Most Revolutionary — Part One — Ground Force One — Prefatory

A Lib Lit Thriller Novel

• MOST REVOLUTIONARY - A SERIALIZED NOVEL

PART ONE: GROUND FORCE ONE
PART TWO: RANSOM
PART THREE: HEART
PART FOUR: ATTACK
PART FIVE: DATE
PART SIX: DESECRATION
PART SEVEN: TIME
PART EIGHT: ULTRA REVOLUTIONARY

NOTES ON LIBERATORY LIT (prior to each Part)
SHAPE POETRY BY SABIA PEREZ (prior to each Part)

Tree

Have you ever
leaned against a tree
and wondered what it might be
never to lean against a thing
to just drop when the time felt right
to be snapped in half by a twister
to blossom green come spring
to flame bright in autumn
to brood brown through winter?
Ever wonder what it might be
roots
limbs
bark
leafs
sky?

NOTES ON LIBERATORY LITERATURE

Amitav Ghosh – The Great Derangement

Climate change ... should ... be the principal preoccupation of writers the world over.

Maxine Hong Kingston – “The Novel’s Next Step”

I’m going to give you a head start on the book that somebody ought to be working on. The hands of the clock are minutes away from nuclear midnight. And I am slow, each book taking me longer to write… So let me set down what has to be done, and maybe hurry creation, which is about two steps ahead of destruction…. The dream of the great American novel is past. We need to write the Global novel…. The danger is that the Global novel has to imitate chaos: loaded guns, bombs, leaking boats, broken-down civilizations, a hole in the sky, broken English, people who refuse connections with others…. How to stretch the novel to comprehend our times—no guarantees of inherent or eventual order—without having it fall apart? How to integrate the surreal, society, our psyches?

Gloria Anzaldúa – Borderlands—La Frontera: The New Mestiza

My Chicana identity is grounded in the Indian woman’s history of resistance.... So mamá, Raza, how wonderful, no tener que rendir cuentas a nadie. I feel perfectly free to rebel and to rail against my culture. I fear no betrayal on my part because, unlike Chicanas and other women of color who grew up white or who have only recently returned to their native cultural roots, I was totally immersed in mine.... So, don’t give me your tenets and your laws. Don’t give me your lukewarm gods. What I want is an accounting with all three cultures—white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own goods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture...

Toni Cade Bambara – Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.)

I start with the recognition that we are at war, and that war is not simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and socialist camp.... The war is also being fought over the truth: what is the truth about human nature, about the human potential? My responsibility to myself, my neighbors, my family and the human family is to try to tell the truth. That ain’t easy. There are so few truth-speaking traditions in this society in which the myth of “Western civilization” has claimed the allegiance of so many. We have rarely been encouraged and equipped to appreciate the fact that the truth works, that it releases the Spirit and that it is a joyous thing. We live in a part of the world, for example, that equates criticism with assault, that equates social responsibility with naïve idealism, that defines the unrelenting pursuit of knowledge and wisdom as fanaticism.... I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to tell the truth about people’s lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block…. It would be dishonest, though, to end my comments there. First and foremost I write for myself….

Mary McCarthy – Ideas and the Novel

As I was saying, if you are going to voice ideas in a novel, plainly you will need a spokesman. In the traditional novel such semiofficial figures are familiar to us and, on the whole, welcome. We quickly learn to recognize which of the characters will be a stand-in for the author, that is, which one we can trust as appointed representative with full powers to comment on what is happening and draw the necessary conclusions. There is nothing wrong with this; events in life seldom speak for themselves. Whether it is world events that confront us or local skullduggery—an ecological scandal or somebody running off with a friend’s wife—we frequently want somebody to explain them to us, sketch in the background, suggest where our sympathies should lie. There is no reason we should be worse off in a novel...

Ishmael Reed – Writin’ Is Fightin'

The current literary establishment, which denies that it exists, is not only a powerful influence upon American intellectual and cultural trends but on political trends as well—both the left wing and right wing of the New York branch having advised political administrations since the 1960s…. The problem with the current literary-industrial complex of publishers, critics, writers, and slowpoke academia is that it can see cultural repression when it happens in other states but can’t recognize it when it’s practiced by its own state, the literary state….

Ben Shahn – The Shape of Content

...we must look upon form as the shape of content.... …form is the right and only possible shape of a certain content. Some other kind of form would have conveyed a different meaning and a different attitude. So when we sit in judgment upon a certain kind of form – and it is usually called lack of form – what we do is to sit in judgment upon a certain type of content.