Most Things Are About Power
Writing has felt impossible lately. Maybe it’s because my life feels so small in comparison to all the other lives I witness every day. Beyond the perfunctory, I haven’t had words in a very long time. Maybe it’s because some things are impossible to articulate. A lot of the work that I busy myself with every day relates to life, death, and migrant justice. In a country where justice is not something freely given, this work is painful but also necessary. It’s terrifying how often these two things appear together: pain and necessity.
I put this out here not because I think I’ve found the right words, but because I think writing is important even (& sometimes especially) when it’s difficult. I don’t always intend for it to be meditative, nor do I think that writing is able to “force the whirlpool of debris that constitute[s] the real into any grammatical or syntactical order.”1. I am simply acting on a necessity.
I recently read a piece by Alexis Schaitkin where she talks about childbirth, writing, and childbirth as a metaphor for writing2. She mentions the kind of transformational quality that motherhood had on her writing:
“We tend to think of writing as an act of reflection, a capturing: We take what we observe and feel and believe about the world and wrangle it into language. But writing can do other work, too. Sometimes, without quite realising it, we are writing into an incipient future, toward something which, through the act of writing, we may learn.”
I think this principle applies to everything I talk about here too—the sort of patience, intentionality, gestation, “fertile imagination”, and “agnonising labour” which goes into the work of building new worlds; of disentangling necessity from pain. The idea that we don’t need/have an end to begin with or work towards; that the spirit of organising and renegotiating our relations with one another and with the earth is constant, thankless, surprising work. All these processes “have something of the miraculous about them. Here is something where once there was nothing.”
Part One: Power
In the last few weeks, my teammates and I have been in ministry buildings, hospital wards, lawyers offices, Coffee Beans, Mustafa aisles, and each others homes at various times of the day & night, fighting very hard against systems that make the lives of ordinary people inordinately difficult. There is something very disembodying about navigating a bureaucratic process, and even more so when it is in a language you cannot comprehend (jargon, foreign). I once had a friend who, over a period of time, uploaded texts I had sent to him into an AI program. Before long the program could generate chunks of text that read a lot like things I had/would have written. It contained my ‘likeness’ and used language just like me, but there was always something slightly off (I later realised what it was missing was affect). Navigating bureaucracy is a lot like that, except the scripts are written by actual human beings who form a very long chain of command—power intensifying & affect abating the higher up you go.
A week and a half ago we tried to help a worker leave an unsafe work environment. It required conversations, applications, mediations, and dealings with so many people in public service to a vision & system of beliefs they may or may not buy into. We watched multiple civil servants look this worker in the eye and tell him they “cannot do anything” and, frustratingly, in many ways they are right, because ultimately they are pencil pushers who have been placed in this chain of command only to create as much distance as possible between those with real power to serve and those they are meant to be serving.
When I first started organising in this space I cried a lot, not because I was overwhelmed by the work (in and of itself), but because it was my first time building relationships and coming into communion with people who had no reason (and sometimes language) to trust me or my friends, but did. In an early case, my teammate and I drove out in the night to meet a worker at a bus stop. We had only spoken on the phone prior, so he told me he was wearing a white t-shirt. I spotted him as we approached—the only person at the bus stop—and in that moment all I could think about was how he had no way of telling if we were going to show or not, but there he was: in a white t-shirt, at our agreed upon stop, in the middle of the night. All this for a chance to access basic rights he had been denied, and the hope/trust that we would be able to support him. It shouldn’t have to be this way.
[for the sake of story closure: both workers managed to get what they needed/wanted]
I think about all the migrant bodies on difficult roads I don’t have to travel—both literally & figuratively—not because I am better or smarter or more deserving, but because power in my country has ordered that the crimson red of my citizenship is worth more than the crimson red of blood spilt on those difficult roads. I think about blood as in family, blood as in “brother”—the anglicising and canonising of a language to mark a new kind of power; one that will take years of/off your life, profit from it, then say you overstayed your welcome.
I think about the phrase “duty of care”—an empty promise that is often peddled in parliament. I think about how care isn’t meant to be borne of duty—an obligation, a requirement—but love and respect and the recognition of oneself in another. The want for another what you have for yourself, maybe more. I think a lot of us (myself included) understand and practise care as a series of actions. Even in leftist organising spaces, care is seen as something to be ‘done’ (exemplified very clearly when movements outsource care or create care ‘roles’) as opposed to the fundamental structure of a relationship. Care requires us to be relational and interrogate the form of our bonds and connections.
I think this sort of care is linked deeply to our ability to liberate one another. I also think it begins with the truth.
Part Two: Truth
What would happen if one woman told the truth about
her life?
The world would split open
— Muriel Rukeyser, "Käthe Kollwitz"I truly believe that one of the most difficult things to do in this whole project we call “re-building” or “re-worlding” is to be honest—with ourselves, with our friends, and with our communities. This is because truth-telling doesn’t come naturally to us, especially when we relate to people in or as competition. We’re conditioned to see the truth as hostile, damaging, an attack on our character. And perhaps in many instances that is what it was, and how it was intended. But the truth can also be a product of care & trust & a desire to be in light, honest communion. It should be.
I think it’s important to get this right because the imagination of a new world is steeped in a vernacular and a practice that requires so much truth. The foundation of a new world asks that we speak truth to power so that power speaks the truth; but it also asks that we are truthful with & to those who are building it. We have to be good tellers and receivers of all sorts of honesty—even (& sometimes especially) when it is difficult. Just like writing. When we reimagine, redistribute, renegotiate, regenerate etc., we are needling in to the core of each concept, stripping it bare, and saying: let’s try that again, for everybody. But to be able to do this politically, we first have to be able to do it interpersonally i.e. we have to be able to look at ourselves and each other and say: That isn’t right. What do I/we need in order to try again? What does better look like? How are we getting there?
I do also believe that truth-telling work has been distributed and valued unequally. Men, for example, are only ever expected/required to tell political & historical truths, all of which are accepted and even revered despite (dis)honesty in their personal relations. I think this is because there has been a hierarchical separation of (1) truth as dialectics and (2) truth as feeling/affect. The former is assigned to the study of conflict/contradiction (patriarchal, and therefore valued) while the latter is practised/taken on/left for those who engage in emotional work (not recognised by patriarchy, and therefore devalued). This might also be why dishonest women are immediately disqualified from meaningfully partaking or having any social/political stake in public affairs & discourse, even if her dishonesty has only “private” implications (see: the entire course of human history, or, Monica Lewinsky). The point here is not, of course, that both men and women should be allowed to lie equally, but rather that we cannot move forward into anything remotely egalitarian (let alone communal) if we do not synthesise different kinds of truths, re-prioritise those that are intuitive, and hold each other to the same standards of truth-telling.
I will say, however, that a big part of rebuilding is also a refusal to engage with the logic of coercion, so inasmuch as the truth is required for a new world and new ways of existing, shaming or backing people into a truth-telling corner would be counterintuitive. Honesty at every point of speaking & relating needs to be accepted and practised organically. We have to want to be honest with the people in our lives; we have to want vulnerability. We have to want how transformative it can be, even if it is challenging at first. I am learning this with lots of wonder and patience.
In an interview with The New Inquiry, adrienne maree brown (author of Emergent Strategy—very big recommend) talks about how we need to unlearn dishonesty, in all its forms. I like this excerpt a lot and have quoted it often (to myself, in private + to my friends, in conversation) in my small attempts to try and reach the heart of certain relations & be clear about the integrity of all their structures.
“…to speak to the truth of the connection (in the organisation, network, relationship, family) to get better at tolerating the truth from others. The results are astounding: humans are capable of anything when we are honest—we have boundaries, work sustainably, do the work most needed by our communities (rather than the easiest funded or most media inducing), get out of unhealthy dynamics, feel seen and appropriately valued, participate in authentic intimacy. This is earth, water, fire, and air level stuff. Without these core connections, injustice flourishes.”3
Part Three: Desire
I desire so many things! Not in the material but in the transformational. My friends tell me I can dream much bigger than the things I currently wish for, which is hard for me to conceptualise (because I wished for 1000 wishes) but exciting all the same.
For now, a world where:
People don’t use the phrase “wash our hands off” to talk about injured and/or vulnerable human beings.
More than 100,000 voices asking the state to spare a man’s life cannot be ignored.
Relationships can survive disagreement; where peace is a result of the truth, not the omission or distortion of it; where everyone feels safe communicating their hurt; where we give each other space to be honest and grow.
I will end with a line from & Other Stories by Eloghosa Osunde4. It is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have read this year. There was so much I wanted to quote while writing this but I did not want to destroy the integrity of the essay, so I picked one part and urge you to read the rest.
“Everyone was truth telling and the room shimmered with an earned sweetness.”
Ferrante, E., & Goldstein, A. (2022). In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. Europa Editions.
Schaitkin, A. (2022). Writing Into the Future: What Motherhood and Creativity Have in Common. Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/writing-into-the-future-what-motherhood-and-creativity-have-in-common/
Imarisha W., Gumbs A., Piepzna-Samarasinha L. L., Brown, A. M., & Mingus M. (2017, April 20). Panel Discussion. The Fictions and Futures of Transformative Justice. The New Inquiry. https://thenewinquiry.com/the-fictions-and-futures-of-transformative-justice/
Osunde, E. (2021). & Other Stories. The Paris Review. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/07/22/other-stories/