on April 7, 1712, a fire broke out in New York City's North Ward. Unbeknown to the residents who roused themselves to combat the flames, the blaze had been started with murderous intent.

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by Akwaeke Emezi

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Finalist for the 2019 PEN/Hemingway Award
Finalist for the 2019 NYPL Young Lions Award
Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction
Longlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction for 2019
Longlisted for the Wellcome Prize for 2019
Semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award for 2019
National Book Foundation's '5 under 35' for 2018
Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize for 2018
Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize for 2018
Longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for 2018
A New York Times Notable Book for 2018
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice for 2018
An Indies Introduce Title for 2018
An Amazon Top 10 Book Pick for February 2018
Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year (So Far) by Esquire for 2018
Named One of the Best Books to Read This Winter by Elle for 2018
"[A] witchy, electrifying story of danger and compulsion . . . Freshwater recounts the 'litany of madness' suffered by Ada in a serpentine prose that proceeds by oblique, hypnotizing movements before it sinks its fangs into you . . . As striking and mysterious as the ways of the gods who narrate it . . . The latest standout in this exciting boom in the Nigerian novel." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"The novel is based in many of the realities of the writer's life, but the prose is infused with imaginative lyricism and tone . . . The journey undertaken in the novel is swirling and vivid, vicious and painful, and rendered by Emezi in [sharp and glittering] shards . . . Emezi's lyrical writing, her alliterative and symmetrical prose, explores the deep questions of otherness, of a single heart and soul hovering between, the gates open, fighting for peace." - Susan Straight, Los Angeles Times

"A startling debut novel explores the freedom of being multiple . . . Igbo spirituality, Emezi radically suggests, has as much to offer as any [Western] schemas when it comes to decrypting human folly or transcendence . . . The book would have made grim sense through a mental-health lens; instead, it is an indigenous fairy tale . . . The book becomes a study in dysphoria-not precisely the distress of being misgendered but the more nebulous pain of being imprisoned in a physical form, of losing your wraith-like ability to evade categorization . . . There is something self-defeating about trying to trace a self that is defined by indefinability; one achievement of Emezi's book is to make that paradox feel generously fertile." - Katy Waldman, New Yorker

"Remarkable and daring . . . Poetic and disturbing . . . Rooting Ada's story in Igbo cosmology forces us to further question our paradigm for what causes mental illness and how it manifests. It causes us to question science and reason." - Tariro Mzezewa, New York Times

"Akwaeke Emezi is a name you will want to remember, because surely it is one you will be hearing again and again . . . A stunning and disorienting story about a broken woman trying to overcome the pain of her human life while straddling 'the other side' . . . Freshwater is unlike any novel I have ever read. Its shape-shifting perspective is radical and innovative, twisting the narrative voices like the bones of a python . . . Emezi has not only made a rich contribution to Igbo mythology, she has crafted a novel so unique and fresh, it feels as if the medium has been reinvented." - Safa Jinje, Toronto Star

"Akwaeke Emezi's bewitching and heart-rending Freshwater is a coming-of-age novel like no other . . . For anyone who has experienced life as a misfit or outcast, this is a resonant rendition . . . For all its sheer invention, Freshwater feels more like an interpretive journey through uncharted territory with an experienced guide. Potent and moving, knowing and strange, this is a powerful and irresistibly unsettling debut." - David Wright, Seattle Times

"Akwaeke Emezi parts the seas of the self in her engrossing debut novel, Freshwater." - Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair

"Harrowing yet beautiful . . . Racing through [ Freshwater] felt disrespectful-To the gods? To Emezi? To literature itself?-for [it] is the kind of novel that deserves, no, demands immersion and focus. Every sentence left me reeling, every paragraph on the edge of my seat, and every chapter begging for more. I could've spent hundreds of pages more in Emezi's lush creation . . . For a debut novelist, Akwaeke Emezi has successfully pulled off what many longtime writers only dream of doing. It's an astonishing, haunting, stunning piece of work." - Tor.com

"[A] stunningly poetic debut. Emezi's deconstruction of identity is gripping, her approach to sensitive subjects deeply moving." - Entertainment Weekly

"Far surpasses your average edgy coming-of-age novel . . . A gripping read that deftly achieves what many postmodern books strive for-a discussion and interrogation of the fractured self-in a way that puts its contemporaries to shame. It is clearer, faster, more intimate, and more inventive than many other topically comparative books . . . A remarkable take on human interiority." - Riveter

" Freshwater is the first novel from Akwaeke Emezi, marking the beginning of what will surely be a long, storied career. Strikingly original and impossible to put down, it tracks the life of a Nigerian woman-from birth through to her adulthood unraveling-and will leave you breathless by the very end."- PopSugar

"A gorgeous, unsettling look into the human psyche, richly conceived yet accessible to all." - Library Journal (starred review)

"In her mind-blowing debut, Emezi weaves traditional Igbo myth that turns the well-worn narrative of mental illness on its head, and in doing so she has ensured a place on the literary-fiction landscape as a writer to watch (...) Emezi's brilliance lies not just in her expert handling of the conflicting voices in Ada's head but in delivering an entirely different perspective on just what it means to go slowly mad. Complex and dark, this novel will simultaneously challenge and reward lovers of literary fiction. A must-read." - Booklist (starred review)

"[An] enthralling, metaphysical debut novel . . . Emezi's talent is undeniable. She brilliantly depicts the conflict raging in the 'marble room' of Ada's psyche, resulting in an impressive debut."- Publishers Weekly

"Freshwater is a clarion call to those of us who find that our minds are more haunted and complex than that of the status quo. In exquisite, unearthly prose, Akwaeke Emezi renders the ordinary strange and the strange, ordinary-making Freshwater the most stunning debut novel I've read in years. An unforgettable literary experience." - Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Border of Paradise

"In Emezi's remarkable debut novel, Freshwater, we enter the lives of our protagonist, starting in Nigeria and ending in the United States. Every page is imbued with radiant prose, and a chorus of poetic voices. With a plot as alive and urgent as it is relatable, Freshwater is also solidly its own, brims with its unique preoccupations. Never before have I read a novel like it -- one that speaks to the unification and separation of bodies and souls, the powers or lack thereof of gods and humans, and the long and arduous journey to claiming our many selves, or to setting our many selves free." - Chinelo Okparanta, author of Under The Udala Trees

" Freshwater is one of those dazzling novels that defies these kinds of descriptions. We can gesture to the story -- set in Nigeria and America, told by all the selves of its Tamil/Igbo protagonist -- but such synthesis fails to convey the magic that awaits its reader. At once fiction and memoir, potent in its spiritual richness and sexual frankness, the text seems not to have been written by but channeled through its brilliant author. This may be Emezi's debut novel but she is an old -- an ancient -- storyteller: thrillingly at home in the tradition of griots, poets, seers and seekers." - Taiye Selasi, author of Ghana Must Go

"Nigerian-born author Emezi presents an emotionally charged debut with her novel, Freshwater . . . Emezi's prose is vibrant and terrifying; she portrays Ada's tribulations with breathtaking detail. Freshwater is a novel of unforgiving spirituality told in a manner that is sophisticated, precise and elegant."- IndiePicks Magazine

"Akwaeke Emezi is a major, exhilarating talent." - NoViolet Bulawayo, author of We Need New Names

"With this stunning debut, Akwaeke Emezi has blessed us with nothing less than a masterpiece. Freshwater is a journey of loss and reconciliation, home and heartbreak, and ultimately a survivor's guide to harmonizing spirit and flesh. Quite simply a gorgeous, elegant, and brutal work of truthtelling. To repeat: a fucking masterpiece." - Daniel José Older, New York Times bestselling author of the Shadowshaper Cypher series

"What if we were not one person, but three in one body-created by careless gods who forgot to 'close the gate'? Akwaeke Emezi's novel, Freshwater, paints a fiercely unique,unforgettable story of identity, mental health and the world beyond ours. This impressive debut is lyrical and well-told." - Tananarive Due, author of Ghost Summer

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Finalist for the 2019 PEN/Hemingway AwardFinalist for the 2019 NYPL Young Lions AwardFinalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender FictionLonglisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for FictionLonglisted for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in FictionFinalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction for 2019Longlisted for

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Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes

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Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes

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by Christia Brown

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Parenting Beyond Pink & Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes a book by Christia Spears Brown

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A guide that helps parents focus on their children’s unique strengths and inclinations rather than on gendered stereotypes to more effectively bring out the best in their individual children, for parents of infants to middle schoolers. Reliance on Gendered Stereotypes Negatively Impacts Kids Studie…

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We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility

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We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility

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by Marc Lamont Hill

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"Marc Lamont Hill offers critical insights into the whirlwind pandemic and racism have reaped. We Still Here appears at a time of intense study and debate about how we got here--and, most importantly, how we get out. Politics, history, strategy, and tactics are all that our side has. Read this book and we'll see you in the streets."
--Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

"Marc Lamont Hill doesn't shy away from the difficult questions, and he is willing to tell the hard truth. In this powerful book, his insight and commitment to justice leap from every page. Read it, be informed, and feel fortified in these trying times. Hill models what Henry James called 'perception at the pitch of passion.'"
--Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of " We Still Here is a brilliant, timely, and inspirational book. Marc Lamont Hill gives a critical intersectional analysis of what got us to the present moment, but also paints a beautiful picture of possibilities for the future. This is the perfect text for students, organizers, activists, and leaders."
--Tarana Burke, founder of Me Too

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We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility a book by Marc Lamont Hill, Frank Barat, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

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In the midst of loss and death and suffering, our charge is to figure out what freedom really means--and how we take steps to get there. "In the United States, being poor and Black makes you more likely to get sick. Being poor, Black, and sick makes you more likely to die.

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How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

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How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

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by Clint Smith

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How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America a book by Clint Smith

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Instant #1 New York Times bestseller A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021 A Time 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2021 Named a Best Book of 2021 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Economist, Smithsonian, Esquire, Entropy, The Christian Science Monitor, WBEZ’s Nerdette P…

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A Youth Speaks Poetry Anthology

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"Between My Body and the Air" is a collection of poems by young voices from the Bay Area and Beyond pushing us to think deeply about our COVID-clad world and the structural violence impacting our communities even before the pandemic hit.

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"Between My Body and the Air" is a collection of poems by young voices from the Bay Area and Beyond pushing us to think deeply about our COVID-clad world and the structural violence impacting our communities even before the pandemic hit.

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by Rebecca Skloot

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a book by Rebecca Skloot

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - “The story of modern medicine and bioethics--and, indeed, race relations--is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”--Entertainment Weekly NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO(R) STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE - ONE OF THE “MOST INFLUENTIAL” (CNN), “DEFINING” (LITH…

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by bell hooks

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Product Details

5.3 X 8.0 X 0.7 inches | 0.52 pounds

About the Author

bell hooks is the author of several books, including Killing Rage, Bone Black, and Wounds of Passion. She is Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York and lives in New York City.

Reviews

"Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us."-- Maya Angelou"She provides a refreshing spiritual treatise that steps outside the confines of the intellect and into the wilds of the heart."-- "Seattle Weekly"Like love, this book is worth the commitment."-- "Toronto Sun

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All about Love: New Visions a book by Bell Hooks

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The acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' Love Song to the Nation," All About Love is a revelation about what causes a polarized society and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering.

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by TJ Klune

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Product Details

5.4 X 8.2 X 1.0 inches | 0.8 pounds

Earn by promoting books

About the Author

TJ KLUNE is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The House in the Cerulean Sea, The Extraordinaries, and more. Being queer himself, Klune believes it's important--now more than ever--to have accurate, positive queer representation in stories.

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The House in the Cerulean Sea a book by Tj Klune

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A NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, and WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER!A 2021 Alex Award winner!The 2021 RUSA Reading List: Fantasy Winner!An Indie Next Pick!One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2020One of Book Riot's "20 Must-Read Feel-Good Fantasies" Lambda Literary Award-winning author TJ Klune's bestselling, breakout contemporary fantasy that's 1984 meets The Umbrella Academy with a pinch of Douglas Adams thrown in.

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by joy harjo

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Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems a book by Joy Harjo

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In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Ark…

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Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion

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Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion

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by Ryan Conrad

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Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion a book by Ryan Conrad

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When “rights” go wrong.
Does gay marriage support the right-wing goal of linking access to basic human rights like health care and economic security to an inherently conservative tradition?
Will the ability of queers to fight in wars of imperialism help liberate and empower LGBT people around the wo…

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by Elizabeth Acevedo

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Winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award!Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afr…

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by Akwaeke Emezi

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by Jamaica Kincaid

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Product Details

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

5.5 X 0.47 X 8.28 inches | 0.37 pounds

About the Author

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John's, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, A Small Place, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, My Garden (Book), Mr. Potter, Talk Stories, a collection of New Yorker writings, and My Favorite Plant, a collection of writings on gardens which she edited. In 2000 she was awarded the Prix Fémina Étranger for My Brother. She lives with her family in Vermont.

Reviews

"Beautifully precise prose . . . It leaves the reader with the unforgettable experience of having met a ferociously honest woman on her own uncompromising terms." -- The New York Times

"Brilliant . . . Lucy confirms Ms. Kincaid as a both a daughter of Bronte and Woolf and her own inimitable self." -- Wall Street Journal

"A furious, broken-hearted gem of a novel . . . Part of the richness of this book is the way we come to see, as Lucy struggles to do, the connections between those of us who have too much and those who will never have enough--and between 'a sentence for life' (what can't be changed in the self) and that which can be wrestled with and, at least, understood." -- San Francisco Chronicle

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The coming-of-age story of one of Jamaica Kincaid's most admired creations--newly available in paperback Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. Lewis and Mariah are a thrice-blessed couple--handsome, rich, and seemingly happy.

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by Frank B. Wilderson III

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Description

Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery--in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms--continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world? These are just some of the compelling questions that animate Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III's seminal work on the philosophy of Blackness.

Combining precise philosophy with a torrent of memories, Wilderson presents the tenets of an increasingly prominent intellectual movement that sees Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery. Drawing on works of philosophy, literature, film, and critical theory, he shows that the social construct of slavery, as seen through pervasive anti-Black subjugation and violence, is hardly a relic of the past but the very engine that powers our civilization, and that without this master-slave dynamic, the calculus bolstering world civilization would collapse. Unlike any other disenfranchised group, Wilderson argues, Blacks alone will remain essentially slaves in the larger Human world, where they can never be truly regarded as Human beings, where, "at every scale of abstraction, violence saturates Black life."

And while Afropessimism delivers a formidable philosophical account of being Black, it is also interwoven with dramatic set pieces, autobiographical stories that juxtapose Wilderson's seemingly idyllic upbringing in mid-century Minneapolis with the abject racism he later encounters--whether in late 1960s Berkeley or in apartheid South Africa, where he joins forces with the African National Congress. Afropessimism provides no restorative solution to the hatred that abounds; rather, Wilderson believes that acknowledging these historical and social conditions will result in personal enlightenment about the reality of our inherently racialized existence.

Radical in conception, remarkably poignant, and with soaring flights of lyrical prose, Afropessimism reverberates with wisdom and painful clarity in the fractured world we inhabit. It positions Wilderson as a paradigmatic thinker and as a twenty-first-century inheritor of many of the African American literary traditions established in centuries past.

Product Details

Liveright Publishing Corporation

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About the Author

Reviews

A compelling, profoundly unsettling blend of memoir and manifesto that proposes that--by design--matters will never improve for African Americans.... Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old.... An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.--Kirkus Reviews [starred review]
Frank B. Wilderson III both thinks and feels, and profoundly knows the difference. I am not sure that I agree with what he thinks, because frankly, how would I know? But I hope that he is wrong, even though I know that no thinking is wishful. Read this book.--Fran Lebowitz
[Wilderson's] writing is powerful, nuanced, and lyrical ("Her hair was white and thin as dandelion puffs," he recalls of a visit to his aged mother.)... [his] passionate account of racism's malevolent influence is engrossing.

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Afropessimism a book by Frank B. Wilderson

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Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery--in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms--continue to define the Black experience? And why is anti-Black violence such a predominant feature not only in the United States but around the world?

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Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

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Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

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by Mark Fisher

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Captured by Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps

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by Vikky Storm and Eme Flores

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Death to gender! Freedom to the queers! But gender dies through eating its own tail. Gender is dying already. Its death rattle is upon us, but it still has time to save itself. It is on us to hurry it along to its final end. To speed it on. To make it...

Accelerate.

Gender: Its Function and Origins

Material Base

Before we can discuss what is to be done, we need to know what is. And, as always, the place to start when understanding a social system is it's material base. The material relations that produce the social system provide us with the best grounding for understanding the social system itself.

Material relations are relations of production. That is, they are the way we relate to the various ways we labor and produce things. All of society is based upon these relations of production and they produce all of our social systems. Gender is no different.

So where does gender's material base lie? Gender is produced primarily by the division of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is any labor that helps to produce the next generation, including sex, birth, childcare, and homemaking, and gender is defined by how this labor is divided up, with the different genders being distinct classes which are expected to perform specific sorts of tasks regarding reproductive labor.

The way gender differs between cultures is determined by how these tasks are divvied up between the genders. The particular characteristics that this produces are what is known as the superstructure. So, while gender is produced by this material base, it also involves an amalgamation of various stereotypes, ways of dress, formal speech, etc in its superstructure which differ how we experience our gender.

And this applies to all cultures. The Bugi people of Indonesia, rather than the two genders of our society, have five genders in total. Calabai and calalai people have biological characteristics that have been gendered as male and female respectively, but they adopt the reproductive labor tasks typically assigned to makkunrai (roughly equivalent to women) and oroané (roughly equivalent to men) which provides them with a different social class. More interestingly, however, are the bissu, the fifth gender, which fills a role distinct from the other four. They fill special ceremonial religious practices and are said to be a mixture of the four other genders. Whereas makkunrai and calabai take on typically feminine reproductive labor tasks, such as homemaking, and oroané and calalai take on typically masculine ones, such as providing support for their spouse, the bissu transcend this and engage in their own tasks.

The Bugi gender system shows how malleable gender can be, but it also provides us with an excellent example of the material base to gender. The five genders of the Bugi are distinguished by how reproductive labor is divided among the Bugi people. Everything else is produced by this division.

Our culture is different from theirs but both are based upon the same sorts of divisions of reproductive labor. What produces gender is how these tasks are divvied up and all else follows from this.

This talk of material relations so often come down to naming capitalistic relations as the base of things, but this does not hold with gender. While gender and capitalism work together and are a part of the same social order, they do not share the same material base. This isn't to say that the material base of gender has no relation to capitalism; reproductive labor is required for producing new laborers for capitalistic production and capitalistic production tends to define the exact nature of male reproductive labor.

Sex and Gender

Since gender is an expression of these relations of production and not of biology, where does that leave sex? Some pseudomarxists claim sex forms the material base of gender, but this is a laughable understanding of historical materialism which centers biology before relations of production. Biology influences our reality, but our social systems find their basis in our material conditions.

But sex is a thing and, if it isn't the basis of gender, what is it? Well, this formulation isn't wrong, per se, it's merely backwards. Gender forms the basis of sex. We are not born with sex already within us. We have penises, vaginas, breasts, beards, chromosomes, etc, but these things are not sex on their own. They are features of our biology, but we group them into sexes. When we call penises boy parts we are creating and imposing gender upon the body.

What this means is that sex is the gendering of our biological features. We assign gender to our biology and claim them to be innate. This is used to present the gender class system as a natural thing that just exists rather than a social system that gets imposed upon us. By gendering our bodies, we act as if gender just is rather than it being something that we've created. As such, sex serves to reinforce and defend gender.

Because sex isn't some inherent thing, but an element of gender's superstructure, it has changed over time. The earliest people could only have gendered the features that are plainly visible, such as genitals. It's only as our understanding of anatomy progressed that we were able to gender things like ovaries. Most recently, chromosomes have been gendered because of their relationship to features we've already gendered.

But chromosomes haven't always been gendered. Half a century ago, no one would look at someone with breasts and a vagina and gendered their bodies male, even if their chromosomes read XY. However, in 1986, the Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño failed a chromosome test in the 1986 Olympics which led people to reject her as male sexed. Three years prior, she had passed a sex verification saying she was a female sexed based on older methods, but, because she is XY, she failed a chromosome test. In previous epochs, no one would have questioned her body's womanhood, but, thanks to the gendering of chromosomes, her body was deemed male and she was shunned and shamed.

Enforcement and Sexual Violence

Gender is the earliest class systems and, as a result, it precedes the state, even in its earliest most basic form. This means that, unlike capitalism, race, neuronormativity, and the various other class systems, the state is not the primary means by which gender is imposed upon people. This isn't to say that the state doesn't impose gender, but it is supplementary, not primary. By the time states were cropping up, gender had already solidified itself and become quite adept at imposing itself upon others.

So, if not the state, how is it imposed? Through sexual violence. When we look to statistics on the issues, what we find is that rates of sexual violence are higher among women than among men and among queer people than among straight men. Some forms of sexual violence are higher among straight women than queer women and some forms of sexual violence are higher among queer women than straight women. Trans people face higher rates of sexual violence than cis people of the same gender as them. This is saddening on its own and the real cost of it upon the lives of those affected should not be ignored. This is a horrifying state of affairs and this should not be diminished in any way.

These higher rates of sexual violence are primarily against lower classes within the gender system. Straight, cis men are placed above women and queer people and straight cis men are less likely to experience sexual violence than women or queer people, while women tend to have rates more similar to queer people. This shows that sexual violence is used primarily against those relegated to the lower class and those who are divergent from enforced gender norms.

Sexual violence fills the role among women and queer people that police violence fills among many others. Indeed, while police violence does exist, it is quite frequently sexually charged when applied to women and queer people. Among queer people specifically, sexual violence is often done with explicitly correctional purposes. That is, sexual violence, particularly rape, is often used against queer people specifically to make them straight and cis. This is when the role of sexual violence is most explicit, but it is always for this purpose. Even when sexual violence isn't done for this explicit purpose, it always serves the purpose of enforcing the dominant gender system upon the victim.

When it comes to sex workers, this can be especially pronounced. As sex workers are performing work that's illegal almost everywhere in the world, they are unable to properly report sexual violence against them to the police and, when they do, they are often jailed for engaging in sex work. This means that sexual violence done against them can be done unhampered by interference from the state in ways it is not possible among other groups. In addition, we find sex workers are more likely to be women or queer than straight cishet men. This is not by mistake, but a specific venue for sexual violence against women and queer people where it can be done with impunity.

The Modern Gender Binary

There aren't any current genderless societies. Though there are many variations, all have created a division of reproductive labor which has produced a gender system. Indeed, they've been around since at least the first civilizations developed the first writing systems. Gender is the first system of power developed by society.

But these are systems, not a system, and the modern gender binary has been enforced on almost the whole world. Some different gender class systems still exist, but, by and large, the advent of the liberal social order as a global social order rather than a regional one has produced a single gender system which all other systems are seen as perversions of. Other gender systems today serve as hold outs within a larger global system.

The modern system is a European one, but it's one that developed during and through colonialism. As Europeans expanded their power around the globe, they came into contact with various other gender systems and, rather than seeing difference, they saw a problem. They responded to it by enforcing their own gender system upon the various peoples their invaded and colonized. But enforcing a gender system upon other groups like that necessarily transforms it.

When a system like this is imposed upon another culture, it will lose some characteristics and gain others, purely from the process of enforcement. Because the imperialists can't allow for the old system to persevere, they need to make their own system less flexible so that it can't account for the old system, forcing people to find a place in the new. Religion also added new significance to it. While gender always had religious significance, the enforcement of the single gender system was done in service of and by religious institutions to a greater extent than it had before. Christian missionaries would force the European colonial gender system wherever they went and they tied it closely to Christian religious morality. This contributed to the lack of flexibility because it infused gender with religious zeal that had previously not played as large of a part.

And this enforcement came at the expense of the people it was enforced upon. Whereas previously, many first nations peoples had third genders which were accepted within their societies and often held honored positions, people who today still identify with those third genders are oppressed and marginalized. This enforcement also served to destroy culture. Cultural practices tied to older gender systems were no longer able to be practiced and European cultural practices got enforced upon them. European, Christian marriages were spread across the globe alongside the gender system and would transform local marriage practices along the way.

It was also transformed by the rise of capitalism. The pre-colonial gender system was tied strongly to the economic systems dominant in Europe prior to the rise of capitalism. Marriage served as a means of securing alliances among the upper classes and as a means of stability among the lower classes. Gender was defined by the intrigues of court or the necessities of toil in the fields or in the cities. But, with capitalism, we find it more and more tied to wage labor and marriage transformed with it. The male part of reproductive labor was increasingly to labor for a capitalistic boss and the female part to support his wage labor from home. This effect on the material base of gender caused it to transform, both in how the classes worked and in the characteristics of the superstructure.

This new system has a few characteristics which define it. Not all of them developed at once, but they've been imposed upon the whole world. They are as follows:

1. Exactly two genders recognized by the dominant power structure: Man and woman. Other genders are seen as perversion and are shunned and marginalized.

2. These two genders are seen as identical to your biology and fixed from birth. While every gender system ties gender to biology, the modern system equates the two. Being a man in this system isn't tied to having a penis, it is having a penis. And this gender is immutable. You can't change it. If you're born as a man, you're seen as a man no matter what. There are no options or alternatives.

3. Marriage is an economic contract between a man and a woman. Men and women are supposed to sign an agreement to be faithful and to stay together and violation of that is seen as a breach of contract and therefore bad.

4. Marriage is a personal choice done for love rather than a social choice done for necessity. Gone are marriages for alliances or arranged marriages, for the most part. Marriage is only a choice for the two who are getting married.

5. In marriage, the man is expected to make money to support the woman and the woman is expected to clean up the home, take care of the children, cook, and shop.

Not all of these characteristics are unique to the modern system and some of them are improvements on old systems, but they are imposed upon everyone which destroys individual culture and choice.

Patriarchy

As has been referenced previously, gender is a system of class, and is one defined by the domination of manhood over society. This is why another name for the gender class system is patriarchy. Gender as a social system is patriarchy and patriarchy is the social class system of gender. Within this class system, we find three distinct classes, two accepted and one subversive.

First, we have men. When dividing reproductive labor, men are the ones who are tasked with controlling reproductive labor and the fruits of that labor and with engaging in economic labor to support those who perform primarily reproductive labor. The exception to this is sexual relations where they engage with them directly, but they're expected to be dominant and in control. This serves as the material base for maleness. The superstructure is more expansive. We find men are assigned with taking action, with increasing strength, and with constant competitiveness. Given their control of reproductive labor and domination over women, this is the ruling class within patriarchy.

Women, on the other hand, are the ruled. They are tasked with performing most reproductive action, with housekeeping, food preparation for the family, child rearing, and other such tasks. They're also expected to engage in sexual relations, but have the relations controlled by the man. They have their labor controlled and confined by men and have the fruits of that labor commanded by men. This is reflected in the superstructure around them. They're expected to be subservient and passive, to accept that which comes for them, etc.

This class dynamic of man over woman is the principal dynamic of patriarchy, but they do not comprise the only two classes. Instead, we find that some people relate to reproductive labor differently than how it's imposed upon the population. This is especially the case with regards to sex, when someone engages in sexual relations that do not fit with the dynamics imposed by patriarchy. This includes people who are sexually attracted to people of the same gender (gay/lesbian people), of multiple genders (bisexual/pansexual people), or no gender (asexual people). In addition, people whose gender is different from the one patriarchy assigns to them can't be classed as neatly as people who accept the assignment by gender. While they might be personally men or women, they aren't treated by society in quite the same way so they comprise a distinct social class. Characteristic to this is the detachment of sex and romance from reproducing the next generation. While it's still possible for all of these groups to reproduce the next generation, it is no longer a necessary part of sex and romance.

Since this third class is defined by it's difference from those of the first two classes, it is named queer. Queer people are all those who relate differently to the division of reproductive labor assigned to them by patriarchy. Because of the different relations, queer people are inherently subversive to the class system as a whole and constitute the revolutionary class under patriarchy.

This queerness is a particular characteristic of the modern gender system. Other gender systems do not have the same class system and, thus, have different categories for people. Indeed, in places where older gender systems have been maintained, it isn't accurate to default to talking about queerness. Many people who identify with genders from older gender systems are queer by virtue of the modern gender system being imposed upon them, but many of them aren't because of the complexities of being in communities with those genders.

Saying "Yes" to Gender

Class, class, class. We are dominated and controlled. Sorted and divided. But where do we factor into all this? People see class like this as merely imposed, but that fails to account for the ways we actually interact with it. It isn't simply imposed upon us. We are active participants within it, we perform it.

Here we can listen to the analysis of Judith Butler: Performative acts, that is all the little actions you take which construct an identity, are key to understanding how gender functions on an individual level. We find these in the most basic things we do and say, "I am a woman", "No, I can't play with that. It's a boy toy", "Boys will be boys". These acts produce an identity, both within ourselves and within others. You identify as a woman or a man and identify others as men or women by engaging in these acts.

This is hardly done freely. The violence of the system is inherent and systemic. We perform these acts surrounded by the violence of gender. But we still perform them. Gender isn't content with forcing itself upon us. Instead, it forces us to say "yes" to it.

This serves as a method of control and reproduction. Gender isn't inherent, but it spreads by assigning us to a class and forcing us to say yes to that class. "Yes, I am a man. It is who I am and who I always have been. I cannot escape it or deny it. I am a man." This is nothing but a lie we are forced to repeat. But by repeating it enough, we come to believe it. Gender becomes natural, inescapable, eternal. It ceases to be an imposed identity and becomes an eternal part of who we are. By objecting to my gender, you are objecting to that which is inherently me.

Here lies one of gender's greatest defense mechanisms: Ourselves. We insist upon it and reject those who turn away from it. It becomes an unholy act for those who turn from the path. Indeed, it seems to us as if there's no other option. We say yes because that's all we can say. It is made inconceivable that it could be any other way.

Communism

The Communist Movement

But now we must speak of communism to understand how gender relates to the rest of society. For that, we must know what communism is.

"We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."

Karl Marx, The German Ideology

Communism conceived in this way is a movement against the present social order, one seeking the liberation of those oppressed. This should not be seen as an ideal we strive for, but a real, active movement that exists in the present day. We don't find communism in plans for the future, but, rather, in a worker sabotaging his workplace, a wife who escapes from her abusive husband with her children, Naxalites engaging in guerrilla warfare against the Indian government, rioters rejecting the police to loot and burn their cities, etc.

Within the communist movement we find all the important work being done in the present day. The communist movement isn't about some far off ideal, but the immediate communism it produces. It's an active revolt against the present state of things which is communizing society immediately, not some theorists in a university considering the world from his armchair. It simply states the present state of things must go, and then takes action to make it so.

But this state of things should not and cannot be conceived of as only one system of class or one element of the society we live in. The present state of things is not capitalism or gender or race or the state. Rather, it is the totality of liberal society, and every system contained therein. As such, the communist movement finds itself in stark contrast with liberalism and gives us a counterpoint to the failed analysis and politics of liberalism.

Liberal analyses reduce oppression to a number of separate, but intersecting, systems of oppression. This renders the fights against them as separate, but allied. There's an anti-racist movement, a feminist movement, an economic justice movement, etc, but these are only allies, not the same movement. This forms the liberal conception of intersectionality. This liberal version of intersectionality presents systems that can be domineering (among the oppressed) or passive (among the privileged), thus a white gay man only ever truly experiences anti-queer oppression and all other systems are silent to him.

In truth, oppressive systems are more than that. There is no one untouched by the domination of class systems within liberal society. Everyone, from the most powerful capitalist to the lowliest worker, from the domineering patriarch to the uncertain young trans woman, from the controlling asylum administrator to the schizophrenic force-fed medication, from the white gentrifier to a black family pushed out of their family apartment all experience the control of these systems. No one is left untouched. Rather than being systems of passive control, they are an active totalitarian whole, a totality.

This totality encompasses every part of society, dominates every member of society, and alienates everyone and everything contained within. It is inescapable and domineering. Totality is where communist analysis, rather than liberal analysis, must lead us.

We find similar problems in liberal conceptions of identity politics which see oppression as done to specific identities over classes. This renders the identity as the base rather than the superstructure. What this means is that the liberal conception of liberation is respecting your identity and treating your identity fairly. But, even if we do this, our identities would still oppress us because it fails to address the underlying conditions that cause them. To them, stripping away the domination of the specific system of oppression we experience renders us free from it, becoming equal with those with privileges. But this leaves the totality untouched.

Liberal politics is ultimately one of reformism, not revolution or abolition. Communist politics provides us with a path forward through abolitionism, not reformism. Gender can't be reformed to free us, it must be abolished.

Totality

When discussing material bases and superstructures, it's important to acknowledge existing analyses of these systems. The more traditional analysis of these systems view the base purely in terms of capitalistic relations of production. The base, in this view, is purely the capitalist ownership of the means of production. This basal relation then goes on to enforce other systems of oppression within the broader liberal social order. Gender is not basal, but an aspect of the superstructure produced by capitalistic relations of production. But this view ignores the basal aspects of other systems of oppression. Gender is not merely an identity. It is fundamentally a relationship of production producing a system of class. Nor are gender and capitalism alone in being basal. We find basal aspects to neuronormativity, white supremacy, the state, etc.

However, it would be a mistake to interpret these other systems being basal to imply they're separate. If we do so, we run into the same problems liberal analyses of intersectionality create. When capitalistic production goes on, it relies upon the reproductive labor imposed upon women at home. The value produced in the workplace would be impossible without new generations of workers being reproduced and without support for the workers through reproductive labor of their partners and that they do themselves. In this way, reproductive labor is unpaid labor done for the capitalist class as much as it is an independent system of class to capitalism.

We also find similarities in the enforcement of cisheteronormative systems and the enforcement of disability. Both disabled people, both in the form of physical disability and neurodivergence, are socially defined in terms of the ability to engage in normal laboring. When someone is unable to labor for a boss in ways other workers are able to, that is made into a disability. And queerness is a reflection of this within relations of production. Queerness is a lack of engagement with the enforced labor of gender, afterall. It is no mistake that queerness so frequently gets conceived of in terms of mental illness. They are materially reflections of each other in different parts of the base.

And this discussion cannot ignore the relations of production inherent to the state. Ultimately, the state is labor. It is as much engaging in labor to break up a strike as it is to turn cloth into a coat. But this labor is not the same. Cops are not workers. Unlike a worker, a cop breaking up a strike is not producing value for the capitalist class. Instead, cops are enforcing the structures of labor production themself. This is, in itself, a vastly different relationship of production than that of workers. They are not unrelated, but the labor of the state is the labor which serves to enforce the relations of production which produce class systems. Unlike what many theories of the state would say, this is not superstructural. This is basal.

Of course, other systems of oppression have basal elements as well which connect in similar ways. A full overview of all the ways all the systems of oppression interact is outside of the scope of this writing, but cannot be forgotten.

These relations of production are not separate. They might be functioning in different ways, but they form a singular basal system. Oppression is not a variety of interacting systems, but a singular totalizing base, a totality. This totalizing base creates the space for a communist conception of intersectionality which abandons the mistakes of the liberal analysis without abandoning the inherent connection between different forms of oppression.

The totalizing nature of the base means you can't change aspects of the base without addressing the base as a whole. Indeed, we find that as we moved from previous social orders to the present liberal social order, gender transformed to match the new sort of society that was produced. This was because reproductive labor is intertwined with all other material relations. Changing the relations of production for economic activity necessarily changes the division of reproductive labor. The base functions organically as a singular system. There is one base, one system. This is what it means for a society to be a totality.

Gender Communism

At its most basic, gender accelerationism is using gender's own process of decay to destroy the gender class system. It's class abolitionism applied to gender, the revolutionary overhaul of society to do away with gender itself. This cannot be done separate of the abolition of the whole of present society. Totality demands we view it as the same system as other systems of oppression.

As such, we cannot engage in gender abolition without abolishing all forms of class. To do away with gender, so too must go capitalism, race, neuronormativity, and the state. These things are one system. They form a single liberal social order which cannot be allowed to continue. Our object is not just an end to one part, but an end to class society itself.

This is the process of the communist movement. As such, gender accelerationism is gender communism, and since gender acceleration is the path to abolishing gender, gender communism is gender accelerationism.

Gender Identity Under Communism

Many people fear that, through the abolition of gender, our own gender identities will be taken from us. That, in abolishing gender, we will force you to stop identifying with your gender, however much you might enjoy that identity.

In many cases like this, it's elucidative to make an analogy. For this, let's talk about bakers. When someone engages with the capitalist system by baking, they tend to form an identity around this baking. That is, having a career in which you bake creates the identity of baker. Similarly, when you engage with reproductive labor in particular ways, you create particular gender identities, both in the ways you conform with the gender that has been given to you and in the ways in which you reject the gender that has be given to you. In both cases, an element of the base is creating within you an identity. Which is to say, your identity stemming from your social position is superstructural.

So will we force people to stop identifying with being a baker or being a woman? The short answer is, "No, we're concerned with changing the base and allowing the superstructure to land where it may," but a more extensive examination is in order.

What happens to my identity as a baker once the capitalist system of careers which produced that identity is abolished? This is much more interesting of a question, anyway. Without the enforcement of labor characterized by capitalism, no longer is someone who bakes bread forced into staying within that career. This abandonment of the basal causes of the identity leaves the identity unfixed. The identity may persist, for example if you really love to bake bread, you may continue to identify with being a baker, but there's no underlying logic to the identity nor does it come out of or reinforce structures of power like identifying as a baker today. But, unlike today, you can engage with baking without it becoming something fixed to you, without becoming a baker.

Over time, the identity of being a baker will likely fade, tho there are many social factors which could allow it to persist, but it would lose its social and political significance. There is no need to enforce the abandonment of the identity of baker to do away with the career system which has produced it.

In this way, there is no need or desire to force people to stop identifying with their gender. The end of gender as a system of power is our goal, and the end to gender identities is an eventual result, if it will happen at all, not something of importance or which we should strive toward.

No Future

Tied up with all parts of the present state of things is the necessity for continual growth. States and white supremacy push forever outward, and often inward, through imperialistic and colonial expansion. Capitalism seeks the infinite expansion of capital. And gender? The ultimate purpose it serves is the continuous expansion of people. The reproductive labor its based around all serves unending population growth.

This unsustainable growth is characteristic of the present state of things and connects all the systems of oppression within it. Communism of all sorts must ultimately challenge this need to grow and expand. Socialism destroys the need for economic growth, anarchy the need for state growth, queerness ultimately decouples love and reproduction. No longer are we all constrained to roles which force us to reproduce continuously and, instead, we can live free to choose whether we want to or not.

By destroying the need for growth and ending endless reproduction, queerness and communism in general abolishes the future as we know it. Here we find the most radical end to queerness. Through queerness we free ourselves from the need to grow and, in turn, say "no" to the future. And, with that radical "no", we can imagine it could be another way.

Twilight of Gender

Saying "No" to Gender

"No." Not everyone says yes to gender. "I reject it." These people have chosen a different path, a different life. "I am not." This forms a different identity.

When you get assigned the male class, but you loudly assert the opposite, you have said "no" to gender. Gender gave you what you are, but you turned away in disgust. You are not a man, you are something else. Some find comfort in womanhood, others in something entirely outside, but whichever path you take, you have said no to gender.

Similarly, when you get assigned the female class, but, again, you loudly assert the opposite, you have said "no" to gender. Your embrace of manhood or something beyond constitutes a rejection, a turning away, from gender.

When you sit apart from your assignment, you are transgender.

Cracks in the System

The modern gender system is weak. It has spelled its own doom by how it has formed itself. When the modern gender system spread itself, it gave up flexibility to destroy competing systems and imposed itself upon all cultures. But this leaves it unable to account for many people. Many have great difficulty with the gender assigned to them and, because they are given no alternatives and their gender is seen as immutable, they end up subversive to the system itself.

People whose gender doesn't match with the gendering of their biological features aren't exactly new. Many previous systems had explicit classes for people like this, such as the Bugi gender system. These are multigendered systems and they have a space for those who aren't willing to accept the gender assigned to their biology.

But trans people don't relate to the gender system in this way. Whereas the people with different genders and sexes in multigendered systems are accepting the gender within their class system, trans gender are rejecting it. The modern gender system has no place for trans people, so we're subversive to it. As such, trans people are not transhistorical, but a historically contingent feature of the post-colonial gender system which has been imposed upon the world. Nor are trans people necessarily a feature everywhere in the world. Within gender systems which allow for gender variations, it's often inaccurate to call people acting within the context of their gender system trans because of how the system they live under functions. These gender systems were less repressive because of their flexibility, but they're more robust. Because of their robustness, combating them would require different strategies particular to that particular system.

Unable to, or unwilling to, accept our place within the gender class system, trans people are dissent against it, and gender as it exists today cannot account for us. Other gender systems have been more flexible, more able to account for everyone within them. Multigender systems give options for people unable to work with the gender associated with their biology. This means that people can fit within the system easier and gives the system strength. Our system does not do this, and this is a crack within the system. It provides us with reason to say "no".

Revolution

As discussed earlier, performativity requires you to actively accept the class you're assigned to by gender. This is a strength of gender because it forces you to be complicit in your own oppression, but it's also a weakness. Since your class is based, in part, on your active acceptance of it, this creates the path to active rejection. Indeed, if enough people reject the gender assigned to them, gender cannot function.

And trans people are those rejecting their gender, saying "no" to gender. This is a modern phenomenon which is subversive toward gender and presents us with a path forward. Here we find the core to the revolutionary potential of queer people. If everyone says "no" to gender, everyone ceases to accept it, then gender is lost. We find similar strategies among resistance to other class systems. People fight capitalism through a refusal to work, a general strike against it. Similarly, a collective "no" to gender rejects the class system and allows us to take it to its knees.

This would be nothing but a revolution. It's an overhaul of society which allows for queer people to take its reigns and remake it in our image. This act of class abolition by queer people, including a self-abolition of our own class, is a daring attack upon gender. It takes over society to transform it and eliminate class from it. This means that such a revolution would be the dictatorship of the queer.

Dictatorship of the Queer

Queer Power

Far too often people do not seek the liberation of queer people, only our assimilation. Gay assimilation is the mainstream LGBT rights movement, but it does not go far enough. If all we do is assimilate, we are still subject to the power and domination of the gender class system. We aren't free, just folded into the existing system of oppression and domination.

And it's dangerous, too. Assimilation provides gender with the chance to escape its final end. If gender can assimilate gayness, lesbianism, bisexuality, transgender people, and all other modes of queerness, it will become flexible and accommodate for the forces driving it towards its end. If we assimilate, gender might never end.

But liberation cannot be found within the context of existing systems of power. If we simply turn to the state, to capitalist businesses, to patriarchal marriage, and call for us to be included, we will never be free. Doing so only perpetuates state power, capitalist power, and male power. But we must create queer power.

Nor can that liberation come through imposing identities upon people. There is no benefit to our liberation and the abolition of the gender system to prevent someone who's identity is rooted in a different gender system or who finds joy in their queer identity from identifying in that way. As has been discussed previously, it is the base we are concerned with, not the identities in the superstructure.

Queer power is separate from the existing institutions. We declare our difference, unashamed and proud. We don't join their projects. We don't participate in their systems. We don't increase their power. In its place, we must make our own!

This means creating queer organizations and institutions. Counterpowers to the dominant patriarchal class system. These allow for us to provide people with what they need for transition, including providing HRT drugs, supporting victims of sexual assault, empowering women outside of the system, and ultimately providing spaces to be different, to escape the domination of gender.

It's important that these institutions don't recreate the sexual violence that enforces gender. This is difficult, but necessary. We cannot allow sexual abusers or sexual assault to creep its way into our spaces. Queer power means safety from sexual assault and abuse. These things empower and enforce patriarchy, so we have no place for them.

Pink Terror

Patriarchal behavior is an act of violence. Violence is what it practices. We cannot oppose that through passivity and non-violence. Queer power needs violence to destroy gender. A sustained terror against those who seek to enforce gender and prevent gender's death, a pink terror, is a necessity in the revolution against gender.

We find no allies in the state or the capitalist class. The cops and corporations are our enemies, not our allies. Indeed, Pride finds its roots in riots against the police. We have only ourselves to rely upon for our own liberation, not the institutions of violence that already exist. We must destroy gender on our own terms, not on theirs.

This means that the queer organizations and institutions we build for queer power must be militant, armed organizations. It's not enough to provide a space outside of patriarchy, we must arm ourselves to defend those spaces and to render an assault upon the overarching structures of power that seek to enforce gender upon us. This means that our queer organizations must be, or include, queer militias to fight against the structures of power.

These queer militias provide us with a framework to fight against sexual assault, too. Queer militias can provide protection and justice where the state will not to women and queer people. This is especially true of those most vulnerable. Sex workers often cannot turn to the police to report sexual assault against them. Their work is illegal, so they risk punishment for the sex they were having, even if it was rape. Indeed, often the sexual assault they experience comes from the police themselves. Queer militias provide them with a way to deal with sexual assault.

This can also provide queer people with a framework for fighting against misgendering and deadnaming. When people continuously and knowingly use the wrong pronouns and names for others, it is a form of violence against them. Doing so frequently leads to self-harm and sometimes suicide by queer people. As such, we need to defend and back other queer people up. Such violence against queer people cannot go unanswered and cannot be acceptable. But we should keep proportional responses in mind. Misgendering doesn't warrant murder.

Bash Back

Gender won't go down without a fight; a counter-revolution will appear to tear us down. Against the gender accelerationist movement, movements will develop to defend, or even regress, gender. Historically, revolutionary movements often find themselves followed by fascist movements rejecting the call for the new world and seeking a rejuvenation of the present one through rebirth. These fascist movements embrace hypermasculinity and seek to exacerbate the domination of masculinity over society.

Here we find our clearest enemy, and the new fascist movements of the present will react to our accelerationism with reaction and counter-revolution. Here the queer militias will be needed to defend the revolution against advancing reaction. Conflict will inevitably get bloody and we'll fight in the streets as needed to shut down the counter-revolution and ensure our victory.

These new movements won't be our only opponents. The forces of liberalism defending the present state of things will see us as a threat as much as the advancing fascists will, and their opposition will be just as brutal. Cops will oppose us in force, and we'll need force to defend our gains, protect the revolution, and advance our victory.

Victory At All Costs

We cannot stop part way or allow for our defeat. Gender means the domination of all and sustained violence against women and queer people. We cannot allow for our defeat and our eyes must be upon victory. This isn't merely a choice, it's a necessity.

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Vikky Storm and Eme Flores The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto 4/24/2019

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Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory

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Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory

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Marsha's Plate is a lively podcast where three friends come together every Thursday to share opinions and perspectives through a black trans lens. Hosted By Diamond Stylz, Mia Mix, and Zee. All Houston-Based digital strategist, civil right advocates, and TPOC. As poor black trans people, We stand at the intersections of racial oppression, gender inequality, and the consequences of phobias of all of our identities. So our voices is often silenced in just as many intersectional ways. Podcasting gives us access to a global audience by bypassing the gatekeepers of traditional media who would otherwise shut us out of the social conversation or, like in the 2016 Presidental election race, delegate us to only discussing dehumanizing issues such as the bathroom bills or our body parts. We care about our murders, unemployment, housing, police brutality, misogynoir, economics and so much more that affects our livelihood. Podcasting on a free Internet is one of our social justice tools and survival mechanism that allows our freedom of speech and self-sustainability. Thank you for supporting and being a part of being the change we want to see.

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First Episode

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Marsha's Plate is a lively podcast where three friends come together every Thursday to share opinions and perspectives through a black trans folk's lens. Hosted By Diamond Stylz, Mia Mix, and Zee. All Houston-Based digital strategist, black feminists, civil right advocates, and TPOC https://www.facebook.com/MarshasPlate/

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"Act with the urgency of tomorrow and also with the patience of 1,000 years."
Jayesh Bhai

This quote from Jayesh Bhai is frequently shared by organizers like Mariame Kaba. Both parts of this quote are important for the political moment that we are in. Recognizing the urgency of tomorrow pushes us to take action and try to create the best world that we can as soon as we can. The patience of 1,000 years, however, reminds us that our movement ancestors have been doing this work for generations to get us to the point we are at today.

I fully recognize that balancing these two are more complicated in theory than in practice, but keeping this in mind has been helpful when I try to place my organizing work within the larger movements I'm involved in. Embodying both urgency and patience on a day to day basis has been the only thing keeping me going in these times.

Move at a pace that makes sense

"The fires you are panicking about are real. But there are a lot of ways that people and work collapse when folks pretend their hearts and hands can keep up with the pace of state/capitalist violence."
Kelly Hayes

This quote, from organizer and movement educator Kelly Hayes, encapsulates the risks of throwing patience to the wind and chasing urgency with everything we have.

The list of societal wrongs that need to be righted and injustices that must be solved is neverending, and seems to get longer every day. When I start thinking about everything on that list, I get the overwhelming feeling that I need to be spending all of my energy and every second of my day doing something about it. That sense of anxious urgency gets to the best of us, especially those of us who are working with a small crew to try and change our neighborhoods and the world. The drive and passion we have to create a new society as soon as possible is valuable, but it isn't enough to do what needs to be done. Urgency has to be paired with respect for the capacity of ourselves and our communities.

Forgetting about patience in our activism leads to burnout in activists, but more importantly, it can turn away people that we should be working with and for. Working parents, disabled folks, unhoused people, and other marginalized communities likely aren't going to be able to spend 5 hours a day attending protests, meetings, and training workshops. Instead of just excluding people with a lower capacity than us, we need to meet them where they are, and create movements and organizations that are accessible to everyone in our communities and neighborhoods.

A helpful phrase to keep in mind when trying to find the pace for your community is "moving at the speed of trust." The phrase was popularized by Stephen M.R. Covey, but the more applicable definition for organizing comes from Adrienne Maree Brown in her book Emergent Strategy. She describes one of the principles of emergent organizing as moving at the speed of trust, emphasizing the importance of our relationships with those in our community in deciding what pace we can actually work at.

"How fast you can move is determined by how much trust you have. And people won't trust you unless you are vulnerable with them."
Adrienne Maree Brown

The success of our organizing depends on relationships that allow for trust, vulnerability and rest. Ignoring the importance of these aspects leaves behind those with the least time, energy, and capacity. We have to embrace the truth that trust, vulnerability, rest, and care don't slow down the work, they help us move at a sustainable pace for everyone in our movements.

The only ones here to save us... are us

I want to keep on emphasizing the importance of balancing urgency and patience while we organize. In my own work as an abolitionist and political educator, the last few months have shown me that urgency and patience also dictate when to take action and how fast we need to move. I want to abolish police and prisons as soon as possible, and that means taking actions now around helping to develop the leadership of other organizers and educate them on abolitionist and organizing theory. I found my role, and an organization to do the work in, and that has helped with the balance.

But we don't all have the luxury of having an organization that we're already organizing with, and that feeling can lead to a heightened sense of urgency. Wanting to do the work immediately, and leaning into patience, can mean recreating the whee l and spending valuable time and effort doubling the space and effort that others have created. That's obviously not what we want, but the same can be said about over embracing patience. We can't spend months or years waiting for someone else to create the movement or campaign or organization that we can plug into. Both sides of this coin waste the valuable time, energy, and passion of ourselves and everyone around us.

There are some guiding questions that can help you do your research on what's already being organized in your community, and whether or not you should be starting something new.

1. Who in your community can you connect with to learn more about movement work, generally and in your neighborhood and city?

2. Who's already doing the work in your community, and do you have the capacity to help them?

3. If you want to start a new formation, do you have the resources and/or capacity to make it successful and sustainable?

4. Is there someone in your neighborhood or community that you can support in starting something new?

5. Have you not taken action because you are nervous about getting started, or because you don't have the access you need to people, organizations, and resources?

Keeping in mind a balance of patience and urgency is helpful for understanding what to do and when to do it. We can start small, support other people, engage with the work slowly, or whatever works best for us. Just so long as we get started and keep going no matter what.

We aren't the first or the last to do this work

It's easy to feel overwhelmed when you're in a constant political battle with powerful, well-funded, and often violent opposition. No matter how much we mobilize, organize, and throw ourselves into our movements, we don't have a guarantee that we'll really and truly win not just the hypothetical battle, but the war.

As a political educator who will never run out of information to learn and teach, and community members to engage with, my work feels never ending. When that feeling of never being done gets overwhelming, I ground myself in the histories of liberatory movement work, and popular education specifically. Organizers and leaders like Ida B. Wells, Assata Shakur, Da'Shaun Harrison, and K Toyin Agbebiyi give me confidence that what I'm doing has an impact, and that I am joining a long lineage of political educators in the Black liberation movement specifically.

The movements we are part of, whether it's climate justice, prison industrial complex abolition, reproductive justice, or anything else, have a long history that we are building on. Understanding our place in the timeline of our movements can be the key to not burning out from trying to do too much too fast.

"My work exists within a history and a present - and therefore a future."
Travis Alabanza

While Travis Alabanza wrote these words in reference to their theater career, the sentiment can also be applied to our movement work. We are part of a lineage of work, and we shouldn't try to be the first or last to do anything in the work that we're doing. Often, actions or campaigns that we identify as the first are the most visible, the best known in the age of information, or are an adaptation of past work. This is not to say that it's less valuable, but instead that all of the work that is being done matters and has an impact, no matter when it happened.

Looking at the history of our movements for patience also means looking to the future to embrace urgency. In my own work, I am hoping to pass the baton by giving my movement descendents my lessons, successes, and advice on how we can all get free.

To do that, I encourage you to ask the following questions when doing organizing or activism:

1. What will your words, actions, and work provide for the generations who will come after me?

2. Are future generations going to have to clean up after any mistakes you made by moving too fast, too soon?

3. Are the movements, campaigns, and organizations you're a part of sustainable? Will they still be doing good work, or have already succeeded, in 5 to 10 years?

In other words, I ask myself if my movement descendents will be able to create gardens from the seeds that I've planted with care and intention, as my movement ancestors have for me.

Moving forward

In the center of the venn diagram of urgency and patience lies sustainability. We want to move fast enough that change is created, that we are contributing to the creation of the world we want to see. The urgency of sustainability comes from leaving some legacy of work that others can build upon in the long haul. But we also recognize that sustainability includes being patient with ourselves and recognizing that we will always be bound by our capacity.

As I write this, campaigns, organizations, and movements are grappling with how to keep fighting for justice and liberation while COVID-19 ravages entire cities. In times like these, times of crisis and uncertainty, it is even more important to understand our relationships with urgency and patience. Our relationship with rushing ahead without centering care, and for holding back when important work needs to be done. All of our futures depend on finding a balance between urgency and patience in everything we do.

About the author
Deana Ayers (they/them) is a Black community organizer and movement writer. They are passionate about Black feminist literature, rest as a liberatory practice, and complete abolition of the Prison Industrial Complex.
You can follow them on Twitter (@deanajayers) and check out their website.

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Balancing urgency and patience when the world is burning around us - Blog - Act Build Change

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"Act with the urgency of tomorrow and also with the patience of 1,000 years." Jayesh Bhai This quote from Jayesh Bhai is frequently shared by organizers like Mariame Kaba. Both parts of this quote are important for the political moment that we are in.

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by Benji Hart

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TDOR 2020 | Honoring Trans Lives, Dreaming of Trans Freedom

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Layleen's Bill (With Revisions)

By Benji Hart with art by Glori Tuitt. About This Collaboration

As artists - one of us a painter, the other a poet - our visions for trans liberation were united by our desire to center Blackness, and the challenge to imagine tangibly what a world post-incarceration might look, feel, taste like.

While Benji entered the project struck by and hoping to pay homage to the life of Layleen Cubilette-Polanco Xtravaganza - an Afro-Latina trans woman who died inside Rikers Island prison in June of 2019 - Glori was particularly interested in honoring Black, trans elders. She hoped to imagine aging-while-trans not as an anomaly but a right, and to capture the tension between Black trans intimacy and public defiance.

With these areas of interest in mind, we began our first collaborative discussion looking for shared imagery around which we could build our respective pieces. What we landed on was doing hair, a site the captured the themes of Black intimacy, joy, and labor outside of capitalism, and which Glori envisioned as representing multiple generations of Black, trans, femme, and gender nonconforming bodies.

Even as Benji's poem went through intense edits - ultimately landing as a revised version of the various bits of legislation ostensibly passed in Layleen's name by the New York City Council-the image of Black trans elders having their hair braided/retwisted by chosen community members remained a central image of Black trans life beyond both interpersonal violence and prisons.

for Layleen Cubilette-Polanco Xtravaganza

The New York City Council will pass a package of legislation, non-binary, and intersex inmates
expanding services for transgender, gender-nonconforming,

will turn out its pockets, never sign another ransom note

New beds will be added to the transgender housing unit
beds of wildflowers will erupt from lots that were not
vacant, just holding their breath

Counselors will be made available to all trans inmates we
are each our sister's counsel

The Board of Correction will convene a task force will
be tasked with something useful, like beekeeping, or collecting

This legislation will take effect in the summer of 2020
we have never asked permission to sing

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TDOR 2021 Poetry | Layleen's Bill (With Revisions). By Benji Hart.

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By Benji Hart with art by Glori Tuitt. About This Collaboration As artists - one of us a painter, the other a poet - our visions for trans liberation were united by our desire to center Blackness, and the challenge to imagine tangibly what a world post-incarceration might look, feel, taste like.

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“To Build A World Without Police and Prisons, We Have to Imagine It First”

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“To Build A World Without Police and Prisons, We Have to Imagine It First”

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by Walidah Imarisha

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A strain of science fiction called visionary fiction empowers activists, artists, and organizers to seed a better future

Photo illustration source: Yevhenii Dubinko/Getty Images

Science fiction is still regarded as the province of space opera and high technologies run amok - but at its best, it shines a light on the ...

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To Build a Future Without Police and Prisons, We Have to Imagine It First

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Science fiction is still regarded as the province of space opera and high technologies run amok - but at its best, it shines a light on the ...

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Intersex Matters: Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism

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Intersex Matters: Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism

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by David A Rubin

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Intersex Matters
Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism

Click on image to enlarge

Price: $95.00
Hardcover - 224 pages

Release Date: November 2017

ISBN10: N/A
ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6755-9

Price: $32.95
Paperback - 224 pages

Release Date: July 2018

ISBN10: N/A
ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6754-2

Summary

Analyzes intersex debates through a queer feminist, intersectional, and transnational lens.

Intersex Matters analyzes the medicalization of people diagnosed as "intersex," which is an umbrella term for individuals born with sexual anatomies various societies deem to be nonstandard. Through an examination of medico-scientific, scholarly, political, and popular archives from the mid-twentieth century to the present, Rubin argues that the medical regulation of atypical sex is fundamentally a feminist and a queer issue, and an intersectional and transnational one as well. Critical attention to intersex lives, bodies, narratives, and activisms profoundly reconfigures contemporary paradigms of sex/gender, race, health, normality, biopolitics, and human rights. Rubin charts the emergence of intersex rights activism in the global north and global south, thus demonstrating the value of understanding intersex experience when rethinking the vicissitudes of body politics in a globally interconnected world.

" Intersex Matters is conceptually sharp, thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and offers an account of intersex that we've never seen before. It is a remarkable book." - Gayle Salamon, Princeton University

"The scholarship is sound and well written. The book makes a significant contribution to the literature and further adds to our knowledge of intersex." - Georgiann Davis, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

David A. Rubin is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of South Florida.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Intersex Matters

1. "An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name": A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender

2. Intersex Trouble in Feminist Studies

3. "Stigma and Trauma, Not Gender": A Genealogy of US Intersex Activism

4. Provincializing Intersex: Transnational Intersex Activism, Human Rights, and Body Politics

5. Intersectionality and Intersex in Transnational Times

Conclusion: Thinking Intersex Otherwise: Disorders of Sex Development, Social Justice, and the Ethics of Uncertainty

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Related Subjects

4-6755-9/4-6754-2(BB/DG/MC)

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Intersex Matters Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism Click on image to enlarge Price: $95.00 Hardcover - 224 pages Release Date: November 2017 ISBN10: N/AISBN13: 978-1-4384-6755-9 Price: $32.95 Paperback - 224 pages Release Date: July 2018 ISBN10: N/AISBN13: 978-1-4384-6754-2 Summary Analyzes intersex debates through a queer feminist, intersectional, and transnational lens.

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Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

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Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

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by Sabrina Strings

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The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia

by Sabrina Strings

Published by: NYU Press

Imprint: NYU Press

304 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in, 0 41 black and white illustrations

Paperback

9781479886753

Published: May 2019

$28.00

BUY

Hardcover

9781479819805

Published: May 2019

$89.00

BUY

eBook

9781479831098

Published: May 2019

Request Exam or Desk Copy

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by Sabrina Strings Published by: NYU Press Imprint: NYU Press 304 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in, 0 41 black and white illustrations Paperback 9781479886753 Published: May 2019 $28.00 BUY Hardcover 9781479819805 Published: May 2019 $89.00 BUY eBook 9781479831098 Published: May 2019 Request Exam or Desk Copy

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Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

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Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

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by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith

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The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities

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The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities

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by Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

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This watershed collection breaks the dangerous silence surrounding the “secret” of intimate violence within social justice circles and provides practical strategies for dealing with abuse and creating safety without relying on the coercive power of the state.

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Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

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Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

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by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha

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Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia's Brood span genres-sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism-but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. The collection is rounded off with essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renée Thomas.
PRAISE FOR OCTAVIA'S BROOD:
"Those concerned with justice and liberation must always persuade the mass of people that a better world is possible. Our job begins with speculative fictions that fire society's imagination and its desire for change. In adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha's visionary conception, and by its activist-artists' often stunning acts of creative inception, Octavia's Brood makes for great thinking and damn good reading. The rest will be up to us." -Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: The Colorization of America

"Conventional exclamatory phrases don't come close to capturing the essence of what we have here in Octavia's Brood. One part sacred text, one part social movement manual, one part diary of our future selves telling us, 'It's going to be okay, keep working, keep loving.' Our radical imaginations are under siege and this text is the rescue mission. It is the new cornerstone of every class I teach on inequality, justice, and social change....This is the text we've been waiting for." -Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier

"Octavia [Butler] once told me that two things worried her about the future of humanity: The tendency to think hierarchically, and the tendency to place ourselves higher on the hierarchy than others. I think she would be humbled beyond words that the fine, thoughtful writers in this volume have honored her with their hearts and minds. And that in calling for us to consider that hierarchical structure, they are not walking in her shadow, nor standing on her shoulders, but marching at her side." -Steven Barnes, author of Lion's Blood

"Never has one book so thoroughly realized the dream of its namesake. Octavia's Brood is the progeny of two lovers of Octavia Butler and their belief in her dream that science fiction is for everybody. In these pages we witness the power of sci-fi to map our visions of worlds we want, or don't, through the imaginations of some of our favorite activists and artists. We hope this is the first of many generations of Octavia's Brood, midwifed to life by such attentive editors. Butler could not wish for better evidence of her touch changing our literary and living landscapes. Play with these children, read these works, and find the children in you waiting to take root under the stars!" -Moya Bailey and Ayana Jamieson, Octavia E. Butler Legacy

"In this provocative collection of fiction, Walida Imarisha and adrienne maree brown provide boundless space for their writers-changemakers, teachers, organizers and leaders-to untether from this realm their struggles for justice.... Like Butler's fiction, this collection is cartography, a map to freedom." -dream hampton, filmmaker and Visiting Artist at Stanford University's Institute for Diversity in the Arts

Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator, and spoken word artist. She is the author of the poetry collection Scars/Stars and facilitates writing workshops at schools, community centers, youth detention facilities, and women's prisons.

adrienne maree brown is a 2013 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow writing science fiction in Detroit, Michigan. She received a 2013 Detroit Knight Arts Challenge Award to run a series of Octavia Butler-based writing workshops.

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Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change.

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A project conceived by Mariame Kaba and coordinated by Micah Bazant

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Abolition Imagination Cards

A project conceived by Mariame Kaba and coordinated by Micah Bazant

Explore images, download, print, and share!

TERMS OF USE: This art is free and available for you to use. We welcome you to reproduce it and share it in your community. Please do not alter the image in any way and or offer these images for sale. Do not use or reprint the image in a publication or for commercial or institutional purposes without the permission of Interrupting Criminalization. If you share the art on social media, please credit the artist.
Click images for print-ready files & artist links.

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Imagination Cards - Interrupting Criminalization

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A project conceived by Mariame Kaba and coordinated by Micah Bazant TERMS OF USE: This art is free and available for you to use. We welcome you to reproduce it and share it in your community. Please do not alter the image in any way and or offer these images for sale.

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Facilitated by Mariame Kaba

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by Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps

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The version of the browser you are using is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a supported browser. Dismiss

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by Kate Shapiro

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by Marge Piercy

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The Low Road

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can't walk, can't remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can't stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know you who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

Back To History Is A Weapon's Front Page

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The Low Road What can they do to you? Whatever they want. They can set you up, they can bust you, they can break your fingers, they can burn your brain with electricity, blur you with drugs till you can't walk, can't remember, they can take your child, wall up your lover.

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Survivors and their families fought for decades for access to the trauma-informed resources and politicized healing support that the Center now offers. Today, with hundreds of survivors still incarcerated and the persistence of racialized police violence, that fight continues.

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by Kelly Hayes

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written by Native organizer Kelly Hayes, co-founder of the Lifted Voices Collective
1. Who am I accountable to?

2. What community consents to my leadership when I assume it?

3. How do those interactions function?

4. Am I sure the people I'm accountable to have a traversable path to intervention/interruption/dialogue, when they feel differently than I do?

5. Who helps me reel myself in when I assume harmful attitudes, or replicate structural oppressions, internally or externally?

6. Who do I turn to for counsel/support in holding myself accountable when I have caused harm?

7. Do I acknowledge that we all both experience and cause harm?

8. Do I believe that mass movements are grounded in relationships, and if so, am I working to build those relationships, or simply attempting to enforce ideas?

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Reflection for Community Organizers - Jes Scheinpflug

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written by Native organizer Kelly Hayes, co-founder of the Lifted Voices Collective 1. Who am I accountable to? 2. What community consents to my leadership when I assume it? 3. How do those interactions function? 4. Am I sure the people I'm accountable to have a traversable path to intervention/interruption/dialogue, when they feel differently than I do?

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Why community is our best chance for survival—a lesson post-Hurricane Maria

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Why community is our best chance for survival—a lesson post-Hurricane Maria

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Ted Talk by Christine Nieves

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Christine Nieves was greeted with the tragedy of Hurricane Maria in September 2017. To initially support her community, Christine co-created Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo Mariana (Project for Mutual Aid Mariana), a cooperative open-air kitchen and neighborhood resource that convenes local community members, providing an oasis complete with solar panels, free Wi-Fi, rainwater collection and filtration for cooking, and serves up to 300 meals per day. With her eyes set on the long-term recovery, Christine and her collaborators are shifting to sustainable development. From transforming an abandoned school building into a community center for cultural and artistic projects, to identifying and marshalling resources for individuals to launch micro-businesses, her team is finding ways to support healing from individual and collective trauma. Christine Nieves is co-founder and President of Emerge Puerto Rico - an initiative focused on rooting cutting-edge Climate Change leadership and education in holistic Indigenous and African wisdom. She is also a Bridge Fellow at TNTP where she is working to learn how the education field can better prepare for the growing instances of natural and human-made disasters affecting students, schools, and communities.

Find out more

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Why community is our best chance for survival-a lesson post-Hurricane Maria

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As Christine Nieves learned in the days and weeks following Hurricane Maria, "when disasters happen, the person right in front of you is your best chance at survival." After Hurricane Maria decimated the physical and material infrastructure of the island of Puerto Rico, Christine began to mobilize what could not be destroyed, the community.

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by Laura Eberly

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by Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps

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facilitated by Mariame Kaba

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Collaborative exercise by our 2021 cohort! Captured by Laura Chow Reeve of Radical Roadmaps

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From The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

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From:

THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

By FRANTZ FANON

Preface by JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Translated by CONSTANCE FARRINGTON

CONCERNING VIOLENCE

-35-

lives of the men and women who are colonized. But the possibility of this change is equally experienced in the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another "species" of men and women: the colonizers.

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together--that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler--was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing "them" well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system.

Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history's floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the

-36-

"thing" which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.

In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the wellknown words: "The last shall be first and the first last." Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. That is why, if we try to describe it, all decolonization is successful.

The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists. That affirmed intention to place the last at the head of things, and to make them climb at a pace (too quickly, some say) the well-known steps which characterize an organized society, can only triumph if we use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence.

You do not turn any society, however primitive it may be, upside down with such a program if you have not decided from the very beginning, that is to say from the actual formulation of that program, to overcome all the obstacles that you will come across in so doing. The native who decides to put the program into practice, and to become its moving force, is ready for violence at all times. From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence.

The colonial world is a world divided into compartments. It is probably unnecessary to recall the existence of native quarters and European quarters, of schools for natives and schools for Europeans; in the same way we need not recall apartheid in South Africa. Yet, if we examine closely this system of compartments, we will at

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least be able to reveal the lines of force it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized.

The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behavior--all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilderers" separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.

The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both

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follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. The settlers' town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settler's feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you're never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler's town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers' town is a town of white people, of foreigners.

The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs. The look that the native turns on the settler's town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession--all manner of possession: to sit at the settler's table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible. The colonized man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, "They want to take our place." It is true, for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler's place.

This world divided into compartments, this world cut

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in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, yon are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.

Everything up to and including the very nature of precapitalist society, so well explained by Marx, must here be thought out again. The serf is in essence different from the knight, but a reference to divine right is necessary to legitimize this statutory difference. In the colonies, the foreigner coming from another country imposed his rule by means of guns and machines. In defiance of his successful transplantation, in spite of his appropriation, the settler still remains a foreigner. It is neither the act of owning factories, nor estates, nor a bank balance which distinguishes the governing classes. The governing race is first and foremost those who come from elsewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, "the others."

The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. To wreck the colonial world is henceforward a mental picture of action

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which is very clear, very easy to understand and which may be assumed by each one of the individuals which constitute the colonized people. To break up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers have been abolished lines of communication will be set up between the two zones. The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less that the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country.

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At times this Manicheism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man's reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations. When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary. The European rarely hits on a picturesque style; but the native, who knows what is in the mind of the settler, guesses at once what he is thinking of. Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or

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end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetative rhythm of life--all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary. General de Gaulle speaks of "the yellow multitudes" and François Mauriac of the black, brown, and yellow masses which soon will be unleashed. The native knows all this, and laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other's words. For he knows that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory.

As soon as the native begins to pull on his moorings, and to cause anxiety to the settler, he is handed over to well-meaning souls who in cultural congresses point out to him the specificity and wealth of Western values. But every time Western values are mentioned they produce in the native a sort of stiffening or muscular lockjaw. During the period of decolonization, the natives's reason is appealed to. He is offered definite values, he is told frequently that decolonization need not mean regression, and that he must put his trust in qualities which are welltried, solid, and highly esteemed. But it so happens that when the native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out his knife--or at least he makes sure it is within reach. The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him. In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man's values. In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up.

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This phenomenon is ordinarily masked because, during the period of decolonization, certain colonized intellectuals have begun a dialogue with the bourgeoisie of the colonialist country. During this phase, the indigenous population is discerned only as an indistinct mass. The few native personalities whom the colonialist bourgeois have come to know here and there have not sufficient influence on that immediate discernment to give rise to nuances. On the other hand, during the period of liberation, the colonialist bourgeoisie looks feverishly for contacts with the elite and it is with these elite that the familiar dialogue concerning values is carried on. The colonialist bourgeoisie, when it realizes that it is impossible for it to maintain its domination over the colonial countries, decides to carry out a rearguard action with regard to culture, values, techniques, and so on. Now what we must never forget is that the immense majority of colonized peoples is oblivious to these problems. For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity. But this dignity has nothing to do with the dignity of the human individual: for that human individual has never heard tell of it. All that the native has seen in his country is that they can freely arrest him, beat him, starve him: and no professor of ethics, no priest has ever come to be beaten in his place, nor to share their bread with him. As far as the native is concerned, morality is very concrete; it is to silence the settler's defiance, to break his flaunting violence--in a word, to put him out of the picture. The wellknown principle that all men are equal will be illustrated in the colonies from the moment that the native claims that he is the equal of the settler. One step more, and he is ready to fight to be more than the settler. In fact, he has already decided to eject him and to take his place; as

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Thus the native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler's skin is not of any more value than a native's skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world in a very necessary manner. All the new, revolutionary assurance of the native stems from it. For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler's, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone. I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence; in fact, I don't give a damn for him. Not only does his presence no longer trouble me, but I am already preparing such efficient ambushes for him that soon there will be no way out but that of flight.

We have said that the colonial context is characterized by the dichotomy which it imposes upon the whole peo-

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ple. Decolonization unifies that people by the radical decision to remove from it its heterogeneity, and by unifying it on a national, sometimes a racial, basis. We know the fierce words of the Senegalese patriots, referring to the maneuvers of their president, Senghor: "We have demanded that the higher posts should be given to Africans; and now Senghor is Africanizing the Europeans." That is to say that the native can see clearly and immediately if decolonization has come to pass or not, for his minimum demands are simply that the last shall be first.

But the native intellectual brings variants to this petition, and, in fact, he seems to have good reasons: higher civil servants, technicians, specialists--all seem to be needed. Now, the ordinary native interprets these unfair promotions as so many acts of sabotage, and he is often heard to declare: "It wasn't worth while, then, our becoming independent..."

In the colonial countries where a real struggle for freedom has taken place, where the blood of the people has flowed and where the length of the period of armed warfare has favored the backward surge of intellectuals toward bases grounded in the people, we can observe a genuine eradication of the superstructure built by these intellectuals from the bourgeois colonialist environment. The colonialist bourgeoisie, in its narcissistic dialogue, expounded by the members of its universities, had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonized intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course. The native intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas, and deep down in his brain you could always find a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Greco-Latin pedestal. Now it so happens that during the struggle for liberation, at the moment that the native intellectual comes into touch again with his people, this

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artificial sentinel is turned into dust. All the Mediterranean values--the triumph of the human individual, of clarity, and of beauty--become lifeless, colorless knickknacks. All those speeches seem like collections of dead words; those values which seemed to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people is engaged.

Individualism is the first to disappear. The native intellectual had learnt from his masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native's mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought. Now the native who has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for freedom will discover the falseness of this theory. The very forms of organization of the struggle will suggest to him a different vocabulary. Brother, sister, friend--these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie, because for them my brother is my purse, my friend is part of my scheme for getting on. The native intellectual takes part, in a sort of auto-da-fé, in the destruction of all his idols: egoism, recrimination that springs from pride, and the childish stupidity of those who always want to have the last word. Such a colonized intellectual, dusted over by colonial culture, will in the same way discover the substance of village assemblies, the cohesion of people's committees, and the extraordinary fruitfulness of local meetings and groupments. Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred--or everyone will be saved. The motto "look out for yourself," the atheist's method of salvation, is in this context forbidden.

Self-criticism has been much talked about of late, but

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few people realize that it is an African institution. Whether in the djemaas * of northern Africa or in the meetings of western Africa, tradition demands that the quarrels which occur in a village should be settled in public. It is communal self-criticism, of course, and with a note of humor, because everybody is relaxed, and because in the last resort we all want the same things. But the more the intellectual imbibes the atmosphere of the people, the more completely he abandons the habits of calculation, of unwonted silence, of mental reservations, and shakes off the spirit of concealment. And it is true that already at that level we can say that the community triumphs, and that it spreads its own light and its own reason.

But it so happens sometimes that decolonization occurs in areas which have not been sufficiently shaken by the struggle for liberation, and there may be found those same know-all, smart, wily intellectuals. We find intact in them the manners and forms of thought picked up during their association with the colonialist bourgeoisie. Spoilt children of yesterday's colonialism and of today's national governments, they organize the loot of whatever national resources exist. Without pity, they use today's national distress as a means of getting on through scheming and legal robbery, by import-export combines, limited liability companies, gambling on the stock exchange, or unfair promotion. They are insistent in their demands for the nationalization of commerce, that is to say the reservation of markets and advantageous bargains for nationals only. As far as doctrine is concerned, they proclaim the pressing necessity of nationalizing the robbery of the nation. In this arid phase of national life, the so-called period of austerity, the success of their depredations is

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swift to call forth the violence and anger of the people. For this same people, poverty-stricken yet independent, comes very quickly to possess a social conscience in the African and international context of today; and this the petty individualists will quickly learn.

In order to assimilate and to experience the oppressor's culture, the native has had to leave certain of his intellectual possessions in pawn. These pledges include his adoption of the forms of thought of the colonialist bourgeoisie. This is very noticeable in the inaptitude of the native intellectual to carry on a two-sided discussion; for he cannot eliminate himself when confronted with an object or an idea. On the other hand, when once he begins to militate among the people he is struck with wonder and amazement; he is literally disarmed by their good faith and honesty. The danger that will haunt him continually is that of becoming the uncritical mouthpiece of the masses; he becomes a kind of yes-man who nods assent at every word coming from the people, which he interprets as considered judgments. Now, the fellah, the unemployed man, the starving native do not lay a claim to the truth; they do not say that they represent the truth, for they are the truth.

Objectively, the intellectual behaves in this phase like a common opportunist. In fact he has not stopped maneuvering. There is never any question of his being either rejected or welcomed by the people. What they ask is simply that all resources should be pooled. The inclusion of the native intellectual in the upward surge of the masses will in this case be differentiated by a curious cult of detail. That is not to say that the people are hostile to analysis; on the contrary, they like having things explained to them, they are glad to understand a line of argument and they like to see where they are going. But at the beginning of his association with the people the native

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The problem of truth ought also to be considered. In every age, among the people, truth is the property of the national cause. No absolute verity, no discourse on the purity of the soul, can shake this position. The native replies to the living lie of the colonial situation by an equal falsehood. His dealings with his fellow-nationals are open; they are strained and incomprehensible with regard to the settlers. Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonialist regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the natives, and ruins the foreigners. In this colonialist context there is no truthful behavior: and the good is quite simply that which is evil for "them."

Thus we see that the primary Manicheism which governed colonial society is preserved intact during the period of decolonization; that is to say that the settler never

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ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown. The oppressor, in his own sphere, starts the process, a process of domination, of exploitation and of pillage, and in the other sphere the coiled, plundered creature which is the native provides fodder for the process as best he can, the process which moves uninterruptedly from the banks of the colonial territory to the palaces and the docks of the mother country. In this becalmed zone the sea has a smooth surface, the palm tree stirs gently in the breeze, the waves lap against the pebbles, and raw materials are ceaselessly transported, justifying the presence of the settler: and all the while the native, bent double, more dead than alive, exists interminably in an unchanging dream. The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the absolute beginning: "This land was created by us"; he is the unceasing cause: "If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages." Over against him torpid creatures, wasted by fevers, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism.

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.

The immobility to which the native is condemned can only be called in question if the native decides to put an end to the history of colonization--the history of pillage -and to bring into existence the history of the nation--the history of decolonization.

A world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world, a world of statues: the statue of the

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general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge; a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world. The native is a being hemmed in; apartheid is simply one form of the division into compartments of the colonial world. The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place, and not to go beyond certain limits. This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; I dream that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me. During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.
* See the section: "Colonial War and Mental Disorders."
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possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand which is guarded by terrible watchdogs.

The native is always on the alert, for since he can only make out with difficulty the many symbols of the colonial world, he is never sure whether or not he has crossed the frontier. Confronted with a world ruled by the settler, the native is always presumed guilty. But the native's guilt is never a guilt which he accepts; it is rather a kind of curse, a sort of sword of Damocles, for, in his innermost spirit, the native admits no accusation. He is overpowered but not tamed; he is treated as an inferior but he is not convinced of his inferiority. He is patiently waiting until the settler is off his guard to fly at him. The native's muscles are always tensed. You can't say that he is terrorized, or even apprehensive. He is in fact ready at a moment's notice to exchange the role of the quarry for that of the hunter. The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor. The symbols of social order--the police, the bugle calls in the barracks, military parades and the waving flags--are at one and the same time inhibitory and stimulating: for they do not convey the message "Don't dare to budge"; rather, they cry out "Get ready to attack." And, in fact, if the native had any tendency to fall asleep and to forget, the settler's hauteur and the settler's anxiety to test the strength of the colonial system would remind him at every turn that the great showdown cannot be put off indefinitely. That impulse to take the settler's place implies a tonicity of muscles the whole time; and in fact we know that in certain emotional conditions the presence of an obstacle accentuates the tendency toward motion.

The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native out loud that there he alone

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is master. The settler keeps alive in the native an anger which he deprives of outlet; the native is trapped in the tight links of the chains of colonialism. But we have seen that inwardly the settler can only achieve a pseudo petrification. The native's muscular tension finds outlet regularly in bloodthirsty explosions--in tribal warfare, in feuds between septs, and in quarrels between individuals.

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the individual accepts the disintegration ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm.

Meanwhile, however, life goes on, and the native will strengthen the inhibitions which contain his aggressiveness by drawing on the terrifying myths which are so frequently found in underdeveloped communities. There are maleficent spirits which intervene every time a step is taken in the wrong direction, leopard-men, serpent-men, six-legged dogs, zombies--a whole series of tiny animals or giants which create around the native a world of prohibitions, of barriers and of inhibitions far more terrifying than the world of the settler. This magical superstructure which permeates native society fulfills certain well-defined functions in the dynamism of the libido. One of the characteristics of underdeveloped societies is in fact that the libido is first and foremost the concern of a group, or of the family. The feature of communities whereby a man who dreams that he has sexual relations with a woman other than his own must confess it in public and pay a fine in kind or in working days to the injured husband or family is fully described by ethnologists. We may note in passing that this proves that the so-called prehistoric societies attach great importance to the unconscious.

The atmosphere of myth and magic frightens me and so takes on an undoubted reality. By terrifying me, it integrates me in the traditions and the history of my district or of my tribe, and at the same time it reassures me, it gives me a status, as it were an identification paper. In underdeveloped countries the occult sphere is a sphere belonging to the community which is entirely under magical jurisdiction. By entangling myself in this inextricable network where actions are repeated with crystalline inevitability, I find the everlasting world which belongs to

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me, and the perenniality which is thereby affirmed of the world belonging to us. Believe me, the zombies are more terrifying than the settlers; and in consequence the problem is no longer that of keeping oneself right with the colonial world and its barbed-wire entanglements, but of considering three times before urinating, spitting, or going out into the night.

The supernatural, magical powers reveal themselves as essentially personal; the settler's powers are infinitely shrunken, stamped with their alien origin. We no longer really need to fight against them since what counts is the frightening enemy created by myths. We perceive that all is settled by a permanent confrontation on the phantasmic plane.

It has always happened in the struggle for freedom that such a people, formerly lost in an imaginary maze, a prey to unspeakable terrors yet happy to lose themselves in a dreamlike torment, such a people becomes unhinged, reorganizes itself, and in blood and tears gives birth to very real and immediate action. Feeding the moudjahidines, * posting sentinels, coming to the help of families which lack the bare necessities, or taking the place of a husband who has been killed or imprisoned: such are the concrete tasks to which the people is called during the struggle for freedom.

In the colonial world, the emotional sensitivity of the native is kept on the surface of his skin like an open sore which flinches from the caustic agent; and the psyche shrinks back, obliterates itself and finds outlet in muscular demonstrations which have caused certain very wise men to say that the native is a hysterical type. This sensitive emotionalism, watched by invisible keepers who are how-

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ever in unbroken contact with the core of the personality, will find its fulfillment through eroticism in the driving forces behind the crisis' dissolution.

On another level we see the native's emotional sensibility exhausting itself in dances which are more or less ecstatic. This is why any study of the colonial world should take into consideration the phenomena of the dance and of possession. The native's relaxation takes precisely the form of a muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalized, transformed, and conjured away. The circle of the dance is a permissive circle: it protects and permits. At certain times on certain days, men and women come together at a given place, and there, under the solemn eye of the tribe, fling themselves into a seemingly unorganized pantomime, which is in reality extremely systematic, in which by various means--shakes of the head, bending of the spinal column, throwing of the whole body backward -may be deciphered as in an open book the huge effort of a community to exorcise itself, to liberate itself, to explain itself. There are no limits--inside the circle. The hillock up which you have toiled as if to be nearer to the moon; the river bank down which you slip as if to show the connection between the dance and ablutions, cleansing and purification--these are sacred places. There are no limits--for in reality your purpose in coming together is to allow the accumulated libido, the hampered aggressivity, to dissolve as in a volcanic eruption. Symbolical killings, fantastic rides, imaginary mass murders--all must be brought out. The evil humors are undammed, and flow away with a din as of molten lava.

One step further and you are completely possessed. In fact, these are actually organized séances of possession and exorcism; they include vampirism, possession by djinns, by zombies, and by Legba, the famous god of the voodoo.

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This disintegrating of the personality, this splitting and dissolution, all this fulfills a primordial function in the organism of the colonial world. When they set out, the men and women were impatient, stamping their feet in a state of nervous excitement; when they return, peace has been restored to the village; it is once more calm and unmoved.

During the struggle for freedom, a marked alienation from these practices is observed. The native's back is to the wall, the knife is at his throat (or, more precisely, the electrode at his genitals): he will have no more call for his fancies. After centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish phantoms, at long last the native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only forces which contend for his life--the forces of colonialism. And the youth of a colonized country, growing up in an atmosphere of shot and fire, may well make a mock of, and does not hesitate to pour scorn upon the zombies of his ancestors, the horses with two heads, the dead who rise again, and the djinns who rush into your body while you yawn. The native discovers reality and transforms it into the pattern of his customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom.

We have seen that this same violence, though kept very much on the surface all through the colonial period, yet turns in the void. We have also seen that it is canalized by the emotional outlets of dance and possession by spirits; we have seen how it is exhausted in fratricidal combats. Now the problem is to lay hold of this violence which is changing direction. When formerly it was appeased by myths and exercised its talents in finding fresh ways of committing mass suicide, now new conditions will make possible a completely new line of action.

Nowadays a theoretical problem of prime importance is being set, on the historical plane as well as on the level of

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political tactics, by the liberation of the colonies: when can one affirm that the situation is ripe for a movement of national liberation? In what form should it first be manifested? Because the various means whereby decolonization has been carried out have appeared in many different aspects, reason hesitates and refuses to say which is a true decolonization, and which a false. We shall see that for a man who is in the thick of the fight it is an urgent matter to decide on the means and the tactics to employ: that is to say, how to conduct and organize the movement. If this coherence is not present there is only a blind will toward freedom, with the terribly reactionary risks which it entails.

What are the forces which in the colonial period open up new outlets and engender new aims for the violence of colonized peoples? In the first place there are the political parties and the intellectual or commercial elites. Now, the characteristic feature of certain political structures is that they proclaim abstract principles but refrain from issuing definite commands. The entire action of these nationalist political parties during the colonial period is action of the electoral type: a string of philosophicopolitical dissertations on the themes of the rights of peoples to self-determination, the rights of man to freedom from hunger and human dignity, and the unceasing affirmation of the principle: "One man, one vote." The national political parties never lay stress upon the necessity of a trial of armed strength, for the good reason that their objective is not the radical overthrowing of the system. Pacifists and legalists, they are in fact partisans of order, the new order--but to the colonialist bourgeoisie they put bluntly enough the demand which to them is the main one: "Give us more power." On the specific question of violence, the elite are ambiguous. They are violent in their words and reformist in their attitudes.

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When the nationalist political leaders say something, they make quite clear that they do not really think it.

Thus there is very easily brought into being a kind of class of affranchised slaves, or slaves who are individually free. What the intellectual demands is the right to multiply the emancipated, and the opportunity to organize a genuine class of emancipated citizens. On the other hand, the mass of the people have no intention of standing by and watching individuals increase their chances of success. What they demand is not the settler's position of status, but the settler's place. The immense majority of natives want the settler's farm. For them, there is no question of

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entering into competition with the settler. They want to take his place.

The peasantry is systematically disregarded for the most part by the propaganda put out by the nationalist parties. And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization are simply a question of relative strength. The exploited man sees that his liberation implies the use of all means, and that of force first and foremost. When in 1956, after the capitulation of Monsieur Guy Mollet to the settlers in Algeria, the Front de Libération Nationale, in a famous leaflet, stated that colonialism only loosens its hold when the knife is at its throat, no Algerian really found these terms too violent. The leaflet only expressed what every Algerian felt at heart: colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.

At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table, before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any blood has been shed. But if the masses, without, waiting for the chairs to be arranged around me

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baize table, listen to their own voice and begin committing outrages and setting fire to buildings, the elite and the nationalist bourgeois parties will be seen rushing to the colonialists to exclaim, "This is very serious! We do not know how it will end; we must find a solution--some sort of compromise."

This idea of compromise is very important in the phenomenon of decolonization, for it is very far from being a simple one. Compromise involves the colonial system and the young nationalist bourgeoisie at one and the same time. The partisans of the colonial system discover that the masses may destroy everything. Blown-up bridges, ravaged farms, repressions, and fighting harshly disrupt the economy. Compromise is equally attractive to the nationalist bourgeoisie, who since they are not clearly aware of the possible consequences of the rising storm, are genuinely afraid of being swept away by this huge hurricane and never stop saying to the settlers: "We are still capable of stopping the slaughter; the masses still have confidence in us; act quickly if you do not want to put everything in jeopardy." One step more, and the leader of the nationalist party keeps his distance with regard to that violence. He loudly proclaims that he has nothing to do with these Mau-Mau, these terrorists, these throat-slitters. At best, he shuts himself off in a no man's land between the terrorists and the settlers and willingly offers his services as go-between; that is to say, that as the settlers cannot discuss terms with these Mau-Mau, he himself will be quite willing to begin negotiations. Thus it is that the rear guard of the national struggle, that very party of people who have never ceased to be on the other side in the fight, find themselves somersaulted into the van of negotiations and compromise--precisely because that party has taken very good care never to break contact with colonialism.

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Before negotiations have been set afoot, the majority of nationalist parties confine themselves for the most part to explaining and excusing this "savagery." They do not assert that the people have to use physical force, and it sometimes even happens that they go so far as to condemn, in private, the spectacular deeds which are declared to be hateful by the press and public opinion in the mother country. The legitimite excuse for this ultra-conservative policy is the desire to see things in an objective light; but this traditional attitude of the native intellectual and of the leaders of the nationalist parties is not, in reality, in the least objective. For in fact they are not at all convinced that this impatient violence of the masses is the most efficient means of defending their own interests. Moreover, there are some individuals who are convinced of the ineffectiveness of violent methods; for them, there is no doubt about it, every attempt to break colonial oppression by force is a hopeless effort, an attempt at suicide, because in the innermost recesses of their brains the settler's tanks and airplanes occupy a huge place. When they are told "Action must be taken," they see bombs raining down on them, armored cars coming at them on every path, machine-gunning and police action... and they sit quiet. They are beaten from the start. There is no need to demonstrate their incapacity to triumph by violent methods; they take it for granted in their everyday life and in their political maneuvers. They have remained in the same childish position as Engels took up in his famous polemic with that monument of puerility, Monsieur Duhring:

In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to obtain a sword, we can just as well suppose that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand, and from then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed: Man Friday gives the orders and Crusoe is obliged

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to work.... Thus, the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the most childish believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary conditions, and in particular the implements of violence; and the more highly developed of these implements will carry the day against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to produce such weapons signifies that the producer of highly developed weapons, in everyday speech the arms manufacturer, triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it briefly, the triumph of violence depends upon the production of armaments, and this in its turn depends on production in general, and thus...on economic strength, on the economy of the State, and in the last resort on the material means which that violence commands. *

In fact, the leaders of reform have nothing else to say than: "With what are you going to fight the settlers? With your knives? Your shotguns?"

It is true that weapons are important when violence comes into play, since all finally depends on the distribution of these implements. But it so happens that the liberation of colonial countries throws new light on the subject. For example, we have seen that during the Spanish campaign, which was a very genuine colonial war, Napoleon, in spite of an army which reached in the offensives of the spring of 1810 the huge figure of 400,000 men, was forced to retreat. Yet the French army made the whole of Europe tremble by its weapons of war, by the bravery of its soldiers, and by the military genius of its leaders. Face to face with the enormous potentials of the Napoleonic troops, the Spaniards, inspired by an unshakeable national ardor, rediscovered the famous methods of guerilla warfare which, twenty-five years before, the American militia had tried out on the English forces. But the

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native's guerilla warfare would be of no value as opposed to other means of violence if it did not form a new element in the worldwide process of competition between trusts and monopolies.

In the early days of colonization, a single column could occupy immense stretches of country: the Congo, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and so on. Today, however, the colonized countries' national struggle crops up in a completely new international situation. Capitalism, in its early days, saw in the colonies a source of raw materials which, once turned into manufactured goods, could be distributed on the European market. After a phase of accumulation of capital, capitalism has today come to modify its conception of the profit-earning capacity of a commercial enterprise. The colonies have become a market. The colonial population is a customer who is ready to buy goods; consequently, if the garrison has to be perpetually reinforced, if buying and selling slackens off, that is to say if manufactured and finished goods can no longer be exported, there is clear proof that the solution of military force must be set aside. A blind domination founded on slavery is not economically speaking worthwhile for the bourgeoisie of the mother country. The monopolistic group within this bourgeoisie does not support a government whose policy is solely that of the sword. What the factoryowners and finance magnates of the mother country expect from their government is not that it should decimate the colonial peoples, but that it should safeguard with the help of economic conventions their own "legitimate interests."

Thus there exists a sort of detached complicity between capitalism and the violent forces which blaze up in colonial territory. What is more, the native is not alone against the oppressor, for indeed there is also the political and diplomatic support of progressive countries and peo-

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ples. But above all there is competition, that pitiless war which financial groups wage upon each other. A Berlin Conference was able to tear Africa into shreds and divide her up between three or four imperial flags. At the moment, the important thing is not whether such-and-such a region in Africa is under French or Belgian sovereignty, but rather that the economic zones are respected. Today, wars of repression are no longer waged against rebel sultans; everything is more elegant, less bloodthirsty; the liquidation of the Castro regime will be quite peaceful. They do all they can to strangle Guinea and they eliminate Mossadegh. Thus the nationalist leader who is frightened of violence is wrong if he imagines that colonialism is going to "massacre all of us." The military will of course go on playing with tin soldiers which date from the time of the conquest, but higher finance will soon bring the truth home to them.

This is why reasonable nationalist political parties are asked to set out their claims as clearly as possible, and to seek with their colonialist opposite numbers, calmly and without passion, for a solution which will take the interests of both parties into consideration. We see that if this nationalist reformist tendency which often takes the form of a kind of caricature of trade unionism decides to take action, it will only do so in a highly peaceful fashion, through stoppages of work in the few industries which have been set up in the towns, mass demonstrations to cheer the leaders, and the boycotting of buses or of imported commodities. All these forms of action serve at one and the same time to bring pressure to bear on the forces of colonialism, and to allow the people to work off their energy. This practice of therapy by hibernation, this sleep-cure used on the people, may sometimes be successful; thus out of the conference around the green baize table comes the political selectiveness which enables Mon-

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Mon, the president of the Republic of Gabon, to state in all seriousness on his arrival in Paris for an official visit: "Gabon is independent, but between Gabon and France nothing has changed; everything goes on as before." In fact, the only change is that Monsieur M'ba is president of the Gabonese Republic and that he is received by the president of the French Republic.

The colonialist bourgeoisie is helped in its work of calming down the natives by the inevitable religion. All those saints who have turned the other cheek, who have forgiven trespasses against them, and who have been spat on and insulted without shrinking are studied and held up as examples. On the other hand, the elite of the colonial countries, those slaves set free, when at the head of the movement inevitably end up by producing an ersatz conflict. They use their brothers' slavery to shame the slavedrivers or to provide an ideological policy of quaint humanitarianism for their oppressors' financial competitors. The truth is that they never make any real appeal to the aforesaid slaves; they never mobilize them in concrete terms. On the contrary, at the decisive moment (that is to say, from their point of view the moment of indecision) they brandish the danger of a "mass mobilization" as the crucial weapon which would bring about as if by magic the "end of the colonial regime." Obviously there are to be found at the core of the political parties and among their leaders certain revolutionaries who deliberately turn their backs upon the farce of national independence. But very quickly their questionings, their energy, and their anger obstruct the party machine; and these elements are gradually isolated, and then quite simply brushed aside. At this moment, as if there existed a dialectic concomitance, the colonialist police will fall upon them. With no security in the towns, avoided by the militants of their former party and rejected by its

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leaders, these undesirable firebrands will be stranded in county districts. Then it is that they will realize bewilderedly that the peasant masses catch on to what they have to say immediately, and without delay ask them the question to which they have not yet prepared the answer: "When do we start?"

This meeting of revolutionaries coming from the towns and country dwellers will be dealt with later on. For the moment we must go back to the political parties, in order to show the nature of their action, which is all the same progressive. In their speeches the political leaders give a name to the nation. In this way the native's demands are given shape.

There is however no definite subject matter and no political or social program. There is a vague outline or skeleton, which is nevertheless national in form, what we describe as "minimum requirements." The politicians who make speeches and who write in the nationalist newspapers make the people dream dreams. They avoid the actual overthrowing of the state, but in fact they introduce into their readers' or hearers' consciousness the terrible ferment of subversion. The national or tribal language is often used. Here, once again, dreams are encouraged, and the imagination is let loose outside the bounds of the colonial order; and sometimes these politicians speak of "We Negroes, we Arabs," and these terms which are so profoundly ambivalant take on during the colonial epoch a sacramental signification. The nationalist politicians are playing with fire: for, as an African leader recently warned a group of young intellectuals, "Think well before you speak to the masses, for they flare up quickly." This is one of the terrible tricks that destiny plays in the colonies.

When a political leader calls a mass meeting, we may say that there is blood in the air. Yet the same leader very often is above all anxious to "make a show" of force, so

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that in fact he need not use it. But the agitation which ensues, the coming and going, the listening to speeches, seeing the people assembled in one place, with the police all around, the military demonstrations, arrests, and the deportation of the leaders--all this hubbub makes the people think that the moment has come for them to take action. In these times of instability the political parties multiply their appeals to the left for calm, while on their right they scan the horizon, trying to make out the liberal intentions of colonialism.

In the same way the people make use of certain episodes in the life of the community in order to hold themselves ready and to keep alive their revolutionary zeal. For example, the gangster who holds up the police set on to track him down for days on end, or who dies in single combat after having killed four or five policemen, or who commits suicide in order not to give away his accomplices --these types light the way for the people, form the blueprints for action and become heroes. Obviously, it's a waste of breath to say that such-and-such a hero is a thief, a scoundrel, or a reprobate. If the act for which he is prosecuted by the colonial authorities is an act exclusively directed against a colonialist person or colonialist property, the demarcation line is definite and manifest. The process of identification is automatic.

We must also notice in this ripening process the role played by the history of the resistance at the time of the conquest. The great figures of the colonized people are always those who led the national resistance to invasion. Behanzin, Soundiata, Samory, Abdel Kader--all spring again to life with peculiar intensity in the period which comes directly before action. This is the proof that the people are getting ready to begin to go forward again, to put an end to the static period begun by colonization, and to make history.

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The uprising of the new nation and the breaking down of colonial structures are the result of one of two causes: either of a violent struggle of the people in their own right, or of action on the part of surrounding colonized peoples which acts as a brake on the colonial regime in question.

A colonized people is not alone. In spite of all that colonialism can do, its frontiers remain open to new ideas and echoes from the world outside. It discovers that violence is in the atmosphere, that it here and there bursts out, and here and there sweeps away the colonial regime --that same violence which fulfills for the native a role that is not simply informatory, but also operative. The great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu is no longer, strictly speaking, a Vietnamese victory. Since July, 1954, the question which the colonized peoples have asked themselves has been, "What must be done to bring about another Dien Bien Phu? How can we manage it?" Not a single colonized individual could ever again doubt the possibility of a Dien Bien Phu; the only problem was how best to use the forces at their disposal, how to organize them, and when to bring them into action. This encompassing violence does not work upon the colonized people only; it modifies the attitude of the colonialists who become aware of manifold Dien Bien Phus. This is why a veritable panic takes hold of the colonialist governments in turn. Their purpose is to capture the vanguard, to turn the movement of liberation toward the right, and to disarm the people: quick, quick, let's decolonize. Decolonize the Congo before it turns into another Algeria. Vote the constitutional framework for all Africa, create the French Communauté, renovate that same Communauté, but for God's sake let's decolonize quick.... And they decolonize at such a rate that they impose independence on Houphouët-Boigny. To the strategy of Dien Bien Phu, defined by the colonized peoples, the colonialist re-

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plies by the strategy of encirclement--based on the respect of the sovereignty of states.

But let us return to that atmosphere of violence, that violence which is just under the skin. We have seen that in its process toward maturity many leads are attached to it, to control it and show it the way out. Yet in spite of the metamorphoses which the colonial regime imposes upon it in the way of tribal or regional quarrels, that violence makes its way forward, and the native identifies his enemy and recognizes all his misfortunes, throwing all the exacerbated might of his hate and anger into this new channel. But how do we pass from the atmosphere of violence to violence in action? What makes the lid blow off? There is first of all the fact that this development does not leave the settler's blissful existence intact. The settler who "understands" the natives is made aware by several straws in the wind showing that something is afoot. "Good" natives become scarce; silence falls when the oppressor approaches; sometimes looks are black, and attitudes and remarks openly aggressive. The nationalist parties are astir, they hold a great many meetings, the police are increased and reinforcements of soldiers are brought in. The settlers, above all the farmers isolated on their land, are the first to become alarmed. They call for energetic measures.

The authorities do in fact take some spectacular measures. They arrest one or two leaders, they organize military parades and maneuvers, and air force displays. But the demonstrations and warlike exercises, the smell of gunpowder which now fills the atmosphere, these things do not make the people draw back. Those bayonets and cannonades only serve to reinforce their aggressiveness. The atmosphere becomes dramatic, and everyone wishes to show that he is ready for anything. And it is in these circumstances that the guns go off by themselves, for nerves are jangled, fear reigns and everyone is trigger-happy. A

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single commonplace incident is enough to start the machine-gunning: Sétif in Algeria, the Central Quarries in Morocco, Moramanga in Madagascar.

The repressions, far from calling a halt to the forward rush of national consciousness, urge it on. Mass slaughter in the colonies at a certain stage of the embryonic development of consciousness increases that consciousness, for the hecatombs are an indication that between oppressors and oppressed everything can be solved by force. It must be remarked here that the political parties have not called for armed insurrection, and have made no preparations for such an insurrection. All these repressive measures, all those actions which are a result of fear are not within the leaders' intentions: they are overtaken by events. At this moment, then, colonialism may decide to arrest the nationalist leaders. But today the governments of colonized countries know very well that it is extremely dangerous to deprive the masses of their leaders; for then the people, unbridled, fling themselves into jacqueries, mutinies, and "brutish murders." The masses give free rein to their "bloodthirsty instincts" and force colonialism to free their leaders, to whom falls the difficult task of bringing them back to order. The colonized people, who have spontaneously brought their violence to the colossal task of destroying the colonial system, will very soon find themselves with the barren, inert slogan "Release X or Y." * Then colonialism will release these men, and hold discussions with them. The time for dancing in the streets has come.

In certain circumstances, the party political machine may remain intact. But as a result of the colonialist repression and of the spontaneous reaction of the people the parties find themselves out-distanced by their militants.
* It may happen that the arrested leader is in fact the authentic mouthpiece of the colonized masses. In this case colonialism will make use of his period of detention to try to launch new leaders.
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The violence of the masses is vigorously pitted against the military forces of the occupying power, and the situation deteriorates and comes to a head. Those leaders who are free remain, therefore, on the touchline. They have suddenly become useless, with their bureaucracy and their reasonable demands; yet we see them, far removed from events, attempting the crowning imposture--that of "speaking in the name of the silenced nation." As a general rule, colonialism welcomes this godsend with open arms, tranforms these "blind mouths" into spokesmen, and in two minutes endows them with independence, on condition that they restore order.

So we see that all parties are aware of the power of such violence and that the question is not always to reply to it by a greater violence, but rather to see how to relax the tension.

What is the real nature of this violence? We have seen that it is the intuition of the colonized masses that their liberation must, and can only, be achieved by force. By what spiritual aberration do these men, without technique, starving and enfeebled, confronted with the military and economic might of the occupation, come to believe that violence alone will free them? How can they hope to triumph?

It is because violence (and this is the disgraceful thing) may constitute, in so far as it forms part of its system, the slogan of a political party. The leaders may call on the people to enter upon an armed struggle. This problematical question has to be thought over. When militarist Germany decides to settle its frontier disputes by force, we are not in the least surprised; but when the people of Angola, for example, decide to take up arms, when the Algerian people reject all means which are not violent, these are proofs that something has happened or is happening at this very moment. The colonized races, those

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slaves of modern times, are impatient. They know that this apparent folly alone can put them out of reach of colonial oppression. A new type of relations is established in the world. The underdeveloped peoples try to break their chains, and the extraordinary thing is that they succeed. It could be argued that in these days of sputniks it is ridiculous to die of hunger; but for the colonized masses the argument is more down-to-earth. The truth is that there is no colonial power today which is capable of adopting the only form of contest which has a chance of succeeding, namely, the prolonged establishment of large forces of occupation.

As far as their internal situation is concerned, the colonialist countries find themselves faced with contradictions in the form of working-class demands which necessitate the use of their police forces. As well, in the present international situation, these countries need their troops to protect their regimes. Finally there is the wellknown myth of liberating movements directed from Moscow. In the regime's panic-stricken reasoning, this signifies "If that goes on, there is a risk that the communists will turn the troubles to account and infiltrate into these parts."

In the native's eagerness, the fact that he openly brandishes the threat of violence proves that he is conscious of the unusual character of the contemporary situation and that he means to profit by it. But, still on the level of immediate experience, the native, who has seen the modern world penetrate into the furthermost corners of the bush, is most acutely aware of all the things he does not possess. The masses by a sort of (if we may say so) childlike process of reasoning convince themselves that they have been robbed of all these things. That is why in certain underdeveloped countries the masses forge ahead very quickly, and realize two or three years after independ-

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ence that they have been frustrated, that "it wasn't worth while" fighting, and that nothing could really change. In 1789, after the bourgeois revolution, the smallest French peasants benefited substantially from the upheaval. But it is a commonplace to observe and to say that in the majority of cases, for 95 per cent of the population of underdeveloped countries, independence brings no immediate change. The enlightened observer takes note of the existence of a kind of masked discontent, like the smoking ashes of a burnt-down house after the fire has been put out, which still threaten to burst into flames again.

So they say that the natives want to go too quickly. Now, let us never forget that only a very short time ago they complained of their slowness, their laziness, and their fatalism. Already we see that violence used in specific ways at the moment of the struggle for freedom does not magically disappear after the ceremony of trooping the national colors. It has all the less reason for disappearing since the reconstruction of the nation continues within the framework of cutthroat competition between capitalism and socialism.

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once the whole of a bloc goes into action, talks about those two men, and uses the beating-up incident to bring up the particular problem of Rhodesia, linking it, moreover, with the whole African question and with the whole question of colonized people. The other bloc however is equally concerned in measuring by the magnitude of the campaign the local weaknesses of its system. Thus the colonized peoples realize that neither clan remains outside local incidents. They no longer limit themselves to regional horizons, for they have caught on to the fact that they live in an atmosphere of international stress.

When every three months or so we hear that the Sixth or Seventh Fleet is moving toward such-and-such a coast; when Khrushchev threatens to come to Castro's aid with rockets; when Kennedy decides upon some desperate solution for the Laos question, the colonized person or the newly independent native has the impression that whether he wills it or not he is being carried away in a kind of frantic cavalcade. In fact, he is marching in it already. Let us take, for example, the case of the governments of recently liberated countries. The men at the head of affairs spend two-thirds of their time in watching the approaches and trying to anticipate the dangers which threaten them, and the remaining one-third of their time in working for their country. At the same time, they search for allies. Obedient to the same dialectic, the national parties of opposition leave the paths of parliamentary behavior. They also look for allies to support them in their ruthless ventures into sedition. The atmosphere of violence, after having colored all the colonial phase, continues to dominate national life, for as we have already said, the Third World is not cut off from the rest. Quite the contrary, it is at the middle of the whirlpool. This is why the statesmen of underdeveloped countries keep up

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indefinitely the tone of aggressiveness and exasperation in their public speeches which in the normal way ought to have disappeared. Herein, also, may be found the reasons for that lack of politeness so often spoken of in connection with newly established rulers. But what is less visible is the extreme courtesy of these same rulers in their contacts with their brothers or their comrades. Discourtesy is first and foremost a manner to be used in dealings with the others, with the former colonists who come to observe and to investigate. The "ex-native" too often gets the impression that these reports are already written. The photos which illustrate the article are simply a proof that one knows what one is talking about, and that one has visited the country. The report intends to verify the evidence: everything's going badly out there since we left. Frequently reporters complain of being badly received, of being forced to work under bad conditions and of being fenced round by indifference or hostility: all this is quite normal. The nationalist leaders know that international opinion is formed solely by the Western press. Now, when a journalist from the West asks us questions, it is seldom in order to help us. In the Algerian war, for example, even the most liberal of the French reporters never ceased to use ambiguous terms in describing our struggle. When we reproached them for this, they replied in all good faith that they were being objective. For the native, objectivity is always directed against him. We may in the same way come to understand the new tone which swamped international diplomacy at the United Nations General Assembly in September, 1960. The representatives of the colonial countries were aggressive and violent, and carried things to extremes, but the colonial peoples did not find that they exaggerated. The radicalism of the African spokesmen brought the abcess to a head and showed up the inad-

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missible nature of the veto and of the dialogue between the great powers, and above all the tiny role reserved for the Third World.

Diplomacy, as inaugurated by the newly independent peoples, is no longer an affair of nuances, of implications, and of hypnotic passes. For the nation's spokesmen are responsible at one and the same time for safeguarding the unity of the nation, the progress of the masses toward a state of well-being and the right of all peoples to bread and liberty. Thus it is a diplomacy which never stops moving, a diplomacy which leaps ahead, in strange contrast to the motionless, petrified world of colonization. And when Mr. Khrushchev brandishes his shoe at the United Nations, or thumps the table with it, there's not a single exnative, nor any representative of an underdeveloped country, who laughs. For what Mr. Khrushchev shows the colonized countries which are looking on is that he, the moujik, who moreover is the possessor of spacerockets, treats these miserable capitalists in the way that they deserve. In the same way, Castro sitting in military uniform in the United Nations Organization does not scandalize the underdeveloped countries. What Castro demonstrates is the consciousness he has of the continuing existence of the rule of violence. The astonishing thing is that he did not come into the UNO with a machine-gun; but if he had, would anyone have minded? All the jacqueries and desperate deeds, all those bands armed with cutlesses or axes find their nationality in the implacable struggle which opposes socialism and capitalism.

In 1945, the 45,000 dead at Sétif could pass unnoticed; in 1947, the 90,000 dead in Madagascar could be the subject of a simple paragraph in the papers; in 1952, the 200,000 victims of the repression in Kenya could meet with relative indifference. This was because the international contradictions were not sufficiently distinct. Already the

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Korean and Indo-Chinese wars had begun a new phase. But it is above all Budapest and Suez which constitute the decisive moments of this confrontation.

Strengthened by the unconditional support of the socialist countries, the colonized peoples fling themselves with whatever arms they have against the impregnable citadel of colonialism. If this citadel is invulnerable to knives and naked fists, it is no longer so when we decide to take into account the context of the Cold War.

Thus capitalism realizes that its military strategy has everything to lose by the outbreak of nationalist wars.

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* Section Administrative Speciale: An officers' corps whose task was to strengthen contact with the Algerians in non-military matters.
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against the people." We have seen with what results.

This atmosphere of violence and menaces, these rockets brandished by both sides, do not frighten nor deflect the colonized peoples. We have seen that all their recent history has prepared them to understand and grasp the situation. Between the violence of the colonies and that peaceful violence that the world is steeped in, there is a kind of complicit agreement, a sort of homogeneity. The colonized peoples are well adapted to this atmosphere; for once, they are up to date. Sometimes people wonder that the native, rather than give his wife a dress, buys instead a transistor radio. There is no reason to be astonished. The natives are convinced that their fate is in the balance, here and now. They live in the atmosphere of doomsday, and they consider that nothing ought to be let pass unnoticed. That is why they understand very well Phouma and Phoumi, Lumumba and Tshombe, Ahidjo and Moumie, Kenyatta, and the men who are pushed forward regularly to replace him. They understand all these figures very well, for they can unmask the forces working behind them. The native and the underdeveloped man are today political animals in the most universal sense of the word.

It is true to say that independence has brought moral compensation to colonized peoples, and has established their dignity. But they have not yet had time to elaborate a society, or to build up and affirm values. The warming, light-giving center where man and citizen develop and enrich their experience in wider and still wider fields does not yet exist. Set in a kind of irresolution, such men persuade themselves fairly easily that everything is going to be decided elsewhere, for everybody, at the same time. As for the political leaders, when faced with this situation, they first hesitate and then choose neutralism.

There is plenty to be said on the subject of neutralism. Some equate it with a sort of tainted mercantilism which

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consists of taking what it can get from both sides. In fact, neutralism, a state of affairs created by the cold war, if it allows underdeveloped countries to receive economic help from both sides, does not allow either party to aid underdeveloped areas to the extent that is necessary. Those literally astronomical sums of money which are invested in military research, those engineers who are transformed into technicians of nuclear war, could in the space of fifteen years raise the standard of living of underdeveloped countries by 60 per cent. So we see that the true interests of underdeveloped countries do not lie in the protraction nor in the accentuation of this cold war. But it so happens that no one asks their advice. Therefore, when they can, they cut loose from it. But can they really remain outside it? At this very moment, France is trying out her atomic bombs in Africa. Apart from the passing of motions, the holding of meetings and the shattering of diplomatic relations, we cannot say that the peoples of Africa have had much influence, in this particular sector, on France's attitude.

Neutralism produces in the citizen of the Third World a state of mind which is expressed in everyday life by a fearlessness and an ancestral pride strangely resembling defiance. The flagrant refusal to compromise and the tough will that sets itself against getting tied up are reminiscent of the behavior of proud, poverty-stricken adolescents, who are always ready to risk their necks in order to have the last word. All this leaves Western observers dumbfounded, for to tell the truth there is a glaring divergence between what these men claim to be and what they have behind them. These countries without tramways, without troops, and without money have no justification for the bravado that they display in broad daylight. Undoubtedly, they are impostors. The Third World often gives the impression that it rejoices in sensation and that it must have

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its weekly dose of crises. These men at the head of empty countries, who talk too loud, are most irritating. You'd like to shut them up. But, on the contrary, they are in great demand. They are given bouquets; they are invited to dinner. In fact, we quarrel over who shall have them. And this is neutralism. They are 98 per cent illiterate, but they are the subject of a huge body of literature. They travel a great deal: the governing classes and students of underdeveloped countries are gold mines for airline companies. African and Asian officials may in the same month follow a course on socialist planning in Moscow and one on the advantages of the liberal economy in London or at Columbia University. African trade-union leaders leap ahead at a great rate in their own field. Hardly have they been appointed to posts in managerial organizations than they decide to form themselves into autonomous bodies. They haven't the requisite fifty years experience of practical trade-unionism in the framework of an industrial country, but they already know that non-political trade-unionism doesn't make sense. They haven't come to grips with the bourgeois machine, nor developed their consciousness in the class struggle; but perhaps this isn't necessary. Perhaps. We shall see that this will to sum everything up, which caricatures itself often in facile internationalism, is one of the most fundamental characteristics of underdeveloped countries.

Let us return to considering the single combat between native and settler. We have seen that it takes the form of an armed and open struggle. There is no lack of historical examples: Indo-China, Indonesia, and of course North Africa. But what we must not lose sight of is that this struggle could have broken out anywhere, in Guinea as well as Somaliland, and moreover today it could break out in every place where colonialism means to stay on, in Angola, for example. The existence of an armed struggle

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shows that the people are decided to trust to violent methods only. He of whom they* The sentence is easily completed. During the phase of insurrection, each settler reasons on a basis of simple arithmetic. This logic does not surprise the other settlers, but it is important to point out that it does not surprise the natives either. To begin with, the affirmation of the principle "It's them or us" does not constitute a paradox, since colonialism, as we have seen, is in fact the organization of a Manichean world, a world divided up into compartments. And when in laying down precise methods the settler asks each member of the oppressing minority to shoot down 30 or 100 or 200 natives, he sees that nobody shows any indignation and that the whole problem is to decide whether it can be done all at once or by-stages. † have never stopped saying that the only language he understands is that of force, decides to give utterance by force. In fact, as always, the settler has shown him the way he should take if he is to become free. The argument the native chooses has been furnished by the settler, and by an ironic turning of the tables it is the native who now affirms that the colonialist understands nothing but force. The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time tries to hide this aspect of things. Every statue, whether of Faidherbe or of Lyautey, of Bugeaud or of Sergeant Blandan--all these conquistadors perched on colonial soil do not cease from proclaiming one and the same thing: "We are here by the force of bayonets...."

This chain of reasoning which presumes very arithmeti-

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This refers to Mirabeau's famous saying: "I am here by the will of the People; I shall leave only by the force of bayonets."--* Trans. †

It is evident that this vacuum cleaning destroys the very thing that they want to preserve. Sartre points this out when he says: "In short by the very fact of repeating them [concerning racist ideas] it is revealed that the simultaneous union of all against the natives is unrealizable. Such union only recurs from time to time and moreover it can only come into being as an active groupment in order to massacre the natives--an absurd though perpetual temptation to the settlers, which even if it was feasible would only succeed in abolishing colonization at one blow." ( Critique de la Raison Dialectique, p. 346.)

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cally the disappearance of the colonized people does not leave the native overcome with moral indignation. He has always known that his duel with the settler would take place in the arena. The native loses no time in lamentations, and he hardly ever seeks for justice in the colonial framework. The fact is that if the settler's logic leaves the native unshaken, it is because the latter has practically stated the problem of his liberation in identical terms: "We must form ourselves into groups of two hundred or five hundred, and each group must deal with a settler." It is in this manner of thinking that each of the protagonists begins the struggle.

For the native, this violence represents the absolute line of action. The militant is also a man who works. The questions that the organization asks the militant bear the mark of this way of looking at things: "Where have you worked? With whom? What have you accomplished? "The group requires that each individual perform an irrevocable action. In Algeria, for example, where almost all the men who called on the people to join in the national struggle were condemned to death or searched for by the French police, confidence was proportional to the hopelessness of each case. You could be sure of a new recruit when he could no longer go back into the colonial system. This mechanism, it seems, had existed in Kenya among the Mau-Mau, who required that each member of the group should strike a blow at the victim. Each one was thus personally responsible for the death of that victim. To work means to work for the death of the settler. This assumed

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responsibility for violence allows both strayed and outlawed members of the group to come back again and to find their place once more, to become integrated. Violence is thus seen as comparable to a royal pardon. The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence. This rule of conduct enlightens the agent because it indicates to him the means and the end. The poetry of Césaire takes on in this precise aspect of violence a prophetic significance. We may recall one of the most decisive pages of his tragedy where the Rebel (indeed!) explains his conduct:

My name--an offense; my Christian name--humiliation; my status--a rebel; my age--the stone age.

THE MOTHER:

My race--the human race. My religion--brotherhood.

THE REBEL:

My race: that of the fallen. My religion...but it's not you that will show it to me with your disarmament....

'tis I myself, with my rebellion and my poor fists clenched and my woolly head....

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We crept in knife in hand...

THE MOTHER:

Alas, you'll die for it.

THE REBEL:

Killed.... I killed him with my own hands....

Yes, 'twas a fruitful death, a copious death....

It was night. We crept among the sugar canes.

The knives sang to the stars, but we did not heed the stars.

The sugar canes scarred our faces with streams of green blades.

THE MOTHER:

And I had dreamed of a son to close his mother's eyes.

THE REBEL:

But I chose to open my son's eyes upon another sun.

THE MOTHER:

O my son, son of evil and unlucky death--

THE REBEL:

Mother of living and splendid death,

THE MOTHER:

Because he has hated too much,

THE REBEL:

Because he has too much loved.

THE MOTHER:

Spare me, I am choking in your bonds. I bleed from your wounds.

THE REBEL:

And the world does not spare me.... There is not anywhere in the world a poor creature who's been lynched or tortured in whom I am not murdered and humiliated...

THE MOTHER:

God of Heaven, deliver him!

THE REBEL:

My heart, thou wilt not deliver me from all that I remember...

It was an evening in November...

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And suddenly shouts lit up the silence;

We had attacked, we the slaves; we, the dung underfoot, we the animals with patient hooves,

We were running like madmen; shots rang out...4We were striking. Blood and sweat cooled and refreshed us. We were striking where the shouts came from, and the shouts became more strident and a great clamor rose from the east: it was the outhouses burning and the flames flickered sweetly on our cheeks.

Then was the assault made on the master's house. They were firing from the windows. We broke in the doors.

The master's room was wide open. The master's room was brilliantly lighted, and the master was there, very calm... and our people stopped dead...it was the master...I went in. "It's you," he said, very calm.

It is understandable that in this atmosphere, daily life becomes quite simply impossible. You can no longer be a fellah, a pimp, or an alcoholic as before. The violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the native balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity. This reign of violence will be the more terrible in proportion to the size of the implantation from the mother country. The development of violence among the colonized people will be proportionate to the violence exercised by the threatened colonial regime. In the first phase of this insurrectional period, the home governments are the slaves of the settlers, and these settlers seek to intimidate the natives and their home gov-

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emments at one and the same time. They use the same methods against both of them. The assassination of the Mayor of Evian, in its method and motivation, is identifiable with the assassination of Ali Boumendjel. For the settlers, the alternative is not between Algérie algérienne and Algérie française but between an independent Algeria and a colonial Algeria, and anything else is mere talk or attempts at treason. The settler's logic is implacable and one is only staggered by the counter-logic visible in the behavior of the native insofar as one has not clearly understood beforehand the mechanisms of the settler's ideas. From the moment that the native has chosen the methods of counter-violence, police reprisals automatically call forth reprisals on the side of the nationalists. However, the results are not equivalent, for machine-gunning from airplanes and bombardments from the fleet go far beyond in horror and magnitude any answer the natives can make. This recurring terror de-mystifies once and for all the most estranged members of the colonized race. They find out on the spot that all the piles of speeches on the equality of human beings do not hide the commonplace fact that the seven Frenchmen killed or wounded at the Col de Sakamody kindles the indignation of all civilized consciences, whereas the sack of the douars * of Guergour and of the dechras of Djerah and the massacre of whole populations--which had merely called forth the Sakamody ambush as a reprisal--all this is of not the slightest importance. Terror, counter-terror, violence, counter-violence: that is what observers bitterly record when they describe the circle of hate, which is so tenacious and so evident in Algeria.

In all armed straggles, there exists what we might call the point of no return. Almost always it is marked off by
* Temporary village for the use of shepherds.--Trans.
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We must go back to this period in order to judge the importance of this decision on the part of the French government in Algeria. Thus we may read in † "Résistance Algérienne," No. 4, dated 28th March 1957, the following: "In reply to the wish expressed by the General Assembly of the United Nations, the French Government has now decided to create urban militias in Algeria. 'Enough blood has been spilled' was whatthe United Nations said; Lacoste replies 'Let us form militias.' 'Cease fire,' advised UNO; Lacoste vociferates, 'We must arm the civilians.' Whereas the two parties face-to-face with each other were on the recommendation of the United Nations invited to contact each other with a view to coming to an agreement and finding a peaceful and democratic solution, Lacoste decrees that henceforward every European will be armed and should open fire on any person who seems to him suspect. It was then agreed (in the Assembly) that savage and iniquitous repression verging on genocide ought at all costs to be opposed by the authorities: but Lacoste replies 'Let us systematize the repression and organize the Algerian manhunt.' And, symbolically, he entrusts the military with civil powers, and gives military powers to civilians. The ring is closed. In the middle, the Algerian, disarmed, famished, tracked down, jostled, struck, lynched, will soon be slaughtered as a suspect. Today, in Algeria, there is not a single Frenchman who is not authorized and even invited to use his weapons. There is not a single Frenchman, in Algeria, one month after the appeal for calm made by UNO, who is not permitted, and obliged to search out, investigate and pursue suspects.

"One month after the vote on the final motion of the General Assembly of the United Nations, there is not one European in Algeria who is not party to the most frightful work of extermination of modern times. A democratic solution? Right, Lacoste concedes; let's begin by exterminating the Algerians, and to do that, let's arm the civilians and give them carte blanche. The Paris press, on the whole, has welcomed the creation of these armed groups with reserve. Fascist militias, they've been called. Yes; but on the individual level, on the plane of human rights, what is fascism if not colonialism when rooted in a traditionally colonialist country? The opinion has been advanced that they are systematically legalized and commended; but does not the body of Algeria bear for the last one hundred and thirty years wounds which gape still wider, more numerous and more deepseated than ever? 'Take care,' advises Monsieur Kenne-Vignes, member of parliament for the MRP, 'do we not by the creation of these militias risk seeing the gap widen between the two communities in Algeria?' Yes; but is not colonial status simply the organized reduction to slavery of a whole people? The Algerian revolution is precisely the affirmed contestation of that slavery and that abyss. The Algerian revolution speaks to the occupying nation and says: 'Take your fangs out of the bleeding flesh of Algeria! Let the people of Algeria speak!'

"The creation of militias, they say, will lighten the tasks of the Army. It will free certain units whose mission will be to protect the Moroccan and Tunisian borders. In Algeria, the Army is six hundred thousand strong. Almost all the Navy and the Air Force are based there. There is an enormous, speedy police force with a horribly good record since it has absorbed the ex-torturers from Morocco and Tunisia. The territorial units are one hundred thousand strong. The task of the Army, all the same, must be lightened. So let us create urban militias. The fact remains that the hysterical and criminal frenzy of Lacoste imposes them even on clearsighted French people. The troth is that the creation of militias carries its contradiction even in its justification. The task of the French Army is neverending. Consequently, when it is given as an objective the gagging of the Algerian people, the door is closed on the future forever. Above all, it is forbidden to analyze, to understand, or to measure the depth and the density of the Algerian revolution: departmental leaders, housing-estate leaders, street leaders, house leaders, leaders who control each landing...Today, to the surface checker-board is added an underground network.

"In 48 hours two thousand volunteers were enrolled. The Europeans of Algeria responded immediately to Lacoste's call to kill. From now on, each European must check up on all surviving Algerians in his sector; and in addition he will be responsible for information, for a 'quick response' to acts of terrorism, for the detection of suspects, for the liquidation of runaways and for the reinforcement of police services. Certainly, the tasks of the Army must be lightened. Today, to the surface mopping-up is added a deeper harrowing. Today, to the killing which is all in the day's work is added planified murder. 'Stop the bloodshed,' was the advice given by UNO. 'The best way of doing this,' replied Lacoste, 'is to make sure there remains no blood to shed.' The Algerian people, after having been delivered up to Massu's hordes, is put under the protection of the urban militias. By his decision to create these militias, Lacoste shows quite plainly that he will brook no interference with HIS war. It is a proof that there are no limits once the rot has set in. True, he is at the moment a prisoner of the situation; but what a consolation to drag everyone down in one's fall!

"After each of these decisions, the Algerian people tense their muscles still more and fight still harder. After each of these organized, deliberately sought after assassinations, the Algerian people builds up its awareness of self, and consolidates its resistance. Yes; the tasks of the French Army are infinite: for oh, how infinite is the unity of the people of Algeria!"

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[blank page.]

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When the native is tortured, when his wife is killed or raped, he complains to no one. The oppressor's government can set up commissions of inquiry and of information daily if it wants to; in the eyes of the native, these commissions do not exist. The fact is that soon we shall have had seven years of crimes in Algeria and there has not yet been a single Frenchman indicted before a French court of justice for the murder of an Algerian. In Indo-

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* This is why there are no prisoners when the fighting first starts. It is only through educating the local leaders politically that those at the head of the movement can make the masses accept 1) that people coming from the mother country do not always act of their own free will and are sometimes even disgusted by the war; 2) that it is of immediate advantage to the movement that its supporters should show by their actions that they respect certain international conventions; 3) that an army which takes prisoners is an army, and ceases to be considered as a group of wayside bandits; 4) that whatever the circumstances, the possession of prisoners constitutes a means of exerting pressure which must not be overlooked in order to protect our men who are in enemy hands.

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China, in Madagascar, or in the colonies the native has always known that he need expect nothing from the other side. The settler's work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native. The native's work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler. On the logical plane, the Manicheism of the settler produces a Manicheism of the native. To the theory of the "absolute evil of the native" the theory of the "absolute evil of the settler" replies.

The appearance of the settler has meant in the terms of syncretism the death of the aboriginal society, cultural lethargy, and the petrifieation of individuals. For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler. This then is the correspondence, term by term, between the two trains of reasoning.

But it so happens that for the colonized people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler's violence in the beginning. The groups recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible. The armed struggle mobilizes the people, that is to say, it throws them in one way and in one direction.

The mobilization of the masses, when it arises out of the war of liberation, introduces into each man's consciousness the ideas of a common cause, of a national destiny, and of a collective history. In the same way the second phase, that of the building-up of the nation, is helped on by the existence of this cement which has been mixed with blood and anger. Thus we come to a fuller appreciation of the originality of the words used in these underdeveloped countries. During the colonial period the people are called

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upon to fight against oppression; after national liberation, they are called upon to fight against poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment. The struggle, they say, goes on. The people realize that life is an unending contest.

We have said that the native's violence unifies the people. By its very structure, colonialism is separatist and regionalist. Colonialism does not simply state the existence of tribes; it also reinforces it and separates them. The colonial system encourages chieftaincies and keeps alive the old Marabout confraternities. Violence is in action allinclusive and national. It follows that it is closely involved in the liquidation of regionalism and of tribalism. Thus the national parties show no pity at all toward the caids and the customary chiefs. Their destruction is the preliminary to the unification of the people.

At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic and the nation is demobilized through a rapid movement of decolonization, the people have the time to see that the liberation has been the business of each and all and that the leader has no special merit. From thence comes that type of aggressive reticence with regard to the machinery of protocol which young governments quickly show. When the people have taken violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set themselves up as "liberators." They show themselves to be jealous of the results of their action and take good care not to place their future, their destiny, or the fate of their country in the hands of a living god. Yesterday they were completely irresponsible; today they mean to understand everything and make all decisions. Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification. From now on the demagogues, the opportunists,

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and the magicians have a difficult task. The action which has thrown them into a hand-to-hand struggle confers upon the masses a voracious taste for the concrete. The attempt at mystification becomes, in the long run, practically impossible.

VIOLENCE IN THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

We have pointed out many times in the preceding pages that in underdeveloped regions the political leader is forever calling on his people to fight: to fight against colonialism, to fight against poverty and underdevelopment, and to fight against sterile traditions. The vocabulary which he uses in his appeals is that of a chief of staff: "mass mobilization"; "agricultural front"; "fight against illiteracy"; "defeats we have undergone"; "victories won." The young independent nation evolves during the first years in an atmosphere of the battlefield, for the political leader of an underdeveloped country looks fearfully at the huge distance his country will have to cover. He calls to the people and says to them: "Let us gird up our loins and set to work," and the country, possessed by a kind of creative madness, throws itself into a gigantic and disproportionate effort. The program consists not only of climbing out of the morass but also of catching up with the other nations using the only means at hand. They reason that if the European nations have reached that stage of development, it is on account of their efforts: "Let us therefore," they seem to say, "prove to ourselves and to the whole world that we are capable of the same achievements." This manner of setting out the problem of the evolution of underdeveloped countries seems to us to be neither correct nor reasonable.

The European states achieved national unity at a moment when the national middle classes had concentrated

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most of the wealth in their hands. Shopkeepers and artisans, clerks and bankers monopolized finance, trade, and science in the national framework. The middle class was the most dynamic and prosperous of all classes. Its coming to power enabled it to undertake certain very important speculations: industrialization, the development of communications, and soon the search for outlets overseas.

In Europe, apart from certain slight differences ( England, for example, was some way ahead) the various states were at a more or less uniform stage economically when they achieved national unity. There was no nation which by reason of the character of its development and evolution caused affront to the others.

Today, national independence and the growth of national feeling in underdeveloped regions take on totally new aspects. In these regions, with the exception of certain spectacular advances, the different countries show the same absence of infrastructure. The mass of the people struggle against the same poverty, flounder about making the same gestures and with their shrunken bellies outline what has been called the geography of hunger. It is an underdeveloped world, a world inhuman in its poverty; but also it is a world without doctors, without engineers, and without administrators. Confronting this world, the European nations sprawl, ostentatiously opulent. This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and from the subsoil of that underdeveloped world. The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races. We have decided not to overlook this any longer. When a colonialist country, embarrassed by the claims for independence made by a colony, proclaims to the nationalist leaders: "If you wish for independence,

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* In the present international context, capitalism does not merely operate an economic blockade against African or Asiatic colonies. The United States with its anti-Castro operations is opening a new chapter in the long story of man's toiling advance toward freedom. Latin America, made up of new independent countries which sit at the United Nations and raise the wind there, ought to be an object lesson for Africa. These former colonies since their liberation have suffered the brazenfaced rule of Western capitalism in terror and destitution.

The liberation of Africa and the growth of consciousness among mankind have made it possible for the Latin American peoples to break with the old merry-go-round of dictatorships where each succeeding regime exactly resembled the preceding one. Castro took over power in Cuba, and gave it to the people. This heresy is felt to be a national scourge by the Yankees, and the United States now organizes counterrevolutionary brigades, puts together a provisional government, burns the sugar-cane crops, and generally has decided to strangle the Cuban people mercilessly. But this will be difficult. The people of Cuba will suffer, but they will conquer. The Brazilian president Janio Quadros has just announced in a declaration of historic importance that his country will defend the Cuban Revolution by all means. Perhaps even the United States may draw back when faced with the declared will of the peoples. When that day comes, we'll hang out the flags, for it will be a decisive moment for the men and women of the whole world. The almighty dollar, which when all is said or done is only guaranteed by slaves scattered all over the globe, in the oil wells of the Middle East, the mines of Peru or of the Congo, and the United Fruit or Firestone plantations, will then cease to dominate with all its force these slaves which it has created and who continue, empty-headed and emptybellied, to feed it from their substance.

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their people and ask from them a gigantic effort. A regime of austerity is imposed on these starving men; a disproportionate amount of work is required from their atrophied muscles. An autarkic regime is set up and each state, with the miserable resources it has in hand, tries to find an answer to the nation's great hunger and poverty. We see the mobilization of a people which toils to exhaustion in front of a suspicious and bloated Europe.

Other countries of the Third World refuse to undergo this ordeal and agree to get over it by accepting the conditions of the former guardian power. These countries use their strategic position--a position which accords them privileged treatment in the struggle between the two blocs -- to conclude treaties and give undertakings. The former dominated country becomes an economically dependent country. The ex-colonial power, which has kept intact and sometimes even reinforced its colonialist trade channels, agrees to provision the budget of the independent nation by small injections. Thus we see that the accession to independence of the colonial countries places an important question before the world, for the national liberation of colonized countries unveils their true economic state and makes it seem even more unendurable. The fundamental duel which seemed to be that between colonialism and anticolonialism, and indeed between capitalism and socialism, is already losing some of its importance. What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.

It might have been generally thought that the time had come for the world, and particularly for the Third World, to choose between the capitalist and socialist systems. The underdeveloped countries, which have used the fierce competition which exists between the two systems in order to assure the triumph of their struggle for national libera-

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tion, should however refuse to become a factor in that competition. The Third World ought not to be content to define itself in the terms of values which have preceded it. On the contrary, the underdeveloped countries ought to do their utmost to find their own particular values and methods and a style which shall be peculiar to them. The concrete problem we find ourselves up against is not that of a choice, cost what it may, between socialism and capitalism as they have been defined by men of other continents and of other ages. Of course we know that the capitalist regime, in so far as it is a way of life, cannot leave us free to perform our work at home, nor our duty in the world. Capitalist exploitation and cartels and monopolies are the enemies of underdeveloped countries. On the other hand the choice of a socialist regime, a regime which is completely orientated toward the people as a whole and based on the principle that man is the most precious of all possessions, will allow us to go forward more quickly and more harmoniously, and thus make impossible that caricature of society where all economic and political power is held in the hands of a few who regard the nation as a whole with scorn and contempt.

But in order that this regime may work to good effect so that we can in every instance respect those principles which were our inspiration, we need something more than human output. Certain underdeveloped countries expend a huge amount of energy in this way. Men and women, young and old undertake enthusiastically what is in fact forced labor, and proclaim themselves the slaves of the nation. The gift of oneself, and the contempt for every preoccupation which is not in the common interest, bring into being a national morale which comforts the heart of man, gives him fresh confidence in the destiny of mankind and disarms the most reserved observers. But we cannot believe that such an effort can be kept up at the same

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The truth is that we ought not to accept these condi-

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* Certain countries which have benefitted by a large European settlement come to independence with houses and wide streets, and these tend to forget the poverty-stricken, starving hinterland. By the irony of fate, they give the impression by a kind of complicit silence that their towns are contemporaneous with independence.

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* It is true that Germany has not paid all her reparations. The indemnities imposed on the vanquished nation have not been claimed in full, for the injured nations have included Germany in their anti-communist system of defense. This same preoccupation is the permanent motivation of the colonialist countries when they try to obtain from their former colonies, if not their inclusion in the Western system, at least military bases and enclaves. On the other hand they have decided unanimously to forget their demands for the sake of NATO strategy and to preserve the free world; and we have seen Germany receiving floods of dollars and machines. A Germany once more standing on its feet, strong and powerful, was a necessity for the Western camp. It was in the understood interests of so-called free Europe to have a prosperous and reconstructed Germany which would be capable of serving as a first rampart against the eventual Red hordes. Germany has made admirable use of the European crisis. At the same time the United States and other European states feel a legitimate bitterness when confronted with this Germany, yesterday at their feet, which today metes out to them cutthroat competition in the economic field.

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In the same way we may say that the imperialist states would make a great mistake and commit an unspeakable injustice if they contented themselves with withdrawing from our soil the military cohorts, and the administrative and managerial services whose function it was to discover the wealth of the country, to extract it and to send it off to the mother countries. We are not blinded by the moral reparation of national independence; nor are we fed by it. The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too. On the universal plane this affirmation, you may be sure, should on no account be taken to signify that we feel ourselves affected by the creations of Western arts or techniques. For in a very concrete way Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries: Latin America, China, and Africa. From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries toward that same Europe diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialized in the Negro slave trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves. So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude. Quite the contrary; we say to ourselves: "It's a just reparation which will be paid to us." Nor will

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we acquiesce in the help for underdeveloped countries being a program of "sisters of charity." This help should be the ratification of a double realization: the realization by the colonized peoples that i t is their due, and the realization by the capitalist powers that in fact they must pay. * For if, through lack of intelligence (we won't speak of lack of gratitude) the capitalist countries refuse to pay, then the relentless dialectic of their own system will smother them. It is fact that young nations do not attract much private capital. There are many reasons which explain and render legitimate this reserve on the part of the monopolies. As soon as the capitalists know--and of course they are the first to know--that their government is getting ready to decolonize, they hasten to withdraw all their capital from the colony in question. The spectacular flight of capital is one of the most constant phenomena of decolonization.

Private companies, when asked to invest in independent countries, lay down conditions which are shown in practice to be inacceptable or unrealizable. Faithful to the principle of immediate returns which is theirs as soon as they go "overseas," the capitalists are very chary concerning all long-term investments. They are unamenable and often openly hostile to the prospective programs of planning laid down by the young teams which form the new government. At a pinch they willingly agree to lend money to

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"To make a radical difference between the building up of socialism in Europe and our relations with the Third World (as if our only relations with it were external ones) is, whether we know it or not, to set the pace for the distribution of the colonial inheritance over and above the liberation of the underdeveloped countries. It is to wish to build up a luxury socialism upon the fruits of imperialist robbery--as if, inside the gang, the swag is more or less shared out equally, and even a little of it is given to the poor in the form of charity, since it's been forgotten that they were the people it was stolen from." Marcel Péju, "To die for De Gaulle?" * Temps Modernes, No. 175-6, October-November 1960.

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the young states, but only on condition that this money is used to buy manufactured products and machines: in other words, that it serves to keep the factories in the mother country going.

In fact the cautiousness of the Western financial groups may be explained by their fear of taking any risk. They also demand political stability and a calm social climate which are impossible to obtain when account is taken of the appalling state of the population as a whole immediately after independence. Therefore, vainly looking for some guarantee which the former colony cannot give, they insist on garrisons being maintained or the inclusion of the young state in military or economic pacts. The private companies put pressure on their own governments to at least set up military bases in these countries for the purpose of assuring the protection of their interests. In the last resort these companies ask their government to guarantee the investments which they decide to make in such-and-such an underdeveloped region.

It happens that few countries fulfill the conditions demanded by the trusts and monopolies. Thus capital, failing to find a safe outlet, remains blocked in Europe, and is frozen. It is all the more frozen because the capitalists refuse to invest in their own countries. The returns in this case are in fact negligible and treasury control is the despair of even the boldest spirits.

In the long run the situation is catastrophic. Capital no longer circulates, or else its circulation is considerably diminished. In spite of the huge sums swallowed up by military budgets, international capitalism is in desperate straits.

But another danger threatens it as well. Insofar as the Third World is in fact abandoned and condemned to regression or at least to stagnation by the selfishness and

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wickedness of Western nations, the underdeveloped peoples will decide to continue their evolution inside a collective autarky. Thus the Western industries will quickly be deprived of their overseas markets. The machines will pile up their products in the warehouses and a merciless struggle will ensue on the European market between the trusts and the financial groups. The closing of factories, the paying off of workers and unemployment will force the European working class to engage in an open struggle against the capitalist regime. Then the monopolies will realize that their true interests lie in giving aid to the underdeveloped countries--unstinted aid with not too many conditions. So we see that the young nations of the Third World are wrong in trying to make up to the capitalist countries. We are strong in our own right, and in the justice of our point of view. We ought on the contrary to emphasize and explain to the capitalist countries that the fundamental problem of our time is not the struggle between the socialist regime and them. The Cold War must be ended, for it leads nowhere. The plans for nuclearizing the world must stop, and large-scale investments and technical aid must be given to underdeveloped regions. The fate of the world depends on the answer that is given to this question.

Moreover, the capitalist regime must not try to enlist the aid of the socialist regime over "the fate of Europe" in face of the starving multitudes of colored peoples. The exploit of Colonial Gargarin doesn't seem to displease General de Gaulle, for is it not a triumph which brings honor to Europe? For some time past the statesmen of the capitalist countries have adopted an equivocal attitude toward the Soviet Union. After having united all their forces to abolish the socialist regime, they now realize that they'll have to reckon with it. So they look as pleasant

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as they can, they make all kinds of advances, and they remind the Soviet people the whole time that they "belong to Europe."

They will not manage to divide the progressive forces which mean to lead mankind toward happiness by brandishing the threat of a Third World which is rising like the tide to swallow up all Europe. The Third World does not mean to organize a great crusade of hunger against the whole of Europe. What it expects from those who for centuries have kept it in slavery is that they will help it to rehabilitate mankind, and make man victorious everywhere, once and for all. But it is clear that we are not so naive as to think that this will come about with the cooperation and the good will of the European governments. This huge task which consists of reintroducing mankind into the world, the whole of mankind, will be carried out with the indispensable help, of the European peoples, who themselves must realize that in the past they have often joined the ranks of our common masters where colonial questions were concerned. To achieve this, the European peoples must first decide to wake up and shake themselves, use their brains, and stop playing the stupid game of the Sleeping Beauty.

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Source: openanthropology.org

hyle.gr | hyle.mobi

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Frantz Fanon, "Concerning Violence," From THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

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From: Preface by JEAN-PAUL SARTRE Translated by CONSTANCE FARRINGTON CONCERNING VIOLENCE -35- lives of the men and women who are colonized. But the possibility of this change is equally experienced in the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another "species" of men and women: the colonizers.

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Introduction to “Get in Formation: A Community Safety Toolkit”

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Introduction to “Get in Formation: A Community Safety Toolkit”

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With Vision Change Win

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Graphic Notes by Laura Chow Reeve / Radical Roadmaps

with Vision Change Win

"Get in Formation: A Community Safety Toolkit" is a collection of security and safety practices built by years of learning from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color movements within the U.S.

From the toolkit: "At Vision Change Win, we believe that Community Safety includes the following: security, office and organizational safety, verbal de-escalation, physical de-escalation, personal safety, transformative justice processes, community safety neighborhood strategies, bystander intervention, and cop watch.

This toolkit will focus specifically on Verbal De-escalation, Office and Organizational Safety, and Security for events and actions, along with specific information tailored to this historical moment of both uprising and viral pandemic."

Vision Change Win Consulting (VCW) is a Black-led team of queer and trans people of color social justice consultants and facilitators dedicated to supporting organizations in fully manifesting their missions, visions, and values.

Ejeris Dixon is an organizer, facilitator, and political strategist with 20 years of experience working in racial justice, LGBTQ, anti-violence, and economic justice movements. She is the Founding Director of Vision Change Win Consulting where she partners with organizations to build their capacity and deepen the impact of their organizing strategies.

Che Johnson-Long is the Community Safety Program Coordinator at Vision Change Win Consulting where she co-designs community safety and security curriculum, provides one-on-one and organizational support and coordinates VCW's safety and security programmatic offerings.

LINKS

Get in Formation: A Community Safety Toolkit

Graphic Notes

Video

VCW's Community Safety Training Series

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Graphic Notes by Laura Chow Reeve / Radical Roadmaps with Vision Change Win "Get in Formation: A Community Safety Toolkit" is a collection of security and safety practices built by years of learning from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color movements within the U.S.