Most Revolutionary — Part Seven — Time — Prefatory
Liberatory Criticism
MOST REVOLUTIONARY — A SERIALIZED NOVEL
During a killer Iowa blizzard, fearless DAPL militant and radical plant nursery grower Sabia Perez first saves then kidnaps the stranded President to ransom a better world.
Other Days Mischievous task hammer firm – crooked nails weathered boards fixing barn – swing and kiss swing and miss. You need to love it all always – your hand the hammer nails boards – to swing and kiss to swing and not miss. Doves bathe in sun and dirt in flowerbed by doorstep stubborn feathers abloom. You go out and accidentally startle them away. Unexpected blossoms – they return. Talk to robins on a cool day – a spring moment in mid-summer – or winter with a late score to settle. Robins warm in red vests. Appeal to them to deliver what they promised long ago seasonal warmth but from perch on limbs feathered crouch they lift up bold and flap away as if to denounce any such wish. They wing away as if to say, "Sorry. You've got the wrong bird." Two little darters wing and flit – aflit – territorial. Wrestle on turf – wings ajar askew entangled as if a single new creature – or simply two birds in struggle – in enmity one. Duel. At marsh edge at dusk. Bobcat stalks – bobcat pounces. Feathers fly quick catch – bird plugged in mouth one wing protrudes. Bobcat sensing company stares – ears in tuft – feathers for whiskers. Steel eyes grow skittish. Bobcat retreats beneath bush. Predator – prey – witness. Doves call by day as if swollen with owl. Whom do they miss? What peace escaped? What visions borne? Owls stalk the night and swoop into morning dove dreams then fly out through morning dove calls during day. Whoo-whoo? Morning doves mourning owl dreams. I ask of hawk Why the talons? Hawk replies Gotta feed the hunger. Prairie eyes are brown to black earth sable water-mirrored star-dazzled glass flakes kaleidoscope prisms. Bear dark and sky bright prairie eyes soar and prowl all day long and all the night. Jenna laughs from belly warm – gem eyes lively alive – throat melody long. She laughs by lips leapt high to sky – goosh! Kiss the world! Sabia laughs at hidden tricks. Jasmine wonders what they really think when they get another way – crafty like coyote sheathed teeth silent in snout cool tongue coiled quiet in mouth. In those days we tilled planted weeded harvested hammered baked hosted one another shared summer life. Singing to plants while watering on high. Rise Up and Glory! Glory! Simple Things. Good green company. Perfect moment at home on prairie – one of many.
NOTES ON LIBERATORY LITERATURE
Eduardo Galeano – Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
We are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are. A literature born in the process of crisis and change, and deeply immersed in the risks and events of its time can indeed help to create the symbols of the new reality, and perhaps, if talent and courage are not lacking, throw light on the signs along the road.
Martin Espada – Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination
Any progressive social change must be imagined first … Any oppressive social condition, before it can be changed, must be named and condemned in words that persuade by stirring the emotions, awakening the senses. Thus the need for political imagination – articulating an artistry of dissent.
Arundhati Roy – War Talk, “Confronting Empire”
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
Ben Okri – The Guardian – “Artists must confront the climate crisis – we must write as if these are the last days”
We have to find a new art and a new psychology to penetrate the apathy and the denial that are preventing us making the changes that are inevitable if our world is to survive.
Ursula K. Le Guin – The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o – Decolonising The Mind & CCCBarcelona Interview
The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves... It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death-wish. Amidst this wasteland which it has created, imperialism presents itself as the cure and demands that the dependant sing hymns of praise with the constant refrain: “Theft is holy” ... The theme of this book is simple. It is taken from a poem by the Guyanese poet Martin Carter ... do not sleep to dream, “but dream to change the world.”
[Authoritarian regimes] suppress the capacity of people to imagine different futures, because imagination gives our first picture of different worlds. The capacity to picture different possibilities is very, very important for humans, and literature is very, very important in that respect. Authoritarian regimes want to limit the capacity of people to imagine different futures… Literature is important because of its capacity to fire the imagination — and to say we cannot just accept the present conditions. So we need other energies that come and imagine a different world.
Natali Segovia – Water Protector Legal Collective
Somos semilla, somos memoria, somos el sol que renace ante la impunidad. We are seeds, we are memory, we are the sun that rises again in the face of impunity.
Nelson Algren – Nonconformity: Writing on Writing
We live today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote. The only real difference being that the England of Dickens and the Russia of Dostoevsky could not afford the soundscreens and the smokescreens with which we so ingeniously conceal our true condition from ourselves.
So accustomed have we become to the testimony of the photo-weeklies, backed by witnesses from radio and TV, establishing us permanently as the happiest, healthiest, sanest, wealthiest, most inventive, tolerant and fun-loving folk yet to grace the earth of man, that we tend to forget that these are bought-and-paid-for witnesses and all their testimony perjured…
“Whin business gits above sellin’ ten-pinny nails in a brown-paper cornucopy,” Mr. Dooley decided, “'tis hard to tell it from murder.”
But behind Business’s billboards and Business’s headlines and Business’s pulpits and Business’s press and Business’s arsenals, behind the car ads and the subtitles and the commercials, the people of Dickens and Dostoevsky yet endure…
The lost and the overburdened … are still torn by the paradox of their own humanity; yet endure the ancestral problems of the heart in conflict with itself. Theirs are still the defeats in which everything is lost, theirs victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope. Whose defeats cost everything of real value. Whose grief grieves on universal bones. And it is there the young man or woman seeking to report the American century seriously must seek, if it is the truth he seeks.
Toni Morrison — The Nation — “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear”
This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. This is how civilizations heal.
