Creative Activism: Conversations on Music, Film, Literature, and Other Radical Arts 9781501337215, 9781501337246, 9781501337239

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Section 1: Coal
1. “I’ll Throw This Apple Atcha”: Mining and Meaning According to Billy Edd Wheeler
2. “Visible, Horrible, Ugly”: Toxicity According to John Sabraw
3. “The Baby Needed Milk”: Collectivity According to Diane Gilliam Fisher
Section 2: War and Peace
4. “It’s a Great American Tradition”: War and Industry According to John Sayles
5. “Revolution by Tricks and Clowning”: Trips According to Maxine Hong Kingston
6. “Part of My Being”: Politics and Poetics According to Keorapetse Kgositsile
Section 3: Borders
7. “I Sing about Cesar Chavez in Gold Lamé Hot Pants”: Revolution and Celebration According to El Vez
8. “I’m Not Some Fucking Gadjo!”: Migration According to Eugene Hütz
9. “Gaps We Cross with Technology”: Solidarity and Surveillance According to Cory Doctorow
10. “What It’s Like to Be Stuck”: Interruption According to Julio Salgado
Section 4: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
11. “It’s Like Walt Whitman Gave Me a Blow Job”: Action According to Abe Rybeck
12. “Simultaneity of Actions”: Liberation According to Sarah Schulman
13. “ Wigs and Skin”: Colonialism According to Ama Ata Aidoo
Section 5: Economic Justice
14. “Hey, I See You”: Revolution According to Boots Riley
15. “Power and Powerlessness”: Detecting History According to Sara Paretsky
16. “Sometimes I Get Political, Sometimes I Get Offensive”: Pushing Back According to Dallas Wayne
Section 6: Prisons
17. “The Anti-Slavery Act of 2002”: Private Prisons and Social Justice According to Si Kahn
18. “Politics through Artistic Eyes, and Art through Political Eyes”: Prison Rebellion According to Raul Salinas
19. “From My 6 x 9 Cell”: Prison and Painting According to Anthony Papa
Section 7: Transformations
20. “It’s All Connected”: Service According to Betye Saar
21. “I’m a Bit of a Threat”: Immortality According to Roz Kaveney
22. “Folklore, Fakelore, and Fucklore”: Metamorphosis According to Emma Bull and Will Shetterly
Contextualizing Timeline
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

i

Creative Activism

ii

iii

Creative Activism Conversations on Music, Film, Literature, and Other Radical Arts Edited by Rachel Lee Rubin

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Rachel Lee Rubin, 2018 Cover image © Erik Ruin All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rubin, Rachel Lee, author. Title: Creative activism : conversations on music, film, literature, and other radical arts / Rachel Lee Rubin. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017049959 (print) | LCCN 2018016541 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501337239 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501337222 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781501337215 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501337222 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Artists–Political activity. | Musicians–Political activity. | Political activists–Interviews. | Artists–Interviews. | Musicians–Interviews. | LCGFT: Interviews. Classification: LCC NX180.P64 (ebook) | LCC NX180.P64 R832018 (print) | DDC 700.92–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049959 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3721-5 PB: 978-1-5013-5252-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3723-9 eBook: 978-1-5013-3722-2 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

v

Contents Introduction

1

Section 1 Coal 1 “I’ll Throw This Apple Atcha”: Mining and Meaning According to Billy Edd Wheeler

19

2 “Visible, Horrible, Ugly”: Toxicity According to John Sabraw

35

3 “The Baby Needed Milk”: Collectivity According to Diane Gilliam Fisher

45

Section 2 War and Peace 4 “It’s a Great American Tradition”: War and Industry According to John Sayles

57

5 “Revolution by Tricks and Clowning”: Trips According to Maxine Hong Kingston

69

6 “Part of My Being”: Politics and Poetics According to Keorapetse Kgositsile

79

Section 3 Borders 7 “I Sing about Cesar Chavez in Gold Lamé Hot Pants”: Revolution and Celebration According to El Vez

91

8 “I’m Not Some Fucking Gadjo!”: Migration According to Eugene Hütz 101 9 “Gaps We Cross with Technology”: Solidarity and Surveillance According to Cory Doctorow 10 “What It’s Like to Be Stuck”: Interruption According to Julio Salgado

113 123

vi

vi

Contents

Section 4 Sex, Gender, and Sexuality 11 “It’s Like Walt Whitman Gave Me a Blow Job”: Action According to Abe Rybeck

135

12 “Simultaneity of Actions”: Liberation According to Sarah Schulman

149

13 “Wigs and Skin”: Colonialism According to Ama Ata Aidoo

163

Section 5 Economic Justice 14 “Hey, I See You”: Revolution According to Boots Riley

177

15 “Power and Powerlessness”: Detecting History According to Sara Paretsky

193

16 “Sometimes I Get Political, Sometimes I Get Offensive”: Pushing Back According to Dallas Wayne

209

Section 6 Prisons 17 “The Anti-Slavery Act of 2002”: Private Prisons and Social Justice According to Si Kahn

221

18 “Politics through Artistic Eyes, and Art through Political Eyes”: Prison Rebellion According to Raúl Salinas

237

19 “From My 6 x 9 Cell”: Prison and Painting According to Anthony Papa

249

Section 7 Transformations 20 “It’s All Connected”: Service According to Betye Saar

263

21 “I’m a Bit of a Threat”: Immortality According to Roz Kaveney

277

22 “Folklore, Fakelore, and Fucklore”: Metamorphosis According to Emma Bull and Will Shetterly

293

Contextualizing Timeline Bibliography Index

307 331 339

1

Introduction

When Studs Terkel died in 2006, the New York Times obituary headline referred to him as “Listener to Americans.” On one hand, this is a touching way to remember the man who established oral history as a serious and prominent field, who talked to more than 5,000 subjects, skillfully demonstrating that each of them had something valuable to say—and that he wanted to hear it. On the other hand, though, there is a big difference between “listening” and the real work of the interview or oral history. Certainly, the historian must ask questions to get the subject talking, to keep her or him on topic, to encourage certain lines of thinking—even if these interventions are edited out by the time the interview is published. But even that is an inadequate description of what is, at its heart, a two-way conversation, with varying degrees of openness concerning how the conversation is presented. And one thing that is so very important about attending to these literal conversations is that they remind us all that the telling of history—no matter how many signals are carefully sent to the reader about its supposed objectivity—is at heart always the same sort of conversation. “Listening” does not generally cover it. Indeed, British historian Raphael Samuel tries to get at the stakes of that conversation by declaring, “History is an argument about the past.” Dutch historian Pieter Geyl shares Samuel’s impulse, stating, “History is an argument without end.”1 In these interviews with artist-activists, that conversation is allowed to be front-and-center. In fact, it is an organizing principle of this collection by definition, since there are, among the artists included here, so many different— even occasionally opposing—definitions of what “activist” means—or, for that matter, what “artist” means. Some emphasized finding the broadest possible reception, while others found it important to carefully monitor and control their own engagement with certain aspects of the cultural industries. This is perhaps

1

It is worth nothing that neither one felt that this meant that any interpretation was equally valid.

2

2

Creative Activism

nowhere more clear than in the different approaches of musicians Boots Riley and Eugene Hütz to advertising; Riley has turned down requests to use his songs in commercials, even when he needed money for tour bus repair, while Hütz, to the disappointment of some fans, sold a song for use in a Coca-Cola commercial. Indeed, in order to continue the dialogue after the subjects and I  stopped talking into this print format, I came up with the term “critical interviews.” This means I  have included a scholarly apparatus:  introductions of each subject, a timeline, a list of sources (works cited in the interviews and additional sources)— and ample footnotes. Russian novelists seem to know that footnotes are a kind of conversation. In his 1964 novel Lyubimov, Abram Tertz introduces a protagonist who is writing diary entries about what is happening in his town when footnotes start to appear, soon challenging his account, and taking over the narrative by the end.2 In Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, academic-seeming footnotes to the novel are revealed to be part of the fiction itself. My notes here are not nearly so ambitious, but they explain the references made by the interviewees, place parts of the conversation in historical context, suggest further reading, give concrete examples, and, occasionally, challenge their assertions (or document their challenges of my assumptions!). For example, a sentence of text Betye Saar uses in several assemblages—“We was mostly ‘bout survival”—is now so associated with her art that attempts to identify the source generally point back to Saar, and when Saar’s artwork is discussed, there is no identification of the source. The powerful, short sentence actually comes from The Black Book, an assemblage-like attempt to rewrite history and reclaim the meaning of familiar images, an ambitious project overseen by Middleton A. Harris.3 In The Black Book, the sentence accompanies a photograph of a black cowboy. Knowing about the book’s powerful, visual attempt to reclaim the narrative of African American history—including images that are as painful as it gets—places Saar in a 1970s conversation about what Civil Rights struggles would mean in the coming historical period. While these annotations help to put the artists included here into dialogue with each other, those artists do not ascribe to one party line or one particular tradition. They do not work in the same artistic medium, nor do they belong to the same generation (see the timeline at the back of the book). But they all fit the description El Vez once offered of himself as a “Johnny Appleseed of ideas: not

2 3

Tertz was the pen-name of Andrei Sinyavsky; the book was translated as The Makepeace Experiment. Harris was assisted by Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith, and Bill Cosby wrote the introduction. The book was published by Random House.

3

Introduction

3

with definite manifestos or spiritual bibles or even . . . credos to follow, but just putting out ideas and different possibilities.”4 Eugene Hütz spoke in remarkably similar ways about his own self-created identity as a “gypsy” in America and his art supports the role-playing. His group’s 2005 record Gypsy Punks began with a song called “Sally,” which presents the story of a teenage girl who picks up an unnamed object dropping by Gypsies passing through her small town in Nebraska—immediately launching a cultural revolution. Conversations ranging beyond the familiar (and all too often, industry-imposed) lines of genre strikingly reveal that the artists here do not belong to narrow traditions. Indeed, the forms some of them use—hip-hop’s sampling and intertextuality, assemblage’s juxtaposition—by their very nature resist these all-to-familiar boundaries. But the conversations yielded fascinating insights and surprises beyond those overt border-crossings. The rapper talked about punk rock. The country songwriter learned to sing from a black preacher. The New York prison artist was inspired by the Mexican muralist tradition. This sly and energetic political hopefulness is what drew me in the first place to the cultural workers whose portraits comprise the bulk of this collection. My beginning premise, articulated by Si Kahn in my interview with him, is that some of the key cultural work of our time is rooted in a sense that the political and the artistic are inextricably linked on all levels—thematic, historical, philosophical, and—let’s not forget—financial. The key to understanding these connections (as Kahn himself suggested) is to embrace the power of the ordinary: to recognize and promote moments from everyday life as artistic material. Thus, these important activist efforts cut across lines of age, region, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, and racial and ethnic identity. In other words, the interviews sketch a path beyond Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement (on which the interview here with Boots Riley of the Coup focuses) to what we might call more decentered artistic “occupy” actions. In these conversations, the artists establish that even as we too often fall prey to nostalgic visions of a time (or times) when artists were “more political” than today— whether we index that time as the 1930s or 1960s—it is clear that we are in the midst of a very rich time for the creation of political art. From popular music to avant-garde performance art, American cultural workers are dedicating themselves with unprecedented energy to the project of changing the world they see around themselves. 4

Rubin, “El Vez Is in the Building,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 16.2 (Spring 2004): 213–20.

4

4

Creative Activism

The interview subjects represent and speak to circumstances in a wide geographical swath. The range of locations where the interviews were carried out is amazing as well. Appalachian songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler insisted I climb a North Carolina mountain with him (including a moment when we feed cheetos to some very happy goats). Dallas Wayne spoke to me at an Austin satellite radio station, having texted me to meet “in front of the Willie Nelson statue.” Ama Ata Aidoo had hunkered down in self-created writer’s retreat: a hotel outside of Accra and among agricultural fields, where she was working on autobiographical writing. Roz Kaveney and Cory Doctorow met with me at a science fiction convention in London, where costumed fans moved around us as we sat in the lobby. Two musicians met with me at clubs right before their performances, with Robert Lopez (aka El Vez) asking a bandmate, “Where can we go to do this interview and not be disturbed?” to which his bandmate answered, “Go to the back of the basement, past the creepy doll.” John Sayles met me at his house in Hoboken—which was quite moving in the way it demonstrated that he and his partner, Maggie Renzi, really wanted to keep their New Jersey presence after moving out of the state where they lived for decades. In addition to these various kinds of physical and emotional geographies, the interviews have other important contexts beyond “listening,” some of which I am able to convey and others which are harder to pass on in written form. There were three moments when interviewees began to cry. There were two moments when interviewees said, “Don’t include this in the interview”—including one complex and moving instance in which the subject was talking about gay rights, and how much these advances meant even to a straight person. She asked me to remove that because “I hate when people say that, ‘I’m not gay,’ like they can’t bear for people to think they are.” And, of course, the interviews were marked by different kinds of losses. Raúl Salinas died shortly after I spoke to him, and Keorapetse Kgositsile died while this book was in production. Jazz saxophonist and writer Fred Ho was confronting terminal cancer when I spoke to him, and although we had a long and frank conversation, it was ultimately unusable here because of that illness. Eugene Hütz of the Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello became the subject of a variety of disturbing controversies with both bandmates and fans, becoming the subject of a lawsuit in 2013 for allegedly absconding with the band’s money, and betraying in the eyes of some listeners the values his music promoted by performing in Israel in the face of calls to honor the cultural boycott.5 5

The current BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement was initiated in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian organizations. The goals are as follows:  ending its occupation and colonization of all

5

Introduction

5

In order to put the interviews in dialogue with each other, I have organized them into sections based on what the subjects returned to, repeatedly, as we conversed. But it’s more accurate to say that these subcategories emerged on their own, speaking to the issues that claim the headlines of our moment: mass incarceration, LGBT rights, war, mountaintop removal. Of course, there is a great deal of implicit and explicit overlap—first, among the categories (“Prison” is related to “Economic Justice,” for instance, and “War and Peace” is connected to “Borders”) and because a fair number of the subjects touch on more than one of the organizing subjects. The collection opens with a section on coal; in many ways, this tightly focused, concrete cluster opens a lens on the larger issues that follow from a variety of perspectives:  labor exploitation, violence, dangerous working conditions, and environmental damage, to name a few. In his first year of presidency, some of Donald Trump’s most contentious stances have been about coal—an industry with a long history of dramatic conflict. Trump has, for instance, reversed environmental restrictions on coal-powered power plants. He has undone regulations of climate-changing emissions from coal-powered plants. He has cancelled plans to prohibit the dumping of mining debris into streams. Not only did he end a moratorium on coal-mining leases on federally owned lands, but he increased subsidies for doing so. The coal industry has given rise to American activist art (especially music) for well over a century. But the industry’s new iterations—particularly mountaintop removal (MTR)—have lent these earlier efforts new relevance and spawned new artistic focus on mining, both from an environmental and a labor point of view. Songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler’s songs have been recorded by over 150 artists, among them Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and June Carter, Neil Young, Florence and the Machine, Nancy Sinatra, the Jefferson Airplane, Richie Havens, Kathy Mattea, and Bobby Darin. Many of Wheeler’s songs are about the coal industry that was the landscape of his childhood in a small mining town, which he connects to the beginning of his musical career. “Well, I started singing in church,” he told me. “We had sort of an interdenominational church in High Coal. High Coal was a very small coal mining town in Boone County, West Virginia. And this black preacher used to come to our church in the evenings, and he would teach shape note singing. [sings] Do re mi fa so la ti. My voice is not very good right now. But that was my first foray into singing.” Arab lands and dismantling the Wall; recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

6

6

Creative Activism

Artist John Sabraw could be said to enact a visual and environmental version of Wheeler’s focus on setting. Sabraw has sought for some time to make his work process as minimally damaging environmentally as possible. But the series of paintings he and I discuss here function at a whole different level of environmentalism:  Sabraw takes toxic run-off from Ohio’s many abandoned mines (which were not regulated until the 1970s) and, with the help of a colleague and scientist, turns the waste into gorgeous paints that he uses. In other words, the series could be said to be letting the polluted rivers speak for themselves. Like Wheeler, award winning poet Diane Gilliam Fisher was born into a coal-mining family (a generation later); her 2004 volume of connected poems Kettle Bottom takes up the 1920–21 West Virginia Mine Wars, the subject of a fascinating recent book by James Green.6 Of her family background, she says, I had my native language, because even though I  was born and grew up in Columbus, I grew up in an Appalachian household . . . My people are people whose language is not respected and whose stories have been told and manipulated by many powers that be for a long, long time. So it is really important for those stories to be told in their own language and through their own voices.

Some of her poems are so heartrending that in reviews of the book, it is not uncommon for readers to report crying when they read them. The frequent naming as “wars” of the series of mining conflicts Fisher writes about, links her work on coal to the artists in Section 2, “War and Peace”—as does the work of filmmaker John Sayles, who opens this part; in addition to filmic treatments of military wars, Sayles examines the West Virginia Mine Wars in his wonderful 1987 movie Matewan, focusing unflinchingly on the violence that led to the naming. The artists included in this section work with veterans and engage in antiwar organizing to develop deep and meaningful commentary on the wars currently being fought, historical wars, and the concept of war itself. Indeed, Sayles’s work is wide ranging and admirably hard to categorize. His 2010 film Amigo is a rare American artistic depiction of the Philippine-American War—a depiction Sayles uses ambitiously. (Sayles has also written about this lack of filmic treatment of the war, in a 2001 essay, “In Search of the PhilippineAmerican War Film.”7)

6 7

Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills. He posted on the film’s website, and it was reprinted and can be accessed here: http://www. berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-08-17/article/38277?headline=In-Search-of-the-PhilippineAmerican-War-Film--By-John-Sayles-from-www.amigomovie.com-.

7

Introduction

7

All of novelist Maxine Hong Kingston’s work has been do some degree organized around this question, which, as Helena Grice has pointed out, was pushed into her consciousness at a new level when she and her husband and child moved to Hawai’i in 1967 to avoid the Vietnam War draft—but instead found themselves even more in the middle of the war, because of the presence on the island of weapons and soldiers. “I could see that war did not just begin in my consciousness but going back in history,” she told me. “And so I think all my work has been trying to answer the question, how can I stop this?” Keorapetse Kgositsile is the poet laureate of South Africa and a long-standing ANC activist who spent decades in exile.8 The fact that he was told he would not be safe in the country reminds us that the apartheid system was not only a social organization—it was an ongoing war against black people, and the oftenforgotten “Border War,” fought to preserve apartheid, serves as a powerful reminder.9 Kgositsile’s international and pan-African approach both to political and poetic alliance are a hallmark of his poetry, which is written in a wide range of registers:  from the social to the personal, from manifesto to confessional. He describes his introduction to literature in internationalist terms as well. He told me, When I was still in high school, an African-American sailor had a copy of Black Boy that he gave to someone in Cape Town.10 And that single copy went all over South Africa amongst those of us who were interested in literature. And you would read and reread it for a week or two and pass it on. No selfishness. You wanted to share.

Fascinatingly, that brief anecdote captures what Margo Crawford has pointed out is poetic focus of Kgositsile: the historical ties—and severing of the ties— between Africans and African Americans.11 Kgositsile’s movement around the globe, and the various reasons behind it, lead into Section 3, “Borders,” which explores the ways in which artists have simultaneously issued calls to smash all borders, or to significantly overhaul the United States’ immigration laws—and celebrated, in their art, the cultural “gifts” that the border condition—or border crossings—can bestow. In the interviews in this part—of four artists born in four different countries—“border” means far 8

9

10 11

The African National Congress (ANC) was founded in 1912 with the primary goal of ending the apartheid system. The South African Border War, also known as Namibian War of Independence, lasted from 1966 to 1990. Black Boy is Richard Wright’s memoir, published in 1945. Crawford, Black Post-Blackness.

8

8

Creative Activism

more than a line on the map. Recording artist Robert Lopez performs as El Vez, or the “Mexican Elvis.” He reworks familiar songs, turning James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” into “Say It Loud, I’m Brown and I’m Proud,” or Elvis Presley’s “American Trilogy” into “Mexican American Trilogy”; this sly reworking, coupled with his exuberant and intelligent stage show, functions as a joyous call to revolution through multidirectional cultural adaptation. “The struggle is always there, so always think about it in some way and apply it to your life in some way, even at a party, as opposed to, ‘Well, I do a march every two months,’ ” Lopez explained. Eugene Hütz, frontman of Gogol Bordello, uses, in his “Gypsy Punk” band and other projects, music to advocate for Romani rights and also to comment on the politics and ethics of people’s transnational movement around the globe. The European Roma Rights Centre has issued a study of the violence against Roma in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic—and the impunity that the perpetrators of the violence almost always retain. But Hütz does not take a pure, polite, and “authentic” approach. Speaking of his song “Think Locally, Fuck Globally,” for instance, Hütz acknowledged, “Actually, sex is quite a taboo within Gypsy culture. And that’s why my work gets some slashing from the Romani community. But it didn’t get only slashing. The majority of it, is, ‘Look at our boy go!’ ” Novelist Cory Doctorow’s provocative explorations of the meanings of technology’s elimination of borders span from the utopian (with visions of technology as an organizing tool and creative force) to the terrifying (taking up new, internet-related global circulation of exploitive labor practices, for instance, or surveillance culture’s aggressive elimination of the border between public and private). While the stories Doctorow tells (in multiple forms and locations) are engrossing and challenging, there are aspects of Doctorow’s writing—especially his quite respectful, non-condescending young adult fiction—that can be seen as fictional encodings of activist manuals. Poster artist Julio Salgado refers to himself as “UndocuQueer,” and his collaborative poster art seeks to claim public space for immigrants without papers or claim to normative sexuality. His chosen form is a striking commentary through content and form—and also context; musing on his artistic path, he recalled, I remember I had just seen Exit Through the Gift Shop. And that’s all about street art, and I really wanted to do that. But because of my situation I feel that if I go and try to put a poster on the street and get arrested, not only am I going to get arrested and get a ticket, I’m going to get deported.

9

Introduction

9

Still, his willingness to put his powerful, direct, and—similarly to Eugene Hütz—frequently deliberately rude art into the public with his name on it is both generous and brave. Salgado’s identification as “UndocuQueer” movingly calls attention to the historical, political, and social valances of components of identity that can seem so familiar that they appear transparent—but nonetheless contain complicated and shifting systems of meaning that are at the heart of Section 4, “Sex, Gender, and Sexuality.” The borders of identity, in other words, are just as contested and politically fraught as the geographical borders under consideration in the previous section. Indeed, constant shifts are at the foundation of the organizational work of Abe Rybeck, founder and artistic director of The Theater Offensive. This multiaward winning Boston theatrical organization has, since its inception in 1989, created innovative artistic/activist productions in collaboration with Boston’s neighborhoods, intended to present through performance the varied realities of the city’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities. Rybeck describes his work not only in terms of thematic content; in his vision, the planning, the discussions, what he calls the “energy,” are equally important. By way of example, he told me, Right now a piece that we are working on is 99% Stone, a musical that looks at the Stonewall uprising of 1969 as the original, queer occupy action. And we’ve been developing it on the streets and in bars and things like that. So we are trying to make sure that it can retain the energy of a guerrilla theater piece when it makes the move into the conventional theater. It’s an interesting aesthetic question—what practices can we follow to support that guerrilla energy?

The Stonewall uprising, a series of demonstrations at a New  York bar in Greenwich Village, is approaching its fiftieth anniversary; Rybeck’s work is useful for speculating about the form the uprising’s current sequel will take. Novelist Sarah Schulman’s works chronicle lesbian life in New  York’s bohemian Lower East Side, the early AIDS epidemic, and familial homophobia. She was a central early AIDS action advocate, a founding member of the Lesbian Avengers, and a cofounder of the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival. Looking back on her career, she mused, “Now People in Trouble . . . I believe it’s the first novel that acknowledges the AIDS activist movement. And I listed as many details as I could of the AIDS crisis, and incorporated them.” Indeed, AIDS was a great unspoken for years, leading to the now-familiar slogan, “Silence Equals Death.” Ronald Reagan’s biographer, Lou Cannon, has

10

10

Creative Activism

pointed out that the then-president delayed responding to the epidemic as long as possible, encouraged to do so by certain advisers (such as members of the conservative organization the Moral Majority). Schulman’s exploration of the AIDS crisis takes place on numerous levels: medical, political, familial. Deep historical examination similarly characterizes the fiction and plays of Ghanaian novelist and playwright Ama Ata Aidoo, often acknowledged as one of the first female African postcolonial writers. Aidoo’s fiction and plays deal searingly and movingly with questions of gender in postcolonial Africa; she connects these questions to explorations of Africa’s relationship, both real and representational, with Europe and the United States. A stunning demonstration of the relationship of the interviews themselves to the ideas under discussion occurred when I asked her about the shifting form of her novel: Rubin: What is your aim in challenging and revising the novel form? Aidoo: I didn’t do that. Rubin: You didn’t? [expectant silence] Oh . . . OK, wow, that’s just me making assumptions about Western literary forms and what is “standard” or “starting-point.” And while we’re talking about anti-colonialism. Wow. Sorry.

What an efficient way to remind us that the old “form is content” adage has acute political meaning in the face of colonialism! It is useful to remember why so much postcolonial literature is challengingly self-reflective in terms of the forms it takes, as scholars such as Afaf Ahmed Hasan Al-Saidi and Neil Lazarus have reminded us. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Aidoo and other interviewees opened up as many questions as they answered. This was particularly true regarding questions of identity: the conversations—and, as I increasingly came to see, the art under consideration—did not neatly answer questions about gender and sexual identity as much as they asked or complicated them. In each case—Abe Rybeck, Sarah Schulman, and Ama Ata Aidoo—the need to confront multiple aspects of identity was raised, sometimes directly and sometimes less overtly, but still powerfully. The aspect of identity (and activism) that came up in almost every interview is, not surprisingly, class. Section 5, “Economic Justice,” takes up a subject that was freshly galvanized for many activists through the rise of the Occupy movement, though of course the issue has necessarily been a central principle for organizers—including most of the ones mentioned above—for far, far longer. The “edu-tainment” Boots Riley carries out as lead vocalist with the hip-hop act

11

Introduction

11

the Coup and with rock-rap hybrid Street Sweeper Social club contributed to his being named one of the most influential people of 2002 by Vibe magazine. The songs on the Coup’s most recent album, Sorry to Bother You (2012), were written both before and after Riley’s deep involvement in Occupy Oakland, setting up a fascinating mutually constitutive relationship. Talking about his own political development, Riley underscores the profound political importance of all the ways in which humans seek connections with each other. “I was totally sober at 19, 20, thinking this is what a disciplined revolutionary is,” he revealed. But then, there were contradictory things I  was hearing from people that I listened to later. Like, there were a bunch of British folks who had been union organizers—in England, but they moved here to become organizers here. They’d say, you know, “If you can’t drink a pint with a man, how the hell are you going to get him to go on strike with you?!”

New York Times best-selling novelist Sara Paretsky, author of eighteen novels, is considered to have introduced the hard-boiled female detective to American fiction, in addition to founding an organization to promote women mystery writers. Questions of labor, industry, and class shape her work. Paretsky’s fiction also invokes the lengthy American history of struggle for economic justice— a struggle that has encountered, her novels underscore, a serious backlash. “I think the McCarthy era in particular destroyed the American Left in a way it never recovered from. I  mean, there was certainly a radical leftist movement during Vietnam, but in terms of having a broad influence on the social contract, I don’t think we’ve ever recovered,” she commented. Dallas Wayne has used his platform as country musician and satellite radio DJ to perpetuate country music’s traditional focus on questions of labor (which he connects to the Occupy movement). He finds that it makes sense to do this work from his position because “country music . . . from the very beginning, these songs were means of carrying current events,” he commented, adding, “I wonder—you know how there are all these songs about Grandpa’s moonshine still? I wonder if thirty years from now, there’ll be songs about Grandpa’s crack pipe.” Working in very different idioms, Riley, Paretsky, and Wayne all focus on the artistic and literal battle for agency among working-class Americans; in fact, overtly portraying class distinctions at all is somewhat striking in the American rhetorical landscape. Fascinatingly, the cultural worlds of Riley (hip-hop), Paretsky (detective fiction), and Wayne (country music) have each long functioned as an important

12

12

Creative Activism

collective processing site of the social and economic meaning(s) of incarceration. Section, 6 “Prisons,” confronts the changing meaning of incarceration with the introduction of supermaxes, for-profit prison systems, and the mass incarceration of young black men—which Douglas Blackmon calls “slavery by another name” in the title of his 2012 book on the subject.12 Singer-songwriter Si Kahn, who came of age as both musician and activist in the Civil Rights Movement and the Southern labor movement, has focused his most recent activism on the growth of the prison-industrial complex. Of recent victories, he remarked, “In a number of states, North Carolina for example, we were able to get a law passed making it illegal to bring someone into the state to incarcerate them in a private prison . . . Privately, I call it ‘the anti-slavery act of 2002.’ ” Poet Raúl Salinas confronts the prison system from the other side of the bars. During his twelve years in prison (1959–71) on drug charges, and for the rest of his life thereafter, Salinas drew appreciation for his own prison poetry and for his work engaging fellow convicts in politics and literature. Shortly before his death at age 73 in 2008, Salinas told me, Prisons are a very microcosmic reflection of the outer society. And so the times were right. It was post-Civil Rights, pre-everybody’s movement. And so the repression was so intense in the prisons because of the increasing numbers of political and politicized prisoners that were entering, that were filling up the jails. And then there were political prisoners from other countries. Everything was right for prisoners to begin to question their encased situations, and who put them there, and how to get out, and why. And so there was an intense educational process going on.

Anthony Papa uses his painting as both expression and pathway in his activism against the aggressive and punitive “war on drugs.” The “war on drugs” is usually dated to Richard Nixon’s administration and devoting of an increased federal budget to eradicating the drug trade and illegal drug use, though Johann Hari traces it back to the 1930s in Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. For the one drug delivery Papa carried out—after, it happens, being convinced to do so by a federal agent as he was going through a time 12

In the United States, for-profit prisons burgeoned in the 1980s. They soon attracted investors including huge banks, such as Wells Fargo and Bank of America. The NAACP has noted that if African Americans and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rate as white Americans, the prison population would drop by close to 40 percent. More recently, studies have indicated that rich black men are incarcerated at a higher rate than poor white men (for instance, Zaw, Hamilton, and Darity, “Race, Wealth and Incarceration.”).

13

Introduction

13

of deep financial hardship—Papa told me, “I was thrown in Sing Sing Prison. I didn’t know what I was going to do to survive. It was like a living nightmare.” Section 7, “Transformations,” allows the collection to end with the words of artists who make literal the notion that transformation is required, meaningful, liberatory—and possible. Visual artist Betye Saar is best known for her mixedmedia assemblages; as George Lipsitz efficiently puts it, she “redeploys and repositions ordinary objects in ways that imbue them with increased dynamism and power.”13 She has focused in a sustained way over the course of her career on not only challenging stereotypes, but rather—as she does with the “found objects” she uses in her work—transforming them into something new and powerful, most famously in her image of Aunt Jemima holding a rolling pin in one hand and a rifle in the other. Explaining how she made this artistic decision, she recalled, “After the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. I said, ‘Suppose Aunt Jemima becomes a revolutionary?’ ” Roz Kaveney, British poet, writer, and transgender activist, has produced works of speculative fiction that are equally steeped in history and mythology and consider the importance of borders—and border-crossings—that are nongeographic. Connecting her own experiences to her fiction, she remarked, In the middle-to-late eighties I wrote a novel which has never been published, though it’s quite likely it’s going to see print quite soon. It’s effectively a memoir of the time during the early stages of my transition . . . The world possibly wasn’t ready for any trans novel that wasn’t, “Oh the pain, oh the agony.” It was simply a novel in which a couple of the people were trans.

Given Kaveney’s history, it is deeply meaningful when characters in her book undergo transformations that frequently make them more powerful or reveal their true selves. And finally, the collection ends with the words of fantasy and young adult writers Will Shetterly and Emma Bull, both of whom mobilize representations of shape-shifting to address in a direct way matters of racial-, class-, and genderbased justice. Both writers locate this focus on other worlds and transformation as a basis for their work. According to Bull, she “identified pretty quickly that transformation was one of my obsessions . . . emotional and physical, personal transformations and transformations of society.” Similarly, Shetterly recalls that his youth

13

George Lipsitz, “Betye Saar’s Cages: Conjuring Freedom in an Age of Incarceration,” 9.

14

14

Creative Activism was a time that we did believe in transformation, that the values of the Summer of Love would could be realized. I didn’t exactly consider myself a socialist at the time—I was more “hippy-vague.” But I was aware of a weird tension between loving these stories in which people become nobility, you know, they don’t transform their societies, they only transform themselves. Until I finally realized that metaphorically, it was still true to what I believed.

While I  have organized the sections according to areas of activism, there are, of course, multiple “roadmaps” for reading this book. One way is to read it straight through from beginning to end; in other words, section by section as I have laid out the interviews above. But there are numerous equally useful paths through the interviews, which serves as a worthwhile reminder of the multiple levels on which artistic conversations happen. One is to privilege the form in which these artist-activists work. For instance, those interested in popular music can read (and compare) the interviews with Billy Edd Wheeler, Dallas Wayne, Boots Riley, and Robert Lopez. Those interested in literary activism can go from Maxine Hong Kingston to Roz Kaveney to Diane Gilliam Fisher to Cory Doctorow to Sara Paretsky to Emma Bull and Will Shetterly. Those interested in visual forms will want to start with Betye Saar, and trace a line from her to Julio Salgado, Anthony Papa, and John Sabraw. But there are equally worthwhile ways to group the interviews in addition to those. It would also be useful, for instance, to take a generational and chronological approach—with Betye Saar, Billy Edd Wheeler, and Raúl Salinas at one end, and Julio Salgado, Boots Riley, and Eugene Hütz at the other. Similarly, it is fascinating to consider which artists receive a great deal of public attention and are, as a result, familiar and which artists operate, deliberately or not, at a lower frequency. (Both seem to come together in the example of Raúl Salinas, who opted out of the system that imprisoned him in many ways—but also is not cited nearly enough for the groundbreaking nature of his work.) Further, overlaps among the interviews are similarly fascinating. Two subjects, John Sayles and El Vez, mentioned the idea of working at Starbucks, which is revealing about labor in our moment. Two of them, Boots Riley and El Vez, also mentioned Cesar Chavez, one as a hero and one as a disappointment. Delightfully, some of the interview subjects mentioned each other. Conducting the interviews taught me a lot about how active listening can and should be, and I hope that reader will apply this and keep the conversation going. There are, as the artists’ range of activism indicates, many ways to do this. Ask your local library to order works by these artists. Comment on the interviews

15

Introduction

15

on this book’s Facebook page. Look into joining an organization mentioned by one of the artists. Think about ways to insert activism into your own art or scholarship. Historically speaking, there are many movements in which arts and activism have been closely and visibly tied together. For instance, labor songs— such as the ones written by Si Kahn and Billy Edd Wheeler—have been sung on many picket lines, particularly in the American South. Poster art (akin to Julio Salgado’s) was a central vehicle of anti-apartheid resistance in South Africa. Occupy Wall Street—and the other Occupy sites that followed, both within the United States and beyond—had makeshift stages where performers sought to educate and energize the movement’s participants. But taken together, these interviews reveal a number of other less direct but no less profound ways that art bolsters activism—by providing a history lesson, by identifying a group with shared interests, by calling attention to material conditions, and, perhaps most important, by showing people that what the artwork carries out on the symbolic level can, perhaps, be carried out on the physical level.

16

17

Section 1

Coal

18

19

1

“I’ll Throw This Apple Atcha”: Mining and Meaning According to Billy Edd Wheeler

The trajectory of Billy Edd Wheeler’s life is striking. Born in 1932 in Whitesville, West Virginia, he grew up in a nearby small coal camp called Highcoal. The community, he recalls, was home to about 200 families; it was crowded into a valley and did not receive much sunshine. He learned music from other miners and church singing—not recorded music, because he had no access to that. He received his first guitar from Sears, Roebuck & Company for Christmas when he was 14, and wrote his first song, “Paperboy Blues,” when he was 15. By the time he was 16 years old, Wheeler had learned first-hand about the drudgery of mining. (He would look back on those days in his often-covered song “High Flyin’ Bird,” which he describes as having roots in youthful daydreams about following birds who soared away over the mountains.) So he worked his way out of the valley and attended high school and junior college in Swannanoa, North Carolina, earning tuition by laboring on the campus. In 1955, he graduated from Berea College in Berea, Kentucky—a tuition-free institution set up to educate students in Southern Appalachia. (Berea, the first college in the US South to be both integrated and co-ed, remains tuition-free today.) While at Berea, Wheeler was asked to contribute a few of his songs to an album of the College’s choir, and through this, music publisher Harold Newman encountered Wheeler’s music; he helped Wheeler sign his first record deal, with Monitor Records. As a result, his first album, Billy Edd, USA, came out in 1961. From Berea, he went to Yale University’s School of Drama to study playwriting. (He would go on to write and compose twenty plays and musicals, including a folk opera commissioned by National Geographic and three outdoor dramas.) Of those days, he has mused that he was seen (by fellow Yale students) as a “country bumpkin,” but that he was also seen (by fellow Appalachians) as frighteningly intellectual. Arguably, Wheeler proves that these two external definitions are not mutually exclusive in his six books of Appalachian humor, which reveal that

20

20

Creative Activism

those seen as “country bumpkins” are frequently what Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci would call “organic intellectuals.” While at Yale, Wheeler would head to New York on the weekends to try to further his musical career, eventually moving there into a one-room apartment with no furniture—not even a bed. This chapter of his life was a fascinating urban follow-up to his uncomfortable mining-town days—but is a significant index of his strong desire to be a successful songwriter. Ultimately, Wheeler’s songs would be frequently recorded by a range of artists. For instance, rock and roll star Neil Young recorded “High Flyin’ Bird” on his 2012 album Americana. Johnny Cash and June Carter’s 1967 version of Wheeler’s song “Jackson” reached number 2 on the Billboard country chart. A range of other musicians have recorded Wheeler’s songs, including bluegrass innovators Flatt & Scruggs, psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane, folksinger Judy Collins, and cultural icon Elvis Presley. While Wheeler has left his mark mostly as a songwriter, he ultimately recorded fifteen albums, including his songs and spoken-word “mountain tales.” He has received numerous awards for his work. Both of his college alma maters conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Berea in 2005 and Warren Wilson College in 2011. Wheeler was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2002, and the West Virginia Hall of Fame in 2007. He has received thirteen awards from ASCAP, and other awards for his poetry. Wheeler is also an accomplished painter; much of this interview took place in his studio with finished paintings and in-progress works surrounding us. While the arc of Wheeler’s career is striking for its wideness, his concern about the environmental and labor costs of mining has characterized his work throughout. He frequently talks with dismay about strip mining and mountaintop removal, mournfully noting the resultant destruction of natural beauty. His mining songs have been very influential; for instance, multiple award winning and charting folk-country artist Kathy Mattea, who had two coal-mining grandfathers, recorded an album of eleven mining songs in 2008; three were written by Wheeler. He has written two plays about mining. The first of these, Slatefall (1965), written while he was still a student, describes a tragedy striking a coal-mining community. The second, Mossie and the Strippers (1980), is about a woman who lies down in front of a bulldozer and pours molasses into gas tanks to prevent their tearing up the mountain; the play is based on a historical figure known as Widow Combs, a 65-year-old Kentucky woman who did lie down in front of a bulldozer that was preparing to strip-mine her farm in 1965.

21

Mining and Meaning—Billy Edd Wheeler

21

In short, Wheeler has an artistic version of what he calls in his most-covered song a “coal tattoo.”

Selected discography Billy Edd: USA (1961) Billy Edd and Bluegrass, Too (1962) A New Bag of Songs (1964) The Wheeler Man (1965) Goin’ Town and Country (1966) Paper Birds (1967) I Ain’t the Worrying Kind (1968) Nashville Zodiac (1969) Love (1971) Wild Mountain Flowers (1979) Songs I Wrote with Chet (1995) Milestones (A Self-Portrait) (2001) New Wine from Old Vines (2006) Rubin: How did you start singing? Wheeler: Well, I started in church. We had sort of an interdenominational church in High Coal. High Coal was a very small coal-mining town in Boone County, West Virginia. And this black preacher used to come to our church in the evenings, and he would teach shape note singing.1 [sings] Do re mi fa so la ti. My voice is not very good right now. That was my first foray into singing. And then, when I was about 13, my parents, my mother and stepfather, bought me a guitar. It was a Kay, a round top, fourteen dollar guitar.2 A terrible guitar because the frets stood so high, it almost made your fingers bleed to press them all the way down. So it took me a while to get used to that. And then some of the coal miners there at High Coal taught me my first chords. I knew basically three chords—G, C, and D. It’s amazing how many songs you can write with just three chords. Later on, I learned a few augmented chords and a couple minor chords, but that was about it. 1

2

Shape notes are a means of printing music with different shapes accorded to different notes on the scale with the goal of facilitating group singing. Kay Musical Instrument Company operated from 1931 to 1968. It was known for low- and midpriced guitars.

22

22

Creative Activism Rubin: So coal mining has been in your music, you can say, from the very beginning, if the miners taught you the chords! Wheeler: And I remember, after I came to Warren Wilson College as a high school student in Swannanoa, North Carolina—I was 15-and-a-half—a couple times in the summers I would go home, and I got jobs working for the coal company. And so, I got a feel of what it was like. I mean, it was the hardest work I’ve ever done, because we did it with a pick and shovel. There was a prospector, he was an older man, and on the High Coal side, in Boone County, there was a big mountain, and they were mining that. And they wanted to see how far it went. And so, we went around to Kanawha County, which was only a couple miles away, and went around there and about six miles up to Dorothy, West Virginia, where that same seam was supposed to come out. And I don’t know how many miles it was in between. And they wanted to see how pure the vein was there. And so, Mr. Hudson and I, it was tough getting our equipment up there. We had a wheelbarrow, and we had a pick and shovel and dynamite. And dynamite comes in little waxed packages about an inch-and-a-half in diameter, about six inches long, in brown waxed paper. We had a rope tied to the front of that wheelbarrow, so he would push and I would pull to get up to the site where the level of the vein was. And then, we started picking our way into the mountain. And the seam of coal was only about thirty-six inches high. So we were on our knees all the time. What would happen, we would pick in as far as we could, and we were going in about five feet wide, maybe six. And when it got so hard with the slate and the coal, he would take an auger with a breastplate and I would put myself against the breastplate and he would turn it and drill a hole back in there. And we would take turns doing that—sometimes he’d have the breastplate and I had the auger and turned it. And when we got it in far enough, he would put a couple of sticks of dynamite in. Then he would put a cap, a blasting cap that’s hooked to a wire. He would open up that dynamite and stick that blasting cap in there, and then seal it back. And then he would trail the wires, very thin wires, and then put more sticks in behind it, and just tamp them in good. They connected to a larger cord, and we would take that out to the opening and take it around to the side, and then he would touch those wires to a battery, and BOOM. [Laughter] It would just blow everything out. And as we went in, we had cut trees ourselves, and we’d put them in to support the roof. Well, the dynamite blew those out, so we’d have to take them back in and reset them.

23

Mining and Meaning—Billy Edd Wheeler We did that day after day after day, all summer long. After the first week, I didn’t think I could get out of bed. Every muscle in my body was tired and sore. But I had to. And so, we kept going back. And at the end of the summer, I was in the best shape that I’ve ever been in in my life. Rubin: Best and worst, probably. Wheeler: [Laughter] Yeah, from that work. So that was my on-hands experience with coal. Rubin: How do you get that work into music? Wheeler: Well, it just seemed natural to write about it. And since I left the coal mining country myself to come down here to North Carolina, I wrote a song about it. It was called “Coal Tattoo.” Because some of the miners would have blemishes on their skin, either from bumping into the coal, or from blasting and some of the blast fragments would get into their skin, and they looked sort of like tattoos. That’s a bit of a stretch, but it was close enough. Rubin: Is “Coal Tattoo” your most covered song? Wheeler: Yeah, it’s “Coal Tattoo.” I have three CDs with twenty-two or twentythree versions of it on each one. This man in Kentucky, Tony Oppegard—he’s a Lexington lawyer—he’s collecting them.3 He lives in Lexington, Kentucky, but he’s always going to Harlan, Kentucky, and fighting for miners’ rights. And the companies, they fire people if they see something that needs to be improved, like a safety hazard, and if they speak up about it, they get laid off. Well, he’s got one guy there who’s been speaking time after time after time, and he’s made sure that this guy gets compensated. Rubin: There probably wasn’t a moment that you remember where you weren’t aware of all the various economies of mining. Wheeler: Well, your environment is you. I used to love to go out in the woods, sometimes to hunt squirrels with my granddad, and sometimes just for the beauty of being out in the woods. And when you live in a coal camp, coal is everywhere; it’s on the roads, it’s on the sides of hills. There are slate dumps; the slate has to be separated out from the coal sometimes. And the pressure, I suppose, when it gets higher and higher, creates a spontaneous combustion, and so they begin to burn. And you smell that all the time. Normally it doesn’t burst out into a volcanic-type fire or something, but it just smolders and burns, and it has its own smell. Now, aside from that, people burned coal in their fireplaces and in their heaters. And if you get up on a crisp winter morning, the first thing you smell is coal smoke. And you just remember that; it’s just part of you. At

3

Tony Oppegard represents miners and their families in safety matters and wrongful death cases.

23

24

24

Creative Activism High Coal, the tipple, where they loaded coal into the railroad cars to be taken out, was on one side of the mountain. And so, to get to coal from the other side of the mountain at the same level, they had buckets. They hung cables from one side of the mountain to the other, and they had these little, flat buckets that would go under and get loaded up, and then they would go across. And you could see that overhead; it was right above the pool room, which was a center of activity in High Coal. Sometimes some of the sprinkles of coal, if you had a little bit of slack, would fall down. So you’re right under that. There was a net there that wasn’t very wide that was supposed to catch all that stuff. But it didn’t always. Rubin: We still get a lot of our energy from it in the United States. Wheeler: That’s right. Now, that’s bituminous coal down there, and that’s soft. I think that’s the worst emissions. I’ve heard that the anthracite is a little bit less harmful to the environment, or the air at least. Rubin: What about the mining practices? You talked about shaft mining. You mentioned strip mining. And now we have something even more dramatic with the mountain-top removal. Wheeler: Yeah. When I first saw that, it was around somewhere in 1961 or 1962. And I was going back to West Virginia to see my grandfather in Boone County, a little place called Sylvester. And they had a little adjunct part of Sylvester; it was called Dog Patch. Rubin: Really? Like the cartoon?4 Wheeler: Yeah. I was driving up from Charleston, along Big Coal River, and in the distance there was one level stretch, most of the time you’re going up and down hills and going around curves, and stuff. But there was one level of stretch that I could see for several miles ahead of me. And the mountain had been decapitated. So in that area, there was the beginning of some mountain top removal. And I thought, how in the world can you cut off the top of a mountain? And why? Rubin: It’s quite striking the way you used “decapitate” about the mountain—it injects a great deal of emotion into it. Wheeler: Of course, it just really struck a deep chord in me. So I started writing more coal mining songs. The first one, “The Coming of the Roads,” is a mild protest, but it still has a lot of anti-strip mining stuff in it. Well, there was not much of that going on there, but now they’ve already cut the tops, decapitated 500 mountains and polluted thousands of miles of streams because the slate and the soil, a lot of it’s very acrid and poisonous, and it

4

Dog Patch is the setting for Al Capp’s series L’il Abner, which ran from 1934 to 1977. The strip was extremely popular and has been seen as offensive in its presentation of “hillbillies.”

25

Mining and Meaning—Billy Edd Wheeler

25

gets in those streams. So you can’t fish, you can’t drink from it anymore. And they use tons and tons of dynamite to blow it up and soften it up so that those big earthmoving machines can get to it easier. And the blasting itself just raises hell with the people who are living nearby. They have to smell that dust, inhale that dust and smell. And of course, it’s stressful to hear them blast. You can feel it. It’s really bad. Rubin: Do the companies confront this at all? Wheeler: A lot of the companies, they really don’t care anything about the environment. They want to get cheap coal. They just throw that stuff aside. Sometimes they pretend that they’re going to restore and make it better than it was; how can you do that? So they’ll plant a little victory garden, a little flower garden here and there, just for show. And that’s like one-half a percent of the devastation they leave behind. Now, I had one strip miner friend—Lawson Hamilton was his name.5 He didn’t take the tops of mountains off. But he stripped, and he’s told me, he said, “I have to pay $1,000 per acre, so if I’ve got 400 acres, that’s $400,000.” And he says, “We do put it back as best we can.” He had these French wire nets, and all the water that drained from his site had to go through those nets and remain in a pool before it was released into the streams. So he was very conscientious, but some of them aren’t. He told me once, said, “Billy Edd, we can put it back, and by god, we are going to put it back.” Well, that’s easy to say. I don’t think he did it 100 percent. But he tried. Some of them don’t care. Rubin: Did you play your songs for him? Wheeler: Oh, yeah. When I wrote “They Can’t Put it Back,” it’s got some really tough images in it, the fish floating belly up in the poison streams. Now, he was a coal broker at Berea College; he sold them coal. But then I think— well, I guess he figured there’s more money if you actually dig the coal yourself and sell it, rather than broker it. And he was a very generous man. He gave to the church there in Berea, and hospitals, and stuff. And so, he was highly respected. So he was having a dinner party once there in Berea, and he said, “I hear you got a new coal mining song. I want to hear it.” And I said, “No, Lawson, you wouldn’t like it.” He said, “Oh, come on!” And then Jean, his wife, said, “Go ahead, Billy Edd.” And everybody said, “Now you’ve got to sing it for her, she’s giving the party.” And I said, “No, Jean, you won’t like the song, I’ll guarantee it.” She said, “It can’t be that bad.” 5

Coal magnate Lawson Hamilton died in 2007; during his life he was the recipient of many awards, included being inducted into the West Virginia Coal Hall of Fame.

26

26

Creative Activism So I started singing it, and after a while, she went, “Oh!” She started crying, and left the room. And I looked at Lawson, I said, “Well, I told you. But you made me do it, so I’m sorry she’s upset.” Rubin: That’s a pretty strong immediate reaction! What are some other responses you’ve had to mining songs? What have people told you or written you? Wheeler: People who’ve lived in the coal country know that what I write is pretty honest, and many of them feel the same way. Now, some people, their only hope to make a living is from working as a miner. And they’re willing to put up with the pollution, the devastation. In their mind, it’s better to have a job, even if it has scary things associated with it, than to not have a job at all. But there are two sides to the story. Some people are finding alternative means to make a living, but it’s tough. Especially if you’re not well educated and you can’t just go out and find a job. Of course today, you’ve got really highly educated people out looking for work. The economy got bad, and everybody’s cutting back, they’ve been laid off by a big company. The coal companies are worse, because these big machines can do the work of 30 men, each one of them, so they’re really putting men out of work. Rubin: And then they claim they’re providing jobs. Wheeler: Oh, yeah, they’re providing a few jobs, but not very many. Of course, it’s incredible what those giant machines can do. Rubin: Do you try to capture the voices of those miners, either the ones who would rather have mining job, or the ones who wished they would do something else, the ones who hope their kids don’t have the same job? Wheeler: I think “The Coming of the Roads” is a little bit like that, where the singer is bemoaning the fact that because the roads came and the devastation, the singer feels like they have to leave home, have to go somewhere else. And that theme is a little bit in “Coal Tattoo.” He’s traveling down that coal town road, going out to find something else. But I’ve never thought of speaking for everybody. Rubin: Sometimes we have an idea that art—and songwriting or singing are definitely in here—is sort of lofty and strangely disconnected from life. I think of your songs as, at least those, having coal dust on them—like “Coal Dust on the Fiddle.”6 What does it mean to make songs with coal dust on them?

6

Coal Dust on the Fiddle:  Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry was a 1943 collection published by pioneering folklorist George Korson.

27

Mining and Meaning—Billy Edd Wheeler

27

Wheeler: When I wrote “The Coming of the Roads,” Mary and I had just gotten married, and I remember going up Big Coal River and seeing that devastation up there. And so, I started writing the song, but I wrote it partly as a love song. And I mixed it in with how I felt about the environment being devastated. And when I wrote that song, I had shivers up my back and on my arms. And it made me think, wow, I’m onto something here, something that’s personal, but is universal and has a little poetry to it. I thought if you write a song that people like to hear, and slip your message in surreptitiously, then you’ve accomplished a lot more. Take “They Can’t Put It Back,” my song. Nobody ever sings that song, it’s just so brutal. But “The Coming of the Roads” is recorded a lot and sung a lot, because it’s poetry. Rubin: Taking into account which of your songs travel the most, how do you imagine the audience for your songs? Wheeler: Well, these days it’s an older audience, because they remember my songs and the things I’m singing about. But it’s also wonderful to hear some of the younger artists singing the songs for their audience, like Florence and the Machine doing “Jackson.”7 Well, hopefully, I’ll start getting records done by people her age. That would be great. And that makes you feel really good to have a song that’s appreciated down through generations. I wrote my coal-mining songs fifty years ago; some of them longer than that. “Jackson,” too. Rubin: I can certainly understand why it is encouraging to have young people take up your musical banner! You also wrote me about a time you refused to sing for someone. Wheeler: Oh, yeah, the governor of Kentucky. There’s a man who bought the Greenbrier Hotel, which is a famous resource in West Virginia, when it was going bankrupt. He owns a whole lot of businesses; he’s a very wealthy man. And one or two of his companies, they’re into mountain-top removal. Well, the governor of Kentucky, he’s all for it. And he was going to have some sort of cultural event in Virginia. He wanted me to come and sing, and I wrote him back and I said, “I know your stance on MTR, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable singing for you knowing that you endorse that sort of thing. So thanks, but no thanks.”8 I said, “If you ever change your ways, then I’ll come and sing for my supper.” Rubin: Did you hear back from him?

7

8

Florence and the Machine (often stylized as Florence + the Machine), an indie rock band from the United Kingdom, recorded Wheeler’s song in 2012. “MTR” is often how “mountain-top removal” is written.

28

28

Creative Activism Wheeler: One of his lieutenants called me and said, “We’re sorry you feel that way. If you change your mind, we’d still like to have you.” But I said, “No, not unless he changes his mind.” Rubin: I was wondering, since people use the term differently, if you can say what you mean if you say “folk music.” Wheeler: To me folk music is the music of the people, and many of the times nobody knows who was the author. And it’s handed down by word-ofmouth. And of course, then it began to get recorded, and people like me, and many others, started writing things sort of in the genre, at least it sounded like folk music. Johnny Cash, he would go to New York and seek out folk singers and folk writers. And he didn’t care who they were; he would record anybody’s music, and he would search for songs. And he claims that’s how he found “Jackson.”9 It surprised me, but the Kingston Trio recorded it, and he learned their version.10 It really blew my mind. Flatt and Scruggs recorded it.11 And it’s strange because it’s a male-female duet, but they just sang all the verses themselves. I don’t think one pretended to be a woman. But Johnny was seeking out folk-type stuff. And of course, some of his songs are considered not just country, but they have folk elements about them. Rubin: That makes sense, given the swell of interest in folk music in the 1960s. Wheeler: Yeah. I remember going to hootenannies—that was the big term back then—and that’s how I got one of my songs recorded. I was in an outdoor drama over in western Kentucky, called Stars in My Crown. And I went out to any sort of place that I could promote the show. I had a leading role, so one of my jobs was to help promote the show. So I went to a hootenanny in western Kentucky. It was near Kentucky Lake. And I sang “Ode to the Little Brown Shack Out Back.” Of course, in the coal camp, we didn’t have indoor plumbing. We had an outhouse. So I wrote a song about an outhouse. It was like a protest song—“don’t let them tear that little brown building down.” Because I had heard that up in a little town right across from Cincinnati, Ohio, right across the river in Kentucky, they passed an ordinance, saying if you had an outhouse, it had to be taken down, or they’d come and take it down for you. Rubin: What were you supposed to do? Buy indoor plumbing?

9

10 11

Cash and June Carter recorded a duet version of the song in 1967, which reached number two on the country singles chart. The Kingston Trio, a folk revival group, recorded the song in 1963, on their album Sunny Side! The bluegrass pioneers Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs recorded the song in 1965 on their album Town and Country.

29

Mining and Meaning—Billy Edd Wheeler

29

Wheeler: You had to buy some indoor plumbing, yeah. But anyway, when I heard about that proclamation, I wrote a song in protest, saying, “Don’t let them tear that little brown building down, for there’s not another like in the country or the town.” And then I told the experiences of going to the outhouse. And it was a minor hit, my first and only hit. It was banned in Boston. Rubin: “Banned in Boston”?12 Wheeler: Yes, that is true! And a lot of country stations back then, I think they might have considered it scatological. Rubin: Well—[laughter]. Wheeler: One guy told me—he owned a station down in Georgia somewhere, and he had not been playing it because it was “off-color.” But he heard Ralph Emery playing it on WSM radio, and that had a big span of audience.13 And he said, “I pulled off the road. I called back to my station.” And he told them, “Boys, open her up.” [Laughter] And they started playing it. As a single, it went to about number two on the country charts. But it also went to about number forty-five on the pop charts at that time. And what made it into a commercial hit was there was a station in Atlanta, a pop station. They played it as a novelty. And it sold several thousand copies in one week. So that helped to launch it. But as I told you earlier, it was banned in Boston. [Laughter] Rubin: Well, you know, we’re very puritanical. There are still a lot of things banned in Boston. Wheeler: Just like back when Louisa May Alcott was librarian of the whole world. She condemned Huckleberry Finn.14 She banned it and said it’s not to be in any of our libraries. Mark Twain loved that because he started taking out ads, “What is it about this book that Louisa May Alcott doesn’t want you to see?” And he used it as a promotion. Alcott said, “Who has the nerve to make a kid and a black man the heroes, the protagonists of this novel? That’s unheard of. I won’t stand for it.” He was one of the first people to write like Americans, using American language, with our slang.

12

13 14

The phrase “banned in Boston” was used from the late nineteenth century through the midtwentieth century to refer to works prohibited from distribution, exhibition, or public presentation in Boston, where public officials had extensive authority to determine what should be banned. Numerous books about the history of censorship use the phrase in their titles. Ralph Emery was a significant country music DJ based in Nashville. Alcott, most famous as the author of Little Women (1868–69) and its sequels, publically lashed out at Twain for using course language in the novel because of his use of slang; this led to the book being banned by various libraries, beginning with Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott grew up (and set her novels).

30

30

Creative Activism Rubin: And so now we have all of this culture that’s strictly American. What does that sound like in music? In Appalachia? Wheeler: Northern people tend to say AppaLAYchia. Rubin: They do. I’ve had that argument more than once. Wheeler: There was a series on that Elmore Leonard created, called Justified.15 It was about Harlan County and all the drug wars, the moonshine stills. In his crime novels, he has the best dialogue of any writer in the crime scene. Well, there was one guy, the most interesting guy in it: Boyd Crowther. He was head of one of the clans, and he said AppaLAYchia. Everything else rang true until he said that. But mostly, everybody south of the Mason-Dixon Line says AppaLATCH-ia. That’s the way I start a song I’m cowriting with Charlie. “Snakes said to Eve, if you try to deceive, I’ll throw this apple atchya.” [Laughter] And then the next line of the song says, “That’s how we say the place that I come from.” Rubin: That’s great. Funny, instructive, and—insistent. Wheeler: We need to get serious about humor, because it’s important. Rubin: The mystery writer Sharyn McCrumb has a piece in one of her books about how to pronounce “Appalachia.”16 A minor character—a visitor to the region—tries to say that it’s just two different ways, they’re both right. And the hotel owner says, well, it’s like if you went to Ireland. Some places have two names, the Irish one and the British one. If you use the British one to ask for directions, they’ll understand you. And they will give you the directions. But they will think of you differently. The comparison to colonialism is striking. Wheeler: McCrumb writes about folk music, too. Rubin: Do you see any kind of break between folk music and, say, rock-androll music? I’m thinking not only of the different people who have covered your songs, but of your early work with Leiber and Stoller. How did you meet them? Wheeler: Well, it’s a series of coincidences, those chance meetings. I went to Yale, I went in 1961 and 1962. Occasionally I would go ride the train down to New York, looking for gigs as a folk singer. And I went to Harold Leventhal’s office; I don’t remember how I found out about him, but he had

15 16

This TV series was based on Leonard’s novella “Fire in the Hole” (2001), and ran from 2010 to 2015. McCrumb is the author of a series of novels called the Ballad Series; each is built around an event in Appalachian history and combines legends with social issues. The book in which that exchange takes place is The Songcatcher.

31

Mining and Meaning—Billy Edd Wheeler

31

Pete Seeger and the Weavers. Eventually he had just about everybody, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins. There was a Jewish actor, he had him; he was Alan Arkin, I think was his name. He had just about everybody.17 Of course, I needed the work, I needed to make some money. So I thought, well, I’m going to go try to get him to handle me. So I’m standing there with my guitar, in a big room outside his office. With a lot of people, mostly women, typing, I assume contracts, press releases. I’m standing there at the side. I was a little shy then. And Norman Gimbel, the great lyricist, who had written the American lyrics for “Girl from Ipanema” and “Canadian Sunset,” and later would write “Killing Me Softly with Your Song,” came out.18 He glanced over and saw me, went over and held out his hand: “Hi, I’m Norman Gimbel.” And I said, “Well, I’m Billy Edd Wheeler.” He said, “You are? My wife bought your album that Monitor Records put out. She’s a model and she walks to work sometimes right by the office, and she saw your album in the window. She went in and picked it up, brought it home. And I’ve listened to it.” That’s a hell of a coincidence. I’m from West Virginia. I go to Yale. And now I meet him by accident in New York, at Harold Leventhal’s office. He said, “Billy Edd, you’re a natural. You write songs like people breathe. But,” he said, “you’ll never make any money at it.” So I’m all at once flattered and then shot down. And I said “Well, Norman, if I’m so natural, why is it that I’m never going to make any money?” He said, “Well, you just take songs as they come out. You don’t shape them. You don’t edit them.” And I said, “Well, how can I get better?” He said, “Hmm, let me take you to a couple guys I know who make more money in music than anybody I know, Leiber and Stoller. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.”19 Well, the next trip when I came down, he did take me there. And I got out my guitar and I played songs for them, which was incredible because Peggy 17

18

19

Leventhal (1919–2005) was known for his insistence on getting fair recording contracts for African American and women artists. He was also known for his political vision, which led to his being blacklisted during the McCarthy era. “Girl from Ipanema” was written in 1962, with music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes. Later, Gimbel wrote English lyrics. Gimbel wrote the lyrics of “Canadian Sunset” in 1956 with jazz pianist Eddie Haywood, who wrote the music. “Killing Me Softly with His Song” was written in 1971 (with composer Charles Fox) and charted two years later, when Roberta Flack recorded it. Songwriting partners Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller authored dozens of songs that charted, including several hits for Elvis Presley.

32

32

Creative Activism Lee and all these people you’ve heard of—the Drifters, the Coasters—they’re coming in and out of the office, and I’m sitting waiting to go in.20 So they took the time with me because they’re friends of Norman’s. I played them three or four songs. And they said, “We agree with Norman. Your songs have too many themes, they ramble. They’re great songs, but,” he says, “they’re not commercial. And they’re not finished.” And so, I started thinking more critically. It was at Yale when I started writing “Jackson.” I had a work scholarship, and it was printing photographs from old negatives of Roman theaters and Greek theaters. I did the whole thing, the dark room work. I would print and then dry the final photo. And while they were drying, I was in a big, open building that had nice resonance; made me sound like I had a big voice. And I started “Jackson” right there. It was probably in 1961. So Leiber and Stoller told me, they said, “Look, if you keep thinking the way we’ve suggested that you think, and if you get an idea, when you come down from Yale to live in the city, call us. And if we like the idea, you can bring it in.” So that was my opening, a chance meeting with Norman Gimbel in the middle of the New York City. Rubin: Well, it’s such a small city. Wheeler: [Laughter] And my record probably didn’t sell 500 records in the whole city; maybe in the whole world. And Norman’s wife just happened to go out of her way to pick it up. And I was not good-looking. It was Billy Edd: USA on Monitor Records. So I went down, when I got down to New York, I called Jerry and I said, “I’m working on this song. I think it might have potential.” He said, “Well, let me hear it.” So I recited a bit of “The Reverend Mr. Black” to him. And then when I got to the “you got to walk that lonesome,” Valley he started snapping his fingers, said, “Yeah, baby, uh huh, yeah, baby.” [Laughter] New York talk. He said, “Bring that one in.” So I took it in and he and Mike sat down with me. I already had the melody. But it was about an eight-minute song; there was too much in it. So they helped me boil it down to a three-and-a-half-minute song. And for that, they took half the songwriter royalties. Credits, I mean. And of course, all the publishing rights.

20

Peggy Lee’s career as a pop singer began in the 1940s and lasted for sixty years. She also had an acting career. The R&B groups the Coasters and the Drifters were from Los Angeles and New York respectively; both formed in the 1950s (although some sixty members cycled through the Drifters in various forms).

33

Mining and Meaning—Billy Edd Wheeler And when I wrote “Jackson,” it had some really funky verses in front before got to “We got married in a fever,” and Jerry Leiber said, “That’s where you should start your song. Throw those other verses away. They’re not good enough. Start it with ‘We got married in a fever,’ that’s your first verse.” And I did. And for that, he took 25 percent of the writer’s share of “Jackson” . . . That’s just the music business. Looking back, I think that was unfair, even though they gave me a great lesson. I already had the melody and I had the idea, so they really just helped with the words. But that was a great piano lesson; that’s what people used to say—“Hey, you just got a piano lesson.” Rubin: A piano lesson? Wheeler: Like if somebody sold you some fake jewelry—“Hey, boy, you got a piano lesson there, didn’t you? You fell for it. That’s not a Rolex watch, it’s not worth ten dollars.” Well, that got me started with them. And we finished the song and they put a man on the plane and flew him, their song plugger, to California, because the Kingston Trio were recording, and they recorded the song. He came back and he says, “They dug it and they cut it.” Now, Jerry and Mike, they’re businessmen. They had given me probably as advances more money than my record sales had earned. And so, they sold my recording contract to United Artists. Murray Deutch, who was the vice president, he was the number two man at United Artists, Murray looked like he was straight out of Guys and Dolls.21 Had on a very slick suit, a silk tie, had rings on his fingers. And talked tough. Anyway, he called me and said, “We have acquired your contract from Leiber and Stoller. And have you had any experience as a manager?” And I said, “Yes, I was alumni director at Berea College. I had a pretty big office, and a lot of people working for me. I raised money and put out the magazine every month.” He said, “Well, we want you to go to Nashville and open an office for us. We don’t have an office there, we think it’s time we did.” So I went to Nashville. That was probably in 1969. I had an office in the Fender Building, Fender guitars. It’s right across the street from RCA, where Chet Atkins was.22 And of course, I had met him on one of my trips down to promote my songs. So “Jackson” was recorded somewhere right in there. And all of a sudden I’m making some money from record sales. Rubin: The Johnny Cash version?

21 22

Guys and Dolls was a musical about gangsters that premiered in 1950. Chet Atkins (1924–2001) was an important country music producer, songwriter, and guitarist.

33

34

34

Creative Activism Wheeler: Johnny Cash. But we didn’t like Nashville. I remember when Martin Luther King died, I went down to the studio and a lot of guys are making jokes about him, and he’s just died; I mean n***r jokes. And I told Mary and she almost—well, she did cry. She said, “Let’s get out of here.” Rubin: So then you moved here? Wheeler: Well, because of the record sales, we thought we might get by without that salary. Rubin: Since you’ve just mentioned returning to North Carolina, I’d like to return to “They Can’t Put It Back.” How can a song be political without talking about politics? And the reason I’m asking this because that song says, “I don’t carry signs, but they’re going to hear from me.” So what are some ways people can be heard from if they don’t consider themselves the picket-line type? Wheeler: Some of us write songs about it. That’s one way I can protest, is through my music. And the people listening, well, I would hope that they would agree with the gist of the song and join the fight in their own way.

35

2

“Visible, Horrible, Ugly”: Toxicity According to John Sabraw

A striking new phrase was coined to describe a body of work by artist John Sabraw:  “toxic art.” Sabraw’s series of paintings under this rubric are gorgeous, sensuous, and colorful—and done with paints created from polluting runoff from the abandoned mines that are scattered across Ohio. After he exhibited the work, Sabraw recalls, a PBS station in Cleveland posted a short interview with him; the interview was accompanied by an illustration of toxic, vivid yellow runoff. Shortly afterward, the Smithsonian magazine picked up the story and coined the efficient and powerful phrase, which has now been used widely to describe Sabraw’s artisticenvironmentalist project. Born in 1968, Sabraw is currently Professor of Painting and Drawing at Ohio University. His first paintings, he admits, were on the backs of denim jackets in high school. “I made my spending money that way,” he recalls. “I would copy Metallica’s cover and put that on a jacket, or vampire faces, or whatever they asked for.” His activism dates back even further, to his childhood involvement in his mother’s social justice work. Bringing environmentalism together with his artwork has long been very important to Sabraw. He does not air-condition his studio, for instance, and tries to rely on natural lights. He avoids driving, uses frames made from sustainably grown bamboo that are lightweight and therefore save on the fuel used in shipping, and minimizes his use of electricity. Sabraw collaborated with Guy Riefler, an engineer and fellow professor at Ohio University, to create the paints after both of them, on visits to the many abandoned coal mines in Ohio, were struck by the colorful and prevalent runoff of heavy metals into streams. Riefler, who has also focused considerably in his work on mediating environmental damage, has patented the process and written about it widely. But his partnership with Sabraw defines environmental work as beautiful—a useful rhetorical gesture.

36

36

Creative Activism

Sabraw’s work, then, is a good reminder of the many levels on which art tells history. Most immediately accessible, of course, is the sensual character of the paintings, which—because of the nature of the paint—seem to be in motion and contain shapes-within-shapes. Indeed, Sabraw has noted that he has had to accept that he cannot be completely in control of images; he frequently paints layers over layers for days or weeks, allowing them to interact with his studio environment, then deciding when the painting is complete. This, I would argue, is artistically profound: figuring out how to interact, acknowledging that art is an ongoing conversation, rather than claiming to be in full control. But learning where the paint came from also stitches the work into both the past and the future: the past, because the mines are closed now, and it is valuable to be reminded of the costs of profits-above-all.1 And the future, because both Sabraw and Riefler hope that the paint could be marketed, spurring the removal of toxic sludge at a much higher level, thereby paying for environmental mediation. Sabraw seeks to host these conversations in his teaching as well as his own art, teaching, for instance, classes about sustainability and art. Overall, he focuses on his belief that there should be more conversations about environmental issues. His work is a moving case study of the ways in which art, indeed, is a kind of conversation.

Selected collections Museum of Contemporary Art, Honolulu, HI Mitchell Museum, Cedarhurst, IL The Elmhurst Museum, Elmhurst, IL Columbus Science Center, Columbus, OH Citizens Bank, Boston, MA Accenture Health, Chicago, IL Rome Blanc, LLC Twin Farms Inn, Barnard, VT Hilton Corporation, TN Emprise Bank, KS Northwestern University College, Chicago, IL Union League Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL 1

The other two interviews in the mining section explore labor costs as well.

37

Toxicity—John Sabraw

37

Thomas Blackman & Associates, Chicago, IL KCR Partnership, Columbus, OH Aramark, Chicago, IL Rubin: How did you develop the idea of painting with the runoff ? Sabraw: Essentially, I’ve always been an activist. When I was a kid in the 1970s, maybe 8–10 years old, I used to go on protest marches with my mother about educational-system issues. We’d march on the Capitol in Idaho of all places, back in the day where you could actually see the governor. They would actually have to come out and talk to the crowd, which doesn’t happen anymore, really. After moving to New York at 17, and figuring out that there was a much bigger picture, I became interested in a lot of different activist notions. I was spread very thin. I was into everything! If an issue popped up, I’d be like, yeah, we’ve got to do this or talk about this, or protest, or make posters. But in terms of pedagogy, and in terms of my own practice as an artist, the activist aspect didn’t really come together until I was teaching at Washington University.2 Now, the great thing about being a professor, and perhaps one of the things that people need to know most about being a professor, is that you’d better be ready to be challenged on everything. I was teaching a class about different issues. It was a conceptually-based course; you know the first thing the students ask is that’s great, but what are you doing? At the time I really wasn’t doing much. So I developed a course there called “Activist Art.” It was a new course, and it was a great, amazing insight for me into how the new generation were viewing themselves as activists. Rubin: Did you introduce them to any particular artists you consider activist artists? Or was it more practice-based? Sabraw: It was more about practice, it was more about getting them out there. George W. Bush and Al Gore came to debate on campus. Ralph Nader came as well, but he wasn’t invited to the debate, of course.3 Lots of us came out and protested. Everybody was very upset. Not necessarily on one side or the other in terms of politics, but more the fact that Ralph Nader, who had a ticket to the debate, was not allowed into the debate even with a ticket, which was eye-opening about the true nature of democracy and representation. Some of my students were arrested at this debate, which 2 3

Washington University in St. Louis is a private university founded in Missouri in 1853. Nader ran in the 2000 presidential election as a Green Party Candidate. He had been asked to run several times by then, but had declined.

38

38

Creative Activism upset me greatly because they were doing nothing more than just walking around protesting, holding signs, that kind of thing. Teaching that class got me to start to think about a lot of issues, and I got much more active. This is about the time that we went into Iraq for the second time.4 It really upset me because it was really unnecessary. I started writing a lot of letters. When I published a letter in the paper, I got boxes and boxes of hate mail. I don’t know how they got my address. Rubin: You got hate mail for a letter in the paper? Sabraw: I got a lot of hate mail. I didn’t get a little hate mail, I got a scary amount of hate mail and it was absolutely polarized. That scared me, and I really pulled back for a while. For about a year I didn’t write anything. I had a baby at that point, I had a young daughter, and I was thinking about fatherhood, I was thinking about how I’ve got to protect my family. I’ve got to ensure that I honor my promises to keep my family alive, keep them close and keep them safe. I began to realize that all of the issues that I was engaged with—whether they were politically oriented, whether they were race oriented, whether they were gender oriented—I needed to find a place where they all connected. The hate letters were so isolated in where they came from that it began to become clear to me that it was such a polarizing issue that maybe a dialogue wasn’t really going to happen—that it was people shouting and shouting, but nothing really getting done. I wanted to see progress. I wanted something where I could actually make a difference, so I could make something happen. That ’s when I began to realize that sustainability, and environmentalism as an offshoot of sustainability, is the universal collective, shared issue. I know this is obvious to some people, but it took me while to come to it. I realized that this issue was affecting everything. It was affecting territorial disputes. It was affecting poverty. It was affecting death. It was affecting childhood illnesses. It was affecting everything. This was maybe the avenue where I could have the most effect, and perhaps leave the greatest legacy for my daughter and my family. Rubin: How did that realization shape your artistic practices? Sabraw: Well, in that moment, I began to examine myself as a practicing artist, and as someone who was a producer of product. In other words, a mini-manufacturer. I have to buy things from manufacturers, sometimes at

4

The 2003 invasion of Iraq lasted from March 20 to May 1, and was led by US President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. The stated reason was that Iraq supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be false. After the invasion, a military occupation began.

39

Toxicity—John Sabraw

39

wholesale places. I bring those supplies into a studio that has to be heated and cooled and ventilated. I have waste product. I have to travel. I produce art, and then I have to package it, I have to ship it—everything that a manufacturing plant has to do. That’s when I began to examine the practice of being an artist. I figured that because the students were so challenging to anything that I would state—which is great—that’s when I began to ask as an artist, how can I tell someone else to be more sustainable if I’m not going to be more sustainable in what I do? That’s where this all began. Rubin: That is a profound turn you took, locating your work environmentally like that; people tend to compartmentalize a great deal. What brought mine runoff to your attention for the first time? Sabraw: I was a geek, I am still. I’m a deep lover of the history of art-making materials: pigments and where they came from, old techniques, alchemists and their little apprentices making things up in the dark. I’m fascinated by those things. In fact, I used to teach a special seminar about it when I was in Chicago, at the Art Institute when I was at Northwestern University. When I got here to Ohio, I joined a group of faculty that was called the Kanawha Project.5 This was a group of faculty that got together periodically with experts in different fields. They would take us around to various sites in Southeastern Ohio. They would talk about issues of sustainability in the environment. At one time, we went to this place where they were showing us an acid mine drainage system, where the color of the stream was orange. I mean just an amazing orange; this was iron oxide being deposited by waste water that was coming out of an improperly sealed, abandoned coal mine. I asked the person who was doing the tour, “If this is just iron oxide, that’s basically a lot of the paint we use. Can I use this to make paints out of?” She said, “Well, funny you should ask because there’s a professor in Engineering right now who’s trying to make that process happen.” That’s how I connected with my partner here, Dr. Guy Riefler in Engineering.6 He was looking for an artist who could tell him if his pigments were worthy of actually making paints out of or not, or whether they were just brown gunk. Rubin: What would you say to students—to me—about the artistic and political significance of collaboration? It seems very profound both of those ways. Sabraw: Oh gosh, it’s huge. I created an exhibition in 2007 that was called Scale. This was my first really large-scale collaborative project. I worked 5

6

Dozens of faculty members have been involved in the project, which was launched in 2007 and has focused on a range of environmental and sustainability issues globally and in Ohio. Riefler focuses his research on environmental pollutants.

40

40

Creative Activism with astrophysicists, I worked with NASA, I worked with a Space Science Telescope Institute, I worked with the Center for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.7 We created a massive, six-part exhibition that was aimed at viewers who were not scientists, who were not necessarily activists, who were just coming to the museum to see what was there. We wanted to make them sense and feel on an emotional and psychic level their true scale within the universe. The goal of it was to make them understand that the human race is a tiny group of people, that we have to work together, and that all the other stuff is crap. I know that this is a statement made by other people, but I wanted to make people physically feel it. We made an eighty-five-feet long by ten-anda-half-feet tall drawing of the Milky Way galaxy in charcoal. We surrounded it in a room, and then we created this tiny centimeter little crystal cube. It was a centimeter cube and we talked about the rarity of atoms in space, and the density of atoms in human flesh. Then we ended it with a digital animation that we had done, which showed how really key important figures—culturally, humanitarian, science-oriented—how all these people were actually connected to one another in this animation globally, and how therefore we shrunk the globe to nothing more than humans knowing humans. Took away borders of countries, took away everything else. That collaboration and the notion that we should really do away with these petty, small differences that keep us separate, that is the key, I think, to being successful in any activist approach. That’s what I bring to bear in my teaching, and that’s what I bring to bear in the work that I’m doing. That’s where the collaborations are critical. Rubin: Yes, I think they’re critical. One of the things I find very striking about your work is the name people have applied to it: “toxic art.” Would you unpack that for me? I mean obviously there’s a literal meaning, but clearly, you’re carrying it beyond that. When is it productive for the artistic product to be toxic? Sabraw: That’s funny because it’s not toxic in the end. It begins as toxic sludge. When we extract it, it’s not healthy. It’s full of sulfuric acid, it’s full of bacteria, it’s full of all kinds of things, so yes, it is quite toxic. You’re not going to touch it and die. It may really cause a lot of skin irritation. You

7

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was established by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 to carry out nonmilitary space science. The Space Science Telescope Institute was founded in 1981 as a community-based science center operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy for NASA. The Center for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence was founded in 1994 to search for evidence of technology on other planets and has largely been grantsupported, including a 2005 grant from NASA.

41

Toxicity—John Sabraw could drink a little bit of it and be all right. You’ll be kind of sick, and if you drink a lot of it you’ll probably have to go see somebody and maybe vomit quite a bit. It’s toxic to every life form in the streams. It kills everything in the streams. There’s only a few bacterias that grow in it, which we’re experimenting with right now. It’s absolutely toxic sludge. The idea that I can take that and turn it into something that is useful, and knowing that the process of turning it into something useful is actually also remediating the stream, and making it viable for biological life again . . . I mean it’s a rare privilege. I feel like it’s something that I have to make succeed on a large scale. Rubin: I’m fascinated by the very basic level on which, in your art, the medium is the statement, not just what you do it with. Can you tell me how you came to this? Sabraw: I’m the worst library patron ever. I’m the guy who has all the books that you want to see, and I have them checked out past their due date and I’m in trouble with the library all the time. I feel bad about it but I need them. I need them. At one point I was in pretty bad trouble with the library. I took all these books that had all of these pages with all these little post-it things in it and everything. I photographed all of them so I could actually go back to the library and return them, and get back in their good graces. I also took all the images and I put them together into one big image. It was like eight gigabytes or something to that effect. When I looked at that and I saw the formal relationship between all of these different phenomena, mostly natural phenomena, it occurred to me that there was a poetics to that relationship and that in fact, that dialogue was the avenue that I had been trying to get at for so long. That is where the Chroma series began. That’s when it was not necessarily about making something look like something. That is when this medium found its home. Because even if I’m using a lot of other colors from a lot of other pigments—which I do, I love colors, they’re so colorful—when I put them all together and I’m trying to make something . . . I’m studying algae as the new fuel, so I’m looking at these algae pools and I’m like, oh my gosh, algae, look at that. Then when I make it, it never comes out the way I want because it takes six weeks, eight weeks, twelve weeks for these to dry and they move around and all kinds of stuff happens that nature has control over, not me. When I hang them in public and the public come to view the work, I can see them walk around the room and go, “What are these abstract circles?” Then one of the circles, one of them will strike them on an emotional level. It will cause them to feel an emotion that they had when they encountered

41

42

42

Creative Activism some kind of natural phenomenon. Whether that was a picture of the earth from space as this blue dot, or looking at the bacterial pools at Yellowstone National Park, or Niagara Falls, it could be anything. The most amazing gift to me, the most amazing thing happens. They turn from the painting, they make a beeline right toward me, and they say, “Oh my gosh. That piece reminds me of . . .” and “When I was there I felt . . .” and they describe this big emotion. At that point, my dialogue with them is, “What is your connection with nature? How does that make you feel? What kind of value do you place on that in your personal life?” Then I can discuss my process with the medium. I can discuss the pigment. I can discuss the process of what I’m doing, and at that point I don’t have to be an activist in the traditional sense of the word. I’m this human talking to another human, and we’ve connected on an emotional, psychological level over a commonality that we didn’t know we had. When I talk about the process, it’s no longer something that has to be convincing as an argument. It’s already done and the support is already there. That’s where this medium has transitioned my work from a side dialogue about an activist notion of sustainability into a direct dialogue where community-building happened. Rubin: That’s beautiful. I’m very glad that you talked about the colors, because I was about to ask you about them. Your use of the colors seems very mindful to me. There’s something powerfully redemptive about turning this pollution into something beautiful. But I’m wondering if you’ve ever worried that you are hiding too much of the ugliness of the pollution, of the damage of the mines. Sabraw: You know, that’s a really good question. I do see it as a redemptive process. The redemptive aspect I think is a real personal-life important value to me. Rubin: It’s profound. Sabraw: Thank you, that’s the word. It is profound to me, and I feel it’s necessary for me to make this work as hard as I possibly can. The funny thing is that there’s a weird gift to this particular pollution. The gift is the fact that it is so visible. If you come out here, you can drive anywhere in Southeast Ohio and within a few hundred yards of you, there will be a stream, or a creek, or a river, that you can see is yellow, or white, or orange, or red, and it’s unnatural. The plants that are around it are coated in this stuff and it looks bad. Due to the extraction of this natural resource that actually gives us a visible, horrible, ugly scar as to what we’ve really done. Rubin: How do you fold that “horrible, ugly scar” into the work you do?

43

Toxicity—John Sabraw Sabraw: It is easy for us so show people that this is a problem, through photography and through videography. They see it and they know it’s unnatural. The visual evidence is compelling. You can’t see the mines. The mines are actually beautiful because they’ve all been grown over with trees and shrubbery, and it looks like natural rolling green hills full of trees. The problem is that underneath there are just miles, upon miles, upon miles of exposed rock and coal, and sulfuric acid. That's not visible. The streams and the colors are easier to get people to be compelled by, because of that visibility. We’re lucky that we can say about abandoned coal mines, coal mining, fossil fuel: “Look at what they’ve done.” And there’s over 4,000 abandoned mines in Southeast Ohio, so this is not a one-site problem. Rubin: That is a huge number! Sabraw: It’s incomprehensible. If I was a better at language, I might be able to put some kind of a really interesting, compelling poetics together about this flow, this blood flow if you will, this vein that’s been opened and bleeds orange because this area of the country has been repeatedly raped. It was initially raped for iron ore, and then to process the iron ore it was raped for trees so that they could be burnt to make charcoal so that we could smelt the iron ore. Then all the hills were carved out for coal. Every single tree in Southeastern Ohio is new. They were all cut down, every single one of them was cut down. By the 1950s, this looked like grassland hills. There were no trees. So when you go to look in all the hills here, all the trees are the same size because they all grew up once they were done raping that part of the land. Rubin: That’s really striking—and we haven’t invoked the toll on the people who worked in the mines! Often, we have a somewhat lofty vision of art that can make it hard to connect art with work. You have literally gotten dirt on your hands in this process. How do you think that contributes to the meaning of what you do? Sabraw: You know, I was thinking about this the other day. There’s a friend of mine who’s an amazing painter. We’ve been working together with some other artists to create a group of artists who are attentive to this climate issue. I think artists are like scientists in Western culture, maybe in world culture too. Like scientists, they have to be super curious, and they have to go out there and they have to wonder about things, and they have to examine things and try theories out. Most of the time they fail: there’s no solution there. Then they’ve got to try something again, in that the job is to come back to the culture and say look, we tried this, we examined this, we

43

44

44

Creative Activism think there’s a problem, we think we had a solution and we didn’t have a solution but we learned something else. Now we have to try it again. Rubin: Comparing artists to scientists is fascinating. There is such a powerful assumption that the two ways of thinking are so different—even though, now that you have gotten me thinking about it, I can see how much science is in any form of art, really: mixing colors and sharpening blades and understanding materials and preserving the work. Sabraw: For me, a lot of it had to do with the fact that I wanted to know, I wanted to be an empirical artist. So I traveled to the coal mines themselves. But I also traveled to the coal plant. Thirty minutes south of my doorstep is the largest concentration of coal-burning power plants in the world, on the Ohio River. It’s pretty devastating. I’ve toured the plants. I’ve looked at the coal fields there; they burn seventeen barges of coal a day at one of these plants. When you see the scale of what’s happening, it’s really horrifying. When I talk about myself as an artist, my process, I want to make sure that I didn’t just read something from someone else. I want to have my hands in it, I want to know. I think it’s important maybe in a larger sense, for more of us to know physically. To put our fingers in the wound, to be that doubting Thomas. That to me is the difference. I can talk to my family members and they don’t understand what I’m talking about. I could talk to friends and they don’t understand what I’m talking about. Or they kind of nod their heads but their sense of urgency, or their sense of scale of the problem itself, it’s not the same. I think it’s really an important part of education for young people, for everyone globally to say well where does your energy coming from? Let’s take a trip there, let’s see where it’s happening. And on the way back, let’s see the damage to the land, you know?

45

3

“The Baby Needed Milk”: Collectivity According to Diane Gilliam Fisher

Several lessons about the most profound aspects and artistic priorities of Diane Gilliam Fisher’s poetry can be learned from a quick look at her other artistic project: quilting. First is that she brings together different pieces (bits of cloth in one and human voices in the other) into a unified piece of art: multiple characters speak in her book Kettle Bottom, which portrays a mining labor struggle that has come to be known as the West Virginia Mine Wars of 1912–13. Second, she preserves and finds beauty in scraps of cloth and slivers of history that some would throw out; the voices of poor miners do not get much attention in conventional histories. (In one of these poems, “Explosion at Winco No. 9,” the two tragically come together, as a scrap of an old dress a woman has used to mend her miner husband’s shirt is the only thing that can identify his mangled body after a mine collapse.) Finally, Fisher’s quilting is a reminder that the past, gracefully if painfully invoked in Kettle Bottom, can both keep us warm and make our lives beautiful. Fisher’s approach of focusing on a group of people, rather than enacting the cliché of poetry as a genuine glimpse into the author’s soul, is visible on multiple levels and is perhaps the most defining aspect of Kettle Bottom. In addition to giving voice to multiple characters there is, for instance, collective caretaking in the book; in her poem “Milk,” a mother can’t stop herself from giving canned milk to feed another woman’s baby, even though her own family, including her own children, is only allowed one dollar a week for food. But her poetic enactment of coming together is especially striking in a historical tale that involves unionization, the labor version of collectivity. Of course, the story of mining in the United States is heartbreaking on a number of levels, and bringing this pain out from historical erasure is an important artistic goal of Fisher’s. Admiring her artistry is no reason to pretend that Kettle Bottom does not make many readers cry. After all, one of the great successes of Fisher’s work is that she lays bare the economic and ecological injustice of the industry on the most local, human level—even giving voice to

46

46

Creative Activism

children in the community and their heartbreaking awareness of what their community faces. In “What History Means to Me,” for instance, Fisher offers the form students’ range of answers to the titular question posed by the teacher. A small boy locates it in the present as well as in the past, insisting, “It is also now/like when Baldwin-Felts knocks on folks doors to put them out when their Daddy joins the union or gets killed in the mine, and says, Your history.” A fourth-grade girl recounts her father swearing with anger and insisting the child write in her assignment, “There aint no company teacher got nothing to teach us children about history.” Another child writes with grief about how he and his favorite uncle loved making ice-cream out of snow, but it is now covered with coal dust and his “Mama says I got better things than that to cry about.”1 Diane Gilliam Fisher was born 1957 into a post–Great Migration family in Columbus, Ohio. Even before she became a poet, her focus on collectivity shaped her Ph.D. dissertation at Ohio State University, in which she wrote about a Spanish poet, Ángel González. Tellingly, her focus was on the poet’s deployment of multiple voices in his poems.2 Her latest book, Dreadful Wind and Rain (2017), is poetic rendering of a fairy tale, one based on an Appalachian murder ballad from which the title is taken. (The ballad, like many from the area, has early English roots, and versions of it have been performed by a range of English and American musicians.) Not surprisingly, Fisher changes the ending, once again, pulling no punches. Fisher’s work has been acknowledged in a range of locations, especially in Appalachia but nationally as well. (She won an award of 50,000 dollars for her poetry in 2013, for instance.) But a short and efficient biographical statement she wrote once again pulls together strands of her story in a graceful and poetic way. “Writing, quilting, sewing and knitting all connect me to the people and places I come from,” she wrote, “all the women who through the centuries, as Adrienne Rich puts it, have used what we have to make what we need.”

Selected bibliography Recipe for Blackberry Cake (chapbook, 1999) One of Everything (poetry collection, 2003) 1 2

Fisher, Kettle Bottom, 69. The title of the dissertation was “Voices of Irony.” The poet she focused on, Ángel González Muñiz (1925–2008), published sixteen books; three translations of his work to English have been published.

47

Collectivity—Diane Gilliam Fisher

47

Kettle Bottom (poetry volume, 2004) Dreadful Wind and Rain (novel in verse, 2017) Work has been published in Appalachian Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Wind Magazine, Shanandoah Rubin: I’ve used Kettle Bottom in two different classes of mine, one on Appalachian history and one on work and culture. It went over very well, both times. And teaching poetry can be hard, you know. Often students come in feeling like it is not for them. There is currently a fairly common vision of the art form that makes it hard to connect poetry with workingclass readers. How did you try to do that? To get poetic dirt on your hands, so to speak? Fisher: Well, it actually wasn’t that hard because, you know, that’s my background. When I started to write those poems I didn’t know that it was a book. It started out in a moment when I was really actively looking for models, for writerly models. I had been trying to write William Stafford poems for years.3 I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t write them. And then I had a teacher. A good teacher: it was David Baker.4 He taught me about how people cultivate vision—how do you learn that? And he said, “Well, you don’t learn it. You earn it by your way of being in the world.” I didn’t fully know what that meant, but there was a part of me that knew that that was true. I just didn’t know yet what was my way of being in the world. I hadn’t really considered that, even though I must have been in my late forties by then. But it did tell me why I couldn’t write William Stafford poems: because I didn’t have William Stafford’s way of being in the world. So I started watching and listening really carefully to everything I read, and asking myself what this person had done in the book or in the poem. Ellen Bryant Voigt, who was the director of the Warren Wilson MFA program where I was a student, wrote a book of poems called Kyrie, which is about the 1918 flu epidemic.5 She wrote through the voices of people in a small town that were going through that. I was listening to a taping of readings from that book. I had just been down in West Virginia, and I had picked up a little book about the Mine

3

4 5

William Edgar Stafford (1914–93) was known for his conversational style of poems about ordinary life. Poet David Baker (b. 1954) has taught at Denison University in Ohio since 1984. Ellen Bryant Voigt, a multiple award winning poet, was born in 1954 grew up on a farm in rural Virginia.

48

48

Creative Activism Wars, which was a story I didn’t even know, even though it was my story.6 And I asked myself that question: what has she done? She had imagined her way into this little bit of history that was mostly forgotten but was really a perilous time for people. And she had imagined her way into it through all of these voices. And I thought, “I could do that.” I had the little Mine Wars book, and I had my native language. Because even though I was born and grew up in Columbus, I grew up in an Appalachian household. And that language was the language that was spoken in my house. So it was native to me. It was not hard for me to go there at all. And after a while I knew it was important because my people are people whose language is not respected and whose stories have been told and manipulated by many powers that be for a long, long time. So it is really important for those stories to be told in their own language and through their own voices. Rubin: The question of language is very interesting. The language of workingclass Southerners is so frequently disparaged; in New England, when people want to sound stupid, they frequently try to imitate a Southern accent. Fisher: It’s true. It’s a language that hasn’t sort of been rounded up yet. Rubin: You mentioned voices, plural. Kettle Bottom has a lot of different voices in it. Why did you decide to make this a collective portrait? Fisher: There just wasn’t any other way. It’s a big story. It’s a story that belongs to a lot of people, not just that particular story of Mingo County in 1920 and 1921. And any story that is really big, I don’t think can be told from a single consciousness. I don’t think you can come close to getting at how complex in its causes and complex in its consequences a big public story like is, without having it spoken in a lot of people’s most intimate voices, through their most intimate stories. Rubin: There is something very moving, though, about imagining this sort of communal picture. You said that you didn’t hear about the Mingo County Mine Wars growing up, but what did you hear about mining in general? Fisher: Not very much, to tell you truth. My dad’s side of the family, they were not involved in mining. On my mother’s side—my mom was born in Mingo County, right there. And I knew that they had lived in a camp for some of

6

The West Virginia Mine Wars is the name for a series of conflicts between mine workers and owners in Mingo County from 1912 to 1921. The owners responded to the miners’ strikes and demands, including better working conditions and an end to the practice of forcing them to shop at companyowned stores, by bringing in Badwin-Felts agents with high-powered rifles to break the strike. This series of conflicts was the subject of John Sayles’s 1987 film Matewan.

49

Collectivity—Diane Gilliam Fisher

49

her very young years. They were like a lot of people. They came to Ohio in the mid-forties, after the war. My Uncle Lou got a job in Mechanicsburg brought the rest of them up. Lots of people moved then.7 So I knew that my mother’s father had worked in the mines. But that’s about all I knew. He was a very violent man, and no stories connected with him were happy. In fact, I didn’t know very many stories about him until I was a grown woman in my middle thirties. When I started writing, I started to find out more because I started to ask more questions. But I didn’t have very much. It’s not a history that I had. Rubin: There are always silences, I think, in families. How were you hoping that this historical story, once you recuperated it personally and more broadly, would speak to the present? Fisher: Well, I think it’s incredibly timely. The book came out in 2004. It was not that far after 9/11. People were still raw and afraid. And what I think—and when I’m saying this, I’m not so much saying, “My book does this,” as I’m saying, “The people in the place that my book comes from do this”—many of us, I think, before 9/11 felt mostly safe most of the time. Not everybody, not everybody by a long shot, but a lot. And even if we weren’t, we had the illusion of it. But after that there was a lot of fear. And there were a lot of “powers that be” that were sort of helping us to be afraid and encouraging us to make choices along the lines of our fear. And we lost the habit of knowing what to do when we’re scared, I think, in the culture at large. So what I think is that the kind of people that are in Kettle Bottom, they offer a model for how to live when things are really scary. You know, they live a fine line every day between life and death and never knowing if it’s going to be all right or if it is not going to be all right. And will you clench up or will you open? And always, wherever I go, I read the poem “Milk” because I want that woman who gave the milk to be famous.8 I think she should have a statue in Washington, right there by Abraham Lincoln. Now that story—I guess I should tell you, almost all the stories in Kettle Bottom are imagined but that one is not. That one was told to me by my friend, Leona Mello. Leona grew up in a Consol coal camp, that’s Consolidated coal camp in Pocahontas 7

8

Fisher is referring to a massive migration by black and white Southerners from the rural South in the 1940s to industrial cities of the North and West—a move with striking cultural, labor, and political consequences. As noted above, in “Milk,” a young person describes how her extremely caring yet poor mother bought two cans of milk each week to feed the baby of a woman whose husband spent too much money on drinking (and was also physically abusive). The husband then runs into a collapsing mine to rescue the narrator’s father because of this gift of milk.

50

50

Creative Activism County in the 1940s.9 And her mother, whose name was Marie Ash, is the woman who gave the milk. That poem is written almost exactly as Leona told me the story. I changed the names and I changed a few of the details, but not very much at all, just to put it back in time in the 1920s instead of the 1940s is all that I changed. They were out on strike, and Leona’s mother had Leona and Leona’s three brothers and Leona’s dad to feed. She had plenty of her own to worry about, but you know, that baby needed milk. And so, did she have to decide? No, she did not. Rubin: She just gave the milk. Fisher: The baby needed milk. And so instead of choosing along the lines of her fear, which she would have been completely and totally justified by any logic in doing, she chose, instead, to make community. And because she did the baby was saved, for sure. And her husband was saved—who could have imagined that turn of events? And even this man who drank and hit his wife, in a way he was saved—because he was led to be the vehicle for the bigger thing, which was community. There was the grave that was given to him because of what she did. And that was true. Those are still choices that we can make. We need stories circulating out in the world that tell us that that is true. We do not need reality TV, where what we do is we vote that we just want off of the island, and the way to win is to be the only one left standing. Rubin: I see your point. Even in a much less extreme way, there is such a visible culture right now of “my kid above all others.” Sometimes, these days, I just feel very sad that we’re not more in the habit of looking out for all of the kids. So on a personal level—a personally political level, I guess—I appreciate your focus on collectivity. Fisher: Yes, you know, there is that king-of-the-hill model of success. My best beloved teacher is Eleanor Wildner, and I think I’m quoting her, though not directly—but I’ve heard her say her model of success was, “Who did you bring along? How many and who did you bring along?” Rubin: You say that you always read the poem “Milk.” Has there been a particular response to the poem that you cherish? Fisher: Oh, yes. Always. I didn’t have to do very many readings before it became clear to me that there were certain poems that people always responded to. There are two kinds of responses. I’ll just say it. I will have people come to get their book signed after the reading and they can’t speak.

9

In addition to mining, Pocahontas County, West Virginia, was the site of a large paper mill.

51

Collectivity—Diane Gilliam Fisher They’re crying. Oftentimes it’s that poem. But the other thing that happens is that other people have stories, too, you know. And they’ll have a story similar to that, of a woman who gave and worked that way. So that is one of the poems that people respond to very strongly. Rubin: In the very first poem of Kettle Bottom, the narrator recounts a group of women identifying their dead sons, lovers, and husbands, insisting, “It is true that it is the men that goes in, but it is us/that carries the mine inside.”10 Who carries the mine inside now? Fisher: You know, I don’t feel very well authorized to speak to that since I’m not living down in those communities. But if I were going to answer I would say probably communities as a whole do their best to carry the weight of that life. Rubin: It does seem like a weight. What struck me about that poem is it is a bit of cloth that’s the identifying mark. And I have just learned, in fact, from your e-mail signature that you’re quilting. Fisher: Oh, yeah. Rubin: You’re working with the cloth that literally functions as a way to identify a miner killed by the industry. I’m wondering if you see a relationship there. You are also doing a piecing-together in Kettle Bottom. Fisher: Well, yes. The answer would be for sure to that. I have always, since I was a little girl, made things, sewing things and knitting things. Right now when I was waiting for you I have dishrag on my lap—the kind that you knit or crochet out of the cotton yarn. So, yes, I have always been doing that. And sometimes I feel that those two things work together and sometimes I feel that they don’t work together. Sometimes I get really close to what I think is true creativity in quilting. It ’s very new to me because I have always loved all the traditional quilts and the old quilts. But since I have had this shop on Etsy, I’ve been in contact with modern quilters.11 It feels very different, and it feels more exciting. I feel much more in touch with something truly creative with some of the new things that I’m trying. Also, I’m on my own financially and I don’t want to sign on to a university job because I’ve been there and done that and it didn’t work for me. And especially when I knew I wanted to be a poet, I knew it would not be a livable situation for me. So I’m trying to do a freelance, patchwork kind of life. And sometimes that makes me need to sew and knit and think a

10 11

“Explosion at Winco No. 9,” in Kettle Bottom, 7. Etsy, an online craft and vintage commerce site, was founded in 2005.

51

52

52

Creative Activism lot about numbers. It’s kind of like that’s my day job. And although I have moments when it feels very joyful to me, I also have moments when I would just really like to be let be so I could sit still and quiet and get into that place where the poems come from. Rubin: When did you start writing? Fisher: It was 1996. Rubin: Well, that’s very specific. Fisher: What happened was I was in a university job, and I was hugely unhappy. And something bad happened in the department. I’m sure you’re familiar with department things. I think it was the day that renewal letters came out. There were grown people crying in the hallway. Rubin: Where was this? Fisher: At Kent State.12 And I was just mad. I mean, my letter was fine, but I was beginning to understand that this was not a livable situation. There were going to be two-week-long workshops out of the English Department through the Wick Poetry Program.13 I went downstairs and I signed up for it. The first one was with Victoria Redel and the second one was with Li-Young Lee.14 And so I just kept doing the next thing. You know, I would take the workshops, and finally I went around to the Wick office. Maggie Anderson was running it then.15 I said, “Well, what would be the next thing that I would do?” And she would say, “Well, you take this class,” and I did. So I just kept doing the next thing. So it was kind of a midlife correction for me. Rubin: I like that notion. Fisher: Yes. Well, I spent my whole adult life trying to get that job. I have two daughters and I had them both while I was in graduate school. So graduate school took a really long time. Then I got the job. I never fully recovered from the first year. I think they handled me badly. Rubin: I want to pick up a little bit on what you said about the two different kinds of quilting: the more traditional quilting and then finding new kinds of quilting. You made me start to think more broadly about what constitutes

12

13

14

15

Kent State University, a residential public university in Kent, Ohio, was in the spotlight after Ohio Army National Guard fired at student anti–Vietnam War protesters, killing four and wounding nine. The shootings were the subject of a song by Neil Young, “Ohio,” recorded first by Crosby, Stills, and Nash in 1971. The Wick Poetry Program was established in 1984 with the goal of encouraging emerging poets through workshops, readings, scholarships, and publications. Fisher published a chapbook in the Program’s series. Victoria Redel is a poet and fiction writer from New York and is currently on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence University. Li-Young Lee, a multiple award winning poet born to Chinese parents in Indonesia, has lived in the United States since he was 5 years old. Poet Maggie Anderson, similarly to Fisher, has Appalachian ancestry. She retired in 2009.

53

Collectivity—Diane Gilliam Fisher the “folk” in the artistic context, or what people mean by it. I always get anxious when people start to talk about any kind of purity about anything. Is your understanding of “folk” something that is necessarily old, or past, or localized? Fisher: Well, I think that that word feels a little dangerous to me. Rubin: Oh, to me, too. Fisher: It’s mostly going to be associated with something like simplicity and lack of education, people that are unsophisticated. Rubin: I agree that it’s partly categorizing people as unsophisticated. I also think that the people somehow become the product for consumption. Fisher: Yeah, and a spectacle. But to get back to quilting—I always dabbled but it was when I got done with my dissertation that I started really trying to make finished quilts. What pleased me about them was they made me feel connected to my grandmother, whom I never knew, my mother’s mother. And the fabrics that I liked best are often reproduction fabrics.16 When you look at them, they are sweet and bright and cheerful. I would love them no matter what time period they belonged to. I feel like there is a continuum and I don’t think it’s broken by the newer patterns. In fact, I got really kind of excited a little while ago. I was moving some things—got the idea that if I changed out the books in my bookshelf in my front room where I spend most of my time, my life would change because I would be sitting with different books. Rubin: Sounds reasonable to me! Fisher: Yes. And so I was bringing up some quilting books and some poetry books because I keep things separated. I thought, what if I don’t separate them? What if I let them live beside each other on the shelf? At first I was not going to bring the traditional quilt patterns, squares and triangles and rectangles. And then I thought, no. Because one of the things that the modern quilts do is revise the old quilt patterns, much like revisionist myth making in poetry. And so I brought them up, and I thought that it’s very possible to honor whatever it is that is already established by interacting with it, not just repeating it but interacting with it, and bringing your own sensibility and your own truth and your own sort of lived experience to it, whether it’s a quilt top or a poem. I think that there is a continuum and I think that a person can move back and forth with allegiance to all.

16

An established quilting practice is to use reproductions of historical fabrics.

53

54

54

Creative Activism Rubin: Do you feel that our culture has a hard time accepting writing poetry as a kind of work? Similar work to quilting, for that matter? Fisher: If they didn’t my lifestyle would be very different. [Laughter] You know, it is very hard. If poetry writing were, in fact, a valued activity, then the people who tried to live by it would be sustained. And we are not. Rubin: Along those lines, it has always irritated me when I sense this idea that if poetry is a kind of work, then that somehow diminishes it. That it is supposed to come from some non-physical place where paying the bills doesn’t enter into it. Fisher: Yeah. That’s madness. Because how do you think you get to that nonphysical place? It’s work that requires choice. For me, this means that although I really need to get a part-time job, I’m not going to get one for at least a few more months because I’m going to really try to finish this book. So I take a hit. I pay to be able to do this work just the way everybody else gives their time for their job. And it’s the same with handmade items. You would be surprised. In my little Etsy shop, I’m on a team, which is one of the things that people do on that website. It hasn’t happened to me very much but I hear many complaints from fellow quilters on the site that they’ve put up a quilt for, let’s say, 600 dollars, which already is such a very low profit margin and maybe not even minimum wage. And people will email and say, “Will you take 300 dollars for that?” I think there is always a gift element in art. I give it as a gift because I got it as a gift and because it came through me shaped in a certain way. But that doesn’t mean that the makers of the thing should give away any more than anyone else. Rubin: No. And if they don’t, that doesn’t in any way diminish that work. Fisher: No. No! It sustains the work. It makes the work possible. If you want to support the arts, then support the artist. Rubin: In the case of something like Kettle Bottom, seeing art as a kind of work connects you to what you are writing about. Fisher: Yeah. You’re working. Your true self is working underground sometimes when you don’t even know.

55

Section 2

War and Peace

56

57

4

“It’s a Great American Tradition”: War and Industry According to John Sayles

Filmmaker John Sayles has always eschewed conformity, and as a result, it is impossible to put him into a directorial box the way we can with certain other directors: George Romero and zombies, John Waters and deliberate rudeness, John Ford and Westerns. Instead, Sayles has focused on deeply researched films that put out an array of profound historical arguments. Admirably, his starting point is having something to say, and his goal is making viewers think, rather than making tons of cash. Sayles has written and directed eighteen films, and they have an impressive (thrilling, in fact) range. He has looked back, making, for instance, a historical film about the West Virginia mine wars (Matewan). He has also looked forward, making an Afro-futurist film about enslavement and racism (The Brother from Another Planet). He has looked abroad, making a film about the Philippine American War (Amigo); he has also looked at home, making a film about American electoral politics (Silver City). He has employed magic and folklore, making a film about an Irish girl who encounters a group of selkies (The Secret of Roan Inish); he has also employed carefully focused realism, making a film about the effects of deindustrialization (Limbo). Sayles uses money he has earned by writing scripts for other people’s films (especially Roger Corman’s) to fund his own, prompting Gavin Smith to note that Sayles is unique in the way he works “both inside and outside the Hollywood system.”1 While his work has garnered a host of awards and award nominations, he has consistently chosen his artistic and analytical goals over pushing for mainstream success. Sayles was born in 1950; he was raised in and around the factory town Schenectady, New  York. He graduated from Hampshire College, but initially worked afterward as a day laborer, a meat packer, and a hospital orderly (which 1

Gavin, Introduction, Sayles on Sayles, ix.

58

58

Creative Activism

he discusses below). Before his first movie came out, he published two novels and a short story collection. In retrospect, it is clear that his fiction provides glimpses of what would come to characterize his filmic approach:  the wider political ramifications of characters’ point of view, for instance, and the lasting effects of historical events—even ones that are forgotten or deliberately suppressed. Sayles’s first two films feature characters looking inward, but connect this to external politics in a filmic version of the second-wave feminist acknowledgment that “the personal is political.” Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980) features a weekend gathering of countercultural friends in New Hampshire who reminisce about getting arrested together on their way to a demonstration in Washington DC. (In a few years there was speculation that it inspired the successful, mainstream movie The Big Chill, about a similar gathering, but the politics and aesthetics of the two films are entirely different.) Sayles’s next film, Lianna (1983), tells the story of a married woman who realizes that she is a lesbian. Over the course of his career—even when he takes up capital-P-Political subjects such as war, labor, urban renewal, political campaigns—Sayles continues to present the personalpolitical dynamic, pushing in both directions, captured quite profoundly in Casa de los Babys, a 2003 film about international adoption. In addition to the films Sayles has directed, he has written four novels, two short story collections, and a nonfiction book about making his 1987 mining film Matewan. He has written scripts for more than a dozen movies—again, funneling these earnings into his own films—and also for television. He has scripted three music videos for Bruce Springsteen. He has not, however, become any easier to categorize. And that has remained one of the most useful aspects of his work.

Selected filmography (as writer/director) Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980) Lianna (1983) Baby It’s You (1983) The Brother from Another Planet (1984) Matewan (1987) Eight Men Out (1988) City of Hope (1991) Passion Fish (1992) The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)

59

War and Industry—John Sayles

59

Lone Star (1996) Men with Guns (1997) Limbo (1999) Sunshine State (2002) Casa de los Babys (2003) Silver City (2004) Honeydripper (2007) Amigo (2010) Go for Sisters (2013) Rubin: Your 2010 film Amigo is set in the Philippines in 1900 and focuses on imperialism and people caught in the crosshairs of the Philippine-American War. I’m always reminding my students that historical art is about the time in which it was made, at least as much as it is about the time it portrays. What did you want audiences to think about? Sayles: First of all, I wanted to get a hit on this purposely erased bit of American history, erased even more in the Philippines than here. There is an overall lack of interest here, and we don’t look so good in the story: it’s only the third American movie ever made about that war. One is like a USAID propaganda piece.2 And then, my Filipino friends were saying, “We hardly had any movies about this and it’s only been in the last decade that we can talk about it because it was just erased and not taught in our schools.” Literally, Joel Torre, our lead, was taught in school that “the Spanish were there for 300 years, and then they sold us to the Americans for 20 million dollars.” No war. Even the war, when you read about it, it’s the missionaccomplished two-year war, not the one that stretched it until and beyond World War I, and just kept moving South into Mindanao. That was part of my motivation. Then, I was also interested in telling a story, an unusual war story, in which you really spend time with three different parties. You spend time with the American soldiers, the Philippine guerrillas, and the village people. They all have their agendas and their view of the world. The people in the village function as a kind of reiteration of my 1997 movie, Men with Guns. It doesn’t matter which men with guns: when they walk out of the woods, your life is not going to be good for a while.

2

The United States Agency for International Development, founded by John F.  Kennedy in 1961 with the stated goal of assisting developing countries, has long been acknowledged by a range of commentators as furthering the US interests more than aiding other countries.

60

60

Creative Activism Also, the audience gets to do something that none of the characters in the movie get to do: they get to read the subtitles. They get to know what the other side really thinks, instead of getting it through a sometimes flawed or even lying interpreter. Rubin: Huh, that’s very interesting . . . it changes the meaning when the audience isn’t pushed into one position. Sayles: That’s always a major thing. For instance, in my novel Some Time in the Sun, I spent a lot of time on what the press was saying and what the “actualities” were saying.3 It’s not just what happened that we know now. It’s also what people think is happening at that time. Like in America where some of senators say, “We not only have red states and blue states, we have red facts and blue facts.” People have a totally different belief system. Among those different groups in the movie, the Filipinos didn’t know that much about the Americans, and so they had a lot of misconceptions. They’re taking over the country and they don’t trust them. The same thing with the Americans: “amigos” is one of the maybe ten words they have in common, because some of the soldiers have been down in the border, the Mexican border. I was interested in soldiers who didn’t really know why they were there. They were volunteers, not drafted. They were state volunteers. In the first year of that conflict, there were state volunteers who had not heard of the Philippines when they volunteered. They literally volunteered to help. Some of them wanted glory and to be warriors and all that stuff, but some of them really volunteered to help the poor Cuban people throw off the yoke of Spanish oppression. And then they end up in the Philippines: “What are we doing here? Why are we fighting these people? I thought this was their country. I thought we’re supposed to kick the Spanish out and then, go home and say ‘You’re welcome’ when they said, ‘Thank you.’ Why are we fighting?” There was some of that feeling about Vietnam and I’m sure in wars throughout the world and forever, not just ours. Rubin: I felt like you put Vietnam a little bit into it with the “hearts and minds” talk.4 Sayles: Well, yeah. I kept running into that one when I was doing my research for Men with Guns, and I also thought it had been coined during the

3

4

An “actuality film” is different from a documentary in that while it is not fictional, it does not stitch its content into a larger or organized argument. During the Vietnam War, the US government used the phrase to refer to its strategy of to win popular support over the Liberation Army of South Vietnam, most known in the United States as the Viet Cong.

61

War and Industry—John Sayles

61

Vietnam War, but it actually goes back to the Bible. Teddy Roosevelt said it about the Philippines. It’s not an anachronism. It’s actually something that I kept running into. So I said, okay, this is a repeating concept, a benevolent assimilation, that had its own version during Vietnam. What do they call it? The Hamlet Problem?5 The pacification that means killing anything that is out after her? They always have euphemisms for the approach of “Okay, we’re going to do the friendly thing first and then, we’re just going to start killing people.” You sell it to your people. You always had to sell a war and I was interested in that. Rubin: How are the wars we’re fighting now being sold? Sayles: One of the ways that they’re trying not to have to sell them is by keeping them very small, so that it’s more like a very distant police action. They did not have the draft for two reasons, I think. One is they would’ve had to really sell it and that’s tough. The other thing was they would’ve had to draft girls. Somebody would’ve said, “How come my son has to go and his daughter doesn’t have to go?” As gung-ho our military is, they were a little queasy about that—even the Democrats might be. They are also queasy about a draft because those people are harder to work with and not necessarily “theirs.” All my father’s reminiscing since World War II was, “Yeah, it’s a good thing we were there fighting the Nazis and the stupid, fucking army, the stupid, fucking people who ran it.” It’s a great American tradition, complaining about the army, whereas if you get an elite cadre of guys who signed up, it’s very different. The volunteers in the case of the Philippine war were really hybrid. They had volunteered, but they often said, “We’ll only volunteer if we get to elect our officer and we stay in our group for our little part of our stay, and we don’t have to fight with those people. We certainly do not have to fight with those black groups.” The idea that everybody knows that war is a good idea and we’re going to go fight, this is not true. In the ancient wars half the people were mercenaries. The Swiss were noted warriors because they just always did it for money, for whoever’s paying the highest; sometimes, in the middle of battles, they would switch hands, which happens in Pakistan and Afghanistan up to this day. Rubin: Are you using religion as a vehicle in Amigo? One guy’s a carpenter and one guy’s a shepherd.6 5

6

“Hamlet problem” refers to the title character’s indecision about taking revenge for his father’s death—which eventually leads to Hamlet being killed. In the Bible Jesus is referred to as both shepherd (Jn 10:11) and carpenter (Mk 6:3).

62

62

Creative Activism Sayles: Actually those weren’t direct references. I was interested more in the way that the church plays two roles: it is a power system and it is a system of spiritual belief. So the leader of the guerrillas is a seminary student. José Rizal, who is like the José Martí of the Philippines, is their big national hero.7 He got radicalized through his brother, a seminary student. Then in about 1888, the Spanish government in the Philippines, with the urging of the Arsobispo, who had more power than even the governors then, they garroted three of their own priests for advocating that Filipinos could become priests.8 That ’s when they started saying, “No. This is going to have to be a revolution. Not reform.” Whenever they bring out a reform by the governor, the bishop gets kicked out within a year. Then, what happened in the Philippines is that they began to be called “Religious Corporations,” which I think is a great term. Rubin: That’s incredibly efficient. That leads really well into talking about Casa de los Babys, which takes up another kind of American international presence and corporation: international adoption, a more literal kind of paternalism or maternalism. I guess I should say that while the film is not unsympathetic to the process, it does sort of interrupt a kind of piety. Sayles: I get some interesting reactions from that film, especially from mothers who had just adopted kids overseas and were very uncomfortable about it. Rubin: Well, being uncomfortable is not always bad. Sayles: No. Also, I think even if you haven’t gone for nine months of pregnancy, when you’re adopting a kid, truly, all those defenses, all those defendingyour-kid mechanisms come into play in both men and women. What was interesting about the reaction in the States though—I don’t really read reviews, but people tell me about them. They said, “Well, what do you say about the half of it that’s about the people in the country, because it’s never mentioned?” Rubin: It’s what? Never mentioned in the reviews? Sayles: Never mentioned, not one of the people’s names, not one of the actor’s names. Yeah. When we made City of Hope, the company that was releasing it put out a trailer. We watched the trailer and I said, “There’s not a black person in the trailer.”

7

8

José Marti (1953–95) was a prominent figure in Cuba’s movement for independence from Spanish colonizers; he was also a poet and essayist. (Most famously, one of his poems was adapted into the song “Guantanamera.”) José Rizal was a key writer and theorizer in the Filipino independence movement who was executed by the Spanish colonial government for rebellion. “Arsobispo” is Tagalog for “archbishop.”

63

War and Industry—John Sayles

63

Rubin: That is a stunning glimpse of the separation between the film itself and the marketing of the film. Sayles: It’s certainly a way of seeing. I think the minute subtitles come on, some people—including some reviewers—just turn it off. I have that problem with italics in books. When a book goes into italics, I kind of skip through it. So, I’m careful about using italics myself. Most of the reaction in this country was just about those women waiting to adopt. People kind of ignored the other side of that dynamic, which is people saying, “So, what does this say about our country?” Before I wrote the script, I got the adoption rules from all the relevant countries. In the six months that I was planning it, three of them just sent a message of “No more adoptions,” usually because of an embarrassment. In two cases, it was somebody basically selling babies that was the embarrassment. In the third case, it was a generalized, “You know what? A new regime came in. It’s embarrassing for our country.” Rubin: Which three countries? I know with Russia, there was something where somebody sent a kid back alone on a plane.9 Sayles: Yeah, I think at that time, one of them was a South American country, and one was an African country. I think the other one might’ve been Romania. But it is, you know, people don’t get to come here and adopt our kids. Rubin: No. International adoption is really complicated politically. Sayles: I know a lot of people who’ve done it and have great kids. It turned out to be a great thing. Rubin: Yeah, it can turn out really well. That’s not what I’m talking about. Sayles: Very often, I don’t have the answer to these things. I just want to get them out. Rubin: Oh, absolutely. Raising questions is at least as important of an artistic role as answering questions. Sayles: In that movie, I wanted to spend a lot of time with these women. Each of them has her own story. Another part of it was about how the people in the country felt about this. Some are more militantly political, and for some of them it’s very personal—like Vanessa Martinez’s character. She plays the maid who gave a baby up and can only wish her kid got a great mother. Then, there are kids on the street who are sniffing glue and paint, and

9

In 2010, a 7-year-old boy was placed alone on a plane by his adopted family with a note that he had psychological issues. Russian president Dmitri Medvedev referred to this act as “monstrous” and Russia threatened to end American adoptions. Ultimately, the adoptive family was ordered to pay 150,000 dollars in child support.

64

64

Creative Activism nobody in that country is taking them. Even in Mexico, where we shot the film, which has good state-run orphanages compared to most of the world orphanages, there’s a lot of kids on the street—when they’re 13, 14 years old, and a lot of them are sniffing paint. There’s a lot of ways to see the international adoption issue. If you only see it from one way, you’re leaving something out. Rubin: No. That’s what I really liked about the different languages because this is literally true, but not just literally true. Sayles: Yeah. I was able to do that, but as I said, one of the problems with having subtitles in an American movie is that less than 2 percent of moviegoing in America is to the movies with subtitles. You’re putting a limit on what your movie can do. In Casa de los Babys, the Irish girl and the maid are almost the same person in some ways. The Irish girl has been a maid. They would be probably the best friends of all those people we meet in the movie if they could speak to each other. But they can’t and so they do this kind of parallel thing that’s emotional. But the facts don’t necessarily translate, and the audience gets to see the facts. They have an emotional reaction that neither of the characters can have. You can’t convey that if you have just people speaking in accents or pretend the people speaking in English without an accent are speaking different languages. It’s a problem in movie-making. I wrote a thing about Sasha Litvinenko, who was the KGB guy who was poisoned in Britain.10 It’s basically about Putin and the oligarchs. One of the problems, truly, is that when it starts, 60 percent of it would be in Russian. It moves to London and a little bit more of it is in English, but they can’t raise the money if it’s not in English. Instead, you have to have guys with accents. Rubin: I hate that. Sayles: It kind of drives me crazy, but people use it. It’s a convention that we accept. Rubin: In the film, you portray someone who has an abortion, and that’s rather rare. I was trying to think of the other movies that showed it; I came up with a few, including Fast Times at Ridgemont High (another New Jersey icon). And I can’t help remembering that in Knocked Up, a character says “shmamortion” because he won’t even say the word “abortion.”11

10

11

Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, who worked for the Soviet and Russian secret service, fled to the United Kingdom after publically accusing his superiors of ordering assassinations. Although he received asylum there, he died of poisoning by radioactive polonium 210 in 2006. A public investigation in the United Kingdom concluded that his assassination was likely to have been approved by Vladimir Putin. Fast Times at Ridgemont High was written by Cameron Crowe after he went undercover as a high school student; the movie opened in 1982.

65

War and Industry—John Sayles

65

Sayles: It’s a fact of life. I have a lot of actor friends who worked in soap operas. They are always defending soap operas: “We deal with this, we deal with that.” I asked, “Well, has anybody ever had an abortion yet?”12 One of the other things that I wanted to deal with in Casa is that there are a lot of movies about groups of men—there are sports movies, army movies, workplace movies where it’s mostly guys. There are very few movies about groups of women. I always just picture this bunch of potential mothers, because usually, the father is not free to go. In the States, they have a residency requirement that husbands visit on the weekends and then, all these babies. There’s one person who’s trying to match them up or even not. Sometimes, it’s just who’s available. I heard a story that really upset some of the mothers of Chinese kids: a friend of mine adopted a little Chinese girl. On the plane, she met this other woman in their group who went to leave with the other groups on the plane. She said, “Oh, she’s so cute.” The woman said, “She’s not the one in the picture, but I’m not giving her back.” I asked somebody involved with the adoption agency who does that. He said, “Well, the Chinese, they do have a sense of embarrassment and probably what happened is that the kid who was in the picture started showing signs of birth defects or mental problems, or a retardation of some sort. They weren’t going to have that be in the role that they were giving away bad merchandise.” That kid is in an institution at China now and they just said, “Well, we’ll get him out of here. Give her that one.” Rubin: I am sitting here brought up short because what you just said referred to an adopted baby as a “piece of merchandise.” Yet it’s true: adoption is an industry. Sayles: It is an industry, yeah. Rubin: You have focused quite a bit on industrial realities and labor in numerous films: Matewan, Amigo, City of Hope, Sunshine Sate, Limbo, Passion Fish . . . And I don’t just mean showing people working, but focusing on labor as such: who does which labor, and who gets the big payoff, for instance. What brought you to this focus? Sayles: It’s a central way that society has defined itself. A great quote from Studs Terkel’s book Working is, “What else do you do for eight hours a day except sleep?”13 Some of it is evolution and some of it is rigging. There was a point

12

13

Daytime television’s first portrayal of a legal abortion was in 1973, in the soap opera All My Children. Groundbreaking Pulitzer Prize–winning oral historian and radio broadcaster Studs Terkel published Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do in 1974.

66

66

Creative Activism in the late 1960s or early 1970s when forklift operators and crane guys, guys who had technical skills, were hitting really big money through their union, but also through their specialty. The people who just had a law degree were doing fine but they weren’t making big money. To me, the 1980s was about a class—a kind of entrepreneurial, “we serve the masters” class—saying, “This is way wrong. These people are making way too much money. They didn’t have to sit through graduate school. They didn’t do well in school. I deserve more than they did.” Whether it was conscious or not, in court case after court case, in things that banks started doing, in things that municipalities started doing, there was this restructuring during this time of where the wealth went. Rubin: This happened in the auto industry, too. Sayles: Yeah, exactly. I remember when the movie Flashdance came out; my reaction was, “I don’t know anybody who would give up a union job as a welder to be in Pittsburgh Ballet even if they want to be a ballet dancer.”14 Then, being a union welder ended up as not such a great thing. Maybe the pension got attacked, the work started to disappear. Rubin: On television, there really hasn’t been much representation of working-class jobs. When they do appear, it’s mostly in cartoons (The Simpsons, Family Guy, and so on).15 Sayles: Yeah, or you don’t see the characters much actually on the jobs. When I was a kid, there was a series called The Life of Riley, with William Bendix in the lead role.16 He was riveter. They just would show him riveting every once in a while, but you knew it was a lunch-pail job. Jackie Gleason was a bus driver, but you never saw him on the bus. It was simple one-set show.17 You got a feeling these are working-class people and not making very much money. Rubin: There were lots of indications of that: what they wore, what they ate, where they lived. Sayles: In Roseanne, you didn’t usually see her at work.18 They did a little bit more over there. Both her character and the husband had various low-level jobs, to get by. But it’s rare, other than cops and hospital workers—and in

14

15

16

17 18

Flashdance, which was released in 1983, was directed by Adrian Lyne. It received negative reviews but was a big box office success. The Simpsons was created by Matt Groening first as a series of satirical animated shorts and then as a prime-time show in 1989; the father of the family works in a nuclear power plant and the mother stays at home. Family Guy, created by Seth MacFarlane, debuted in 1999; the father is a blue-collar worker and the mother also stays at home. The Life of Riley began as a radio show in 1944, was adapted into a feature film in 1949, and ran as a television show from 1949 to 1958. Jackie Gleason played a bus driver in the television show The Honeymooners (1955–56). The situation comedy Roseanne, starring Roseanne Barr, ran from 1988 to 1997.

67

War and Industry—John Sayles

67

hospitals they’re usually dealing with nurses and doctors, not with the lower level staff who are really custodial ones, or earning minimum wage like the custodians, which I did when I was an orderly. Also, now it’s expensive to show a factory. There aren’t that many factories anymore. Rubin: Not here in the United States, anyway. Sayles: Yeah. Now, what if you were setting things at a Starbucks, or places like that? Rubin: That would be an interesting shift to the service economy. Sayles: How do we make that story, or make that part of the story? I adapted Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed for Showtime.19 They never made it, but I thought it would’ve been a great, little TV movie. Do you know what they finally wanted to do? They said, “What if we made her more like Ann Coulter, and so then she had a change in her attitude?”20 Rubin: As if Ann Coulter would go undercover as a domestic worker! In Matewan, mining emerges as a deeply questionable industry. In fact, it’s amazing how many coal mines had incidents that came to be described as “war” or “massacre.”21 Did you track any of the 2011 Blair Mountain march activities?22 Sayles: A little bit, yeah. Rubin: How did that strike you as a follow-up to Matewan? Sayles: It’s reached, because it’s happened in other parts of West Virginia and Kentucky when they just taken the top of off these mountains. Rubin: Mountain-top removal is horrifying. Sayles: It just happened to have reached Blair Mountain now, which has always been evil. It was evil when we were making Matewan, and it’s evil now.

19

20

21

22

In Nickled and Dimed:  On (Not) Getting By in America, Ehrenreich takes low-paying serviceindustry jobs, finds inexpensive housing, and writes up her experiences on the job and living on those earnings. Ann Coulter is a Christian conservative author and political commentator who opposes same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and amnesty for undocumented workers. Since 2006, she has been a contributor to the anti-immigration website VDARE, which is associated with white supremacy and the alt-right. Some examples, besides the Mingo County Mine Wars portrayed in Matewan, are the Colorado Coalfield War (1913–14), which included the Ludlow Massacre; the Columbine Mine Massacre; the Herrin Massacre (1922); the Harlan County War (1931–39); and the Illinois Mine Wars (1898–1900). In the summer of 2011, a march was organized to trace the fifty-mile path of the striking miners who were demanding the release of imprisoned miners and the end of martial law.

68

69

5

“Revolution by Tricks and Clowning”: Trips According to Maxine Hong Kingston

Since her first book was published in 1975, writer Maxine Hong Kingston has been showered with a range of awards.1 She has also, just as immediately, had critics scrambling to figure out how to categorize her work and reaching for nuanced terms such as “creative nonfiction” to do so. The Modern Language Association named her first book, The Woman Warrior, published in 1976, the most commonly taught book in US universities. Set in China and the United States, that book blends autobiography with folk tales, approaching both with a writerly license. The way Kingston’s work has flowed over boundaries has thrilled some and vexed others. Quite usefully, it has hosted a lively debate over the responsibility of the writer. Kingston has been criticized, for instance, by writer and playwright Frank Chin—who, together with Jeffrey Paul Chan, came up with term “racist love”—for tarnishing “authenticity.” But trickster figures can’t be pinned down, or frozen in time, or taken at face value: they are, in fact, tricksters! Indeed, there are many examples of writers identifying with or presenting trickster figures (from folklore to their own creations) to fool the readers. While Chin claims Kingston is making the trickster figure “more palatable,” Kingston is hinting, “Hey, reader, I’m tricking you.” Kingston uses these figures in many ways to show the complexities of the writer. Nonetheless, Kingston shares some of Chin’s distaste at certain exoticizing reviews of her books that, while positive, slide into “mysterious Oriental” stereotypes. For example, in an essay she wrote in a collection titled Asian and 1

Some examples are the General Nonfiction Award: National Book Critics Circle for The Woman Warrior:  Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts in 1976; the National Book Award in 1981 for Non-fiction for China Men; the PEN West Award in fiction for Tripmaster Monkey:  His Fake Book in 1999; the National Endowment for the Arts Writers Award in 1982 and 1997; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Asian American Literary Awards in 2006; and the National Medal of the Arts in 2013, among numerous others.

70

70

Creative Activism

Western Writers in Dialogue:  New Cultural Identities, she quotes a review by Barbara Burdick in the Peninsula Herald that states, “No other people have remained so mysterious to Westerners as the inscrutable Chinese. Even the word China brings to mind ancient rituals, exotic teas, superstitions, silks, and firebreathing dragons.” Kingston admits to being unsettled by this sort of attention, acknowledging, “When reading most of the reviews and critical analyses of The Woman Warrior, I have two reactions: I want to pat those critics on their backs, and I also giggle helplessly, shaking my head. (Helpless giggles turn less frequently into sobs as one gets older.)” She goes on to say that “they praise the wrong things.” In her book-length study of Kingston, Helena Grice introduces her (on the first page of her book, and on the blurb on the cover) as “one of the most popular—and controversial—writers in the Asian American literary tradition.”2 Another novel of Kingston’s, Tripmaster Monkey:  His Fake Book (1989), makes even more clear how the writer is a useful trickster. The main character is named Whittman Ah Sing—invoking, of course, poet Walt Whitman and his poem “Song of Myself,” in which he declares, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” But the reference to Whitman is only one of numerous cultural references that shape the book, which takes place during the Vietnam War and involves the main character’s attempts to avoid the draft. Thus, Kingston treats movement between the United States and Asia in multiple and complicated ways: willing and unwilling, for the sake of life and for the sake of death. (Of course, the word “tripmaster” and the surrealist style of the book also invoke the use of psychedelics.) Questions of war are threaded through some forty years of Kingston’s writing. But engagement with war and its many social costs would come to define projects in addition to her own books. Since 1993 Kingston has been working extensively with veterans, first by using prize money she received to organize writing workshops for Vietnam veterans that focused on war and peace, trauma and recovery, and, sometimes, the definition of “writer.” Ultimately, she gathered the stories of veterans of Americans wars from World War II forward into a collection called Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006). She also taught at UC-Berkeley, where she is now a professor emerita. Kingston was born in 1940 in Stockton, California, to immigrant parents; two of her seven siblings were born in China. A memoir she published in 2011, 2

Grice, Maxine Hong Kingston.

71

Trips—Maxine Hong Kingston

71

I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (the title is taken from Henry David Thoreau), continues her useful strategy of refusing to be confined by genre; the story is told through free verse, and invokes—and continues the stories of—characters from her earlier books. As with her frequent inclusion of trickster figures, Kingston demonstrates again the dead seriousness of play.

Selected bibliography The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) China Men (1980) Hawai’i One Summer (1987) Through the Black Curtain (1987) Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) To Be the Poet (2002) The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (2006) I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (2011) Rubin: What are you in town for? Kingston: Well, I just gave a talk at the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences.3 And I spoke in memory of Grace Paley.4 Rubin: That’s really wonderful. I remember one of the times when she was here at the Joiner. I had lunch with her. And because she was Grace she wanted to just eat in the student cafeteria. So we were standing there with our trays and waiting for our sandwiches. And all of a sudden I became aware that I was petting her. Kingston: Oh. Oh, yes. Rubin: I couldn’t stop myself. I just loved her so much. She took it all completely in stride. Kingston: It’s more as if she were petting you already.

3

4

The William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences was founded at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 1982, and was named after the African American veteran who served as the university’s first director of Veterans Affairs. (Joiner subsequently died in 1981 from liver cancer associated with his exposure to Agent Orange.) The Institute’s activities include sponsoring research and creative projects, public programming, and international exchanges with scholars, artists, and educators. Grace Paley (1922–2007) was a writer, poet, and peace activist, perhaps best known for her connected short stories and self-reflective, shifting narrative voice.

72

72

Creative Activism Rubin: Yes. Exactly. That was the given. Kingston: I remember Susan Sontag saying that when she sees Grace, she just wants to cuddle up in her lap.5 Rubin: I have that feeling when I read her. Do you imagine a conversation between your writing and Grace Paley’s writing? Kingston: There is some, because there were real conversations in our real lives. And then, of course, you try to bring it back to what you are writing. Her voice—it was just so amazing. There was so much warmth and love and strength. And also that New York Jewish accent. That was so good. And her humor, of course. Rubin: Really funny—funny in the everyday. So you said you gave your talk and it was sponsored by the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequence. You could look at your career in terms of war running through it. Take Woman Warrior—you must have written at least parts of it while the Vietnam War was happening. Tripmaster Monkey is largely about it. Where has it gone from there? Kingston: Well, I feel that in real life it’s been constant war. I remember very clearly as a girl seeing my cousins come and go in uniform as they were heading toward Europe of the Pacific in World War II. And it’s never been over. It’s constant. And then writing The Woman Warrior, my first book, I could see that war did not just begin in my consciousness but going back in history. And so I think all my work has been trying to answer the question, how can I stop this? So —China Men ends with the chapter, “My Brother in Vietnam.” And then Tripmaster Monkey is about how you can you avoid the draft. From there we get to The Fifth Book of Peace. And that book is based on the Chinese myth that long ago there were books on how to end war. And I go on a quest to find those books, to find that they are lost. Probably all those library burnings throughout Chinese history, right down to modern times when the Chinese are burning the temples in Tibet, which are libraries.6 And I think, oh, those books, the lost books of peace. They were lost somewhere in there. And then I thought, well, it behooves me to write the next one. So I was writing a fiction, trying to find characters who knew how to bring peace in the middle of conflict. I was working on

5 6

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was an influential cultural critic and educator. In particular, there was an extensive library-burning during the Quin dynasty, when the emperor Qin Shi Huang acted upon the suggestion of his chancellor, Li Shi, that all previously written historical books were worthless. See Jared Diamond, Germs, Guns, and Steel (1999).

73

Trips—Maxine Hong Kingston

73

that for two years. And then we had one of those big, California forest, urban fires.7 So I lost that book. And then—after destruction, how do you create again? And it becomes a big question. Not just how do you write a book again but what happens when a city or society or a race has been destroyed, how do we create again? So there is the idea of how to prevent war but also how to begin a peaceful society. And so that turned into a book where I gather people who know about war, which is veterans. And we spoke together, meditated together, wrote together. And then we came out with—I think—a literature of peace. Rubin: How are you defining “veteran” here? Kingston: You know, at first veteran was just anybody who had been in a war. But from the very beginning we thought we must not just have these solitary veterans come in. They must come with somebody who is there to support a person, so veterans and their family came. But then, widows came. And then the children of veterans, of soldiers who died. Rubin: Grown children? Kingston: Yes, grown children. And after that—it was about twenty years after the Vietnam War when, all of a sudden, the women vets, they all came together. And they were not soldiers. A lot of them were not soldiers. They were Red Cross. They were supporting people in Vietnam. But they insisted that the definition of “veteran” be larger. And then another kind of person came. And I never thought that they were veterans but they considered themselves veterans. These are people who had survived gang warfare—in Oakland, San Francisco, Redwood City, California cities. One gang member whose entire gang was killed, just like people whose entire platoon was killed. So they come in. Rubin: You know, I was just talking with my class about a song by Ice Cube about gang members, called “Ghetto Vet.”8 He is definitely taking on that word. Kingston: Oh, so they have done it themselves. They have called themselves vets. But the one kind of person who came that changed, that really broadened the idea of “veteran” is peace activists. So here were people, peace demonstrators, people who were jailed for peace. People who were not in a war and did not want the war to be happening. And, also, with the

7

8

Kingston lost her home and the only copy of a manuscript of her new novel, titled The Fourth Book of Peace, in 1991. She addresses the fire and the grief it caused in The Fifth Book of Peace. “Ghetto Vet” is on Ice Cube’s 1998 solo album, War & Peace Vol. 1.

74

74

Creative Activism reputation that they, the peace activists, had spat on veterans.9 And so these people came in. And soon after that Grace Paley was with us, too. And so the idea of who was a vet expanded to include people who were not wanting anybody to be soldiers. So when we gathered the book of our writings, I thought that the title I came up with said it all, said it a lot about who’s a vet: Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace. Rubin: And all of these people together wrote the collection? Kingston: Yes. Rubin: How was it helpful to tell the stories? Kingston: Oh, you know, storytelling, story-writing is miraculous because the very shape of form or story takes a person through a way of consciousness, a way creating and recreating the self and recreating history, finding meaning to the terrible things that have happened to our lives. In a story we are trying to understand. We’re trying to understand the situation, human nature, ourselves, our enemy, all the characters that are in our lives. The shape of the story is that it becomes more and more dramatic as we arrive at great blowout conflict. And then we write through that conflict and write it thoroughly. And then the story takes us to resolution and reconciliation. And then when that happens we understand our history. We have transformed what has happened. And also, we transform ourselves. And let’s hope that when the story is really good, then a change will also happen in the reader. Rubin: I think so. I can’t help thinking now of the opening of The Woman Warrior: “You must not tell anyone.” And then later in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved she writes, “This was not a story to pass on.” It seems that, in particular, stories that are forbidden in some way might be really, really worth telling for the sake of that transformation that you speak of. What moved you the most about working on Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace? Kingston: Well, I also remember in Toni Morrison, “Quiet as it’s kept.”10 And in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, “I can’t tell anyone but you,

9

10

The “spitting on returning vets” story is still alive, despite its veracity having been called into question. Two books that address this matter are Jerry Lembecke’s The Spitting Image:  Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (2000) and H. Bruce Franklin’s Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (2001). Lembecke is a Vietnam veteran, and Franklin was fired from Stanford in 1971 for supposedly inciting a riot at an anti-war protest on campus. Toni Morrison uses this phrase to capture the need to confront unspoken truths in three of her novels: The Bluest Eye (1970), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1997). Further, the phrase has been used as the title of two books about her work’s role in confronting secrecy and shame, by J.  Brooks Bouson in 2000 and by Whitney Renee Smith in 2011.

75

Trips—Maxine Hong Kingston

75

God.”11 All of these writers are beginning their work by confronting the silence that we put on ourselves and also the silence from when our society says, “These are terrible things. Don’t tell.” You would be amazed at how many people from all these different wars—we hear from their wives and children, “Oh, yeah. My father was in the World War II,” or “He was in some camp,” or something, “but he never talks about it. We don’t know anything about it.” This is the common way of coming back from a war. I think that they are trying to spare the rest of us. They went through such suffering. You don’t want to break that terrible news to your children. So the veterans in their workshop and the writers of these books that begin with the silence— what we are doing is breaking through the taboo that we are working with forbidden material. I have encouraged the veterans that, you know, “You have been through hell. It’s now your duty to let the rest of us know what that was so that we can learn to not have that happen to the rest of us.” So I think it is just a joyful miracle to see all, so many mute and silenced people write and read and listen to one another’s stories. As a writer and as a writing teacher, I also see something that may be happening in these silent people. Some great adventures just happen to them. Big emotions, great themes. Rubin: In a course I teach, students write a three-generation family history. They are always startled that parents or grandparents who are veterans mostly will not talk about their time there. It reveals something that startles them about the telling of history, of course—but also about their family member’s experiences both in the war and after. Kingston: They hold it in. And they hold it in for twenty years. And then, all of a sudden, somebody, me, gives them permission, “Oh, come on. Just tell it. Just write it down. Just tell it.” It’s been gestating for twenty years but somehow I know that the subconscious is already arranging that story into some wonderful form, and even finding the right words for it. And so these whole stories and poems come out. I am amazed at the quality of the first draft. It seems so complete. Rubin: Because there have been all these internal drafts. Kingston: Yes! Yes. And this is something I can’t do. It takes me twelve drafts for anything, even a short essay. Rubin: But you do work on things a long time.

11

Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Color Purple (1982) opens with rape and the line, “You better not tell nobody but God.”

76

76

Creative Activism Kingston: Hm-hmm. I do take a long time. Rubin: So that gestating that you talked about still pays off. Kingston: Yeah. Oh, here’s a model that I like to give to the veterans. Look at Odysseus, coming home—going to Troy and then destroying Troy and then coming home. It took twenty years. It took forever to get back home. And all along the way, whenever he met anybody, he would tell his story. He would tell it again and again. And then, the last draft is when he gets home to Penelope, his wife. And then he tells her the whole thing again.12 And I think the ability to come home from war goes along with the ability to tell the story. Rubin: I’m going to use what you just said to pivot a little bit since you talked about using Odysseus as a model. You use folklore quite a bit in your own writing. In particular, why is the trickster figure important to you? Kingston: Oh, I think part of it was the fun of hearing the monkey stories when I was a kid.13 I could hear them as a bedtime story. I just want to bring that fun into the writing. But then, during the 1960s, protesting the war in Vietnam, there was a whole movement epitomized by Abbie Hoffman, that you could clown your way—14 Rubin: —to social change. Kingston: Yes. The revolution can be done by tricks and by clowning. And nonviolence is not just passively sitting there. Maybe if you make them laugh, they won’t fight. And so there are the costumes and the tricking of people into a different way of thinking. Rubin: Sounds like my teaching, actually. Why do you think some critics got so hung up on the question of authenticity in these characters you use? Because it seems to me if you’re talking about looking for an “authentic” version of a trickster, then you sort of deserve what you get. In the Southern states, there is definitely this tradition: people will play you in such a deadpan way that you don’t know you’ve been had. They’ll act like some kind of stereotypical Southerner. And you’ll walk away and maybe later on you will figure out you’ve been insulted or tricked.

12

13

14

The journey of Odysseus, the king of Ithaca in Greek legends, was the hero of Homer’s oral poem The Odyssey. She also invokes the Odyssey in her own novel Tripmaster Monkey, which makes numerous references to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, first published in serial form in 1918–20. Joyce’s novel is based on Homer. Sun Wukong, frequently called the Monkey King, appears in a large and historically extensive body of Chinese folklore. Abbie Hoffman was a 1960s–1970s activist, anarchist, and cofounder of the Youth International Party, known as the Yippies. He was prominent for his role in the anti-war protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, and his subsequent arrest.

77

Trips—Maxine Hong Kingston Or maybe you won’t ever realize it. But I’ve often wondered about that question of your trickster figures. Why do you think the question of authenticity is something that gets people so worked up? About Woman Warrior but not only . . . Kingston: Well, one way is a lot of the myths and legend that I work with come through talk story. But here I am writing it down. And when you write things down it’s fixed in one version. But when you tell them, there are so many different versions. Then we have a society now—well how are you going to document something? It’s “authentic” if you can document it. Well, you can’t document the oral stories. They change constantly. The trickster is a shapeshifter. The trickster changes and changes. And then when you come to that word, “change”—change is revolution. So I think when people want authenticity, they want something to stay put somehow. It’s got to be one truth. Rubin: And a representative truth. Kingston: Yes. But we want the truth that everything changes. “True” itself changes. Everything changes. Rubin: The changeability has made it very interesting to try to describe your writing. Because if I were to say what kind of work you do, I would have to say, “Well, poetry and folklore and nonfiction and fiction and memoir and essay,” and I’m probably leaving out something. And it’s all kind of blended together anyway. What do you think is the artistic payoff of the fluidity? Kingston: Oh, breaking through barriers, breaking through categorizing that insists fiction is not true and nonfiction is authentic and true. What do you do with dreams? What do you do with wishes and hopes? And how can you tell a story in which miracles happen? And then do you have to categorize that as a fiction? So what I’m doing is making the border between fiction and nonfiction very wide so that we can include all kinds of things that cannot be explained in ways that can be documented. Rubin: To think more literally about what you just said about making the border really, really wide so we can inhabit it, perhaps, reminds me of a call you’ve made recently for writers to address the global. Kingston: Oh, yes. Yes. Oh, I remember saying that when I was noticing that every city that I go to throughout the world, there are people from everywhere else. And surely a good story nowadays has to include people interacting—and they have different accents and different languages and different looks and different customs. And yet they are all in one story. So I was thinking of the global novel vis-à-vis the goal after World War II, which was the great American novel. So everybody has been working on the great American novel for decades.

77

78

78

Creative Activism I ’ve been thinking what the world needs right now, the authentic story of who we are now, is the global novel. Rubin: If I were to give a title to our conversation now I would like it to be “All in One Story.” Kingston: Oh, that’s good. Good.

79

6

“Part of My Being”: Politics and Poetics According to Keorapetse Kgositsile

Keorapetse Kgositsile is the poet laureate of South Africa.1 Born in Johannesburg in 1938, he came of age as an anti-apartheid activist with the African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912 with the aim of ending apartheid. Kgositsile was a founding member of ANC’s Department of Education and its Department of Arts and Culture. In 1961, at age 23 and under great pressure from the apartheid government, he left South Africa at the urging of the liberation movement. Kgositsile would end up remaining in exile for twenty-nine years. He spent some of these years in the United States, where he taught and studied creative writing and literature at a number of universities. Of that time he commented, “I spent a lot of time in the library trying to read as much black literature as I  could lay my hands on.”2 This international approach to both political and artistic alliance became a hallmark of his poetry, which is written in a wide range of registers from the political to the personal, from manifesto to confessional. His first book of poetry, Spirits Unchained, was published in 1969 by Detroit’s Broadside Press, a pioneering publisher founded by the significant African American poet and anthologizer Dudley Randall. This first book was followed by nine other collections, published both in the United States and in South Africa. Kgositsile’s poetry is striking for its range of references: to fighters in African and African American liberation movements (such as Patrice Lumumba and Malcolm X), to African American musicians (such as Nina Simone and Otis Redding), to poets from around the world (such as Pablo Neruda and Vladimir Mayakovsky), to people from his past. He also deftly combines different registers in his work, blending “high” poetic diction with colloquialisms, soulful language with rudeness. Even the range of people he dedicates particular poems to indicates his

1 2

Kgositsile died on January 3, 2017, while this book was in production. Rowell, “ ‘With Bloodstains to Testify’: An Interview with Keorapetse Kgositsile,” 23.

80

80

Creative Activism

vision of international camaraderie and the way he considers art to be part of a conversation. In an introduction he wrote to the historically significant anthology Black Arts:  An Anthology of Black Creations, Kgositsile muses, “One looks forward to a period when a majority of these young poets abandon mannerism and get involved in direct community action; when the state of black desire becomes an everyday act to satisfy that desire and split the skies with human and humanistic possibilities.”3 Indeed, his use of “split” here invokes a story he has told in various interviews, recalling his anger when he really learned about what apartheid meant. For a while afterward, at age 12, he would head to white suburbs every day before people woke up and break the bottles of milk that had been delivered to them. It is useful to think about some of his work as poetic bottlebreaking. An example of this is in his 1995 poem “I Am,” in which he declares: I could be the ghoul In your nightmare Which hurls you out of bed And sleep wet with cold sweat Because you have just heard That Communist and terrorist monsters Have taken over the country and they say The land belongs to those who work it

In addition to publishing books of poetry, Kgositsile has been influential in spreading the idea of poetry as performance and encouraging an interest in African cultural practices among African Americans. In fact, there has been has wide acknowledgment that Kgositsile has acted as a diasporic cultural bridge and a political one. This bridge is evident in the collaborations and projects he has taken part in. He published a book in 1994 about how to write poetry (Approaches to Poetry Writing) because he finds the art useful in working for social justice. As he wrote in “For Cecil Abrahams”: Our poetry will be the simple act The blood we bleed Moulded by pain and purpose Into a simple Do not fuck with me Your shit is going up in flames Here and now 3

Kgositsile, Introduction, Black Arts: An Anthology of Black Creations.

81

Politics and Poetics—Keorapetse Kgositsile

81

Selected bibliography Spirits Unchained (1969) For Melba: Poems (1970) My Name Is Afrika, introduction by Gwendolyn Brooks (1971) Places and Bloodstains: Notes for Ipeleng (1975) The Present Is a Dangerous Place to Live (1975) When the Clouds Clear (1990) To the Bitter End (1995) If I Could Sing: Selected Poems (2002) This Way I Salute You (2004) Beyond Words: South African Poetics, with Don Mattera, Lebo Mashile, and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers (2009) Rubin: I’d like to plunge right into your poetry, because it has such historical specificity. And there was such a major historical shift after you wrote many of them. Taking all that into account, what is one poem you’d like to be known for? Kgositsile: Oh, that’s a very, very difficult question. But I would say I have a very short poem dedicated to my wife. It’s called “Letter from Havana.”4 I think I like it quite a bit. Rubin: What makes you feel that this poem is a particular success? Kgositsile: Maybe the direct expression or the precision of the statement of the depth of feeling, exploring the question of missing someone. Like, for instance, the last few lines say, “Should I love my heart more because every time I miss you, that’s where I find you.” Rubin: That’s beautiful. You are certainly familiar with the seriousness of missing someone, having lived in exile for twenty-nine years—meaning you were away from South Africa during one peak of your literary career. What are some of the gifts of your time away from South Africa or should I say your time in other countries, including the United States? What did you bring from that? Kgositsile: I would say meeting other people with concerns similar to mine, going through a whole spectrum from activists to fellow activists and so on. And honing my skills in the process of getting clarity also about being, as Neruda might have put, “a resident on this planet.”5 4

5

The poem is in Beyond Words: South African Poetics (2009), with Don Mattera, Lebo Mashile, and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers; foreword by Margaret Busby. Recidencia en la Tierra, or Residence on Earth, by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, was published in three parts, in 1933, 1935, and 1947.

82

82

Creative Activism Rubin: You said of that time that you spent a lot of time reading black American writing. What writers were particularly influential to you? Kgositsile: The first very influential one and that was even before coming to the US was Richard Wright. When I was still in high school, an African American sailor had a copy of Black Boy that he gave to someone in Cape Town. And that single copy traveled all over South Africa among those of us who were interested in literature. And that you would read and reread it for a week or two and pass it on. No selfishness. You wanted to share. And that’s what happened. And what I would say Richard Wright taught me at that early age was that I didn’t have to—in handling the English, I didn’t have to sound in any way like a carbon copy English boy. Rubin: That picture of the sailor bringing the book, I felt that in my heart when you said it. You’ve also always said, and I think your poetry shows, that you were deeply influenced by musicians as well as other poets. Why do you think that these musicians, in particular, these great African American musicians were so profoundly shaping of your young self? Kgositsile: I think that I would go so far as to argue that without music there would be no poetry. That if we go even to the oral tradition that there is no boundary between poetry and music in other words. That you might find, for instance, an oral poet reciting and seamlessly moving into singing or half singing and going back and forth between, you know, a musical presentation and a recital of poetry without any problems. That the boundary between the two or the criminal responsible for that boundary I think is the “classical”. As a result, the disadvantages, or the problems that that has created is that nobody has to take any music classes to respond to or have an appreciation of music. But you have to study literature. But all those supposedly deal with the human experience. How could something that deals with your experience not be understandable or readily accessible to you? But going back to jazz specifically, there is a lot of jazz in South Africa— both South African and African American. And here when we talk about South African jazz I would say we are talking about jazz with a distinctly South African accent. Rubin: What gives it the accent? How would you describe that? Kgositsile: See, it is very much like if we move through language like we are talking now, that I have an accent, which is South African, but I’m still using English.

83

Politics and Poetics—Keorapetse Kgositsile

83

Rubin: That’s right. Kgositsile: So the same applies in this case to musical expression that you detect, that you can tell, you know, in the rendering, that this musical voice in terms of even an instrument, that this is South African. Rubin: Well, I’m very happy to hear what you say about the accessibility of music. I’m always telling my students that it is so important for us to talk about music because pretty much everyone can listen and does listen. In addition to your invocation of the musical in your poetry, another hallmark of your poetry is quotation—of musicians, but also of writers, thinkers, and activists. Why has your artistic vision drawn you to the collaborative or the collective? Kgositsile: Perhaps that comes from the worldview that places me in terms of my view of the world as part of a collective. That each actor is just a soloist that contributes to an ongoing piece. In other words, that whether I had ever been born or not, there would have been poetry created by these others. And that we borrow, we dip into each other’s. We are moved and we move others. We are moved by others. We move others. And it’s an ongoing, mutual exchange. That, for instance, in the 1960s in New York and other parts of the US— Chicago, New Orleans, the West Coast, and so on—you found almost very regularly musicians sharing platforms with poets. It was very common. And that I think in the process there was mutual nourishment. I spent a lot of time, maybe at the beginning, more time with musicians and political activists than with fellow writers. I still remember that, for instance, even with the late June Jordan that initially I didn’t know her as a poet.6 She didn’t know me as a poet either. We knew each other as activists. It was only later that we found out we were both poets. Rubin: That’s really funny [laughter]. You know, speaking of mutual nourishment, it made me think that it’s not quite enough to say that poetry and activism are related either but that the influence goes in both directions—just the way you said poetry does with music. What do you think are some ways that poetry and action construct each other, nourish each other? Kgositsile: If I use myself as an example, I would say I am unapologetically political before picking up a pen and paper or approaching anything to

6

Jordan, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, was born in Harlem in 1936. Her first book, Who Look at Me, was published in 1969. In addition to her poetry, Jordan was known for her feminist theorizing and for publically identifying as bisexual.

84

84

Creative Activism use to write. That the political content is not summoned when I sit down to write. It is part of my being. It is an integral part of my identity. It is an integral part of who I am. So when I sit down to write poetry in this case, I approach it the same way that I expect a musician to approach a solo. In other words, I don’t expect a musician who is taking a solo to be thinking music. It’s too late. I expect them to create, to produce music. So when I sit down to write the poem I do not expect myself to think. I’m supposed to poet. I’m supposed to take my solo. Rubin: I guess that’s the difference between something you are and something you do. I’m a historian and so I have to ask you about history. How does poetry—your poetry but poetry in general—create a kind of poetic, historic record? In other words, what stories does poetry tell that other kinds of writing or telling cannot? Kgositsile: Poetry, like music and other art forms, is an affirmation of life, a creative activity in the historical period that people collectively go through. And it explores the period that the artist lives in, the desire, the collective desires, the pain, the hatred, the loves, the struggles, everything no matter where you start from. Then you participate at that level also in your era. And in that way from some kind of continuity with what happened before and with what will happen in the future. Rubin: This is a good chance for me to ask you if you wouldn’t mind returning to the 1960s and 1970s just for a moment. We used the word “liberation” a lot more then than we do now. We spoke of women’s liberation. We spoke of black liberation. And I always have felt that that word is a wonderful combination of insistence and idealism. What do you think is contained in the word “liberation”? Is it “liberation from” or is it “liberation to”? Kgositsile: I think often when there is some confusion is that a lot of people don’t have problems grappling with liberation from. But liberation to is a different matter. To have developed clarity between what you are against and what you are for in terms of possibilities of social transformation, I think it’s very crucial. And I think a lot of casualties, one might say, from the 1960s as you say, from people who ran out of steam—I think that was a result of the confusion between the two, so when there is no longer some pressing issue to be immediately against . . . Let ’s say like in South Africa, in 1994 officially apartheid gets dealt a blow.7 And after that those people who were writing against apartheid, instead of writing for something else that is clearer, dry up. They can no

7

Although South Africa’s apartheid system was abolished in 1991, the first multiracial elections were held in 1994.

85

Politics and Poetics—Keorapetse Kgositsile longer write. Or they decide to write against what they see as the established order, which means then the new government becomes the target. But any government would have become the target for that kind of person. Rubin: What struggles today that are being waged give you hope or make you feel that people know what they are working toward as well as what they are working against? Kgositsile: I think the two are likely to continue at every stage of history for quite a while because people don’t develop in a linear or straight line. But I think what gives people hope, or what gives me hope, is that when some problem or an number of problems get resolved, then the route ahead into the future gets more clarified. Then you realize that when you resolve some issues, other issues may be more complex than the ones you were dealing before crop up. And in that way we keep developing and getting clearer about the world we live in. Let us say, for instance, if you had believed that your problem was apartheid and apartheid is out of the way but you still have problems, there are still problems of social transformation to deal with. There are problems of education. There are problems of redistribution of resources. Then you have to shift again and move fast. Otherwise you get destroyed by your own frustrations because you don’t understand what is happening. Because you end up feeling betrayed unless you understand what is happening. Does that make any sense? Rubin: That makes a whole lot of sense and, in fact, you’ve made me start thinking toward the future. What do you see as the future of South African literature? What will help develop it into this next, more complex stage? Kgositsile: I think it is happening already, now, that the glimpses of the future there in connection with poetry, for instance. Let’s say, in the past the more vibrant, the stronger voices, poetic voices seem to be predominantly male. But as we are speaking today, among the younger poets, if I were to name the first three or so that I consider very dynamic and worth looking out for, they would probably be all three, young women. That in other words, when they decided to come out of their exile, that the patriarchy pushed them to, that they’ve decided they are not going to ask for permission to express themselves from any patriarchy or any institution created by the patriarchy. Rubin: You are talking about a kind of metaphorical exile that’s incredibly profound. There is a video online of you reading one of your poems in which you say that you would build a bonfire and destroy all the maps if it would erase boundaries from the face of the earth. Could you say something about how borders function in our world today, our planet?

85

86

86

Creative Activism Kgositsile: I think that the borders were created to serve very specific, identifiable interests. And those interests usually were aimed at exploiting the majority of the people on this planet. That today, when we talk about countries, so-called, like South Africa, like Kenya, like Ghana, and so on, we are talking about a carving up or pockets carved out of the African continent by Europeans in Berlin in the nineteenth century. And they were not doing it for African interests. Now when today, totally overlooking that, we are prepared to defend those borders that we did not create, even if it meant that defense means declaring war our own brothers and sisters, fellow Africans—that I think the glaring blunder of the borders, of boundaries from even that physical level becomes more immediate. But also, there are boundaries in many other areas—you know, censorship in even how children are brought up. You know, the average parents in all these cultures in the world don’t think of themselves readily as potential fascists. But they are. Because if you’ve brought up children, you’d realize that in any language the formative years of the child, they hear the word “no” more often than they hear any other word. They’re about to experiment, put their finger through a flame or something. “No! Don’t do that. You will get burned.” They try to run. “No! Don’t run like that. You will fall and hurt”— “No. Don’t do that.” You hardly ever hear, “Yes. Yes.” No child gets that kind of encouragement. Rubin: Well, my own child is going to be thrilled to hear that you said that. But moving beyond that to a subject that you brought up that I think looks both backward and forward: your vision of pan-Africanism, which is something that you were very active in encouraging. I would like you to say what that means for you now, and if you think that looks any different today than it did when you were starting out as a writer. Kgositsile: I’m not sure that it is different and, hopefully, it wouldn’t be. But that now, perhaps, since there is independence, that the solidarity between Africa and its diaspora, between the countries of Africa and the AfricanAmerican and Caribbean African communities—that they could now work without the stumbling block of the former colonial master. In other words, that we should be able to interact even on platforms that we create and formalize to intensify that interaction. One of those platforms is the diaspora conference that happens in different parts of Africa, in different parts of the world every year. This May, for instance, it is going to be in South Africa and there is going to be participation from the US and from anywhere or everywhere that there

87

Politics and Poetics—Keorapetse Kgositsile

87

are African descendants. Then, in connection with 2012 being the 100th anniversary of the African National Congress, that in October there is going to be a solidarity conference in South Africa. Because in October we will be celebrating the life of one of our important presidents, Oliver Tambo, who was one of the presidents who, during his lifetime, interacted dynamically with the diaspora.8 And there would be an expectation that that celebration involves the diaspora in a very dynamic manner.

8

Oliver Tambo (1917–93) was president of the African National Congress from 1967 to 1991. He was known for his privileging of international solidarity.

88

89

Section 3

Borders

90

91

7

“I Sing about Cesar Chavez in Gold Lamé Hot Pants”: Revolution and Celebration According to El Vez

El Vez is a character. Publicity photos identify him as the “Mexican Elvis,” a moniker that fairly efficiently introduces a performer who wears rhinestonestudded suits with the Virgin of Guadeloupe pictured on the back, and gyrates to a tight version of “Esta Bien, Mamacita.” But the nickname alone doesn’t go far enough in summoning everything that the character accomplishes. El Vez is the alter-ego of Robert Lopez, a West Coast–based performer born in 1960 who sang in his youth for the LA punk band the Zeros. El Vez’s reworked songs, such as “Say It Loud, I’m Brown and I’m Proud,” “Mexican American Trilogy,” and “Baby Let’s Play Safe” and his exuberant and intelligent stage show, which Michelle Habell-Pallan has called “part strip-tease, part Chicano studies course, part labor history, part history of popular culture,” are no less than calls to revolution through forward-looking cultural adaptation and old-fashioned booty-shaking. As the story goes, the birth of El Vez was part accident, part inspiration, and part long-time-coming. When he was a child, Lopez maintains, the style Elvis adopted in movies such as Roustabout made him think that “Elvis must be Latino, like me. He looks like my uncles!” In 1987, Lopez, then curator of a folk art gallery, organized an Elvis-themed exhibition. For the show’s opening, Lopez hired an Elvis impersonator to perform. The performance was a disappointment, and Lopez decided that he’d have been better off doing it himself. Shortly thereafter, he was pretending to be “Robert Lopez, El Vez’s booking agent,” and scoring a slot on an Elvis tribute show in Memphis. Before long, El Vez’s picture was in People and Newsweek, and Robert Lopez’s project of making Elvis “brown” had taken off. “When people leave an El Vez show,

92

92

Creative Activism

I want them to be happy to be Mexican even if they’re not,” he told a journalist some years later.1 Lopez’s extensive collection of Elvis memorabilia, while paying homage to Presley and his fans in a totally sincere manner, maintains this slyness about his mission. On his wall, for instance, gold records complement gold Aztec sundials. The words and art on his referential—but never deferential—CD covers (El Vez Calling and Graciasland, for example) are case studies in double and triple entendre. The Mexican Elvis, he insists, is part of the American Dream. El Vez’s earliest songs were not explicitly political. But then came the time when he dedicated the goofy “You Ain’t Nothing but a Chihuahua” to Jerry Falwell, adding another layer to the story of borrowing and theft. After that, El Vez began to take up a range of social issues—safe sex, immigration policy, gender roles, Chicano pride—and fitting them into a performance that is irreverent, showy, and hilarious. To make his music, and his points, he scavenges not just through the Presley oeuvre, but all over the popular culture map. “All the things I steal from are the things that matter to me,” he remarks in the videodocumentary El Vez es el Rey de Rock ‘n’ Roll. The performances of El Vez are characterized by gleefulness; the shows feature gorgeous and outrageous costumes, many costume changes, a certain amount of costume removal, and background singing by the Lovely Elvettes. The way the Lovely Elvettes are presented seems to take apart the idea of the girl backup singer, and put it back together differently: El Vez is quick to point out that on stage, they stand level, in a line, with him. According to El Vez, the Lovely Elvettes “are not backup singers. They are very strong, up-front singers.” Before performances, Robert Lopez draws on his John Waters mustache with a Sharpie permanent marker. He confesses, “I’m gay, but El Vez is straight.” What El Vez is not, he would tell you, is an impersonator (despite the story of how he got his start). Although he is quick to say that he doesn’t mind being called an impersonator, he prefers to think of himself as a translator. Thus, although he knows the moves of Elvis—and has memorized also the costumes and the exact arrangements of the songs—he is more interested in taking the frame of Elvis, the spirit of Elvis, the meaning(s) of Elvis in popular culture, in celebrity culture, in the history of American race relations, and putting these meanings to his own use. This “use” ranges from spiritual ideas to sociopolitical ideas to sexual ideas 1

Blackwell, “El Vez Walks the Line between Camp and Commentary,” Metro, November 27– December 4, 1992.

93

Revolution and Celebration—El Vez

93

to cultural ideas. “I don’t come with definite manifestos or spiritual bibles or even sexual credos to follow,” he told me, but just putting out ideas and different possibilities. I make the meaning of the songs ambiguous on purpose. That way, they can be open for interpretation. To be lost in interpretation, too—that’s what happens when you have different cultures and language. So if you interpret [a song] as something different [from my interpretation], it is all the better for me.

El Vez does more to change the songs he covers than merely “Latinizing” the lyrics or the beat, however cleverly. He might, for instance, add pieces of five different songs to one song, resulting in a concise rock and roll history in one song. According to El Vez, “It is a funny thing: Elvis is taking black music and making it white, and I am taking white music and making it brown.” When he does this, the meanings change in a way that is at once seamless and hysterically funny: “I mean, people who know the song “Suspicious Minds” may not see that is has anything to do with immigration rights . . . but now, when they hear it, it does!” The booklet from his CD “G.I. Ay, Ay! Blues” (1996) is decorated with the symbol of the United Farm Workers, and features a banner with the words “Support the United Farm Workers.” The album is also dedicated “to the memory of Cesar Chavez.” His stated goal in terms of raising political awareness is to encourage people to “act Elvisly and think globally. He has used, in various places—a t-shirt, an album cover, a poster—a quotation from the 1960s antiwar folksinger Phil Ochs about Elvis. Phil Ochs said, “If there is any hope for America it lies in a Revolution. If there is any hope for a Revolution, it lies in Elvis Presley becoming Che Guevara.” Part of the cultural payoff of an El Vez show is that audiences will recall “Immigration Time” when they hear “Suspicious Minds.” This is quite fitting: after all, the El Vez fan club membership card is a green card—and his gold lamé suit is in the Smithsonian.

Selected discography Not Hispanic (1992) How Great Thou Art: Greatest Hits of El Vez (1994) Fun in Español (1994) Graciasland (1994)

94

94

Creative Activism

Merry Mex-Mas (1994) El Vez Is Alive (1995) G.I. Ay! Ay! Blues (1996) Son of a Lad from Spain (1999) No ElVezSi (2000) Pure Aztec Gold (2000) Boxing with God (2001) Sno-Way José (2002) God Save the King (2013) Rubin: What’s the importance of activism that you can dance to? Lopez: The idea that the struggle is always there, even if you’re at a party as opposed to, “Well, I do a march once a month.” The struggle is part of your daily life. An example from the Cesar Chavez days is, “Well, I have a choice here. I could buy these grapes or not.”2 Rubin: Good example: we didn’t eat grapes for a huge chunk of my childhood. Lopez: In Mexican culture, if you’re spiritual, the Virgin of Guadalupe is part of your everyday life. They have gear shift knobs that picture her. There’s a clock. There’s shopping bags. It’s not just, “Well, on Sunday, I go to church.” When you’re having sex, there’s probably a Virgin of Guadalupe candle on the nightstand. Not that that’s why you’re having sex, but you don’t separate things into boxes, one with activism, one with being polite or being kind to people or dancing. Thinking about political situations is something that you could do while you’re dancing or enjoying a nightclub or you’re out having a beer. You don’t put that aside and say, “I’ll think that later.” Not that you’re always holding a protest sign or having to say, “Here’s a pamphlet.” Just don’t put it in the top drawer and save it for special occasions. It’s part of your daily life. Rubin: Plus, fun can be really serious. Lopez: Yeah, it is, because the revolution is a constant thing. It’s not like one revolution’s going to fix everything. There are always a million things to think about. Also, everything can always be better. It’s constant, in familyraising or in the especially in the environment. But that doesn’t mean, “Oh, I have to be downhearted.” It’s in celebration too.

2

Chavez (1927–93) was cofounder of the National Farm Workers Association (which became the United Farm Workers Union) in 1962. The boycott was in support of the Delano grape strike, organized by the United Farm Workers and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee; it lasted from 1965 to 1970. When a collective bargaining agreement was reached, it was largely considered to be due to the boycott of non-union grapes.

95

Revolution and Celebration—El Vez Rubin: I love the notion of celebratory revolution, because I have long felt that there is particular political importance to being irreverent. Lopez: Yeah. I can sing about Cesar Chavez, but I can be in gold lamé hot pants. Someone might say, “Oh, that’s irreverent,” but it’s a celebration too. I’m singing while I’m shaking my ass. You don’t have to separate reverence from humor, or mocking your heroes from loving them at the same time. I think people put art and artists on pedestals too much. It is a job too! There are great plumbers, I think, who see can the beauty: “Oh, look how well they did that coppering.” That is a different art, which I can’t do. I don’t know if you can. Rubin: Not really. I can snake clogged drains, but that’s as far as it goes. I really admire plumbers who can figure out what is wrong. Lopez: Well, there’s the whole idea, there’s plumbing to do. Rubin: That is a fascinating parallel to draw because, I think, at least in the United States, there is a certain amount of resistance to seeing about musicians and other artists as persons performing labor, but they are. Lopez: They are, yeah. People frequently romanticize that work: “Oh, to be an artist, that must be a wonderful life.” It can be, if you’re doing something you love. For some reason, most artists don’t go into it unless they love it. Then there are people who are writers: “I’m writing a sitcom. I hate this work. But I’d rather be doing that than working at Starbucks.” Rubin: Teaching gets a little of that. I love it. But I don’t only do it out of nobility. It’s my work. Lopez: I love my job. I love working in the theater too, but that too, also can be a drag. That hour and a half that you see us on stage, we’re on. We make it look easy on purpose. You don’t see the work that went into getting onstage. But sometimes people think, “Oh, he just arrives, does it, and leaves.” No. I’m schlepping. Rubin: They don’t see the underbelly. As a music historian, one of the things I confront all the time is that there are these industry-drawn lines, very artificially drawn, between different genres of music. I have more than once found myself passionately ending a class by begging my students, “Go out and this weekend, like something you’re not supposed to like.” What do you think is important about crossing those lines, which you do? Lopez: It’s border crossing. It’s commercial border crossing, because the industry is set on so much selling so many units. These are people who never think outside the box. Good A&R [artists & repertoire] guys in the 1970s used to be more creative. Now it’s more along the lines of, “You got to bring us in 2 million dollars this year from your band that you signed.”

95

96

96

Creative Activism Rubin: It’s all so targeted. Lopez: Borders in music separate people vastly. It was really interesting in the punk rock days because there were some borderless ideas circulating. I grew up with punk rock.3 You had rockabilly. You had ska. You had jazz. You had noise-makers, and people who were into roots stuff, into stuff that wasn’t here before. Later, in the early 1980s, it just turned into hardcore. It turned into a certain sound. This is what punk rock has been. Early Ramones and Television and Patti Smith are all completely different takes on what was considered punk rock.4 That was the beauty of it, because it was mainly just misfits gathered under this banner. It was more open. Then, it got more narrowed, and the word was, “Okay. Green Day is what punk rock sounds like.”5 It used to be more free-flowing. Rubin: How would you draw a line from The Zeros to now? Is it on a continuum? Lopez: Well, I just did a tour with The Zeros this summer in Spain. All the stuff I’ve learned from punk rock is in. There was a band called the Screamers—Tomata du Plenty was great.6 I learned so much in showmanship from him. I think being influenced by all different kinds of bands is what I am free to do with El Vez. Of course, I’m thinking about it more than a regular band. It’s costumes, and timing, and dancing, and musical references, all that stuff—that’s how I work on a multidimensional El Vez mythology. Rubin: Yeah. That’s what anthropologists would call a “thick description.”7 A long time ago, you said something along the lines of, “I want people to be happy. They’re Mexican, even if they’re not.” Has what that means to you changed? Lopez: I think not. I’m proud to be up there in whatever I’m saying in my Latino references. I think people can apply things to themselves. I think everybody says things like, “Oh, my Christmas was a little different because we had egg nog with kimchi in it,” or whatever they might say. There’s

3 4

5

6

7

Lopez played guitar in the Zeros, a punk rock band founded in 1976 in Chula Vista, California. The Ramones were founded in New York in 1974 and are widely acknowledged as one of the first punk rock acts. Television was also founded in New York in 1973. Punk rock innovator Patti Smith (b. 1946) recorded her first album, Horses, in 1975. The punk rock duo Green Day was formed in 1986 in Berkeley, California, and released its first album in 1990. The Screamers were early contributors to the Los Angeles punk rock scene; the band was formed in 1975 and came to be known as “electropunk” and “technopunk.” “Thick description” focuses on context(s) as well as a particular act or cultural behavior. The term was applied culturally by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973).

97

Revolution and Celebration—El Vez not one role model for any culture. Everyone mixed it and did something different, but when you get out there and say, “I had egg nog with kimchi,” someone will say, “Oh, I can relate to that because we used to put bourbon in ours,” or something like that. You see people feeling pride, you feel your own pride. I hope it goes that way. I hope my self-referential presentation will speak to their self-referential thoughts. When I’m talking about me, I’m just talking about you. Rubin: That’s better much better than the reverse, when people seem to be talking about you, but are really just talking about themselves all the time! While we’re talking about your carefully deployed phrases, let’s take your motto, “Think Globally, Act Elvisly.” I want to hear what you meant by that. Also, there is an amusing parallel here: Gogol Bordello has a song “Think Locally, Fuck Globally.”8 What does acting “Elvisly” mean? Lopez: Now, it’s almost like whatever you can do locally can be taken globally because of the way economic structures and media structures are set up. Rubin: Yeah. Some people put together “global” and “local” and call it “Glocal.” Lopez: It is that. I’m working with my friend, Paula, the Swedish Housewife, and she’s doing these one-woman shows.9 She is working with so many people. She just went to Istanbul because she met friends online who are doing things in their own town. Her work in Istanbul has affected so many other people. Just doing events in your hometown can get projected on the other side of the earth. She’s so into hashtagging, it leads her into a whole wicked web of rabbit holes of all these new people. Just saying, “Well, this what I’m doing.” This is what I’m doing locally and it has global reach. Whatever you do, don’t worry about affecting the world because you can. Rubin: Are you connecting your line-crossing artistic vision to what you think about immigration now? Lopez: Yeah. It’s no closer to peace, love, and understanding of that. There will always be a revolution because it never turns into nirvana because that’s still what makes life interesting. That’s what makes art conservative and liberal; it’s always a cycle, a swinging pendulum. I remember thinking, “Oh, if Romney wins, here come some great songs.”10 When you have those difficult times, such as Reagan’s period, that’s when you have to speak up. We were saying, “Oh, I’m going to move to Canada. This is terrible.” There were so many people going, “America has died today.” 8 9 10

See the interview with Eugene Hütz, the band’s lead singer, in this volume. Descriptors applied to the Swedish Housewife shows include avant-garde, drag, and burlesque. Mitt Romney (b. 1947) ran for president against Barack Obama in 2012.

97

98

98

Creative Activism I have a whole list at home on my computer of issues to use in songs. Rubin: Do you think that we define activism broadly enough? Lopez: No. Activism is in what you do when you go shopping and what you wear, and what you put in your hair, and what you do in your yard. It’s gardening to field working to wearing fur, to wearing a t-shirt that says, “Vote.” It can affect every part of your life. Turning off the light when you leave the house, when you leave a room, is activism. Separating the glass from the bottles is activism. You can be a Republican and turn off the lights when you leave the room. Rubin: That’s true. Lopez: As Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” says, starting with yourself can really matter.11 It works on both sides. Republicans and Democrats, everyone needs to work harder. Rubin: Whom do you consider to be your musical allies? Lopez: I really like Manu Chao.12 It’s not that we are that similar, but he’s having fun and mixing up things and dancing while being politically sharp. Rubin: Yeah, he’s great at all of that. I am not surprised to hear how highly you regard him. I love him too. What is the role of the Elvettes? Are they regular backup singers? Lopez: No, they are not. They’re a call to arms. It’s not sexism because I’m being just as sexy as they are. It’s a battle to be sexy. It’s part feminist—they are strong—and part show business too. Rubin: They have a strong presence. Lopez: They a strong presence and they sing wonderfully. They sound great. It’s sexy-ism. Both of us equally play in sex. Rubin: Besides the immigration commentary implicit in the green card/fan club cards, what you think are the issues you’re most absorbed by? Lopez: I am not that marriage-based, but I like the idea that homosexuals could make the same mistakes as straight people. The whole idea of holding up marriage as a sacred thing doesn’t work. Why is marriage something we hold sacred? With a 50 percent divorce rate, how can you do that? Rubin: And whether you are marriage-based, as you put it, or not, it’s still a question of equal rights. Lopez: Homosexuals should be allowed to make the same mistakes as everybody else. Rubin: Yeah. There has been an extreme polarization. I just saw this photograph online of a guy who tattooed on his arm the Bible verse in

11 12

Jackson recorded “Man in the Mirror” in 1988. It reached number one on the Billboard charts. Chao (b. 1961) was born in France of Spanish descent; he sings in more than ten languages.

99

Revolution and Celebration—El Vez

99

Leviticus condemning homosexuality. Two Bible verses down from that the Bible says that tattoos are not acceptable either.13 Lopez: I will say one thing, which maybe is counterrevolutionary. I’ve always loved Cesar Chavez, but one of Cesar Chavez’s statements was, “Every worker is an organizer.” They’re not, which is sad. I mean, all people are different things. Sadly, there are leaders (people with the ideas) and there are followers. There are people who don’t know which way to go. There are people who just don’t even think about that at all. They contradict the idea that leaders, be they revolutionary or band leaders or art movement leaders or theatrical leaders, can be anywhere or anybody. When I started El Vez, it was kind of neat because it was just guerrilla theater. I pulled people, my friends, and said “Come on. We’re going to do the show at this great hall. Just hold the sign and just dance like that.” “Oh, come on. All you have to do is say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Sing this line.” I always forget that some people—or even my band members—when I go, “Just do this,” will go, “You forget that everyone’s not theatrical. No one has ‘theatrical’ built into their head.” I go, “You worked with me for years, how can it not rubbed off ?” As in, I’ve been going to union meetings, you can’t go up there and give a good speech to make people in the field involved in something? There are leaders and there are workers and there are followers. That’s part of the activism thing. You can do what you can do. Don’t worry about having to give the speech. Rubin: Speaking of upending, your “adult” mix of “Say It Loud” is a good joke.14 Lopez: People think it’s all just dirtier words . . . Rubin: But it’s the adult voices. That’s why it’s a good joke. Tell me how gold lamé is political. Lopez: It’s a mirror.

13

14

Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is an abomination” (Lev. 18:22) and “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves” (Lev. 19:28). There is some disagreement over the role translation plays in the degree or specifics of the anti-gay sentiment of the first verse. In funk-singer James Brown’s original (“Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” recorded in 1968), he sings, “Say It Loud,” and a group of children respond with “I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

100

101

8

“I’m Not Some Fucking Gadjo!”: Migration According to Eugene Hütz

Eugene Hütz (b. 1972) refuses to be polite. This is especially true in his music with the innovative Gypsy-punk band Gogol Bordello. But his music demonstrates that being rude can be very useful, interrupting as it does definitions of “polite” that are determined by those who are in power and create social contempt for those who are not. Hütz also refuses to be limited by geopolitical borders. (These borders are, of course, linked to the power structures that determine what is polite.) One way this manifests is in the way he uses language in his lyrics. He does not have individual songs written in different languages; rather, he switches among the languages within a song. This movement is associated in many places with “Gypsy,” an exonym for the Romani people that is considered offensive by many. Hütz uses the word “Gypsy” in his music in both senses: to self-identify and to describe movement and nonconformity to the powers that be. The band’s name captures this strategy. Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, from whom the band got its name, was born in what is now Ukraine; he plays in his fiction with conventionality, reality, and folk wisdom. And “bordello,” of course, is immediately a slap in the face of politeness. In fact, border-crossing characterizes Hütz’s music in multiple ways. He has written songs about it—for instance, “Immigrant Punk” (2005), which was accompanied by a moving video, and “Wonderlust King” (2007). He has named albums after it—for instance, his 2012 album Trans-Continental Hustle. His band members, a shifting group, have come from a range of countries: Ukraine, Ethiopia, Russia, Israel, Ecuador, China, the United States, and others. The band has toured with a range of other acts, not tightly limited by audience or genre. And in a thirty-minute film directed by Madonna, Hütz cross-dresses, thereby ignoring the borders imposed by gender, a gesture he would repeat in some live performances.

102

102

Creative Activism

Hütz was born in 1972 in an appropriately border-crossing family: his father was Russian, and his mother was half-Ukrainian and half-Servitka (a Romani subgroup). His family left Ukraine after the Chernobyl plant disaster, and after moving through a number of countries, ended up in the United States in 1992 under a political refugee program. He formed Gogol Bordello in 1997, and has consistently cited diverse artistic influences. The Romani have been on the receiving end of contempt in Eastern European countries in recent years. In Ukraine, for instance, Romani have been driven out of their homes by mobs, which then torched the buildings. In the Czech Republic, large anti-Romani demonstrations have been held. In Russia, antiRomani hate speech has been used frequently in newspapers, and Romani people have been attacked. In Slovakia and Romania, walls have been built to segregate the Romani population. This adds a level of profundity to the gesture Gogol Bordello made by recording and releasing their eighth album in Russia in 2011. But despite these significant acts of resistance, Hütz has ended up at the center of several controversies. Many fans were deeply disappointed when he recorded a commercial for Coca-Cola in 2012 with a song titled “Let’s Get Crazy”; the same year, he had condemned in a video short the way globalization of the economy has shaped the world into a place “where you can buy all these stupid souvenirs and shirts that you can’t tell where they’re from.”1 Former band members have sued him for stealing their share of royalties. And online campaigns were created to urge the band not to play in Israel given its illegal occupations in Palestine; these failed, and the band performed there in 2008 and 2017.

Selected discography ● ● ● ● ●

1

Voi-La Intruder (1999) Multi Kontra Culti vs. Irony (2002) J.U.F. (2004, with Tamir Muskat) Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike (2005) Super Taranta! (2007)

Anthony Papa, also interviewed in this volume, wrote about the video on Huffington Post (April 9, 2012): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-papa/eugene-huetz-of-gogol-bor_b_1260494. html.

103

Migration—Eugene Hütz ● ● ● ● ●

Live from Axis Mundi (2009) Trans-Continental Hustle (2010) Моя Цыганиада (“My Tziganyada,” 2011; self-released in Moscow) Pure Vida Conspiracy (2013) Seekers and Finders (2017) Rubin: I’ve been walking around listening to your last album, and working hard to understand all the Russian. In doing so, I have been made acutely aware of the particularities of my relationship to both languages (native English speaker, scholarly knowledge of Russian) shaping me as a Gogol Bordello listener. But what about your perspective on the languages, as creator? What does it mean to you to use more than one language in the same song? And what difference do you think it makes for various audience members or listeners who can understand both of those, and for those who can’t? Hütz: It’s simple for me, because that type of multilingual songwriting is simply a reflection of my background. Actually, I think, it’s a reflection of these times as well. And because I speak several languages, it is often that the word for the next line just comes off in another language. So I work with that, because that’s my territory. I didn’t get into rock and roll so I can ask somebody “Can I do this or not?” Rubin: I’m with you there—I really don’t think any kind of art should ask, “Can I do this?” Do you find the permission you claim through those languages extends beyond reaching for the next word or line? Hütz: Oh, yes, the freedom of that goes on. Plus there is additional excitement of working with new language, because by using words, sometimes purely wrongly, you come up with astonishing things for yourself. And also, I think that that type of mentality is quite widespread these days. It’s taking over. I mean, as a songwriter who always was sensitive about the community around me—well, I always grow quite attached to the characters that surround a band. Using several languages is quite common in our extended family. And it’s also people of my generation. Most of us are immigrants who lived in two or three countries, and know several languages. And when they listen to music in two or three languages, for them it’s not foreign at all. There’s a lot of people like that. You know, maybe there were not a lot of songwriters like that before, but there are a lot of people like that now. Rubin: I know a lot of musicians who go back and forth between English and one other language—Tex-Mex singers, for instance, with English and

103

104

104

Creative Activism

Spanish. But that particular . . . bipolar tension, I guess you could say, seems very different from the linguistic kaleidoscope of some of your songs. Hütz: Yes, that exists almost in every culture, somebody going back and forth, one and two. But going between one, two, three, four, five, six is kind of where we are at. For me personally, it comes from traditional Russian/Ukrainian gypsy music, which is entirely like that. It’s a complete combination of two—of Romani and Russian language, back and forth, all the time, you know. And I always thought it was brilliant. Rubin: It is brilliant. It sets up a sort of implicit dialogue. Hütz: Absolutely. And it gives you so much leeway. It can also put the hidden meanings, hidden messages into the songs much easier. Which is also quite fun. Rubin: Wait, are you purposely building in different content for that will be understood differently (if at all) by different listeners? What scholars—that’s one of my languages, though I don’t know how fluent I am, you understand [laughter]—call “hidden transcripts”?2 Hütz: Exactly. Although, with all these times, kids in the chat rooms and the international fan websites quickly ask the other websites, and they’re translated, and it’s posted immediately. I mean, the songs that I wrote in quasiItalian, there are numerous translations of that. Just take your pick, you know. Rubin: Let’s pick up one of those back-and-forths for a moment. In “Wonderlust King,” you say in Russian, “Ya ne yevrei, no koye-chto pokhozhe,” or “I’m not a Jew, but something in me resembles one.”3 Hütz: Yeah, it’s actually—I will help. It says “I am not Jewish, but much is very alike.” Simply because I’m not some fucking gadjo. “Gadjo” is non-gypsy. Rubin: You are claiming both difference and affinity to being Jewish, right? Or are you commenting more on the people who ask you whether you are Jewish? Hütz: So there’s a firewall between the Jewish and gypsy culture that’s been there many times. I mean, Jewish people often want me to be Jewish. And, you know, I’ve been all over Jewish press. Rubin: Well, your last name could make certain Americans think you were Jewish. Hütz: It’s not. It’s actually a purely Ukrainian last name. I mean, I grew up surrounded by Jewish people in Ukraine, because Jews and Gypsies are quite

2

3

The term comes from a work by anthropologist James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), which claims that subordinated groups employ strategies of resistance that are unnoticed by, or illegible to, those in power. The song is on the album Super Taranta! (2007).

105

Migration—Eugene Hütz

105

alike, in the ways, the way that both are survivalist cultures, you know. And that’s the affinity. That’s a really important thing for finally to state in a song, you know. Even though the last line of the thing is, “Simply because I’m not some fucking Gadjo / Da ya shoot” which is a “Well yes, I am a joker. And I am a”—what do you call it? “I am a jester.” Rubin: Now that strikes me as very Russian-circus-tradition influenced: the seriousness of clowns. Hütz: I’m a clown. So fucking what? That’s my birthright. Rubin: Since we’ve gotten onto the subject of translation—which you may be able to tell fascinates me—do you mind if I veer off to the side for a moment? Because I have a question about translation for you. In the movie Everything Is Illuminated, when your character is speaking Russian and describing the American Jew, he uses the word “Zhid.”4 But the subtitles just said “Jew.”5 Hütz: Yeah. Rubin: I don’t think of those two as being entirely equivalent. Hütz: Well, I did what I could to give a film a truer sense of that culture. Rubin: No, I understand your use of it. But why do you think they didn’t translate it? They could have said “Hebe,” or, you know—there are other options—“kike” is probably the most offensive, “Yid” seems more equivalent. Hütz: Well, basically, that would be my choice for how to do it. But the thing is that America is so obsessed with identity politics and specificness of terms. Whereas in Eastern Europe, nobody gives a shit about it. They just use shit without any negativity, you know. So people say “tsigan,” you know, gypsy— it’s just what they call it.6 They can say, “Oh, he’s a good shit, you know. He’s a good ‘russkii’ you know.” They don’t really think of it as negative. They have not, at any level of accommodations, had that much free time, as people in the West, to think about things like that, you know. They’re just not quite there yet. And that is why I use it in the film freely. Rubin: In the movie, it comes off as funny, and ultimately poignant. Hütz: It’s funny, and whether that’s negative or positive depends on intonation. Rubin: Yes. So we’ve talked about literal languages, Russian, Ukrainian, English, and so forth. If you think about “language” as being much broader, more figurative, what languages would you want your ideal audience to

4 5

6

“Zhid” is a pejorative term in Russian for “Jew,” akin to “Kike.” Everything Is Illuminated (2005) was directed by Liev Screiber and based upon a 2002 novel by the same name written by Jonathan Safran Foer. “Gypsy” and “tsigan” are equivalent exonyms in English and Russian for the Romani; both are considered offensive by some.

106

106

Creative Activism

speak? What do listeners have to understand to really “get” Gogol Bordello? I mean, clearly having some punk rock history would help, and we spoke of understanding the Russian circus tradition. What would you like people to be bringing that they already have some understanding of? Romani history? Post-Soviet struggles? Hütz: Yeah, I get what you’re saying. I guess first-hand, I’d wish people to know examples of great creators like, for example, Charlie Chaplin.7 The whole dynamics of creative mind that has ability to go many different directions and, you know, have a background of knowledge of more vision of the artist. And that would basically take care of a lot of really stupid questions that we, that kind of artist, have to deal with all the time, which people are just so obsessed with . . . You know, that artistic mind is very many dimensional in its nature to change, you know, and that its nature is to change and its nature is to go up and down. And a lot of times artists suffer from, basically, their own ups and downs. But a lot of times, they suffer seriously strictly on the ignorance of masses, that if they don’t know how to resist that, they sometimes are fucked. Some of them are stronger, you know. But there is no win with an audience that’s ignorant. You do something different, they say “Oh, he changed.” You don’t do something, they say, “Oh, it’s boring. It’s the same thing.” There’s no fucking way. The key is, you have to always surprise people in a new way, in a way that they like, you know. But then you’re kind of getting caught in this “pleasing the crowd” way, you know. Rubin: Yeah, that’s sort of a trap, isn’t it? Your music is your work, your—it makes me cringe to say this, but I’m going to—your product. But selling it is sometimes going to seem like selling out. Hütz: And then you say to yourself “This is time to stop this whole thing. Because initially, I’m in here to give a voice to my soul, which, in turn, uncorks bubbles of their souls. So I have to be true to myself.” And, you know, in this society, in the modern day, I think everyone, actually, the idea of failure is so massively turned to dislike, fear of all fears. Well, it’s not a really big deal. You can fail and rise again, and fail and rise again. And that’s basically how it’s been for Charlie Chaplin and for any great composer, for any great writer.8 Rubin: He really did fail and rise again, and stop, and then start again.

7

8

Chaplin (1889–1977), born in Great Britain, was an actor, filmmaker, and composer; he was especially well known for his work in silent films. Chaplin’s popularity plummeted in the 1940s after he was accused by the US government of having Communist sympathies.

107

Migration—Eugene Hütz

107

Hütz: Yeah, it’s just like people need to understand that they would benefit from understanding more how a creative mind works. Because essentially, they live on that shit, you know. They are the ones who drive for 2,000 miles to see something, or fly from fucking Tokyo to see this band, you know, or things like that. They fly to get high. They fly to mooch off—crudely speaking—our high, you know. And artists, because they’re forced into being people who are much more introspective and face a lot of struggle, they figure out patterns of crowd. But the crowd never really ever figures out the patterns of creative individuals that they love. They are essentially absolutely—I wouldn’t say they’re merciless, as they’re rumored to be, they’re just clueless, you know. Rubin: There have been times when it seems like it’s been important to you that your audience not be allowed to become too comfortable—or maybe what I mean is complacent. Hütz: See, I don’t encounter that because even if we go someplace where people think our music came from, those people are equally shocked, you know. Rubin: No, I mean things like pouring water on them. I mean, it’s not hot tea like the Russian Futurists did, which is probably a good thing.9 Hütz: I think that they have no chance to be complacent, because there is so much migration in the band. Rubin: Interesting word choice, in light of our talk about languages, and immigration. Hütz: Not accidental! It’s a strange chemistry of something very solid and yet very fragile, you know. And for us, even when you’re with the band, and you feel that unbelievable rage and avalanche, which cannot be stopped; in its essence, it’s very fragile. And it takes a lot of attention from us and from 100 percent engagement to keep the avalanche going. The minute one person somehow relaxes in the band and stage, everybody else feels it. I feel it with my back, you know. And within this band, it’s on the verge of being a federal crime. [Laughter] Rubin: Relaxing is a crime. Hütz: Yeah.

9

Russian Futurism was a literary and artistic movement generally acknowledged to have begun in 1912 and ended by the 1920s. The movement’s first theatrical performance in 1913 sought to make audiences uncomfortable in multiple ways—including printing posters for the performance on toilet paper and insulting the audience—and during the performance, poet Alexei Kruchenykh spilled tea on an audience member. After that performance, drinking and spilling tea on members of the audience became standard to their performances.

108

108

Creative Activism

Rubin: “Relaxing Is a Crime” would make a great title for a nineteenthcentury Russian novel about the workplace. Which reminds me—clearly, you are a fan of Nikolai Gogol.10 Hütz: From Nights on the Rivers Near Dikanka.11 It’s his first successful book, which was based completely on interpretation and playing with Ukrainian folklore. It is literally one of my most favorite books of all times. The tone of it is brilliant. It starts in an absolutely pop rock way, where it’s like “God the hell knows what’s happening in the world. How can this be happening? Check this out.” It’s complete nonsense happened. Rubin: I love him. Hütz: That was my whole approach to anything, really. And I was inspired a lot by that. Rubin: What about having half of your name be “bordello”? Does this imply that you can use “gypsy” in a sexual way? Hütz: Actually, sex is quite a taboo within gypsy culture. And that’s why my work gets some slashing from the Romani community. It didn’t get only slashing. The majority of it is, “Look at our boy go.” And, you know, some communities are more conservative than others. And they love the wildness of our spirit, and they love the actual melodies. It became this crazy comment of gypsy spirit through the world. But the sexual themes are very masked in gypsy culture. And that gave me extra possibility to obtain a recognition. Rubin: Well sometimes it’s important not to be too polite. I mean, that’s one of the things that one could say your music prioritizes. Hütz: Yeah. I mean, you know, the simple thing is that even taking off shirt for a man, traditional-wise in the community, is not a very honorary thing to do. But the reason why I take off all my clothes—not all of them, but things off on stage, take off my shirt on stage—is as simple as that I don’t want to carry with me tons of wet, sweaty clothes on tour. They got to go before I start breaking sweat. It’s as simple as that. Because I do break a lot of sweat. Rubin: How do you characterize the role of the women that you have touring with you now? Hütz: Pam and Elizabeth. You know, I always wanted something fantastic and grand, something that’s trans-generational and trans-international, and all

10

11

Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) was a significant Russian writer known for inserting strains of surrealism into his work. Nights on the Rivers Near Dikanka (in Russian:  Вечерá на хýторе близ Дикáньки; usually translated as “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka”) was a collection of short stories written between 1831 and 1832; when they were first published in book form, Gogol was 22 years old.

109

Migration—Eugene Hütz

109

sexes, all nationalities included. And without female energy, it’s impossible to escalate to the level of what I want to do. It’s a really—we’re really looking for that kind of fantastic and grand universal feeling. And I thought that having strong women characters, that that show confidence and beauty in a way that’s very original, and not in a Hollywood kind of way . . . You know, rock and roll basically, for the most part, consists of cheap, sleazy tricks. And I always wanted to get away from it, you know, because things that worked in the late 1960s are still copied, you know, by every rock musician. But they just look ridiculous, you know. It’s just absurd. Rubin: Are you talking about stage antics? Hütz: Stage and just the using of their sexuality. So maybe it’s something that has to do with my childhood and the way I grew up. I grew up with the girls, basically. And, you know, from 6 years to age when I was 16, I was on a very serious track team in Ukraine. And that team consisted mostly of girls. There was only a couple guys. And this was a team, this was the kids who were going for Olympic preparation. It was a very hardcore team. And the girls that were all winners, they beat everybody all the time. I was champion of Kiev, myself, my own category. And I guess growing up with them, you know, and spending whole summers with them, and that atmosphere, that’s the kind of girls . . . they’re winning. They’re kind of girls with victorious attitudes, but without cheap rock and roll, sleazy tricks, you know. Rubin: I’m glad to hear about women with “victorious attitudes”! When you talk about being gypsy punks, there’s a literal side. And you said that audiences tend to be very literal. And on the historical side, that’s very important. How much of it has turned into metaphor, like when you talk about the “gypsy part of town”?12 Hütz: Yeah. I think it took on a life of itself. I mean, there are about a dozen of bands in New York, at this point, that call themselves New York City gypsy punks on their posters. And none of them are gypsy, and none of them are even punk. Rubin: But they are from New York. Hütz: [Laughs] But they are from New York. And that basically makes a gypsy punk these days. But I think this case starts with the fact that there’s two definitions of what “gypsy” means, in Western culture, which are widely confused and mistaken for one another. And first one gypsy, being as a description of ethnicity,

12

“Gypsy Part of Town” is the first song on Gogol Bordello’s 2004 album J.U.F. (a collaborative project with Israeli musician Tamir Muskat).

110

110

Creative Activism

which is essentially derogatory. But we admit up to it, because people just don’t know what the Romani are. Rubin: People in the United States use the word “gypped” all the time. Hütz: Yeah. And, you know, there are activists, of Romani communities, that are very against the term. And they fight for that their whole life. But my thing is different. If I call it a Romani punk, it will simply not ring any bell to people. And as an artist, I have got a potential of much, much more people than oldest activists. There are a lot of those activists, you know, which I respect. But rock and roll is a big vehicle. Rubin: Yes, it is. Hütz: So my thing is like this. First I call it gypsy punk. Then, when I get everybody’s attention, I’ll tell them about what Romani is. And that’s how we’re basically doing it. And the second definition of “gypsy” is, basically, a traveling person or somebody—with all its limitations of somebody who is unsettled and half criminal and so on and so forth. Rubin: Yes, that usage is pretty common as well. In fact, I bet I could list ten songs without thinking hard that mention “gypsy” in a non-ethnic way. Hütz: So I’m basically horrified for both. Rubin: Okay, fair enough. Hütz: And I have no problem with being called that because I know that I have people’s attention at the point where I can tell the rest of the story. Rubin: Well, that’s also a great way for an artist to be: to travel around and find things here and there, and be half criminal. Hütz: Well, sure. Rubin: But there’s also a tradition of reclaiming hurtful words, you know, like the LGBT community be calling itself “queer,” or hip-hop artists using “ni**er.” Hütz: It takes the power out of it. It’s exactly the same syndrome for me. That’s how I look at it. Also, you know, autobiographically, “gypsy” never came in in my life until I was in the West. So I didn’t know what it means, actually, until I left. Rubin: How can having a really good time be political? What is your reaction to the fairly common idea about art that is organized around “Here’s the political stuff over here. And here is the fun stuff over here.” It seems to me that your music is not orientated around separating things into little boxes. Hütz: Well, I could never separate none of these things. And that’s why it sounds the way it sounds. You know, while talking about this, you have to understand that I’m basically pressured into it.

111

Migration—Eugene Hütz Rubin: Pressured into what? Hütz: Into being analytical about it. In my own creative process, I operate strictly on instinct. And everything goes with instinctual flow, really. And that’s why it’s connected to having a good time. Because instinct is your fire, you know. It’s everything cathartic and joyous is connected to that very much. And I most fully believe in the spirit, and that’s my guiding force, you know. Otherwise I get a sort of feeling in my spine that something is wrong. I stay true to my spirit before anything else.

111

112

113

9

“Gaps We Cross with Technology”: Solidarity and Surveillance According to Cory Doctorow

Doctorow puts his money where his mouth is (or rather, where his keyboard is) when it comes to publishing his well-regarded fiction. A  prominent supporter of digital exchanges—he believes that copyright laws should only be activated if someone is trying to sell and profit from someone else’s work—he has released his writing via Creative Commons, an organization formed to enable electronic distribution of copyrighted works.1 His first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was the first novel released under the Creative Commons license. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom went on to win the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2004. In this futuristic piece, death is obsolete, suspended animation is ordinary, and abandoned Disney theme parks are considered the most “real” locations that remain. Overall, the question of authenticity and reality in the digital age is a shaping subject in many of his works—as is the resultant surveillance and loss of privacy. He has written in various forms, fiction and nonfiction, about the Patriot Act. For instance, in a 2015 piece in the Guardian, Doctorow asserts:  “It’s possible that four senators and their respective staffers wrote the Patriot Act in a mere 36 hours, while America went into a panic over the worst terrorist attacks in US history. It seems a lot more likely, though, that the Patriot Act was already sitting in someone’s desk-drawer, waiting to be tabled when a suitable disaster occurred.”2 Perhaps Doctorow’s most emphatic treatment of surveillance culture is in his bestselling 2008 YA novel Little Brother, which follows four teenagers who resist, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in San Francisco, the Department of Homeland Security’s violent and authoritarian attack on the Bill of Rights. (Digital copies of this book

1 2

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization founded in 2001. “Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy?” (October 2, 2015): https://www.theguardian. com/technology/2015/oct/02/why-is-it-so-hard-to-convince-people-to-care-about-privacy.

114

114

Creative Activism

are also available through Creative Commons.) The book takes up a range of serious matters:  incarceration and waterboarding, sexual relationships, family disagreements, political crafting of social fears. Doctorow’s inclusion of these subject stems from a deep respect on his part for young people; when asked to tone down the challenging elements, he refused. Doctorow’s respect for young adult readers is likely couched in his own past. Born in 1971 in Toronto, Ontario, he left home when he was 17 years old and moved to Mexico to write. “I was an adolescent who was very firm in my belief that I should be afforded a very wide range of autonomy and self-determination,” he recalled. It took Doctorow seven years to graduate from high school—he spent one of them organizing protests against the first Gulf War—but clearly, the focus on writing and on charting his own path has come together in his work.3 He does not limit himself to writing in a particular form; in addition to novels he has published nonfiction, short fiction, journalism, essays, blog entries, a graphic novel. He is frequently interviewed, has appeared in numerous documentaries, and is an effective tweeter. The same autonomy that has shaped Doctorow’s successful writing career has in some ways caused him to remain controversial. What is seen as his support for hacking in resistance to government surveillance has led to his books being pulled from a Florida school district. His definition of “fair use” regarding posting of other writers’ work has gotten pushback. Boing Boing, a blog Doctorow coedits, has been regularly censored by both governmental agencies and private companies. Understandably, he sees these moves as threats. But Doctorow also believes that the internet provides people with a significant way to come together—for solidarity, for socializing, for activism. “This will be a great thing, if only we don’t screw it up,” he writes.4

Selected bibliography ● ● ●

3 4

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (novel, 2003) A Place So Foreign and Eight More (short stories, 2003) Eastern Standard Tribe (novel, 2004)

The first Gulf War, also known as the Persian Gulf War, began in 1990. “Unchecked Surveillance Technology Is Leading Us Toward Totalitarianism.” International Business Times (May 5, 2017): http://www.ibtimes.com/unchecked-surveillance-technology-leading-ustowards-totalitarianism-opinion-2535230.

115

Solidarity and Surveillance—Cory Doctorow ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

●

115

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (novel, 2005) Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present (short stories, 2007) Little Brother (novel, 2008) Makers (novel, 2009) For the Win (novel, 2010) The Rapture of the Nerds (novel, with Charles Stross, 2010) Chicken Little (novella, 2011) With a Little Help (short stories, 2011) Pirate Cinema (novel, 2012) Homeland (novel and sequel to Little Brother, 2013) In Real Life (graphic novel, with Jen Wang, 2014) Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age (nonfiction, forewords by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, 2015) Walkaway (novel, 2017) Rubin: There are certain words I discourage students from using in their essays; one of them is “natural”— because in the humanities, very few things are, in fact, “natural.” You write about technological intersections with the human body. How would you put those two into dialogue? Doctorow: The thing that springs to mind it is that “natural” is an ideologically loaded word, often meaning “correct,” or “defensible,” or “inevitable.” And one of the great tensions between science and science communication is the extent to which science tries to plumb something like objective reality, while science communication turns that into ideology. I had a teacher at the University of Waterloo named Anne Innis Dagg, an anthropologist and biologist.5 She wrote an amazing book called Love of Shopping Is Not a Gene, which is a critique of Darwinian psychology. And Darwinian psychology, she points out, is a series of made-up stories that have no experimental validation to explain why it’s “natural,” why all of the inequalities in our society are “natural,” therefore inevitable, and therefore excusable. She critiques that thinking as a biologist, but also as a feminist, and I think that for a long time claims about naturalness in relation to technology were bitter rejection of technology. “It’s unnatural for humanity to travel more than 60 miles an hour, our eyeballs would fall out of their sockets!” And now, one of the rubrics of technology has become to discover what is truly “natural” about us, and what is imposed. What is artifice. To me it seems obvious that this is an artificial divide, as we are a part of the natural

5

Anne Innis Daag (b. 1933) is a biologist and author of numerous books and articles, many of which focus on gender politics, animal rights, and homosexuality.

116

116

Creative Activism

world, right? If a beaver dam is natural, then so is capitalism. Right? And if a beaver dam is disruptive to the environment, then so might capitalism be. And in the same way that deadly nightshade is natural and organic, “natural” to me is a word without any kind of endorsement. “Natural” might be to live 35 years and die of a dental abscess, like Tutankhamen.6 Rubin: I think that the question of what is “authentic” is connected to these definitions of “natural.” In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, you have the abandoned Disney Park as the most “authentic” remaining location. And you have the “authentic” Roman ruins in Little Brother. Doctorow: In Little Brother, the Sutro Baths are pure Baudrillard, they’re the simulation of something that never happened, right?7 Rubin: Absolutely. That is a good way to put it. Doctorow: And I know that Baudrillard used simulacrum to describe Main St, USA, and I think that there’s something to it. But I think that in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, there are some technological changes that are more of a Rubicon than others. So there’s some technological changes. There are some gaps that we cross with technology where it’s much harder to look back, across the gap, and empathize with life on the other side of it, than others. I think that any sound reproduction verses no sound reproduction is a huge gap. 8-tracks to cassette tapes? Not so much, right? Talking to someone who had never experienced or expected that sound could be recorded and reproduced later is foundationally different from someone who expects sound, all sound, to be recordable as opposed to only some sound, which is like life in the modern hard drive. I think that the characters in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom are concerned that they’re crossing one of those gaps. And of course this is Douglas Adams’s formulation that everything invented before you were 19 was inevitable, everything invented before you’re 30 is amazing, and everything invented after that should be illegal.8

6

7

8

Tutankhamen, frequently referred to in popular culture as “King Tut,” was an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled for about ten years, until he died at the age of 19 around 1324 bc. His tomb was discovered in 1922. The Sutro Baths were constructed in 1896 as an indoor salt-water swimming complex, and were destroyed by fire in 1966. In Little Brother they are described as “San Francisco’s authentic fake Roman ruins.” Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a French philosopher; he explored the notion of simulacra (a copy of something that never existed) in his 1981 Simulacra and Simulation. Douglas Adams (1952–2001) was a British author and humorist. In his unfinished book The Salmon of Doubt, released in 2002, he notes, “I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

117

Solidarity and Surveillance—Cory Doctorow

117

It’s in the nature of everyone to assume that the technology that is characteristic of their generation is one of profound innovations that change the world, and not one of the minor ones that we look back on, collapse with a whole bunch of other ones, and just call “The Age of Digital.” Or whatever. And they feel—and they have good reason to feel—that there is a big difference between a practice that is defined by a place that you visit and a practice that is defined by a service that you consume over a network. And they’re right in as much the end game of what they’re doing, or of what the clique that they’re opposed to is doing, is that you shutter the whole of Orlando and replace it with a data center. I mean why bother with Walt Disney World if you can experience it at home? Right? Rubin: Right. Doctorow: And, so, they brand what they have as authentic. Rubin: Absolutely. It’s an interesting chain for me. I am thinking about a time I’ve been to Disneyland as an adult, when a friend of mine came from Ghana. He’d never been in the United States before, so I took him there. And we got on the “It’s a Small World” Ride and we’re riding in the little boat, and all of a sudden we were going through the Africa room. And little dolls with bones in their noses and grass skirts were dancing and singing: I was just shrinking. And after we came out I said, “Nasser, I’m so sorry about that.” He said, “About what?” I said, “The Africa room back there.” He said with astonishment, “That was Africa?!” Doctorow: The Canada room is also unrecognizable. Rubin: Obviously, there is ideological meaning to performing “African” on that ride. But now, I want to ask you about another kind of performance that crops up in your writing: what some people have started to call “security theater.” Doctorow: I call it the “security syllogism.” Something must be done; we have done something; something has been done. On all the panels I’ve been on today, the Daily Mail has come up. The Daily Mail is a bit like Fox, but it’s a newspaper and it has its tentacles much deeper into British psyche.9 And its principal effect is to whip people up into a frenzy of terror that admits no inaction on the part of the state, regardless of the objective reality of their terror. Or the likelihood that whatever the Daily Mail is calling for will solve it. The CCTVs are, I think, an outgrowth of Daily Mail terror about thugs.10 It’s a highly racialized narrative when it comes from the Mail as well. I was just

9 10

The Daily Mail is a British tabloid newspaper and traditional supporter of the Conservative Party. CCTV is closed-circuit television, a prominent form of video surveillance. In 2011, there were approximately 30 million of them in the United States, and 1.85 million—or one for every thirtytwo people—in the United Kingdom.

118

118

Creative Activism

reading in a column five minutes ago that someone mentioned during the last panel I was on that MI5, the spy agency, was created in the UK because the Daily Mail syndicated a novel about a German invasion of Britain in 1910.11 They convinced their readers that there were German spies in Britain. They created a campaign to demand that the government create a spy agency to round up German spies. And they promptly rounded up a bunch of German spies, who in retrospect have all been exonerated. Our spy agency, our major spy agency, exists because they syndicated a hysterical war novel. Rubin: Since we were talking about Little Brother, I’d like to hear what kind of structures and ideas you think can circulate especially effectively under the heading “Young Adult.” I have the sense that YA is more than just fiction that is for young adults. Doctorow: That the adolescent narrative is a feature of young adult fiction, and young adult narrators are spectacularly fun to write because they’re doing things for the first time. When you do something for the first time, it is qualitatively different from doing it for the one hundredth time or even the second time, because you have no direct knowledge of what the outcome will be. You are taking a literally unknowable risk the first time you tell a lie of consequence or you do something noble for a friend that requires selfsacrifice. You’ve no idea how bad it’s going to turn out. And as a result there is a heightened drama in those actions, which is why it often makes sense for a young adult novel to consist of a coming of age story, a bunch of these Rubicons to cross, ending in a literal loss of virginity. That’s the last chapter of a lot of YA novels. Obviously, negotiating and navigating authority. Stories of intense social cohesion and intense social cohesion challenged from within and without. Stories of surveillance. Someone told me a story last night about a mother bringing her son to Gandhi, saying, “He won’t listen to me. He eats too much sweets and he’s getting fat. Will you please tell him not to eat so much sugar?” And Gandhi said, “Listen to your mother.” And she said, “No, no, no tell him not to eat sugar.” And he said, “Listen to your mother.” And she said, “Tell him not to eat sugar!” And he just said, “Listen to your mother!” And he said, “Come back in a month.” So she comes back in a month, and he’s still eating sweets and she says, “Will you tell him?” And he said, “Don’t eat sugar.”

11

The Military Intelligence, Section 5, is the United Kingdom’s counterintelligence agency.

119

Solidarity and Surveillance—Cory Doctorow

119

And she says, “Why didn’t you tell him a month ago? I’ve traveled 200 miles on a train, why didn’t you tell him a month ago not to eat sugar?” And he said, “Because a month ago I was eating too much sugar.” Right? And I think it’s illuminating that so many of us, while eating too much sugar, can quite handily tell people that they’re eating too much sugar, especially our kids. It’s not reciprocal. I think that kids are much more conscious of hypocrisy than grown-ups. Mostly because they’re on the shitty end of that stick more often, right? Hypocrisy is a lot more palatable when you’re its beneficiary. Rubin: That’s for sure. Has your daughter busted you yet on hypocrisy? Doctorow: Oh yeah! “Daddy, that’s blackmail.” Rubin: Good for her. That is so admirable . . . in someone else’s kid! Doctorow: My recourse to this is logical and natural consequences. To me the difference between “blackmail” and “parenting” is this: blackmail is, “If you don’t eat your dinner, we won’t go to the movies.” Parenting is, “If you don’t eat your dinner, I don’t wanna go to the movies with you because I know that you’ll be crying, because you’ll be hungry half way through it. So I won’t take you to the movies.” And so that’s sort of explaining a chain of logic that is not a punishment, it’s a consequence. Rubin: How do young people of the current generation become activists? Doctorow: I often hear from adolescents who’ve read Little Brother or my other books, and are resolved to, or have figured out how to, break their school’s censor-wall. And first of all I always tell them—I feel honor-bound to tell them—“This is not worth getting kicked out of school for.” But then I also say, “I don’t mean that you should just take it lying down. What I think you should be doing is trying to figure out how you could get rid of the censor-wall because it’s one thing for you to get outside your school’s censoring proxy. All of your fellow students are still fucked.” Right? I’ve been talking for years to young people. I still hope that this will someday take hold because it is the only way I can see these things changing. Because there are federal mandates, because of the Communications Decency Act, every facility receiving federal funding has to have these censor walls.12 I say, “You need to study the failings of your censor walls and present them to the PTA, the school trustees, the board, your local government, your congressmen, whatever. And this is an opportunity for you to learn advocacy. So I want you to gather ethnographies of the people in your school 12

The Communications Decency Act (CDA) was passed in 1996 in the United States as a Congressional attempt to regulate pornographic material online. In 1997, the Supreme Court struck down the Act’s anti-indecency sections.

120

120

Creative Activism

who run into problems with these censor walls. Find out from teachers how they interfere with teaching. Document all the ways students break through it. Don’t break through it yourself, that will get you kicked out of school. Figure out how to file FOIA requests. Find out who’s supplying it, what your school board is paying for it, and then figure out who these corporations are.” They’re so dirty, right? Rubin: Yes, a combination of censorship and profiteering is especially dirty. Doctorow: The major customers for censorware are Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, and Kazakhstan. And then they repackage it for Fortune 100s and American schools. So find out who these companies are, find out how much money your school board is diverting to people who are complicit in routine human rights abuses, who are effectively war criminals. How much they are diverting from your education for a product that doesn’t work, that over-blocks, that under-blocks and that is trivially circumvented, and then present that. Start pointing out the nudity of the emperor. That’s a kid’s job, right? Point out the nudity of the emperor in a systematic way, don’t take no for an answer. Build up a practice of it. Write it down. Document it. Put it on the internet. Get other kids doing it. You know, build a movement! Don’t just liberate yourself. Structurally you can do it under the auspices of something called “The Students for a Free Culture” which is a global network of campus clubs that do this kind of work. I think you can get credit for it. I think you can get AP credit for it. I think it will look great on your transcript. Rubin: It certainly is a valuable educational experience for young people to strategize, and to connect their opinions and efforts to social change and collective work. In Little Brother, is there a reason why you don’t identify who the terrorists are that trigger the Department of Homeland Security’s compromising of the Bill of Rights? Doctorow: Who gives a shit about who terrorists are? They’re idiots! Terrorists are not legitimate. Terrorism is not a legitimate form of political discourse. Who cares who they are and what they want? The important thing about terrorism isn’t who they are and what they want, it’s what we do when they crop up. I don’t pretend that this is a comprehensive account of the causes of terrorism, but certainly one of them is authoritarianism, and a lack of any legitimate means to change. I don’t know that I consciously decided this, but in retrospect, that just feels like adding complexity where none is necessary. I wrote a story called “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” which is a postapocalyptic story.13 I never say what the disaster is in part because it doesn’t 13

The story appeared in 2007 in the online magazine Jim Baen’s Universe.

121

Solidarity and Surveillance—Cory Doctorow

121

matter. I think that one of the most corrosive fantasies of the Cold War era is that the people nursing their ulcerated sores in the mountains of radioactive ash will care who launched which bomb first. Rubin: That is hard to argue with, though I am a little anxious about sliding into the “art is a simple, objective mirror of reality” narrative. Writing about who did it is making an authorial point. Doctorow: All questions of ideology are irrelevant in the face of terminal radiation poisoning. Rubin: I do see your point. How does the question of work and labor emerge in all of this? In For the Win you have video game sweatshops.14 Does it expand out from there? Is it broader than that? Doctorow: These days the thing I’m thinking about the most is whether the problem with society is automation, productivity gains, or an uneven apportioning of the dividends of productivity gains. There’s an economically illiterate critic of technology named Jaron Lanier; he talks about how few workers are needed to accomplish certain technological feats.15 He makes a completely fallacious parallel between Kodak and Instagram. A better one would be Canon and Kodak. Or one of the digital camera companies. Or Apple and Kodak. But even if his claim were correct that Instagram has, whatever it is, 12 people and Eastman Kodak has 5,000 people, and that as a result this is economically destructive . . . it’s just wrong on its face. That’s like saying that the fact that we all use toilets, but only some of us have to clean, them means that if we automated cleaning toilets that would be a net evil because it would put people out of the toilet cleaning business. Actually, there is no virtue in the fact that some people have to slave over vats of chemicals for Eastman Kodak. There is no virtue that some people had to be alienated from their labor sitting in photo labs selling boxes of film, and there is no virtue in the fact that people do work that machines can do better. The vice, if there is one, or the demerit, if there is one, is if we automate toilet cleaning and then all of the people who are no longer needed to clean toilets end up as economic roadkill. That is a genuine problem, but it is not a problem of automation. It’s a problem of unfair apportionment of dividends between capital and labor. My friend Charles Stross thinks that we’re approaching the end of work.16 14

15 16

“Video game sweatshop” refers to the labor conditions of “gold farming”—selling credits related to online games such as World of Warcraft to gamers for cash. The World Bank has recently estimated that “gold farming” is a 3-billion-dollar industry, prevalent in China, and frequently involving prison labor. Lanier (b. 1960) is often called a “computer philosophy writer.” Stross (b. 1964) is British science fiction writer.

122

122

Creative Activism He’s parsed out some department of labor statistics; he thinks 40 percent of Americans of working age are out of work. That if you actually parse the statistics closely that’s what you end up with. And he thinks it’s going to increase. I kind of buy that. And to the extent that industry is repatriating to America, it’s repatriating without jobs. The GE factories that just reopened after moving back from China? The reason is that it is economical to operate a factory in America now instead of in China, where labor is cheap—the cost of labor has fallen in America, but the real difference has been that the quantity of labor inputs to a finished product has fallen by an order of nine to two. So even at a higher wage, the cost of diesel is higher than the cost of labor. Because there’s not much labor in it anymore. And if we don’t need humans to work anymore, what do we need them for? Even if you are a fan of capitalism, you can’t sustain capitalism without a workforce that has buying power. You can’t have a functional economy based on 15,000 oligarchs living on mountain tops amid rising seas, selectively breeding their children by Harrier Jet, selling each other Rolexes built by robots. This is not a functional world.

123

10

“What It’s Like to Be Stuck”: Interruption According to Julio Salgado

Artist Julio Salgado has repeatedly been described as having come out of the closet twice. Once, in the more-familiar sense, because he is gay; and once because he is undocumented. The two are, in his experience, shaping of each other—especially because when we spoke, same-sex marriage had not been legalized in all parts of the United States, with the result that a familiar path to citizenship was not equally accessible to all. Salgado uses a relatively new term about himself that captures the way the two aspects of his identity are shaping of each other: “UndocuQueer.” Similarly, he also refers to himself as an “artivist.” Salgado was born in 1983 in Mexico, and came to the United States with his parents when he was 11  years old. He received a BA in journalism from California State University-Long Beach. But fairly early, he realized that there was a hierarchy built into American higher education and the journalism world that he felt excluded by. Indeed, objection to social hierarchies permeates Salgado’s vision and expression beyond his works of visual art. As we spoke, for instance, I was very struck by Salgado’s frequent use of the word “folks,” a usage that efficiently and consistently eliminates a hierarchy and implies the word “we.” Salgado’s art, much of which is created digitally, is extremely efficient in its social and political declarations, though it frequently takes up complicated issues: sexuality, border crossing, labor, economics, imperialism. (In a gratifying moment for me as interviewer, Salgado and I had a pleasant moment when we bonded over mutual admiration for graphic novelists Los Bros Hernandez, who also take up these issues and others in impressively adept form.) A moment when Salgado’s artistic efficiency in dealing with serious social issues received a great deal of attention occurred when he responded artistically to an advertisement for American Apparel, which featured an older Mexican or Mexican American farmworker with a young white woman, that essentially turned him into a prop. As we discuss below, Salgado created a series of responses to the advertisement

124

124

Creative Activism

that injected serious social commentary, delightfully—and again, efficiently— renamed “American Apparel” as “Undocumented Apparel.” Salgado’s insistence that the economic basis of various kinds of oppression— anti-gay sentiment, demonizing of undocumented workers and their families, sexism, and racism—are not only connected to each other but also to the US economic system that permeates his work—and his daily life. For instance, he described being at the Long Beach Pride Parade with his mother. One of the first floats to pass them was the Wells Fargo float. He recalled, “We start booing, and the queer folks around me asked, ‘Why are you booing?’ And I  started explaining how Wells Fargo invests in GEO groups that make money out of detention centers.”1 Salgado is currently the art director at DREAMers Adrift, which he established with four others to create a space for DREAM Act students to tell their stories in various forms (poetry, comedy skits, autobiographical narratives, and a range of visual art forms) and thereby encourage more visibility of undocumented Americans. He created the illustrations for Papers:  Stories by Undocumented Youth, a book that was published while its editors were working on a documentary film of the same name. His work is not only featured in gallery exhibitions, but used in the streets at demonstrations—once again, pushing past borders.

Selected publications and exhibitions Power in Numbers, Movimiento de Art y Cultura Latino Americana (2012) Papers: Stories by Undocumented Youth (illustrator), ed. J. Manuel, C. Pineda, A. Galisky, and R. Shine (2012) Studio 34, Butler College (2014) Taller Arte del Neuvo Amanecer (2014) “FTP: For the People”: Group Exhibition (2016) ¡Mírame! Expressions of Queer Latinx Art, La Plaza de Cultura y Artes (2017) Rubin: How do you convey collectivity when you seek to tie your art to a movement or a sense of unity? Salgado: I started as an art major at a community college. But I felt that I didn’t belong there. The people that we were studying—well, I didn’t 1

Wells Fargo holds shares in GEO Group, a company that builds and operates private prisons and immigrant detention centers.

125

Interruption—Julio Salgado

125

see people of color. And even though it was a community college, I was surrounded with folks who were saying things like, “I might take a trip to Europe next summer.” So I studied journalism. I think that made me think of art not so much as a private thing, even though there is something private about it, but something that you can share and ideas that you can share with other folks. With the UndocuQueer series that I started making, I really wanted to have other folks tell me what to write or tell me what to put in there. I really wanted to quote other folks. I wanted to ask, “What do you want to say? As somebody who is undocumented—what does ‘UndocuQueer’ mean to you?” Rubin: What kinds of response did you get? Salgado: I started getting a lot of response from folks all across the nation sending me pictures and telling me how they saw their UndocuQueer movement. I really felt that political art means that you have to be present in the movement. If that means going to meetings, being on call, which I hate—even being part of sit-ins. Putting yourself in line of fire, that brings creativity. There is this collaboration of sorts between activists and artists that is not necessarily going to be me sitting in a corner by myself drawing. Rubin: People have used multiple words—with different connotations—for what you do. There is “artist,” which you feel a little bit like you turned your back on in college. There is “cartoonist”—which can invoke political cartoons that are serious, as well as fun. And there is “illustrator,” when, as you just described, you are getting other people to share their experiences and then giving visual expression to it. Now, some people, if you said to them, “I’m really into art,” would feel alienated. Because socially we have structured a notion of who museums are for to exclude a lot of people. I am flashing on one of the Batman movies, the one with Jack Nicholson playing the villain.2 At one point, he goes into a museum—it’s a crazy museum because it has paintings and sculptures that don’t really exist in museums together. And he and his thugs, they turn on the boom box to a song by Prince. They go through the museum and deface the paintings, knock sculptures over. I feel like a lot of people were secretly happy to see somebody splashing paint around in the museum because there is an externally imposed sense of not belonging. What do you think makes people feel alienated from the fact that they can understand art? Salgado: We recently had undocu-nation exhibition at a gallery here in San Francisco. And it’s a great space. But a lot of the time we feel lost because,

2

In 1989’s Batman (directed by Tim Burton), Jack Nicholson plays the villain known as the Joker.

126

126

Creative Activism

especially as people of color, we don’t see ourselves. Unless it is special, like, “Let’s do Latino heritage month!” I can’t speak for everybody or say why anybody else would not like art or be uncomfortable in those places. But I feel uncomfortable because, yeah, it’s white and you can’t touch. And that’s just a physical part. Then there is the part of funding or who gets those spaces. I think what we are doing now is creating those spaces. I think that’s making people comfortable. And I think that Facebook and digital media are changing a little bit of how we see art. Rubin: It is making art more accessible in some ways. Salgado: I feel very lucky to be alive now because this feels like something is changing. Facebook became my gallery. I ’ve been drawing for a long time. But the drawings that I started making, the DREAM art . . . I remember I had just seen the movie, Exit Through the Gift Shop.3 And that’s all about street art, and I really wanted to do that. But because of my situation I feel that if I go and try to put a poster on the street and get arrested, not only am I going to get a ticket, I’m going to get deported. Rubin: Wow. That is incredibly defining. I never exactly acknowledged that before, though of course there are differences in how people would be treated if arrested for that. Salgado: And so I had to find a creative way to put the art out there because I really wanted to—again, it was a selfish thing. I wanted to say to the world how I felt. Rubin: That’s opposite of a selfish thing. That is called sharing. Salgado: When this was happening, when the sit-ins were happening, they were still calling us “illegals.4 “There is a rally with illegal aliens trying to get rights. How dare they?” And I thought, “My God. They have it so wrong. They have this opportunity to see how youth are rising up and doing something that is so radical and constructive and they’re putting it like, ‘How dare they?’ ” I wanted to express that. I wanted to pay homage to those students who were being so brave and putting their bodies on the line for us. I couldn’t do it on the streets. So I started using Facebook to put it out there. Facebook has been very instrumental in my being able to release art.

3

4

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a 2010 documentary about the British political street artist Banksy, whose legal name has never been released. There has been a great deal of discussion about the term “illegal alien” on one hand, and “undocumented worker” on the other.

127

Interruption—Julio Salgado

127

Rubin: It’s interesting that you bring Facebook into it. I wanted to ask you about public space because it seems to me that art like yours can be an important way of claiming the public space. But then I thought, what if I’m being old fashioned in the way I think what the public space is? And then I can’t help being struck at the fact that they call it a “wall” on Facebook. Salgado: I know! It’s a wall. And I feel like a lot of times I’m not the only one. There are so many undocumented artists that are putting stuff out there, too. Rubin: Do you think the phrase “street art” is useful anymore? Salgado: Yeah. I’m a huge admirer of street art. I love street art. The commercialization of street art, though . . . Rubin: It’s always upsetting. Salgado: You have huge billboards that you have no say on. You know, corporations can, at any time, create a billboard. We can’t say anything. Yet you make a poster that is political and brings a positive message and you are the criminal. Rubin: Yeah. It’s about who owns the space. Salgado: It is. I think street art is still relevant, because there are so many artists out there that are putting amazing artwork and yet are being criminalized for it. But who gets to do street art? Maybe I’m just adding more to it. But you have a lot of white, male, artists—they are making money out of it. Shepard Fairey—I mean he’s huge.5 You know, this guy who is using a lot of our stories in his art is making so much money out of it. And he is so well respected. Yet if you see a kid of color, doing graffiti, putting his own spin on art, getting arrested . . . it’s scary. I’m not a street artist. Rubin: You’re a virtual street artist. Salgado: Virtual street artist. [Laughter] To me it is really interesting who has been able to move from street art to museums, who gets access to different spaces. And we haven’t even mentioned women. There is a series on YouTube called “Voice of Art.” It’s basically short documentaries featuring street artists. And the overwhelming majority are males. They finally added people of color in there, and Favianna is one of them.6 And to me it is all these men and Favianna. I am not sure if there is another female artist. Rubin: Favianna can hold her own.

5

6

Shepard Fairey (b. 1970) is an American street artist and activist. His art received a great deal of attention during the 2008 presidential election for a poster of Obama with the word “hope.” Favianna Rodriguez (b. 1978) is a Latina artist based in California who self-identifies as queer and is known for her social justice work; Salgado has worked with her in Culture Strike.

128

128

Creative Activism

Salgado: I’m so blessed to be working with her because she is so inspirational as a woman of color. Her art—I don’t know if you have seen her reproductive rights posters—her art is just so amazing. Rubin: I love the one that says, “I’m a slut.”7 Salgado: She just had a show in Maine. And people got offended. They took her work down. I think it ultimately went back up. But, you know, there are so many layers of issues, like who has access to what. And what happens if what you are trying to say doesn’t fit the little box that is the way art is “supposed” to be. Rubin: I know. And who finds what offensive. I don’t think she is offensive. Salgado: Because you’re a woman and you know what it’s like. Rubin: Oh, I do. But what’s the rule about being offensive if you’re an artist? Isn’t that important? Or do you get a message that art is supposed to always be comfortable? Salgado: Exactly. I actually got some negative feedback from some DREAMers, with this image that I made. The cap and gown has sort of become a staple. That represents us. So I made this image of a cap and gown and a DREAMer giving the finger. And the caption said, “I’d rather be undocumented than die for your acceptance.”8 The history behind that piece was that a Latino Republican from Florida was trying for a different version of the DREAM Act, without college. It’s military. The rationale was like, “If they are willing to die for this country, they deserve to be citizens.” I was like, “Fuck that. I’m not going to die for this country just so you can feel that I deserve these papers. I’d rather be undocumented than die for your respect.” So a lot of people, when they saw the piece, felt, “That’s not the image that we’re trying to put out. We’re good DREAMers.” But I had to insist, “No. We can’t continue to give out this narrative about the ‘perfect immigrant’—you know, ‘I deserve to go to college because I’m a good immigrant.’ ” Rubin: Doesn’t the DREAM Act seem blaming of the parents? Salgado: Yes. “I’m a good immigrant—my parents are the criminals.” I think we are all to blame here when we tell our stories like, “It wasn’t my fault that my parents brought me here. It wasn’t my fault that I’m here. I didn’t have a say in it.” Well, the truth is, our parents brought us here because they are responsible and courageous. I think this is, again, why images and art are important to change the narrative that criminalizes our parents. 7

8

The full text of the 2012 poster is “I’m a slut. I vote. So does everyone I sleep with. And you’re about to be more fucked than I am.” The poster is from 2012.

129

Interruption—Julio Salgado

129

And so I made an image. It was a picture of my family, because my parents are responsible and courageous. It was a collaboration with another DREAMer activist in LA. And the media took that and continued to put that narrative of “this poor little immigrant . . .” Rubin: “. . . he couldn’t help it.” Salgado: “It’s the parents.” And so there we get things like DACA, which only is good for a few folks, only for the folks who can go to college, only until the age of 31.9 And what about our parents? Who gets to get their papers? Only a few folks would be able to qualify. So we have to be very careful in the words that we use and not be afraid to express ourselves to the max. You know, like using a middle finger. I mean, it’s not as bad as what politicians try to do with our bodies, trying to send us to war to get papers! Rubin: It’s like feudal Europe, when if you were really rich, you could pay somebody poor to take your place in the military. Sometimes the sort of discourse that we consider polite needs to be interrupted. It sounds like you are trying to interrupt that on both an artistic and a political level. Salgado: I do that because I’m so inspired by the interruptions that DREAMers make. Doing a sit in, in an office or in a street, it’s almost—it is performance art. You have your outfits. You have your media. You’re sitting down and you are making people uncomfortable and you’re making people angry and you have to do it. These kinds of actions that have empowered me to come out. A lot of those folks are younger than me. I’m 29 and a lot of them are only 21, 22. They are doing things that I never could have imagined. Some of these folks are going into detention centers. And people ask, “Why? Why are you doing this?” I was part of the Undocubus and they held a rally in Knoxville.10 They tell you when you are doing that, when you are participating, when you are blocking a street, to look a person in the eyes because if you look a person in the eyes they are less likely to run you over. But the anger in their faces! And their not understanding why we were doing that! Well, the reason why people do this kind of action is you have to make people feel what it’s like 9

10

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was an immigration policy put in place by the Obama administration in 2012. The policy allowed undocumented minors a renewable two-year period of deferred action on deportation. It also made them eligible to receive a work permit. Undocumented activists rode a bus together in 2012 with stops in ten states to protest for immigrant rights. Part of the strategy was to reveal their undocumented status and encourage others to do the same. Participants were arrested (and released) along the way. The action is examined by Lisa Patel and Rocio Sanches Ares in “The Politics of Coming Out Undocumented.”

130

130

Creative Activism

to be stuck . You have to block . And then you say, “Well, this is how we feel every single day.” Rubin: Besides interrupting, can you think of artistic strategies that can become political strategies or vice versa? Salgado: Yeah. As a cultural worker, I think our job is to look beyond policies. Policy is important. I mean policy is the work we have been doing. But when you are trying to do cultural work, you are trying to change the image that people have—for instance, the word “illegal,” “illegal aliens,” the right have so strategically placed that in people’s mind that they often automatically think “illegal aliens” equals “bad.” How do we challenge that? How do we continue to challenge that? The way we have been putting out our art, it’s just to constantly be in people’s faces. I think a lot of the times we have to reach out to politicians. We have to. But how are we going to make our community stronger with this art? How are we doing to empower communities? Doing art workshops. Using humor. Using other types of media, not getting stuck in the idea that this poster is it. There are many different strategies, and I don’t think there is a specific answer. We are still trying to figure it out. But it is important not to forget that culture is very important to social change. Rubin: First of all, I want to call attention to your use of the word “worker” about artists. But you have got me thinking about artistic strategies. If you think about art as the thing in the frame that is hanging on the wall, that is one thing—but what if you think about art as the hammer you use to hang the thing on the wall? Because what you are describing is a tool for getting an issue out there. It doesn’t make it any less important or gratifying. Salgado: Exactly. And it is not just saying that artists are more important than activists, or even vice-versa, because I think they go hand in hand. An example was the book project.11 I had so much input in it. It wasn’t somebody saying, “Okay. I want you to do this drawing.” Instead, it was like, “You, Julio, you figure it out. You create.” When people receive the art that I did, they know I’m undocumented. And that is just me as a male queer undocumented, from southern California. My experience is so different from that of somebody who lives in Georgia and is undocumented and queer and a woman. I cannot tell her story. I can only be a tool and ask her, “How can we help each other? You tell me your story.” 11

The book is called Papers: Stories by Undocumented Youth and was edited by José Manuel, Cesar Pineda, Anne Galinsky, and Rebecca Shine; it was published in 2012 and takes the form of firstperson stories of young people with an age range of 14–32. Salgado illustrated the book.

131

Interruption—Julio Salgado

131

Rubin: It’s a collaboration. You seem to really privilege that sort of project— that defined Culture Strike. Salgado: Culture Strike came out of artists getting together and after the SB1070 passed in Arizona.12 There was a lot boycotting of Arizona, artists not doing shows in there. There was this whole discussion about what artists could do. How do we get everybody activated? And how do we support each other as artists because this is what we do for a living. Culture Strike has definitely helped in creating some projects that we do because we’ve got to eat. You know, I think money is a very dirty word. Rubin: It can be. But you are creating, and you should be fairly rewarded for it. Salgado: In the same way that an organizer might get paid, because they have to eat—it’s labor. It’s work. As artists, we need to stress the fact that this is the way that we live. It’s taken me some time to own that and call myself a cultural worker. Rubin: Advertisers pay artists who create posters. Salgado: Exactly. Why can’t we use that method but for something good? That’s the importance of street art. It is like reclaiming those spaces—but that street artist has to eat. And as an undocumented person, how do I get access to grants? How do I get access to certain things that other artists would do? Rubin: We’ve been talking about advertisement and I have to ask you now about the American Apparel ad.13 You’ve created a lot of wonderful responses to it. Salgado: I saw this ad for American Apparel. And it was a photograph of a farmer with a white girl leaning against him. And it seemed to be stating, “See? There is unity between folks.” When I first saw it, I was like, “Well, not really—no. Hold on.” That advertisement affirmed my belief in art as a strategy for getting people thinking. I used to be a construction worker. I used to work in kitchens. I’ve done all kinds of labor. Women who look like that, or men who look like models, did not look at people who look like him. So I started making my own versions. The models are people who are undocumented. And they are the ones who are going to be telling me what to put in the ad.

12

13

Arizona SB-1070 was an immigration measure that was quite controversial. Perhaps most famously, it not only required immigrants over the age of 14 to carry documents at all times, but it encouraged law enforcement to ascertain whether a person was in the country legally when there was “reasonable suspicion”—which led to racial profiling. Salgado received a lot of attention for his artistic response to a 2012 advertisement for American Apparel clothing that pictured a young white woman holding onto a Latino farmworker. American Apparel was already notorious for its controversial advertising, especially regarding very young scantily clad women.

132

132

Creative Activism

Rubin: Whether he is undocumented or not, it does seem that he is there for shock value. Salgado: Exactly. So my thinking was, “Is an undocumented person or a farmworker involved in the creation of this ad, which ultimately is to sell expensive T-shirts?” And so I started making them. They went viral. Then I got an e-mail from somebody called Marcia Brady, which I thought was a joke.14 Rubin: It was not? Salgado: It was someone named Marcia Brady. It wasn’t a joke. She was one of the creative directors. And they were appalled. They were like—“But we love immigrants!” My first thought was, “I’m getting sued.” And then I thought, imagine a corporation trying to sue an undocumented person. They threw numbers at me about how many people they’ve helped. They asked, “Why are you treating us so bad? How come you don’t show us any love?” And I’m like, “You’re an ally? You should know better than to use somebody.” And then the person tried to turn against me: “Well, you know, you are killing Raúl’s 15 minutes of fame.” I asked, “What do you mean?” They said, “Raúl never thought that he was going to be in an ad. And your images are not focusing on him. And I asked her, “How was Raúl involved in the creating of this ad?” “Well, he chose the shirt that he was wearing.” So that was my biggest criticism: “You are deciding how we are going to be portrayed in this ad that automatically makes money for you.” But the fact that an American Apparel employee contacted me and was kind of scared, was asking me to stop! And I thought, “Wow, the power. I’m a little immigrant. I just like to draw and make art.” It was one of those “Yes!” moments. But then I thought, “Well, what do I do with this?” I was so mad. They were offering me shirts! I was like, “No! I don’t want anything from you. I want you to apologize.” Which they never did—they never apologized. The only thing they said was, “People are overreacting to this ad.” It was a small triumph right there. Rubin: Instructive about the response art can garner. Salgado: Yes, and the power of media because my pictures went viral. So many people were sharing them! And I can say that I got American Apparel scared.

14

Salgado is referring to a character in the 1970s sitcom Brady Bunch.

133

Section 4

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

134

135

11

“It’s Like Walt Whitman Gave Me a Blow Job”: Action According to Abe Rybeck

The implicitly collective nature of theater—working together to mount a performance—is perhaps the most profound aspect of the Theater Offensive, an organization dedicated to the presentation of queer works. After all, LGBTQ people have long and frequently reported feelings of isolation. The Theater Offensive has created a sense of community in an impressive plurality of ways: through working together on theatrical productions, through holding listening sessions in different neighborhoods about what they would like the organization to engage, through who and what are represented in its productions, and through expanding its purview and the people who work in and for the organization. In the face of this defining reality, the humility of the Theater Offensive’s founder, Abe Rybeck, is incredibly moving: rather than seeing himself as some kind of savior, he is thrilled by being taught and having his consciousness raised by people brought under the Theater Offensive’s tent—especially young people, whom he quotes with admiration in this interview. Since Rybeck founded the delightfully named Theater Offensive in 1989, the organization has consistently grown in scope, range of projects, and attention it garners. Furthermore, it does not pretend that LGBTQ issues can be separated from class issues, from racial or ethnic issues, from gender issues, from geographical issues, and so forth, addressing them as all part of the bundle that is LGBTQ identity. (Racism, Rybeck points out in an op-ed in the biweekly LGBT magazine The Advocate, “remains Boston’s number 1 hot-button issue, causing astounding disparities in everything from health care and education to theater attendance.”) One result of this approach is that the Theater Offensive has also increasingly made its programming free. Rybeck was born in 1960 in Wheeling, West Virginia. He formed the Theater Offensive (which morphed out of an earlier, guerilla-theater company called United Fruit Company) in 1989. The Theater Offensive’s success, and increased

136

136

Creative Activism

national acceptance of its subject matter, does not make Rybeck complacent. In an Arts Fuse piece focused on the Theater Offensive’s production of Lenelle Möise’s show Expatriate, he muses, One of the enormous changes I’ve seen is that in big city theater scenes, queer work isn’t so scarce anymore, which is great. These days, no major theater company in a city like Boston would program its season without discussing what might be of interest to gay men. That puts many gay theater groups around the country in a real competitive tough spot. On the other, sadder hand, many folks in our community—especially women and people of color—still don’t feel seen or understood or represented by those plays. That’s why working with our neighbors in Villa Victoria to present this stunningly profound show by queer women of color is right smack in the middle of The Theater Offensive’s mission.1

Community outreach, then, defines Rybeck’s work through the theater as much as community creation. For instance, the Theater Offensive houses the newly formed Pride Youth Theater Alliance (PYTA), a national network of arts organizations with programs focused on LGBTQ youth theater. Rybeck also facilitated a response from the Theater Offensive to answer the call of a statewide Safe Schools Initiative, a program intended to make clear to teachers what the needs are of LGBTQ students, who face higher risks than their peers in a range of ways, including suicide. Summing up the Theater Offensive’s respectful and sophisticated approach, rather than educating teachers about the risks these students face (which on the face of it was what the Initiative was for), the Theater Offensive focuses on the students, working to create a space where they could feel safe, develop meaningful relationships, and figure out what they needed to reach their own definition of fulfillment. A  youth theater project called True Colors: OUT came out of this initiative, which would become the subject of a documentary by Ellen Brodsky, The Year We Thought about Love (2015). The next year, the True Love:  OUT project became the first LGBTQ organization to receive the National Arts & Humanities Youth Program Award, which was presented by Michelle Obama. (It is worth noting that Rybeck and the Theater Offensive have received a range of awards: local and national, organizational and individual, for art and for community service, for different kinds of activism.) 1

Thal, “Fuse Stage Interview: The Theater Offensive Brings Lenelle Möise’s Expatriate to Boston”: http://artsfuse.org/69871/fuse-interview-the-theater-offensive-brings-lenelle-moises-expatriate-toboston/.

137

Action—Abe Rybeck

137

Rybeck’s work with the Theater Offensive includes creative work as well as organizational work, of course:  he is a writer, actor, and occasional singer. For instance, he both wrote the musical lyrics and cowrote the music for Pure PolyEsther: A Biblical Burlesque, which was mounted at the Theater Offensive in 1991. The puns in the title alone indicate Rybeck’s understanding of the many levels on which meaning is created. “Poly,” of course, invokes “polyamory,” but “PolyEsther,” besides being a delightful joke, invokes the 1981 movie of the same name (written as “Polyester”) by gay icon John Waters. Pure PolyEsther is a gay (in both senses, as it happens) musical vision of the biblical book of Esther, involving cross-dressing, simulation of sexual intercourse, both vulgar and sacrilegious language, and very revealing costumes. In addition to his theatrical work, Rybeck has recorded a song, “If I Can Take a Hint,” on a 1989 album Feeding the Flame: Songs by Men to End AIDS. He has offered sophisticated discussion of the politics of transgenderism and the response to it, frequently noting that the Theater Offensive grew out of a drag act (which he mentions in the interview below). “That gave me a hint,” he has commented, “about how much I  owe to the inspiration and patience” from trans-friends. And then, capturing his forward-looking vision and his gratitude for being challenged and taught, he added, “And, in fact, the lack of patience.”2 Rubin: When it comes to reporting on LGBTQ rights, many mainstream outlets focus entirely or almost entirely on marriage. While I think we should all join the battle for true equal rights, this has always seemed both limited and limiting. But then, an earlier interview subject in this collection, with a young artist who identifies as “undocuqueer,” sort of schooled me. I love when young people do that! Rybeck: They should be the ones we are listening to. Rubin: He was saying, “All right. I can see where criticizing the institution of marriage makes sense. But undocumented gay people, if we could get married, we could get papers.” Rybeck: Well, marriage is access to rights. I have all sorts of questions about why you should need to be married to get those rights. But access to the same rights—I have no mixed feelings about that. Culturally, it’s more complicated, because I’m a 1970s gay guy. Marriage is not an institution

2

Rybeck, “I Am: The Trans People Speak: Abe, a Trans Ally”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= W04ll5fpIog&t=163s.

138

138

Creative Activism

in which I have any interest and I don’t respect it very much. I tear up like anybody else does but it’s partly out of anger. And, you know, me and Roberto, we’ve been together for nineteen years. It would be a big deal for us to give up living in sin. We really like that status. Rubin: That was very John Waters-ish thing to say.3 Rybeck: That said, the young artist’s point is well taken. The only reason Roberto and I can live in the same country is because he was married to a woman when we met, a US woman. He’s from Costa Rica and that’s how he is able to live in this country. And ironically, that was a genuine marriage but not a good one or a lasting one. They lived together for less than two years, and then they couldn’t make it work. She knew he was gay going into it, but she thought it could work anyway. He did, too. She needed him to not be gay. Not have sex with other people. Not be who he was. And I don’t mean to be speaking for Roberto but my point is that you don’t have to have a good marriage for it to count legally. So it seems pretty crazy to me that that’s the litmus test for whether you get to live in the country or not. I’m not against people getting married and I fought hard for the right. The Theater Offensive was presenting work on the issue of queer marriage, from very early on in our history. It wasn’t uncritical work but it was definitely about equal rights in that area. I don’t have mixed feelings about the rights in terms of equality. I have lots of cultural problems with marriage and I’m not that much interested in it myself. Secondly, the institution is problematic and I’d like us to take a look at that as opposed to only fighting for access. I was reminiscing the other day. I was thinking, “What was the first thing I did about gay marriage?” And I remembered that in 1990, there was a demonstration in front of the cathedral in the South End in favor of queer marriage. They asked me to perform at it. I think they had no idea what they were getting into, those poor folks. I don’t know what they thought I would do. But I have a song called “I Want to Get Married” that Dana Moser and I worked on together.4 Dana really wrote all the music and a bunch of the lyrics. And it’s about how, “Yeah, I want to get married, too, because I want access to having a contract for domestic abuse. I want to have my oppressive

3

4

John Waters (b. 1946)  is a progressive filmmaker and author who launched his career with transgressive cult films, such as Pink Flamingos (1972), and has continued to build in deliberately disgusting elements in his more mainstream successes, such as Hairspray (1988). Dana Moser is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in the Studio and Interrelated Design Department.

139

Action—Abe Rybeck

139

relationship sanctioned by the state. I also want to have one of those weddings where it’s my day. And everyone else is made to feel as miserable about themselves as possible.” I performed it in a white wedding dress and by the end it was completely smeared with blood. I ’m sure it was appalling. It was plenty appalling to the church officials who saw it. But I doubt if it was much more pleasing to the organizers of the demonstration, who were there for marriage. Rubin: Ouch. But it is very funny in retrospect, and being appalling— offensive, as it were—can be an important artistic strategy. How would you describe the Theater Offensive’s aesthetic and philosophical priorities? Rybeck: We grew out of a guerilla street theater troop called United Fruit Company that started in 1985. And that grew out of a political affinity group of queer men who were doing activism together. We came together specifically around US intervention in Central America—that’s why we chose the United Fruit Company. Rubin: Best name ever, by the way. Rybeck: There was also lot of anti-apartheid activism and fighting racism in Boston. We were covering those issues as well, from the queer point of view. We were trying our own version of street activism against AIDS, starting in the spring of 1985. And that was a couple of years before the founding of ACT UP.5 Rubin: Since you’ve called our attention to street activism, how do you define “guerilla theater”? Rybeck: I guess I use the term “guerilla theater” to mean performance that is not supposed to happen but it is happening. It is not planned. It is not organized. You are not buying a ticket to it and you never know where it might happen. And part of the art form is to create work that’s not meant to happen, that somebody is not seeing on purpose. That definitely changes the beginning of the pieces. Even if they end up the same way as they might on stage, they certainly can’t start that way when it’s guerilla theater. An interesting aesthetic question for us right now is, what practices can we maintain to support that guerilla energy, even when we make the move into the conventional theater? Rubin: How did the Theater Offensive grow out of United Fruit Company? Rybeck: The first big production that the Theater Offensive did was a oneweekend show, Blame It on the Big Banana, about a troop of radical drag 5

The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was formed in 1987 at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York. For more on ACT UP, see the interview in this volume with Sarah Schulman.

140

140

Creative Activism

queens that go on a cultural exchange mission to Nicaragua during the Sandinista government’s time in power. And it was very odd because right the weekend we produced it was the weekend of the elections in Nicaragua and the Sandinistas lost.6 And I really don’t think it was our fault, though. Rubin: Um, no. There were other things at work. What would you say are the underlying values of the troupe? Rybeck: One, and maybe the most important one, is the idea of “out-ness.” That’s our conviction: you can be who you are, and share that with people. And that’s meaningful at a personal and a political level—or a personal, and therefore political level. In a way, that’s our core belief. In different communities, out-ness is expressed in different ways, but that core setup is the same. And I think a second idea that was really central, a value that was central to our coalition building, was that queer culture has something important to offer to society—that our reason to take part is not just to ask, “Please accept us.” And that is why we are called the Theater Offensive: not to defend what we are doing but to go out and say, “No. We have something to offer society. We need to contribute and we’re not asking anybody’s permission.” Rubin: I want to pick up here on the two meanings of “offensive” you’ve invoked, because they both point to the group’s priorities. You have indicated that “offensive” is the opposite of “defensive,” pointing to a sort of forwardlooking action. What about the other meaning? Whom do you offend? That can also be very useful. Rybeck: I know how we can manage to offend everyone involved. But I hope we can do it in a way that they think, “Oh, that was the best time I ever had getting offended.” But you could argue that that part of our name is dated, because it refers to a whole period in history, the culture wars of the 1980s, in which offensive art—and that term was often used—faced a movement to completely defund it and isolate it and try to pretend it wasn’t a part of an American cultural dialogue. Which it just is. There is no way out. Rubin: No, history certainly shows that you can’t make it disappear. Rybeck: And very few people in mainstream conversations about this were standing up and saying, “There is an eternal role for art that elicits unpleasant responses.” 6

The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional ) lost the election in 1990, after years of fighting against the Contras, a militia funded by the US government and trained by the CIA.

141

Action—Abe Rybeck

141

Rubin: But sometimes it’s the best artistic strategy! I also have to say as a woman that the pressure to be a “good girl” or a “lady” sometimes makes being offensive really important. Rybeck: Absolutely. And the direction the LGBT movement at that time was really all about this effort to have people think, “No. Gay people are good in sense of that we behave well.” I’m not sure that’s desirable and it’s certainly not progressive. It’s certainly not progressive to say, “You know, I use our rights because you like me.” Rubin: Theater Offensive has a variety of different kinds of events. Rybeck: The main work we are doing now falls into three categories. We do “collective creations” projects. A great example is our True Colors: OUT Youth Theater, which gets a group of young people, age 14–22, together three times a year. They get support and training to create a show based on their own experience and what they see around them. We did one—there was a multigenerational project in the South End and lower Roxbury with everyone from teenagers to people in their eighties, including lots of queer elders. A second category is what we call “neighborhood productions.” We work with world-class artists to present work that’s relevant to a specific neighborhood we’re working in, with the support of that neighborhood. A great example of this was the Secret History of Love, a piece by a San Francisco–based artist named Sean Dorsey who was interested in developing work about the pre-Stonewall LGBT community and how trans and queer folks in that era found and loved each other.7 Sean, by the way, is an amazing trans artist, one of the first trans choreographers to really get a national reputation. We hooked Sean up with trans and queer elders in Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and the South End, whom he interviewed. And based on those interviews and others that he did in San Francisco, he created this amazing dance theater piece which is now touring all over the country and around the world. But when it began here in Boston and we performed at Hibernian Hall, it was an amazing experience to have those elders on whose story the piece was based, sitting there in the audience—and the audiences loving the show and then getting to also honor their elders in the room and thank them for sharing their stories.8 It was really powerful.

7

8

Dorsey, a dancer and choreographer, founded a San Francisco Dance Company called Sean Dorsey Dance and a nonprofit organization called Fresh Meat Productions, which focuses on transgender performance. Hibernian Hall, built in 1913, began as a gathering-place for Irish and Irish American Bostonians, and then housed a nonprofit job training program for African Americans.

142

142

Creative Activism

The third kind of work that we do is what we are calling cultural events. The idea behind this is Boston is full of a rich diversity of cultural events. And we want to help all of them have a culturally competent, queer component. A great example of our work here is that we helped create a True Colors component to Wake Up the Earth Day in Jamaica Plain.9 We had a float and marching group, musicians. Rubin: You’re strongly emphasizing the “collective creations” projects as intergenerational. Why do you think that is so important? Rybeck: Well, I think it’s important for everyone. But in the queer community it’s even more poignant because when you think about it, it’s a fairly small fraction of LGBT folks who grow up in the family with queer people, out queer people in the family, certainly as parents. And that’s unusual for a culture, for a subculture. You’re Jewish, there’s a very high chance you grew up with Jewish parents. If you’re Latino or African American, it’s a high probability. It’s certainly not 100 percent. You grew up with acting part of the culture of your family. And for that reason, because that we didn’t grow up with it, I think that’s a big part of why the history of queer subcultures is so rich with examples of important, multigenerational connections. I remember Allen Ginsberg saying, “Well, you know, when you can’t trace your lineage in one way, you look for other ways to do it.”10 And he had sex with someone who had sex with someone who had sex with someone who had sex with someone who had sex with Walt Whitman. And that’s the generational passage of it. And it was very sweet the way he was talking about it. He was saying, “This is intimacy that we are talking about. This is connection.” And I know people who had sex with Allen Ginsberg. In fact, I had sex with people who had sex with people who had sex with Allen Ginsberg. Rubin: So basically, you had sex with Walt Whitman. Rybeck: It’s like Walt Whitman gave me a blow job. But more to the point, there was a cultural intimacy that was passed on. I do not believe in this kind of essentialist gay spirit or something like that. But I very much do believe in culture. I believe that queer culture has something to offer society at large. You know, one huge part of it is this idea of out-ness. Another thing is that just in the last couple of generations, our experience of AIDS is tremendously profound; the experience has been a learning opportunity. 9 10

The Boston neighborhood Jamaica Plain houses a visible lesbian and gay community. Ginsberg (1926–97) was a shaping poet of the 1950s-era Beats movement and the subsequent counterculture.

143

Action—Abe Rybeck

143

And our community has useful wisdom from that experience! I recently posted something on Facebook that kind of has gotten a lot of response. And it’s a story of how, in 1980 during the presidential election, I, along with many of my leftist friends, felt like Jimmy Carter was a big disappointment, that he wasn’t nearly progressive enough. And that in fact, he was really representing the same kind of monolithic establishment that Ronald Reagan was. And because of that there was no real difference between them. And I argued against voting for Carter. I didn’t like Reagan or Anderson.11 But I organized my friends to vote for my mother. Don’t tell her. She will never forgive me. And then Reagan won. Conservatism swept across the country. And less than two years later, my friends and my lovers are dying around me. And Reagan and his administration are insanely cowardly and malignant and malicious in their inaction and inability to even say the word “AIDS,” much less act against it. They were horribly bigoted in their response against queer people—and against people of color just as much. Say what you will about Jimmy Carter, you and I both know he would have reacted very differently, no matter who that disease was affecting. And so there is a simple equation that I will never be able to forget for the rest of my life, which is, I voted for the death of my friends. The way I chose to kind of blithely write off consequential difference between Reagan and Carter was not an abstract issue. It was life and death and nothing less. So, people can vote for whomever they want. But do not pretend that it doesn’t matter. I learned that the hardest way a person can. I watched my friends die knowing that if a bunch of us had voted differently, some of them might be living. And so, when you talk about the importance of intergenerational work in the queer community, part of me feels like for me, as a 52-year-old gay man, when I’m working with young people—first of all I want to make it clear I’m learning things from them every day. But just as much I ask, since they didn’t grow up in a queer household, what am I doing to clue them in to the kind of experience a parent or an uncle might tell them? So there was a real mish-mash of emotional responses from both ends. Rubin: How does the Theater Offensive take clues from different neighborhoods and communities? Rybeck: The most straightforward way is that we try to just listen to them saying what they want. When we really devoted our entire organization to this 11

John Anderson (b. 1922) ran for president in 1980 as an independent against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter.

144

144

Creative Activism

approach, the first six months we canceled all programming, and said, “Let’s just listen for six months.” That was a really valuable move. We just got together with folks in the neighborhoods that we are serving and said, “Tell us what you want.” And, you know, a great example of that was, we were meeting with young people in the Villa Victoria neighborhood, the housing development. And if we bring an artist in from out of town who would you want it to be? And they said, “Oh, my God. We would love it if you would bring Leiomy Maldonado,” who is this trans dancer who is part of Vogue Evolution.12 I was like, I never heard of them. I don’t know who this is. I was like, “Who are you talking—who is this? Give me more.” And they were like, “Oh, my God. Don’t you watch America’s Best Dance Crew?” And I was like, “No. I’ve never seen it.” And they were like, “Oh, there was this queer Voguing troupe that was a finalist on ‘America’s Best Dance Crew,’ and they were huge.” Vogue Evolution. So I went online and looked that. They were fabulous. And then I got in touch with them; they are really amazing activists. I had never heard of them and shame on me. This 19-year-old girl had, and she urged us to bring them. And it was a great move. A second important way of taking cues is having folks from the community as a big portion of our staff and board. That’s who meets up from the neighborhoods we serve are the majority of our staff and our board, and of the participants in our programs. And the participants in many cases drive the programs. So True Colors decides what True Colors is going to be about. And the majority of youth in True Colors are from the Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain and South End. It is about two-thirds youth of color from those neighborhoods. They also have a Leadership and Inclusion Council that is not only— True Colors not only decides what True Colors is doing but these youth from True Colors also decide what should the Theater Offensives youth programming be. So they picture—like right now we are expanding True Colors and they are the ones who have decided what the nature of that expansion will be. Rubin: When I was out in the room out there I was looking at that big poster for the annual festival Out on the Edge. And since the language has been so important, I want to talk about—and we’ve talked about “out.” Can we talk about “edge”?

12

Vogue Evolution competed on America’s Best Dance Crew Season 4 in 2009.

145

Action—Abe Rybeck

145

Rybeck: Well, Out on the Edge started in 1992. And I’ll never forget. We had our first festival. We didn’t know what we were doing, really. I think there were eleven different shows in a two-week period in four different venues. And sometimes we’d have all four venues at the same time, which meant our audience was split up and everything. We lost our shirts on it. I remember thinking, “Well, this is the end of the Theater Offensive.” But then a bunch of people really responded, including the Massachusetts Cultural Council who said, “Wow! That was really amazing,” and gave us our first grant based on their site visit to that event. And then we had eighteen festivals through 2009 that focused on bringing from around the country and around the world the most exciting, new performance that was happening in the queer community. And, you know, I got to work with such a range of artists: Quentin Crisp was in it; Split Britches; women in Sister Spit or Lenelle Moïse.13 And, you know, Joey Adias who performs in Cirque du Soleil and things like that.14 These amazing artists we got to work with! We got to work with Amanda Palmer before the Dresden Dolls existed—so both up-and-coming talent but also established greats.15 Paula Vogel pitched in once.16 When we started out it was really rare to see an LGBT-themed show at the BCA.17 It was really unusual. Now, in any given month of the year, it would be strange not to find something there that had LGBT themes. But outside of that theater ghetto, outside where everybody really lives and works and goes to school and plays, not only was it rare, super rare, to find LGBT theater, it was unusual to find any kind of theater at all. And that’s when we thought, “Well, gee, right now, this is what’s important for us to be doing, not a festival in a little theater fortress but to go out beyond the moat and really just where we live say, what if queer culture were right here.” Rubin: It’s very interesting you raise that because I was thinking about the name “Out on the Edge” and want to ask you what you mean by “edge.” In

13

14 15

16 17

Quentin Crisp (1908–99) was the stage name of an English actor and model known for his nonconformist approach. Split Britches is a lesbian performance troupe based in New York but performing internationally. Sister Spit was a lesbian-feminist spoken word and performance art collective founded in 1994 in San Francisco and disbanded in 2006. Lenelle Moïse (b. 1980) is a Haitian-born poet, performer, and playwright who currently lives in the United States. Cirque de Soleil is a Canadian performance company founded in 1984. Amanda Palmer (b. 1976) is a performance artist and musician known for rejecting requirements of polite femininity. She formed the duo the Dresden Dolls with Brian Viglione in 2000. Paula Vogel (b. 1951) is a playwright and Yale University professor. Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) began operating in 1970.

146

146

Creative Activism

other words, what’s the difference between edge and margin? If you’re taking queer theater from the margins and putting it in the center of where people live, what does that accomplish? Rybeck: This was inspired in many ways by a 16-year-old Haitian American girl from Mattapan. Ashley was her name, who, in a True Colors improvisational exercise, was talking with a friend and she says, “So why should I have to take two trains and a bus just to be who I am? I want to be out in my own neighborhood.” I was in the room and when I heard that improvisation I thought, “My God! That is worth having a theater company about.” You know, this kind of precious notion of gay theater in a little gay neighborhood somewhere, it’s fine. I have no problem with it. But what was needed most at this moment is what Ashley was putting out there. What’s going on in the center of people’s everyday lives, not just in the margin, as they walk between their house and the bus, where they get the bus to work, they may encounter queer theater. And I love that change! I feel it’s a lot more radical. It has special challenges but unique rewards. At first, when we proposed this idea, some people raised questions over safety. First of all, how can I say it—if you’re an artist and your first concern is safety, I’m just a little worried about your art. But, of course, we’re worried about the physical safety of the young people we work with and the adults as well. But the point was that you can avoid a lot of what needs to be done. You can make things extremely dangerous tomorrow by telling yourself you need to stay safe today. Rubin: It’s very gratifying on some levels to have an ideal audience member who comes in ready to understand everything you have to say, but it doesn’t sound like that’s your vision. Rybeck: No, exactly. Rubin: It sounds a little lazy, or something. Art should move people along. Rybeck: Yes. But here’s the thing. Let me tell another story. This is the story of the moment I think of as the beginning of the Theater Offensive. United Fruit Company was at a demonstration where we were doing a sit-in, in front of the JFK Building, right here in town. And it was about the embargo on Nicaragua. We were, arms linked, sitting on the ground, legs folded and chanting, “Arrest us. Arrest us. Arrest us,” until they arrested us. And then we are chanting like, “Let us go. Let us go. Let us go. Let us go,” something profound like that. And I remember seeing like the secretaries coming out of the building for lunch. I’m dating myself back when there were people called secretaries.

147

Action—Abe Rybeck

147

Rubin: Administrative assistants. Rybeck: Administrative assistants, coming out of the building and walking past us and not even giving us a second glance. They knew there was some political thing going on over there. I’m like, I can’t believe that we feel so strongly about these issues. They are life and death issues for some people and yet, even I am bored with how we are presenting this. You know, it is like the secretaries don’t even know we exist. So I went home and worked on writing a silly comedy sketch and then got the guys together. We went back the next day, the demonstration was continuing. And instead of doing the sit-in we put on a little performance. It was a take-off on a popular TV commercial at the time. It was in drag. It was silly. It was about, you know, a gay guy frustrated because he’s always falling in love but his one-night stands never see him a second time. And Mrs. Olson says, you know, “You should break the embargo that Reagan has and get some of this great Nicaraguan coffee because really the problem is the next morning when these guys wake up your coffee sucks! If you make good coffee they come back.” Basically, if you got the one-night stand to stay for breakfast, that was our moment’s gay marriage. So we were performing this piece. There’s a drag queen in it. And I see the secretaries coming out for lunch from the JFK Building and they’re walking right past us and they kind of like glance over and look back away, like “What the hell is going on over there?” But then I notice they are walking past us and one of the secretaries kind of looks back. She does a double take. She looks back at us and then she grabs the elbow of the next secretary. About a half-dozen of them actually stop and turn around, and watch what we’re doing, our piece about Nicaragua and AIDS and all that stuff. And then after the show, one woman said, “I’m really happy you are doing because I think it is really funny. Your wig is funny. And, you know, I don’t know about Nicaragua but I’m really glad you are doing this. My best friend from high school just died from AIDS and this would have made him so happy.” And this was 1985 when people were just dropping everywhere around us. And I thought, “Oh, my God.” You know, we thought we were doing a little fun, educational sketch. But the real learning that went on in this conversation, in this performance, was not me teaching this woman about Nicaragua but was her teaching me about the lives of the secretaries. And that AIDS could be just as much a part of her life as mine. And that I needed to broaden my idea of who I was talking to and serving. So when you say, get out into the neighborhood so that we can spread the word about good theater or the political stance or whatever, I see it quite differently. I think

148

148

Creative Activism

since our work is based in the neighborhoods, there’s a stronger dynamic going on, period. We’re learning just as much as we’re teaching. And I think it’s that kind of dynamic that’s needed. Frankly, I don’t think the Dudley Square neighborhood was looking for some Jewish, West Virginian gay guy who lives in Central Square, Cambridge, to come teach them about anything. I don’t think that is what they wanted. Do they want a fair exchange of culture and art and ideas between themselves and other people? Hell, yes. That is what we wanted. Rubin: And conceptualizing theater without a deeply controlled dividing line between audience and performer is quite powerful. Rybeck: Nobody is stronger than drag queens. I’m telling you, when you are out in the world in drag with the right attitude, you’re pretty powerful. Rubin: Right. Stonewall shows that.18 Rybeck: Stonewall shows that. And I’m not saying drag queens can’t be hurt. I’m just saying that we have practices in our work that make people safe. We never go out and do this kind of work alone. We have collaborators in our communities so it is not just us against somebody. The communities that we work in stand up for us. But putting yourself into positions where the structures of power aren’t all on your side is a profound, artistic, and political choice. Before we took this approach, my sleepless nights were often over financial matters. Now my sleepless night is much more likely to be, “In that workshop today, I think I was kind of racist when I said . . . What am I going to do with that?” Now, to me, that’s worth sleepless nights. That’s an artistic and political life where I am in situations every day where it is highly likely I’m going to screw up and I’m not going to be the smartest person in the room who is the best at understanding the life of the neighborhood, all these things, where the structure of power is not all on my side. There is a lot good about that artistically and politically. And I have to admit it’s hard for me but there is no conventional, theatrical success that could satisfy me the way that does.

18

The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, was the site in 1969 of a riot in response to arrest of patrons during a police raid. The riot is often cited as an important event in kicking off the gay and lesbian liberation movement.

149

12

“Simultaneity of Actions”: Liberation According to Sarah Schulman

New  York author Sarah Schulman has broken ground in a range of roles: as a novelist,  a political activist, a creative writing professor, a chronicler in multiple forms of the gay rights movement—and the anti-gay stances that made it necessary— in the United States. Born in 1958 in New York, she published her first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story, in 1984. Since then, she has received numerous awards, including the Stonewall Award for Improving the Lives of Gays and Lesbians in the United States (twice—in 1989 for her novel After Delores and in 1999 for her nonfiction book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America). The range of Schulman’s chronicling of lesbian and gay lives alone is a compelling lesson on the many ways a historical record is created. She has also offered strong commentary on the ways the historical record is “cleaned up” and whom that benefits. For instance, she told an interviewer that the 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague, which addresses the early years of the AIDS epidemic, could accurately be named “The Five White People Who Saved the World.”1 And she has expressed frustration that young lesbian and gay writers who are still hoping to launch their careers feel as though they must exclude gay characters from their work in order to get published. Schulman’s activism has taken many forms. In addition to her written work, for instance, she has played founding or leadership roles in several trailblazing organizations. She participated in an early abortion rights action with the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) that disrupted a Congressional anti-abortion hearing. She cofounded in 1992 the Lesbian Avengers, a group focused on direct action to bring about lesbian

1

Interview with E.  Alex Jung, “Writer and Activist Sarah Schulman on The Normal Heart, Being Friends with Larry Kramer, and the Whitewashing of AIDS History”:  http://www.vulture.com/ 2014/06/writer-sarah-schulman-on-the-normal-heart-larry-kramer.html.

150

150

Creative Activism

visibility and rights.2 With filmmaker Jim Hubbard, she created the ACT UP Oral History Project; Schulman and Hubbard had also founded the Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival.3 Schulman is also a prominent figure in the movement against the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, speaking out on the subject in a range of venues, including op-eds in the New York Times and an academic book titled Israel/ Palestine and the Queer International. Schulman emphatically and movingly states about the occupation, a violation of international law, telling me that “as an American, it’s done with my money, and as a Jew it’s done in my name. So I  have two responsibilities, besides just being a person, to try to support whatever nonviolent efforts exist to overturn that.” Not surprisingly, she has received both praise and pushback on the issue, being banned from talking on the subject, for instance, at the New York City LGBT center. In an important op-ed in the New York Times, Schulman raises the notion of “pinkwashing”— presenting Israel as gay-friendly in order to obscure its other human rights violations.4 Schulman is currently a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the College of Staten Island. She describes the students in her creative writing class as “very, very, very, very, very diverse,” noting that it is quite usual to have fifteen or sixteen nationalities in one class. She speaks movingly of the many obstacles her working-class, multinational students face:  financial, social, internalized, invoking The Hidden Injuries of Class to describe what her students confront.5 “Life for queer kids on Staten Island is hell,” she pointed out.

Selected bibliography ● ● ●

2

3

4 5

The Sophie Horowitz Story (novel, 1984) Girls, Visions and Everything (novel, 1986) After Delores (novel, 1988)

The Lesbian Avengers issued an “Action Outline” that laid out strategies and principles for meetings, fundraising, tactics, media outreach, and finding organizational support. John Hubbard (b. 1951) has focused on experimental film. ACT-UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a direct-action group focused on the development of and access to treatment for AIDS, was formed in 1987. Schulman, “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing.’ ” The Hidden Injuries of Class (1972) is a book written by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb.

151

Liberation—Sarah Schulman ● ● ●

● ● ● ● ● ● ●

● ●

● ●

151

People in Trouble (novel, 1990) Empathy (novel, 1992) My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life during the Reagan/Bush Years (1994) Rat Bohemia (novel, 1995) Shimmer (novel, 1998) Collected Early Novels of Sarah Schulman (1998) Manic Flight Reaction (play, 2005) The Child (novel, 2007) The Mere Future (novel, 2009) Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (nonfiction, 2009) Israel/Palestine and the Queer International (nonfiction, 2012) The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (nonfiction, 2012) The Cosmopolitans (novel, 2016) Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair (nonfiction, 2016) Rubin: One of the most striking aspects of your fiction is your inclusion of early depictions of HIV-positive protagonists. What made you see that it was particularly important to represent them? Schulman: The character in Rat Bohemia was an amalgam of people I knew who had died, and who had said profound things that were disappearing. Everything was happening so fast that their insights couldn’t be recorded. So I wrote down as much as I could remember from a wide variety of people, and made it into one character. Now in People in Trouble, which was earlier, I believe it’s the first novel that acknowledges the AIDS activist movement. I listed as many details as I could of the AIDS crisis, and incorporated them. Like Rock Hudson at the airport.6 Or, people putting egg lecithin, which is called AL721, on their toast. Or, watch alarms going off to remind people to take their AZT. These types of details. I wove them in. I did the same, but with people, for Rat Bohemia. I created a character based on things that people who had died had said. And I tested it out. First, I did a reading in the voice of that character at OutWrite, the gay and

6

When film star Hudson’s diagnosis was public, airlines refused to fly him.

152

152

Creative Activism

lesbian writers’ conference that operated from 1990 to 1995. John Preston, a friend of mine who died of AIDS very quickly after this incident, heard me read it. He told me, “You’ve got it. That’s exactly what it’s like.” And he died. Then I did a little play in New York City with the HIV-positive actor Mark Ameen playing that character. It was a solo piece. And people with AIDS that I knew came to see the play. If there was anything that they thought was not accurate, they would tell me. So by the time it went to print, it had been pretty vetted, and I was fairly confident that people with AIDS would recognize themselves in that character. This was important to me, having myself been misrepresented a million times in lesbian characters. Rubin: It sounds like you were really careful, but you were certainly putting something new out there. Why is it important to interrupt discourse as usual? I guess what I want to ask is, is there a writerly way for you that’s similar to interrupting a Congressional hearing? Schulman: I don’t feel that I’m interrupting. I feel that I’m saying what’s happening. And there’s this mechanism to prohibit that from being integrated. You have to work with other people to do cultural activism, to open up a space for an individual voice to be heard. That’s the dynamic, the dialogic experience that I’ve been involved in for most of my life. Rubin: You’re right. By saying “interrupting,” I am implicitly taking a certain worldview as a given, as default. Is this related to why a person must ACT UP, so to speak? Schulman: Well, not everyone does. When Jim Hubbard and I started the ACT UP oral history project in 2001, one of our questions was, “What do these people have in common?” Because it’s a small group of people who are quite effective. I mean, the largest ACT UP demonstration had 7,000 people; they never had more than that. Yet they were able to really make a huge paradigm shift that was felt globally. What does this amazingly effective group of people have in common? We ’ve now done 134 interviews. At first we thought, maybe they have something in common in how they were brought up: that they had families who were engaged socially. But that turned out immediately not to be true. And then we thought, well, maybe they all had some kind of experience with AIDS. But that’s not true. There are people in ACT UP who didn’t know anybody with AIDS when they joined ACT UP. So we began to find out that it was not experiential. Finally, after eight years, we realized that it was characterological. It was a certain kind of person who could not imagine sitting still in the face of a historic cataclysm.

153

Liberation—Sarah Schulman

153

And many of them retreated afterward and never were involved in anything again. They just rose to the historic occasion. Rubin: In your futurist 2009 novel The Mere Future, the only career left is marketing. That’s very depressing. It made me think, by the way, of a piece of speculative fiction by Barbara Hambly, where a character time-travels and goes to rent a room. He is told that if he wants to cover the video screen in the room that is blaring ads, he will have to pay extra—as he will for every level he turns the volume down.7 That’s a similar market-based dystopian vision. What are some places that marketing has infiltrated that you think weren’t there, say a decade ago? Schulman: I don’t know if it’s more than ten years ago—I’m maybe more aware of it. When you open the New York Times, every single article is the product of an enormous apparatus. Basically, every article is an ad. Right now, we’re in Canada, and I had dinner the other night with a guy who works at a men’s shelter. And he was telling me, “Oh, we get these U.S. soldiers who are AWOL in a Canadian men’s shelter.” No one in America knows about this. It’s just not covered. Pinkwashing was not covered; it was one of those unspoken stories. I finally got it into the New York Times, and then it explodes.8 But thousands of people knew about it and were talking about it all the time. I feel like I’m always in communities where things that are being discussed that are not represented; it’s not marketed, it doesn’t have a marketing apparatus. Rubin: What do you think is particularly useful about science fiction? Or historical fiction, to bring Shimmer into the picture. You’re looking both forward and back. Schulman: Shimmer was an effort to escape AIDS. I had written three novels and two nonfiction books about AIDS, and I couldn’t do it again. So the only way to get away from it was to go back in time. And The Mere Future was clearly written line by line. It took a lot of collaging. Rubin: I loved that one parent is from Colombia, and one is from the District of Columbia. And I thought, wow, this is about one letter, not just one sentence, not even one word. It’s one letter that made me sit there thinking. There are recent two mainstream locations in which equality work is particularly visible: marriage and the anti-bullying campaign. Why have they become such visible sites of equality work?

7 8

Hamby’s novel is called Knight of the Demon Queen (2000). Shulman’s op-ed on November 22, 2011, titled “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing,’ ” targets the co-opting of white gay voices to support anti-immigrant and anti-Palestinian position. That strategy is still common in opposition to BDS on college campuses.

154

154

Creative Activism

Schulman: Well, Herbert Marcuse talked about repressive tolerance.9 I mean, the original impulse of gay liberation, and of every liberation movement, was to transform the society and expand its understanding of itself. And what happened is that society has instead transformed us and made us be more like straight people in order to win acceptance. And that was not the agenda. So to the extent that we resemble them, they are willing to accept us. And believe me, I see it in Canada. It’s very interesting here, because they have total gay rights here, right? When I come across the border they say, “Why are you coming to Canada?” I say, “I’m coming to visit my girlfriend.” And they say, “Have a nice weekend.” And so, gay people are in the same bourgeois, banal situation here as straight people. I find it suffocating. I mean, it’s all very nice and good, but not what I had in mind. The reason that AIDS activism was successful was because we had a community-based relationship, and that enabled a certain kind of resistance. People with AIDS, 1981, as you well know, faced the fact that there were sodomy laws in this country.10 Homosexual sex was illegal. There was no job protection. So you had this group of people who had absolutely no rights facing a terminal disease who were able to transform a national paradigm because they had a community-based relationship that turned out to be stronger than the apparatus of the state. And if you only have a privatized familybased relationship, you cannot do that. Rubin: And the “anti-bullying” campaign?11 Schulman: Oh, that’s the biggest joke. What it does is it creates homophobia as a discrete, special event that occurs in a particular moment in a person’s life by a perpetrator. And it gets everybody else off the hook. It eliminates all of the systemic and institutional marginalization that’s part of everyday life. Rubin: What were you trying to say by introducing the two protagonists of Shimmer? Schulman: I can say in retrospect we have all this Americana, and it’s always the same protagonist. What happens when you look at a classic moment in American history and suddenly you have a Jewish gay girl and a black man as your emblematic American? The whole thing shifts. Even though it’s still 9

10

11

Marcuse (1898–1979) was a German philosopher and sociologist; “Repressive Tolerance,” an article he published in 1965, asserts that true tolerance does not support repressive structures or actions. Sodomy laws made a variety of sexual acts illegal, especially sex between members of the same sex. The Supreme Court struck down all sodomy laws that remained on the books in 2003. The “anti-bullying campaign” encompassed anti-bullying videos, legislation, charities, institutional policies, a Congressional anti-bullying caucus, workshops, and national and international anti-bullying days.

155

Liberation—Sarah Schulman

155

all about the American dream, which is what everything in that era is about. But they’re not allowed to have the American dream. But they don’t know that—because it’s before all the social movements that evolved. I mean, of course, 1948 is pretty much the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. They see it as personal failing because there’s not a group analysis yet. It’s a very interesting movement. Rubin: The book also powerfully takes up the blacklist.12 Schulman: One of the things that influenced me there was when Jesse Helms and all those guys got NEA grants taken back from four artists.13 And I really was suspicious of our side’s rhetoric about all of that, because the rhetoric was that these four artists were being censored, because their grants were being taken away. But most artists are censored by never getting to the funding level. And so, I feel like this was a really self-serving rhetoric. And it made me think about the blacklist, which they were comparing themselves to. Because you had to already be in the system to be kicked out of it. As one of the characters in Shimmer says, “If you’re black, you can’t get on the blacklist, because you can’t get in to get kicked out.” And that was really what I was thinking about and talking about at the time when I was writing that, the false sense of who’s being marginalized.14 Rubin: You are reminding me of an experience I had recently on a weekly radio show on our local public radio station. We were talking about the Miss Universe beauty contest, the one Donald Trump was judging, and whether, as a contestant claimed, it was rigged. I just said, “Of course it’s rigged!” And then I started listing all the people it’s rigged against: anybody who’s not thin, most women who aren’t white, transwomen, older women . . . But that’s pop culture and part of the work it does, sadly. You ’ve worked in a lot of different forms: novels, obviously, but also journalism, plays, film . . . Schulman: Nonfiction. Rubin: Nonfiction books. And if I’m not mistaken, did you work on a porn film? 12

13

14

Schulman is exploring the anti-Communist blacklist of the 1950s, which Sara Paretsky also takes up in novel form (see the interview with her in this volume). Jesse Helms (1921–2008) was a Republican senator who gathered other senators in an effort to defund the National Endowment for the Arts because of the content of certain artists’ work. He led a Congressional effort to restrict the content of NEH-funded work, which ultimately failed. A number of African Americans were blacklisted and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee because of their Civil Rights work; some prominent examples are Paul Robeson (1898–1976), Langston Hughes (1902–67), Alice Childress (1916–94), and William Patterson (1891–1980). Mary Helen Washington takes this up in her 2015 book The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s.

156

156

Creative Activism

Schulman: I did. I wrote a porn movie for Cheryl Dunye called Mommy Is Coming.15 Rubin: What did you feel you could accomplish through the different forms? Schulman: I’m the kind of writer who likes to try a lot of different things. This guy wanted us to do a porn movie, and I thought why not. So he gave me twenty porn movies and I watched them. And I realized that there were certain set pieces that you had to have. So then the original idea was that I would write a kind of like a real movie, kind of like What’s Up, Doc?16 It was sort of like a screwball comedy with mistaken identities and slamming doors, and all of that. And then we put in the seven key porn sex scenes. But the movie itself is actually really, really funny. So then Cheryl went to Berlin to shoot this thing—it had a German producer—in five days. And we looked at the footage—well, it’s a weird thing to say, but Germans aren’t funny. Like, have you ever heard of a great German comedy? My kind of deadpan, New York, Jewishy humor, they couldn’t land it. So scene after scene was just horrible. And not horrible in a John Waters kind of way; it was like unwatchable. With every single line, the timing was off. Nothing was funny. So Cheryl reedited the whole movie and basically just kept in the sex scenes. And then we got into the Berlin film festival and it showed there. We got a good review in our forum, but they said the plot is thin. Because it’s all on the editing floor! Rubin: Well, we can, of course, learn from porn. I recently needed to find for a research project a very particular porn movie that is no longer around, from 1975, and the closest I came was finding someone online who sent me a DVD with whole collection of coming attractions, written as “cumming attractions,” from porn movies from that period. And so I had to sort of scroll through them all to find the one I wanted. I was mostly just struck by the fact that the women had body hair. Schulman: Oh, that’s funny. Rubin: It was the 1970s. It was beautiful. Schulman: I had a unique experience in that when I was very young, I think I was 23, 24, a friend of mine and I were involved in an abortion rights group. And we went to ask Andrea Dworkin to do a benefit for our group.17

15

16

17

Dunye (b. 1966), born in Liberia, is a filmmaker identified with the 1990s “queer new wave.” She explores issues of sexuality and race in her work. What’s Up, Doc? is a 1972 movie directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. Dworkin (1946–2005) was a leader in the radical feminist anti-porn campaign, working closely with lawyer Catharine MacKinnon (b. 1946).

157

Liberation—Sarah Schulman

157

And at that time, she was just writing her book on pornography. She wasn’t known for her views yet. We went to her apartment on 14th Street, and it was filled with pornography. And she was showing us what she was doing, and she had quite a collection. I mean, she had pregnant women—because she was interested in the fetish category. She had pregnant women, women being rained on, women in raincoats, women shaving. It was very, very precise. Rubin: People are starting to say that there is a greater representation now gay and lesbian characters on television.18 But, of course, that doesn’t address how those characters function. What is your take on that? Schulman: The only queer person on TV who I like is Kalinda in The Good Wife.19 She’s a secondary character. Bisexual. Played by a South Asian actress. It’s a really interesting character because she’s actively bisexual in the show. And she’s completely unknowable. It’s the mystery of queerness, and it’s really great. The problem with these other characters is that they’re one-dimensional. And homophobia is not shown for what it really is. Straight people are never shown as truly homophobic. Homophobes are either shown as “crackers,” or they’re right-wing religious fanatics. Or it’s comic; it’s benign. And gay people have no anger. They have no consequences of their oppression. The most common thing in gay representation on television is that gay people are in the closet because of themselves, because they didn’t realize how truly kind and good all the straight people around them were going to be if they came out. Rubin: Have any of your books gotten noticeable pushback for not following that line? Schulman: It doesn’t operate that way. It gets ignored. I mean, I’ve written two, I think, really important nonfiction books recently. Ties That Bind was the first and only analysis of homophobia in the family. It did not receive a single mainstream review. But I was contacted by gay people every single day telling me how important it was to them. I mean, the gap between how gay people experience that and how it was treated by the apparatus was the most profound I’ve ever experienced. I ’m having that experience again with The Gentrification of the Mind. People in their early twenties are responding to this book. I mean, usually as

18

19

Some examples are Glee (2009–15), The “L” Word (2004–2009), Modern Family (2009–present), and Ugly Betty (2006–10). The Good Wife ran from 2009 to 2016; the character of Kalinda was played by Archie Panjabi (b. 1972), born in England to immigrant parents.

158

158

Creative Activism

a writer you age out. But suddenly I have this whole new readership who’s in their twenties. Rubin: What is gentrification of the mind? Schulman: The basic idea is that the reason cities produce new ideas for the world—whether they’re political ideas, like gay liberation and black power, or art ideas, like postmodernism—is because of difference. It’s the mix, the fact that living in the city means that you cannot pretend that other people are not different from you. You’re faced with difference all the time. And that’s what urbanity is; it’s the dynamic of different. And that’s what produces ideas. When you homogenize a city, as is happening now with gentrification, they cease to be able to produce new ideas for the world. Because you’re eliminating difference. So actually, gentrification changes the way that we think. And that’s what the book’s about. When the cities started to gentrify in the 1970s, the excuse was that we needed to bring more rich people in the city to expand the tax base because we couldn’t support the infrastructure. So they put a lot of money into corporate welfare, into subsidizing luxury developers. They stopped building low-income housing and they started stealing housing stocks and renovating, so that you would take a floor of a tenement that had four families and make it into one loft. And then they tried to attract the children of white flight, people who had grown up in the suburbs but had sentimental attachment to the city. But they had grown up in the gated-community mentality. So when they came back, they were a new phenomenon, because of course throughout the history of the United States, heartland whites have come to cities to be free. But suburbanization produced people who were willing to trade freedom for security. So those white people, when they came to the city, they only could see things through their own perspective. One of the things suburbanization does is that it tells you that you’re the center of the universe. It’s the opposite of the urban experience, which is the affirmation of difference. So they come back to the city and suddenly the way everything’s described has shifted. If you have a neighborhood where the police are completely harassing the residents, it’s called “getting better.” If people are losing their homes, it’s called “safer.” Nothing is viewed from the point of view of the people who live there. It’s only viewed from the point of view from the people who coming in. That is a colonial paradigm. Rubin: In My American History, you take up “zap actions.” What are zaps?

159

Liberation—Sarah Schulman

159

Schuman: A zap is a quickly planned action by a small group of people designed to confront the powers that be in a way that communicates through the media. I think they were first used by the Lavender Hill Mob, and I think the first real zap was organized to try to get the American Psychiatric Association to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness. My first zap was the Women’s Liberation Zap Action Brigade in 1982. Ronald Reagan was elected—it was the first success of the coming together of the evangelical Christians and the fiscally conservative Republican Party, the people who have now eaten alive the Republican Party. Their agenda of what legislation they wanted passed was called the Family Protection Act. And one part was overturning Roe v. Wade.20 John East, who was Jesse Helms’s co-Senator from North Carolina, held hearings on a bill called the Human Life Statute.21 This was designed to outlaw abortion—all forms of abortion and some forms of birth control. And no one who supported abortion rights was allowed to testify. So we went down to Washington. Now, this was before CNN, this was the time of live television. There were six of us. I was 24. We went into the hearing and when the guy testified that a “fetus is an astronaut in a uterine spaceship,” we stood on our chairs, unfurled our banners, and said, “A woman’s life is a human life.” And we got arrested and were charged with obstruction of Congress. It was on live television; we had stupendous coverage. It was the lead story on all three networks, and we got about 25,000 dollars in unsolicited donations from people around the country. Then we had an eleven-day jury trial. We were convicted. And the judge’s daughter was a lesbian and the judge gave us probation. But the guy who arrested me, the Capitol guard, he testified under oath that I had chanted, “Ladies should be able to choose.” Which I found so fascinating because what I said was, “A woman’s life is a human life.” And obviously he couldn’t understand that. It was so interesting. Rubin: “Ladies,” huh? Schulman: Right. And “choose.” Choice—that was the strategy of Planned Parenthood and the mainstream abortion rights organizations. The more radical groups did not want that language. To me, that really became the main strategy of ACT UP: direct action.

20

21

This landmark Supreme Court decision on 1973 recognized that a woman’s right to privacy extended to her decision to terminate a pregnancy. John Porter East (1931–86) committed suicide in 1986 at age 55.

160

160

Creative Activism

Rubin: The power came from a combination, didn’t it, of direct action with artistic manifestation? Schulman: But also a lot of real research. The order was self-education, making proposals that were winnable, doable, and reasonable. Rubin: Speaking of research, you mentioned in the beginning of our conversation the ACT UP oral history project. What was the process of turning that material into United in Anger, the documentary on ACT UP?22 Schulman: In 2001, Jim and I realized that there was absolutely nothing about ACT UP. People had forgotten ACT UP. It was not historicized in any way. There was no data to look at. People were writing dissertations and quoting the New York Times as their sources for AIDS, which is a disaster, right? We used to call them The New York Crime. So we decided to create a database, and not to interpret it, but just to make it possible for people to do real research. We started interviewing people and posting the interviews on our website. Then we started going around the country, going to universities, showing the material, showing people how to use the database, showing professors how to use it in class, showing graduate students how to use it. Also, Jim preserved something like 2,000 hours of archival footage as well. And then books started coming out. We made it possible for all these books, these dissertations, these films, all of this renaissance by creating these materials. Two people can do a lot! Now that it’s all happening, the carpetbaggers arrive. Our film is called United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. It’s ten years of our work because we were in ACT UP. The other film that appeared a year and a half or two years got funded by HBO.23 We’ve been doing this thing for ten years. And we gave him all our footage and helped him like we do everybody. But he is the corporate product. I mean, HBO is not going to invest in something unless somebody else has already created a context for it. So he produced this film that basically argues the opposite of what we argue. Rubin: In what way? Schulman: Our film is about the simultaneity of actions: that so many different kinds of people with AIDS acted in so many different ways at the same time. We have a lot of footage with the Women with AIDS empowerment movement, the women of color who were the leaders of that

22 23

United in Anger: A History of ACT UP was released in 2012. The film is called How to Survive a Plague (2012) and was directed by David France (b. 1959), an investigative journalist. In 2014 he published a book with the same name.

161

Liberation—Sarah Schulman

161

movement, who are all dead now, and about needle exchange. It’s about all these different elements and how they came together. The HBO version is about the white men who saved the world. It’s about how the most highly educated white people in ACT UP were the real heroes, and they are the ones who got the NIH to change by working inside the system.24 It’s completely opposed ideologically to our film. It’s similar to what I was saying earlier about gay characters on television. Gay people produce gay characters for years and years. Then the corporations come in produce the kind of gay character that’s acceptable for them, and that’s the representation that dominates. But if all these other people hadn’t been doing all this grassroots work for decades, it wouldn’t have happened.

24

The National Institute of Health is the US government’s primary public health research agency. It was not given direction (and funding) to carry out AIDS research until 1987.

162

163

13

“Wigs and Skin”: Colonialism According to Ama Ata Aidoo

Aidoo is widely acknowledged as a trail-blazing African woman writer. But her work constantly reminds us that we need to put just as much emphasis on “blaze” as “trail.” She certainly has, in multiple ways, contributed to the creation of postcolonial African literature. But she refuses to be pushed into a box of female politeness or passivity. Her work is filled with powerful gestures and sly subversions—on the levels of plot, language use, cultural and political references, and structural choices, among others. An interview with Aidoo on BBC captures much of her approach. After she states, “I am a feminist,” the host asks her, “You don’t see that as a bit of a loaded term, that’s associated with the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement, women burning their bras in Western capitals?” Aidoo responds impatiently, “So what if they were burning their bras?” She goes on to say, “A feminist is somebody, not necessarily a woman, who believes in the potential of women to get to the highest possible level of development. Feminism is an ideology, like socialism, like pan-Africanism . . . How it is formulated or how it is negotiated depends upon the details of the particular environment.”1 Aidoo was born in 1942 in Abeadzi Kyiakor, Ghana—the first Sub-Saharan African country to be free of colonial rule. Her Fanti royal family named her “Christina Ama Aidoo.” She studied literature and theater at the University of Ghana-Legon, and also cites the folktales her mother told her as influences on her writing. Her writing would come to include prose, plays, poetry, and a children’s book. Aidoo’s work takes up historical issues with an unblinking presentation of their continuing implications. Her play Dilemma of a Ghost, for instance, first mounted in 1964, explores the African diaspora and its relationship to slavery. Similarly, she deftly shows the ongoing political nature of personal lives, 1

HARDtalk, hosted by Zeinab Badawi (BBC: July 20, 2014).

164

164

Creative Activism

confronting the issues that shape marriage, parenthood, education, definitions of family, and so forth. In particular, though, she pushes back hard against visions of African women as only oppressed. “It removes any agency from Africa women!” she says, “As if we are just . . . there.”2 In fact, in addition to her own writing, Aidoo has long sought to empower other African women to find a voice through writing. She served as Ghana’s minister of education in 1982, leaving the post in 1983 to work for the Ministry of Education in Zimbabwe. She has taught in the United States, Tanzania, Kenya, and South Africa. She has provided assistance to emerging writers and cofounded in 1991, with African American poet Jayne Cortez, the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA); the OWWA has mounted huge conferences of women writers, created an ongoing series of videotaped conversations with creative women, and launched a literary literacy project whose aim is to connect young students to writers. Aidoo has won numerous awards for her work and is the subject of a 2014 documentary, The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo (directed and written by Yada Badoe).

Bibliography ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

The Dilemma of a Ghost (play, 1965) Anowa (a play based on a Ghanaian legend, 1970) Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (1977) Someone Talking to Sometime (a poetry collection, 1986) The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories (for children, 1986) Birds and Other Poems (1987) An Angry Letter in January (poems, 1992) Changes: A Love Story (novel, 1993) No Sweetness Here: A Collection of Short Stories (1995) The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1997) Diplomatic Pounds & Other Stories (2012) Rubin: Obviously, the question of which language to write in is something you have to confront before you start writing. What are your thoughts on writing postcolonial African literature in English—which the main character in Our Sister Killjoy, Sissie, refers to as a dubious heritage?

2

HARDtalk interview.

165

Colonialism—Ama Ata Aidoo

165

Aidoo: It is dubious. I agree with Sissie. It is still a dubious heritage. For some of us—me included—the issue has not gone away. The debate has not been won by anybody, so we are still very much inside this whole issue. I know that not everybody will agree with me. I go with Ngũgĩ but only half-way.3 I mean, as you know I’m still interrogating the fact that we have to use English. But then either it’s from a lack of courage or just because I realize that English is useful, I have not pretended that I would want to even try and do a novel in my first language. Rubin: What’s your first language? Aidoo: Fante.4 It creeps into my poetry every now and then. As you are aware, even in the novels, it creeps into them. But for me, fortunately—or even more unfortunately—the issue has not gone away. I find myself having to deal with the language issue even now. In fact, precisely because I am so unhappy at the thought that I am still dealing with this issue, it’s like I am almost getting to a place where I might for the first time suffer from a writer’s block and it’s just out of sheer misery. Rubin: It’s a very complicated question, that’s for sure. That is why I think your interrogation of the matter, the way you take it on and sort of pull it around, is very useful. Aidoo: The thing is that it’s just that it has not been resolved. One way or the other in my lifetime so far, it is not possible for me to act and speak as though it has. I certainly don’t have Ngũgĩ’s courage. Rubin: Well, then there are immediate translations of his work. So there’s no simple way to confront this question. The fact is that even in the United States when we are talking about English, we should make it plural. In the Treyvon Martin case . . .5 Aidoo: Please! Rubin: I know. Heartbreaking and enraging. Aidoo: I know about the Trayvon Martin case, but how did language enter it? Rubin: The young woman who was his friend, whom he was talking to on the phone when he was killed, testified in court about what he was saying. Then

3

4

5

Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiang’o decided to write in his first language, Gikuyu, rather than in English, exploring that decision in his 1986 book Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Fante is a formal dialect of the Akan language in the Central Region of Ghana. It is also spoken in other regions. Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old African American killed in Sanford, Miami, by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, who claimed that Martin, walking back from a convenience store, was acting suspiciously. Zimmerman was acquitted.

166

166

Creative Activism

a lot of people said, “Well she is not reliable because of the kind of English she speaks.” They said it wasn’t “correct.”6 Aidoo: They’re idiots. Rubin: Worse. But it was correct. It followed a whole linguistic structure. Black English, as we call it, has its rules. It’s a language and she spoke it beautifully. We should respect that. Aidoo: Yes, and if Treyvon Martin’s friend had been deaf would they have dismissed her evidence for not being correct or it is just English? Can you imagine? She was speaking American creole. Rubin: I took one course in college with Amiri Baraka.7 He said, “All African Americans are bilingual. I’m bilingual. I’m talking to you now.” Aidoo: Yes, I agree with him. Rubin: I admire the way you foreground the messiness and multiplysignifying nature of language in your work. I want to ask you about some key words that you very effectively use. Let’s start with “independence.” Obviously, in African history “independence” has a very powerful and particular meaning. It also sometimes refers to women. Were you making that connection there between breaking away from colonialism with breaking away from subjugation to a man? Aidoo: Yes, I was. For me independence is located on as many levels as human existence. For instance, somebody might say, “Aidoo is an independent woman.” I wouldn’t disagree because that might just indicate that however haphazardly, however inefficiently, I’ve had to handle all the essential aspects of my life myself, right? Wherever there has been an important decision to make in connection with anything, I’ve had to make it myself. I may have consulted friends, family, colleagues in the process of coming to the decision but in the end it will be my decision. So on that level this is independence. When you are independent in that way, it’s like a work in progress, it’s life. But then one can also see independence as the end product of a process. Like if you consciously break free from anything or anybody, then you become independent in that kind of way, free. Then tomorrow is another story but so far you’ve become free of ideas, mindsets, psychological complications, family, friends, colleagues, workplace, you know. If something was bothering you in any way and you work your way through it, when you get to the other side you are free. 6

7

After the response to Rachel Jeantel’s testimony on June 26, 2013, criticizing her appearance as well as her speech, numerous linguists and news outlets challenged and explored the responses. Amiri Baraka (1934–2014) was a highly significant and influential African American writer.

167

Colonialism—Ama Ata Aidoo

167

Then of course there are the public notions of freedom. I’ve seen Ghana becoming free in 1957.8 Looking at where we are now, so many of us feel that we are not free after all. There is no doubt at all that on the 6th of March 1957, a certain process was concluded. How we’ve messed up since then is another whole story, but we attained independence on the 6th of March at 12:01. For me independence is equal to freedom in that kind of very total sense. Rubin: I’m going to ask you about another term that seems very loaded to me: “native.” I think you very judiciously use it sometimes. So what are you trying to convey? Aidoo Well, again it depends on how it is being used, of course, because there is the meaning of “native” as somebody who is from a place, born there. But it is historically loaded, like “tribe.” Except that as far as I’m concerned “tribe” is more offensive. But “native” is what the colonizers used for us. We were the natives. This was a perfectly decent word, which was uglified because they used it in a nasty way. You know, the natives, like the primitives, like the ugly ones, like the useless ones, like the senseless ones, like, like, like. But even now I’ve noticed especially when I’m in the US, if someone was referring to me a native—something like, “Aidoo has returned to her native country Ghana.” I don’t want to swear, but when are people going to understand that first of all if we are so called in a global universe then people must know where Ghana is? There is no need to interject native. I am a Ghanaian! If they can say that a certain damsel has gone to Romania and just say “Romania,” why should Kofi go to his “native country, Ghana”? It is brought in to indicate a certain otherness. “Native” is still used to only refer to us, the Eastward colonies, those of us on the margins of the Western world. It’s not pretty. Now if you could remind me of the context in which I used the term, I may be able to defend myself or explain myself. Rubin: I am thinking of Our Sister Killjoy when the main character, Sissie, is in Germany. Aidoo: Oh, yeah. In Germany and it is so amazing—Our Sister Killjoy was published in 1977 the first time. It’s thirty-something years later and look at what happened to dear Oprah in Zurich. Tina Turner was getting married to her old boyfriend, who is Swiss-German, and Oprah was attending the wedding. She got to Zurich and wanted to buy a bag. She was taken to the

8

Ghana, a former English colony, was established as autonomous and a country in 1957, and in 1960 held its first presidential election.

168

168

Creative Activism

most expensive shop in Zürich. She wanted to just see a bag. It turns out that later on they said that bag costs 40,000 dollars. Well first of all— Rubin: Wait, there is such a thing as a bag that costs 40,000 dollars? Aidoo: Yes. Obviously there is and Oprah wanted to see it. So the shop girl says what has been said to countless of us African and African-descended people: something like, “Oh but ma’am it’s too expensive, you can’t afford it.”9 Rubin: Or else they accuse her of trying to steal it. Aidoo: You know what I mean! In those days, like in the novel, when the man Sissie met says, “Oh, I thought if you washed your body with soap and water, your skin will be whiter or like ours,” everybody recognizes that either they had experienced this themselves or that they knew someone who knew someone who had. We talked about “independence” and “native”? “Native” for you! And “civilized”—the West appropriates the term for itself. They are the “civilized” world. Sometimes one can’t help feeling a little uncomfortable at the very least, or resentful, and it comes through. You see the West has been conquerors for such a long time that they all think, or you all think, that if you are a Westerner, and you know only the Western view of life and art and everything that has to do with human life and culture, that only your view of things is the correct one. So when they say “civilized” they mean Western civilization. We all have to do obeisance. If you refuse then you are difficult, you have a chip on your shoulder. Rubin: In Our Sister Killjoy you also use the term “cultural vulture.”10 That’s a powerful term. Aidoo: What I meant was that if we as Africans are not making a meaningful contribution to world culture, then we are just culture vultures. It came from an impression from childhood that becomes visually meaningful only if you grew up in the kind of village that I grew up in. In the old days they would design a section of the bush just outside the village as the waste dump. Every morning people will sweep their houses, collect the garbage and go and

9

10

Winfrey’s “handbag incident took place in August 2013. There was a great deal of reporting on this exchange, in which Winfrey—the only black female billionaire—asked to see a 38,000-dollar handbag designed by Tom Ford. After a comment that desserts are the mark of a leisured class, including a list of canned fruits, the text continues: “Brother, The internal logic is super cool: The only way to end up a cultural Vulture Is to feed on carrion all the way” (39)

169

Colonialism—Ama Ata Aidoo

169

dump it there. By noon the vultures would be smelling things: waste, rotten food, meat, and stuff like that. And they would swoop on the dump and do their pickings. I saw so clearly at the time that if you don’t contribute to the dump, but you go and drag anything from there then you are a culture vulture. Now that I’m talking to you and in fact because I had been dealing with this imagery for the past thirty years or more I’m also thinking that probably explains why we don’t pick anything. That whatever is good in other people’s cultures, that’s not what we pick up. It’s usually the nasty ones. Rubin: That’s interesting, because in the United States I see it used occasionally to invoke cultural appropriation. Aidoo: Yeah. They too are doing a bit of culture vulturing of another type. When we straighten our hair or when you wear a wig that looks like white people’s hair, that’s culture vulturing. Now white girls are cornrowing their hair and I think there is nothing wrong with it. If we didn’t see anything wrong in bleaching our skins and straightening our hair and now perming and doing now this, why shouldn’t they also if they like the look of it? Do you see? Rubin: Yes, I do see. But sometimes there is a power differential. Aidoo: Aha! But of course that’s the difference, isn’t it? That they are doing this out of a sense of entitlement. Isn’t that interesting? Rubin: Very interesting. There’s a bit in Killjoy where women are trying very hard to be at home with their own bodies. What do you think prevents them, and is that still just as true here? Basically no American women are allowed to be at home with their bodies. Aidoo: But listen, you say that! Do you mind if I agree with you and ask why you say that? Rubin: Because if we felt at home with our own bodies, there will be no reason for us to keep on buying products to fix whatever problem we perceive. Aidoo: So you think it’s only in a response to the market, consumerism? Rubin: Maybe not only, but at least a large part. I was very struck by the line in Killjoy that white teeth are in style because someone is making money off them.11 Aidoo: I also think that it has to do with heterosexuality. That’s how it started or that’s the socialization that has brought us to that. The fact that we have to be attractive not to other women. It has distorted everything for women.

11

“White teeth are in, my brother/Because Someone is/Making/Money out of/White Teeth (28).

170

170

Creative Activism

Once I was reading a piece that quoted a woman who had said, “What would be the world like if there were no men?” and the answer was, “If there were no men in the world, there would be just a whole lot of very happy, fat, hairy women.”12 It hits you because it is true. I feel that beyond the imperative of being healthy, women have been bullied into one shape or the other to our detriment. For a woman to be herself, she must take her a body as an essential part of herself and deal with it only in terms of what will make her healthy. If a woman herself understands that maybe I shouldn’t be fatter than this, fine. But the pressure of thinness is getting really out of hand. Rubin: It’s obscene and really, really, really bad. Aidoo: Yes. I’ve struggled with my weight all my life, including now. The fact that I have never properly lost enough weight to be thin is a matter of grief to me. Not because I want to be attractive to anybody, male or female, it’s just because now I have a bad leg. I had an accident and it is so much more difficult to carry a whole lot of weight around than not. When I was younger and I had better legs, it didn’t bother me but even then I was trying to lose weight. Being easy with their own bodies simply means that whoever they are, these characters, are not trying and probably have never tried to sculpt their bodies to suit anybody’s notion of what a woman’s body should be. That’s what I mean. Rubin: In the first story in No Sweetness Here, “Everything Counts,” there is a beauty contest and a focus on wigs and skin. Aidoo: Wigs and skin. I was watching German TV and there was a documentary on Nefertiti or Cleopatra. And there was this art critic who was saying that some new imagines of Cleopatra have emerged. Someone was asking her about Cleopatra being beautiful. The woman was saying, “Well, according to this and that she had a beaked nose and in any case we don’t think she was beautiful in any classical way.” So “classical” way means “Western” way. But Cleopatra was not a white woman, so whose “classical” was she talking about anyway? Rubin: There is definitely a “beauty” hierarchy! There are also several instances in your work where you indicate higher valuing of male children. In Our Sister Killjoy, Sissie’s German friend says something along the lines of, “If I had to have only one child at least it’s a boy.”13

12

13

Nicole Hollender, cartoonist and author of Sylvia, commented, “Can you imagine a world without men? There’d be no crime, and lots of fat happy women.” “And now smiling even more broadly she said that since Adolf was going to be the only child, she was very happy that he was a boy” (51).

171

Colonialism—Ama Ata Aidoo

171

Aidoo: You see I am an Akan, and we are a matrilineal people, so it is not that easy for us here. Although we are the majority ethnic group here, we are a minority within the world because we are matrilineal. Inheritance and all material sources for security come to people in terms of who their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers were. When I had my daughter some woman came to visit. The issue of me having had a daughter came up and then she asked me, “But I hear your daughter has had a child?” and I said, “Yes.” She said, “Boy or girl?” and I said, “Boy.” She said, “Don’t worry. God will make a granddaughter one of these days.” Rubin: That’s very interesting! Both of my children have my last name and that actually makes some people angry. Aidoo: They would be. What does their father say? Rubin: He says, “Well, what we decided to do is wait until the child is born and see whose body she came out of.” Aidoo: That’s wonderful. He did not mind? Rubin: He did not mind—but the funny thing is that other people do mind. Regarding marriage—I was very, very struck by how you call the wearing of the wedding ring “occupied territory.”14 That is incredibly powerful and efficient. In many places in the world right now there are battles over who has the right to get married at all. So I appreciate your indicating that marriage is not somehow what’s “natural,” it’s what people decide. Aidoo: You know who I love? Archbishop Tutu.15 He said, “I’d rather go to hell than worship a God who is homophobic.” He is wonderful, isn’t he? Rubin: Yes, that is a wonderful thing to say. You also refer to marriage as a funeral.16 Aidoo: Well you know, sometimes—and this is a confession—I almost can’t believe I said these things. I didn’t know I was saying it until I had said it and then of course, there was no going back. I wasn’t going to cut it out. What I thought about at the time—and again it may have something to do with how utterly morbid that kind of sense death is treated in this society—is how when you are laid down until now, they put on a white dress on you. Rubin: A wedding dress! Aidoo: And when I went to the United States maybe the second time or the third time, I was reminded that in Western societies until recently, when a 14 15

16

This is in Aidoo’s 1993 novel Changes: A Love Story (71). Tutu (b. 1931) is a South African social justice worker and an Anglican bishop. He was prominent in the 1980s for his anti-apartheid work. A character in Changes: A Love Story refers to a wedding ceremony as a “funeral of the self that could have been” (110).

172

172

Creative Activism

woman got married, and people were given invitations, the invitations would come as Mr. and Mrs. John Doe, Mr. and Mrs. Then it was a quick jump to referring to the woman only on as Mrs. John. I thought it was so peculiar. Even her first name was not good enough! I must say that I have held a grudge against the West and Western societal norms for the whole notion of a “Mrs.” Even Mrs. Jones. Even when she’s Mrs. Mary Jones because in one fell swoop, her identity is completely annihilated. I’ve never never forgiven the West for this. Why? One day she’s Mary Johnson. She gets married and the next day she’s Mary Appletree. I’ve never, never understood why and never, never, never forgiven it. Rubin: It’s a property claim. You shouldn’t forgive it. Aidoo: For me, it’s cannibalism at its worst. You get married and the man swallows you up completely and then spews you out and what comes out is not what went in. Never. That’s what I meant in all that, marriage being a funeral of the self. That’s what I mean because after that you are not going to be you again—ever. Rubin: In Killjoy and then Changes to you very effectively and deliberately break up the novel form. What is your aim in challenging and revising the novel form? Aidoo: I didn’t do that. Rubin: You didn’t? [Expectant silence] Oh . . . OK, wow, that’s just me making assumptions about Western literary forms and what is “standard” or “starting-point.” And while we’re talking about anticolonialism. Wow. Sorry. I framed too naively from this Western perspective—you start with the novel because that’s what’s primal and first somehow and then you alter that. Aidoo: No. Rubin: No, absolutely. I see that now. Aidoo: Thank you. Rubin: No, thank you. I was making an assumption there. Aidoo: In fact, it’s connected short stories. That’s what Killjoy is. As I wrote them, I thought each episode could be seen as having concluded, could have stood on its own but the publishers kept insisting. It was the publishers who said, “That constitutes a novel.” Rubin: Western critics have had trouble with it as well. They have said “prose poem” and so forth. Aidoo: Prose poem, experimental. I didn’t think that I was doing anything experimental. Rubin: In your work there’s a lot of focus on food. That is really interesting to me because food on one hand is the most universal thing. We all have to

173

Colonialism—Ama Ata Aidoo

173

eat. But then what we find familiar and “exotic” and so forth is so culturally based and class based and region based and more. What are you doing with all of the eating in your work? Aidoo: You are right, food emerges in my writing quite a bit. In fact, I have two, three poems now dedicated to food. Long poems to food in deep sorrow, different aspects of food. Different types in different places with different implications. In fact, I was just last night working on a poem in appreciation of a poet and doing it through food. It’s because it’s an essential part of existence and I love food and I used to like cooking a lot. These days not at all, but I appreciate eating. I appreciate good food. I’m not terribly finicky in terms of ethnicity and origins of food. If I taste it and it feels good in my mouth, I like it. Of course, my first love is the food I grew up eating like everybody else but since I started traveling, I’ve learned to like and love other food. I’m not surprised that food makes a noticeable presence in my work. It means something. It means something! Recently, I came across another wonderful quotation—somebody was saying that poverty is a quest for carbohydrates and that wealth is avoidance of carbohydrates. Rubin: That is quite gracefully put. You end your introduction to The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by talking about the author’s targets, saying that if words could kill, he would be aiming at powerful people who make other people suffer by the use of their power.17 If your words could kill, what would you aim at? Aidoo: I’ve been thinking a whole lot about power and the use of power in the world. My daughter, thank God, she’s young and she still feels and she gets angry all the time about what’s happening everywhere. I tell her, “You know, unfortunately, the world has been fucked up for a very, very, very long time.” Power. It’s at the basis of racism, sexism, religious intolerance. Abuse of children. Rubin: That’s the worst. Aidoo: It’s the worst.

17

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) was the first novel by Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah. It takes up the social changes of postindependence Ghana, including corruption and profiteering. Aidoo’s Introduction, which she published in 1969 as Christina Ama Ata Aidoo, ends with, “The contents of the book clearly delineate what his targets would be if words could kill.”

174

175

Section 5

Economic Justice

176

177

14

“Hey, I See You”: Revolution According to Boots Riley

“We make everybody dance while telling them they need to get rid of the system,” announced rapper Boots Riley in August 2014 to Fox News Cleveland anchor Autumn Ziemba, in response to her rather bland question about his band, the Coup, and what listeners could expect of them at an upcoming music festival. Without losing his characteristic warmth and wit in the fifty-second interview, Riley went on to add that “exploitation is the primary contradiction in capitalism.”1 Although Riley has never been one to hide his politics—he does, after all, have a song titled “5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO”— what might be called his “Dance Dance Revolution” self-description here was especially efficient at capturing the Coup’s artistic strategy.2 Not surprisingly, Riley’s characterization was both celebrated and condemned, both shared and obscured. It traveled via YouTube after Fox refused to post it online, instead almost immediately sending an angry email to the one of the festival’s organizers to insist that “FOX 8 was not the time or opportunity for Boots to go on his political rant. With his statements he not only hurt our station’s credibility, but also the festival’s. I was looking to do a fun interview and it turned into something entirely different. We will not be reaching out for any interviews in the future.” But the station’s harried response shows that Riley hit his mark, furthering the social and political vision that his songs with the Coup and various musical collaborations—with the genre-blending super-group Street Sweeper Social Club (formed in 2006 with Rage Against the Machine rocker Tom Morello), with the New Orleans jam band Galactic, with other hiphop artists—are organized around.3 1 2 3

Spin magazine, August 25, 2014. Dance Dance Revolution is a music video game introduced in 2009. The name of the Street Sweeper Social Club invokes a line from an early, hugely important, and highly class-conscious topical rap song, “The Message,” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five

178

178

Creative Activism

Riley’s music, writing, and conversation share a remarkable historical depth and artistic breadth, making powerful use of hip hop’s penchant for cultural references and historical lessons. His song “Kill My Landlord,” for instance, invokes a 1981 Saturday Night Live skit in which Eddie Murphy plays a poet reading his poem about breaking into a house to “kill my landlord”—and revises Langston Hughes’s poem “Ballad of the Landlord,” in which an African American man tries to get his landlord to fix his crumbling residence and instead is threatened with eviction. The tenant muses about “landing [his] fist” on the landlord and as a result, he is arrested and accused of “trying to ruin the government/and overturn the land.”4 In Riley’s song the resistant tenant is trying to overturn the racist and exploitive government.5 Similarly, “My Favorite Mutiny” refers to the spoken-word artist Gil Scott-Heron, the main character of Roots, the pimp-turned-author Iceberg Slim, and activist Rosa Parks—while offering, I would argue, more analysis of the origin of the drug crisis in two lines than in the whole run of The Wire.6 (Riley repeats the claim that the CIA is responsible for crack cocaine entering black neighborhoods in more than one song. In “The Liberation of Lonzo Williams” [1993], for instance, which narrates the evolution of its titular character from drug dealer to revolutionary, he says, “You never worked for the mob, you had a government job.”) The overt challenge Riley lays down through his art, summarized so well in the Fox interview, led to his being the only popular musician mentioned in documents revealed by Wikileaks.7 (Riley responded by commenting that this acknowledgment was “better than winning a Grammy.”8) He was named in the document for his involvement in Occupy Oakland: “This is a city that has already had a lot of trouble with police vs. protestor issues in the last decade . . . Today will be a test case of that escalation. If we see broad general strikes, the propaganda of the protestors is catching on and the momentum is in their favor”

4 5

6

7 8

featuring Melle Mel and Duke Bootee (Sugar Hill Records, 1982); the narrator describes his son saying that he doesn’t want to stay in school because the teacher looks down on him; instead, he says, “I think it’d be cheaper / if I just got a job, learned to be a street sweeper.” Hughes’s poem was published in 1940. The song also arguably turns “The House I  Live In,” Abel Meerepol and Earl Robinson’s 1943 antiracist song (recorded by Frank Sinatra and Paul Robeson, among others), into “the shack I live in.” The Wire ran on HBO from 2002 to 2008, and deals with the heroin crisis in Baltimore; it was conceived of and primarily written by David Simon. Wikileaks, founded in 2006, publishes leaked secret information online. Riley’s comment circulated mostly through fellow rapper Talib Kewli’s Twitter feed.

179

Revolution—Boots Riley

179

(on a related note, Boots Riley is there).9 Fascinatingly, Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee currently in exile after leaking documents posted online by Wikileaks, echoed a statement Riley made in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview about the Occupy movement; Riley told the interviewer that they were “doing what’s right, not what’s legal.”10 In a 2014 interview on the NBC network about his work with Wikileaks—his first television interview after exposing military secrets—Snowden commented that “sometimes, to do the right thing you have to break the law.”11 Riley was involved with Occupy Oakland as an organizer as well as occasionally  performing there, and although the Occupy movement both within and beyond the United States had numerous locations, the Oakland manifestation was particularly striking for its involvement with organized labor. Riley’s music is quite congenial to Occupy’s stated mission; it frequently mentions work (a variety of jobs:  UPS employee, a job Riley himself held, along  with musical collaborator Spice 1; sex work; telemarketer; “booster” [someone who, as the song’s lyrics put it, “steals from the retail/then sells it on the street for dirt-cheap resale”], to name a few). Riley’s music is not his only platform. He has written a screenplay titled Sorry to Bother You that was chosen by the Sundance lab program and subsequently received the San Francisco Film Society/Kenneth Rainin Foundation grant. He gives invited talks on college campus and other venues—netting him what amounted to a ban at Western Michigan University and a charge of obscenity in Norfolk, Virginia.12 And his social media presence, encompassing a blog, a robust Twitter feed, an Instagram account, and a Facebook page, not surprisingly, reaches far beyond the now-familiar need to musical acts to publicize their new shows and new releases. It is an iteration of the wonderful tradition of the corner soapbox, and notices about shows or photographs of fans wearing Coup t-shirts are interspersed with passionate, thoughtful political critique. Following

9

10

11 12

The Global Intelligence Files (Wikileaks): https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?viewemailid= 1641873. Binelli, “ ‘Doing What’s Right, Not What’s Legal’: Boots Riley on Occupy Oakland”:  http://www. rollingstone.com/ politics/ news/ doing- whats- right- not- whats- legal- boots- riley- on- occupyoakland-20120130. The interview was on May 28, 2014, conducted by NBC journalist and news anchor Brian Williams. The University insisted that a student group pay such a hefty “security tax” if it hosted him on campus that the group saw it as an in-practice ban, and sued, with the support of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The University ultimately settled the suit by agreeing to pay 35,000 dollars to the plaintiff ’s attorney.

180

180

Creative Activism

the 2015 death of Freddie Gray while in the custody of Baltimore police, for instance, Riley posted on Facebook: I support looting, whether a riot’s going on or not. Will it change the system? No. But it’s poor people working together to get a temporary benefit . . . This is how people come into contact with capitalism in their daily lives. The struggle to survive. This is why rebellions very often turn to looting. People need shit. Even if they loot expensive shoes, most often, they’re selling that shit afterward. Looting is not the protests going off topic—it’s addressing the thing that was the topic in the first place. The one that people aren’t talking about.13 Communities of color have interactions with the police on the pretense of the illegal economies that many of us must engage in to have an income. This need for the illegal economy is ordained by the structure of capitalism and it’s necessity for unemployment. When people say “Fuck The Police” it’s not only about the daily harassment they receive, it’s also that the police—even if they aren’t being brutal and are arresting someone in accordance with all laws—are further impairing people’s ability to pay bills, to pay rent, to buy food.

Riley’s political work and his music, then, often play the important role of saying what no one else is willing to say—a significant role he continued to play in our conversation.

Selected discography Kill My Landlord (1993) Genocide & Juice (1994) Steal This Album (1998) Party Music (2001) Pick a Bigger Weapon (2006) Sorry to Bother You (2012) Rubin: Did your route into politics and your route into music become clear at the same time? Riley: As a young person, it didn’t seem that way. Because to a young person, each day is like a year. I think at first because I was addicted to TV, I just

13

Posted on the Coup’s Facebook page on April 30, 2015 (https://www.facebook.com/TheCoup/ posts/951238968243891)

181

Revolution—Boots Riley

181

wanted to be on TV. Then, once I became like 12, I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to be Prince, actually. Specifically I wanted to be Prince. Rubin: Who wouldn’t? Riley: Yeah. So I was taking guitar and was really into it. Then separately, I got involved in organizing when I was 14. Soon wanting to be a rock star seemed to be something individualistic and the antithesis of what I was into then at that time. So I kind of shunned that and put that off. Really, what was happening is they were both the same to me. They both come from the idea that when you’re sitting there, you’re watching TV, and your life is something you see as boring. Everything exciting is happening in the media. What we end up learning, what is being taught to us, is that we are insignificant. All of this other stuff is significant. It matters. Everyone wants to matter. I think people want to be artists. Even if they just want to be artists who do something that few people remember. Somebody sees that you’re putting a record on the earth. You want to matter. It’s that same thing with organizers at some point: your life to have meant something. It’s all part of that same process. Rubin: Thinking about your watching Prince and wanting to become a rock star reminds me that you have a category of songs that are simultaneously party songs—and songs about revolution. How does “Laugh/Love/ Fuck” go?14 Riley: “Laugh, love, fuck, and drink liquor.” Rubin: “Laugh, love, fuck, and drink liquor . . . And make the revolution come quicker.” Ozomatli also has some songs in that category, especially “Saturday Night.”15 I have always been really drawn to these songs. Could you speak to that message—that human activities like the ones you just quoted are somehow really important on the social, political landscape? Riley: What’s interesting here is that I think that I was totally sober from the ages of 19 to 29, holding to an idea of disciplined revolution and how it should be. Rubin: God, I was the same way. I was like, “I’ll work for social change much better if I never drink or smoke pot or anything!” Riley: But there were contradictory things I was hearing from folks that actually I listened to later . . . There were a bunch of British folks who had been union organizers in England, but they moved here to become

14 15

The song is from the Coup’s 2006 album Pick a Bigger Weapon. Ozomatli’s “Saturday Night” (Street Signs, 2004)  refers to social change as global block party. Critics and cultural historians have argued that, in a less direct way, Martha and the Vandellas’ most well-known song, “Dancing in the Streets,” accomplishes the same thing.

182

182

Creative Activism

organizers. They were like, “If you can’t drink a pint with a man, how the hell you going to get him to go on strike with you?” Then I thought about Russians and the fact that they had a revolution. Obviously aspects of their culture have to do with drinking . . . it’s all part of it. The reason why anybody would organize in the first place is because they feel a connection to people. Rubin: That’s putting it mildly. I spent actually quite a bit of time in the former Soviet Union, and I had to get really creative when turning down alcohol . . . They play hardball about the drinking. I would say, “No thanks, I don’t drink vodka.” Then they would respond with something along the lines of, “Do you not you want peace between our peoples?” OK, let’s move from drinking to sex, since both of those very ordinary activities are given deep political significance in that song. You have a couple of songs representing sex work. There’s “Violet” on your most recent album Sorry to Bother You but also your much earlier song, “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ‘79 Granada Last Night.”16 Why do we need to think about sex as work? Riley: Because everything in life we do, everything that should just be natural human functions or just people spending time, is turned into a commodity. A lot of people would agree that sex shouldn’t be work. That it should be something you do just because you want to. Because you’re connecting with someone. Or whatever other number of reasons people have for it. But it shouldn’t be because you have to in order to survive. I think that you could apply that to all sorts of other activities. It’s interesting—I had a therapist for a while. I was thinking about it like, this is really like paying someone to be your friend. We shouldn’t have a society where that has to happen. I don’t think about these things consciously, but I think that’s why it comes up. I think people see that when they say someone was “pushed into” this situation of being a prostitute. It’s easy to illustrate the idea they’re in a place that they don’t want to be. Of course, one argument that I don’t agree with has come up . . . There are some people who would call themselves “sex positive,” but an aspect of that is to say that all sex workers aren’t forced into it.17 That some enjoy it. Maybe that exists. I’m sure it does. I’ve seen people who say that exists. You don’t

16

17

“ Violet” is from Sorry to Bother You (2012), and “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ‘79 Granada Last Night” is from Steal This Album (1998), the title of which invokes activist and anarchist Abbie Hoffman’s 1971 book Steal This Book. “Sex-positive” feminism points to sexual liberation as a key part of women’s liberation. Whether sex work and pornography are part of that freedom has long been debated.

183

Revolution—Boots Riley

183

know their history or background on anything, so I can’t make a judgment on it. But anytime you have to do something to survive . . . I think the flip side of that for me is “IJustWannaLayAroundAllDayInBedWithYou.”18 It’s talking about sex as something you want to do. Rubin: And it’s not just that sex is not work in that song, but the lyrics are really specifically about taking back the time from the boss. Turning off the clock, not being on the clock. Riley: Yeah. Those are issues I really deal with. With “Violet”—and sometimes I think the character is a male prostitute, and sometimes it’s a female prostitute—it’s just really someone having a glimmer of hope that doesn’t really work out. A guy, a male prostitute, had written me a bunch of e-mails about his take on “Me and Jesus the Pimp” and how it helped him out in a certain situation. Rubin: It sounds like he found himself in some meaningful way in that song. I think seeing yourself in art is really profound. Riley: The guy, I had seen him a few times before he wrote, but at the time I didn’t realize that was his story. And then he told me. It’s not that the details of his story are in “Violet.” It just the dynamic of people wanting something more. Rubin: It’s beautiful. With Street Sweeper Social Club you recorded a lot of really powerful cover songs, and from a variety of musicians working in different genres. What do you think is artistically important about covers? Riley: I think covers are sometimes just helpful as far as making the connection with someone. Like saying, “Here’s a song you know. We’re going to put our twist on it.” This can allow you to notice what we do artistically to a certain extent. I think my primary art is writing words. I do the other stuff, too, but it’s so that I can write the words. We did the “Paper Planes” cover, for which the music was really from the Clash’s “Straight to Hell.”19 Which is also one of my favorite songs. I changed the words on it. I’m ambivalent about them myself— Rubin: Covers? Or The Clash?!? Riley: About those particular covers that we did. Rubin: OK, that’s a relief. I can understand the ambivalence, but there’s something really powerful there, I think. Covers can remind me of the way

18 19

The song is on Pick a Bigger Weapon (2006). “Paper Planes” was recorded in 2007 by British musician MIA (listing members of the Clash as cowriters); the song takes up realities and misperceptions about immigrants and refugees. The Clash’s “Straight to Hell” was released in 1982 on their album Combat Rock; the song also takes up global immigration as well as economic injustice.

184

184

Creative Activism

that in number of languages, the most common greeting basically means, “I see you.” I find that incredibly moving. Riley: It’s funny because we say that in Oakland, too. Rubin: Do you? Riley: Yeah. We’ve said that since high school at least. “Hey, I see you.” Rubin: It’s actually kind of profound. Isn’t it? “I see you.” Like that guy who wrote to you with his thoughts on “Me and Jesus the Pimp.” He felt seen by you, and that really mattered to him. What about the Occupy movement as an aesthetic? Can you track a transformation or development in your sound following your involvement with Occupy? The thing that struck me about your new album Sorry to Bother You is that, to my ear, there is a lot of material that resembles or invokes picket-line chanting, resembling, for instance, a slogan I remember from my youth, “I need a J-O-B so I can E-A-T.” Riley: Well, I wrote most of the stuff on that album before I got involved in Occupy. Let’s see. I wrote “The Guillotine” after Occupy Oakland. I wrote some of “Land of 7 Billion Dances” after Occupy Oakland. And I wrote “Long Island Iced Tea, Neat” after Occupy. But it’s just the same, to a certain extent, that it’s something to be chanted. The thing is, I had always been talking about a movement, even when one wasn’t visible to most of the people listening to my music. Rubin: I think they are likely taking it in on some level. Riley: That’s what I always am hoping will happen. In this case, one of the reasons that I put off doing the album was because Occupy Oakland was something that people were paying attention to. A couple months later, after we did the general strike, Occupy Nigeria called a general strike for Nigeria.20 Theirs was way more successful . . . but the idea and the connection were there. I want to make something that helps people feel inspired to have a movement. I want the music to be useful in that vein. The difference is that now, people can see at least some movement playing out. Rubin: Did you grow up in a political family? Riley: Yeah, I think so. Activism wasn’t pushed on me. My father started out in the NAACP in the 1950s. When he was 12 years old, he got kicked out

20

Occupy Oakland’s general strike was passed by its general assembly and organized by its Strike Coordinating Council. It took place on November 2, 2011; the mass demonstration was publicly supported by a number of trade unions that urged members to take a personal day in order to attend. Occupy Nigeria announced its strike action on January 9, 2012, in response to the federal government’s removal of fuel subsidies.

185

Revolution—Boots Riley

185

of his church even though his mother was one of the pastors there. It was because he stood up in church and suggested that the church should be involved in the Civil Rights Movement. That’s what they don’t talk about when they talk about the Civil Rights Movement . . . they make it seem like the black church and the Civil Rights Movement were one. No. The reason they needed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is because they were the few. Most black churches were not involved in the Civil Rights Movement. My father, at age 12, suggested that they be involved. The pastor that was up there at the time responded that it would be blasphemy for the church to be involved. That it was blasphemy for my father to suggest that the church be involved in such worldly matters. My father said, “Well, if Jesus doesn’t want to be part of my freedom, I don’t want any part of Jesus.” The pastor at the time kicked the whole family out. My father had eleven brothers and sisters. His mother had eleven brothers and sisters. And my father— Rubin: They were all out? Riley: Yeah. The church wasn’t going to survive because there were so many. That only lasted for a day, but my father didn’t go back. Rubin: That must have been a big chunk of the congregation! Riley: So my father didn’t go back. He continued with the NAACP. He was part of the first coffee shop sit-in in Greensboro.21 Rubin: Was he? That’s amazing. Riley: He wasn’t in the coffee shop during the sit-in, but he was one of the organizers of it. He joined CORE later on. They moved him to San Francisco where he then became part of Progressive Labor Party, SDS.22 They moved him to Chicago, where I was born. Then he moved to Detroit as their fulltime organizer for Detroit. I lived there starting when I was one. Then he decided to become a lawyer. My parents moved back to the Bay Area, so he could go to law school. That was when I was already 8. He never 21

22

National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded by the important African American writer, theorist, activist, and historian W. E. B Du Bois, Moorfield Storey (a white Boston lawyer and Civil Rights activist), and Mary White Ovington (a white Brooklyn-based journalist and women’s voting rights activist) in 1909. The Greensboro sit-ins were a series of protests in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960; participants, who were mostly African American students, sat at lunch counters from which they were banned by racist rules, and refused to leave despite threats and heckling that involved pouring food products on them and violence from counter-protesters and police. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in 1942, and played a central role in the Civil Rights Movement. The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) was formed in 1962 (initially known as the Progressive Labor Movement) after splitting with the Communist Party of the United States. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a campus activist group in the 1960s, and held its first meeting in 1960.

186

186

Creative Activism

pushed. I remember things happening, but it wasn’t like they pushed those ideas on me. I even remember when the first movie Red Dawn came out, I was all hyped.23 Rubin: Really?! Riley: Yeah. I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to see this!” My father argued with me about going to see it. But he didn’t argue in any way that revealed to me his politics in any form that I could bite into. He was just like, “This movie pushes militarism.” I was like, “We might need that if we get invaded by Russia.” But he didn’t push his politics on me. He was not in the Progressive Labor Party anymore, but we had friends of the family around that still were. I got involved in its youth organization. I got involved in summer project that the youth organizations were going to. So, yeah. You would say a political family, but it wasn’t that any of that was expected of me. As a matter of fact, my father argued with the Progressive Labor Party when they let me join. Because he was like, “He hasn’t read shit. When I was leading the Party, there would have been no way that I would let him join.” Rubin: [Laughs] Actually, that sounds a little familiar to me. Riley: He was basically saying that they were being opportunist, and they weren’t interested in my development. There may have been some truth to that in the way that they were organizing at the time. Because the way that they organized was more on a one-to-one level. Like OK, I’m talking to this person at my job. We’ve been talking about communist ideas. Our meetings would be people talking about conversations that they had with someone about the general idea of communism. There were no campaigns going on, or reform struggles. They were past that. It was like a religion, almost. It didn’t matter whether someone actually had differences as long as they would say that they were communist. Then they could join the Party. Which in a certain sense is fine. If you’re saying you agree with these general ideas. But at the same time, it was a party with a line. You said you got some of that, too? In what way? Rubin: I’m a generationally out-of-sync generation of red diaper baby because my father and stepfather were 25 and 20 years older than my mother. My stepfather (after my father died) used to say to me, if I ever got on his nerves in any way, half-joking but half not, “The problem, young lady, is that you lack a good Marxist-Leninist foundation.” And I would look at him and say, 23

Red Dawn came out in 1984 and was directed by John Milius. It is organized around an alternativehistory scenario in which the Soviet Union, with the support of Cuba and Nicaragua, invades the United States.

187

Revolution—Boots Riley

187

“I’m sixteen.” I am interested in those conversations, though. Is it still hard to say you’re a communist, after all the Cold War anti-communism? Riley: No. When I was in high school, obviously I was very gung ho about it. Among the kids who go to school in Oakland, all they know is “communist” means the government doesn’t like you. So that must mean it’s something good. Rubin: No pushback? Riley: Nobody cared. At the most, they were like, “Oh, that’s something different.” Or “That’s political . . . Oh, you getting political pussy.” Or something like that. The school tried to red-bait me, but they didn’t realize that the kids didn’t care except in the sense of gossip. But they had no stance that was in line with mainstream America. Me and a few friends, one of my first efforts after coming back from the summer projects being hyped is we worked with these farm workers in the Delano-McFarland area, Central California, who had been kicked out of the UFW in the 1960s because they were communist. Also because they wanted to organize undocumented immigrants—no one talks about the fact that the UFW only organizes documented workers. Chavez was opposed to undocumented workers.24 Rubin: Awful about that. Riley: Obviously the way that they pay people less is to have them be mostly undocumented. I did three summers in a row living with these families. After the first summer, I was so hyped because, in the morning, they would say, “OK, it’s your job to lead the rally that’s going to happen when we get off work at noon. Right out there.” And you’re like, “I don’t know how to do that . . .” They’re like, “OK. Here’s a pamphlet. Here are the people that can drive the trucks. You got to figure out the rest.” So you figure shit out and you learn. And you get hyped and . . . I came back with all these stories and histories of what happened and what could happen, and I was hyped! Me and some friends led a walk-out at Oakland High that ended up being 2,000 of 2,200 students. We walked out and marched down to the school board. We won! Right then. They caved in as soon as they saw— Rubin: What were you walking out over? Riley: The issue, really, was that they were having cutbacks at certain schools, and the one school that was still the white school, which was

24

The United Farm Workers for a time wanted to limit immigration, which they argued would lead to a constant supply of cheap labor. Concerned about undocumented workers as strikebreakers led to reporting those who refused to be organized and to honor the picket line to Immigration and Naturalization Service.

188

188

Creative Activism

Skyline, wasn’t going to have the cutbacks. The way that the cutbacks were going to take place is they were making [the other schools] into yearround schools. Rubin: And so people go in different shifts? Riley: You go in different shifts, and you can share books and all that kind of stuff. Also, there would be tracking because of it. A walk-out against yearround school sounds really good to anybody. Like, “Fuck that.” We passed out little fliers that were handwritten and not even photocopied. We just showed up there. It was weird because everybody was waiting outside the school, and somebody gave me a bullhorn. I was trying to use what I had just learned . . . Right as I’m speaking, the principal comes. He was a Mexican guy. Buff. Ex-cop. Came marching up: “Riley, give me the bullhorn.” I was just like, “OK.” And started handing it to him. And everyone was like, “What are you doing? Don’t give him the bullhorn.” Everybody charged in, and it ended up being a tug-of-war. But this is a big, buff dude, so there’s twelve students, and he’s waving everybody around. This guy, the bullhorn scratched him on his arm, and blood splurted all over [the principal’s] white shirt with the tie. We got the bullhorn back and ended up marching off. The principal was standing there watching the crowd go past with blood all over his shirt. The first time they had a color picture in the Oakland Tribune that I knew, the caption said, “Principal watching the crowd go by after being assaulted by Raymond Riley,” or something like that. So we marched, 2,000 students, down Park Boulevard to the school board. Actually other schools were coming to meet us. As soon as we got there, five to ten minutes afterwards . . . They had the doors chained up. This is the 1980s. We had not seen anything like that in our own lifetime. They came out and read a statement that said, “We’ve hereby decided to not have the year-round school program.” And so everybody cheered. We were just drunk with power. Rubin: It’s not usually that quick. Riley: The next day, though, the principal took hold of the morning bulletin and started saying, “I want to warn the students about Raymond Riley. He is a communist. He wants to take us back to the days of the Black Panther Party. You should not listen to him.” Now what he’s not understanding is that in the first place, everybody hates him already. So he should have had someone else do it. And at the same time, even in the 1980s in Oakland, we didn’t know who the Black Panther Party was. It was only when Public Enemy came out that we started really

189

Revolution—Boots Riley

189

learning about the Black Power movement. This is even in Oakland! Only ten years after their existence, right? In most of the classes, people then asked the teachers, “Black Panther Party? Who is the Black Panther Party?” Three teachers, it was confirmed, as if they talked about it together, said that the Black Panther Party was the black version of the Ku Klux Klan. Rubin: Oh, come on. Riley: Yeah. And people were like, “Yeah, I heard that was the black version of the Ku Klux Klan.” Later on, I took certain teachers to task because I found out some of the teachers were socialists or political in some way. And nobody stood up for me. Rubin: Whom do consider to be musical allies? Riley: It’s funny because over the years I’ve really tried to look for them in various places. Speaking of collaborations, on Genocide and Juice, we had Spice 1, who was somebody I worked at UPS with.25 Who had become a platinum artist. E-40 was somebody who I knew from around town. He also did something with one of my songs. I would hang out with folks who weren’t doing what I was doing but try to get them closer to putting some stuff in their songs. That wasn’t working out. It really wasn’t connecting. In 1999 I met the dudes from Dead Prez.26 That was at first more an artistic kinship than a political kinship, in that they look at writing songs in the same way I do. It was something we could talk about. I think politically, we’ve both even gone farther apart from each other. But friendship-wise, we’re still really good friends. Folks like Tom Morello. But yeah, it’s hard to find someone that you feel like is an artistic and political ally. I think if there’s a movement, it will create artists. A movement around material things will create the artists. I don’t think there has been a big movement yet. Rubin: Have you tracked Ice Cube’s turn toward economic analysis in his most recent albums? Riley: I just saw something where he was like, “Everything’s Fucked Up.” Some song called that.27 25

26

27

Spice-1 is the performing name for Robert Green, Jr. (b. 1970); he has been releasing albums since 1992. The New  York–based social-justice oriented hip-hop duo Dead Prez consists of M-1 (Mutulu Olugbala, b. 1972) and stic.man (Khnum Muata Ibomu, born Clayton Gavin in 1974). Ice Cube’s song “Everythang’s Corrupt” was released in 2012, the day before the November elections. The song connects capitalism to mass incarceration, among other powerful assertions.

190

190

Creative Activism

Rubin: He has once song that actually directly refers to capitalism as a “hustle.”28 Riley: He’s always tried to have a few things in there. It’s funny because I used to just want to sound like Ice Cube. Never could and was jealous of other people who could sound almost exactly like him. Luckily, I wasn’t able to. At some point, and I don’t know where it started, I met him one time, and he was somebody who I could not speak around. I would get tongue-tied, not knowing what to say. Rubin: That’s . . . sweet. Riley: I felt like he felt nervous about it. It would be funny because anytime I would come to his shows, and he would immediately tell his people, “Tell Boots he can come backstage.” But I’m like, “I don’t want to go backstage because I don’t want him to think I’m just being a groupie and coming to all his shows.” He would always do that. Rubin: I’ve been reading lately about various musicians who have been declining to perform in Israel. Do you have thoughts about the power of not performing? Riley: I think it’s more the power of saying you’re not going to. A cultural boycott can then let people know about the other kinds of boycotting, can lead to divestment campaigns by universities, for instance. It’s something that worked with South Africa. An economic strike is really one of the most potent things. I think the boycott is something that gets the word out there. The biggest economic pressure is when the workers don’t do something. Consumer-end protesting is a lot harder to organize. A boycott where artists are boycotting is more like a strike. Rubin: I’ve never thought of that. It is a kind of strike. Because you’re withholding labor. Riley: That’s why it has the possibility of working. It’s interesting. My mother’s mother’s a German Jew. Her brother was a communist in Germany. He escaped. First he became part of the French resistance. Now I only met that guy a couple times when I was too young to know what his politics were. That being said, I’ve followed its history. I think a lot of nationalist movements start out progressive and even have radical elements to them. Start out with ideas that it’s nationalist and not looking at the world as a whole. It becomes about some sort of genetic protection of a few people, which is very easily turned into a really right-wing force.

28

The song is “The Nigga Trap,” which is on Ice Cube’s 2006 album Laugh Now, Cry Later.

191

Revolution—Boots Riley

191

Rubin: How you bring politics to your parenting? You clearly make the connection in “Wear Clean Draws,” which is addressed to your daughter.29 Are there parenting decisions you’ve made that strike you as especially important? Riley: I think politics and parenting have an overlap. I talk to my kids about whatever they want to talk about. Try to give them some leeway. Try to give them some leeway to make mistakes. I think some of my politics come into play in certain situations that have to do with problematizing actions that to me are part of regular development. When something is made into some sort of genetic or mental health problem that’s just something everybody does as a kid. It’s focused on, talked about in a way that is not healthy. I think that’s where some of my politics come into play. Which has to do with taking what the supposed “experts” say with a large grain of salt. Rubin: Or with a pint (or so) of urine, as in “Piss on Your Grave!”30

29 30

“Wear Clean Draws” is on the 2001 album Party Music. “Piss on Your Grave” is the thirteenth track on Steal This Album. In “Piss on Your Grave” and the skit that precedes it, Riley sonically enacts the song’s title activity on several people’s graves, including George Washington and a parodically named corporate CEO, Philthy Richbanks. The song’s chorus is sung in an overtly disco style that reminds the listener of the political implications of “good time” music; Riley places the song in dialogue with NWA’s “Gangsta Gangsta” by changing Ice Cube’s line “about how he should not have been released from the penitentiary” to “Never should have been put in the penitentiary.”

192

193

15

“Power and Powerlessness”: Detecting History According to Sara Paretsky

The work of mystery writer Sara Paretsky, which currently spans more than three decades, offers a stunning example of the depth and seriousness of popular fiction—all too frequently considered lower on familiar cultural hierarchies than “high” literature. Best known for her series of detective novels with a Chicagobased protagonist, V. I. Warshawski—credited with the transforming of the female detective from “sitting room” to hardboiled—Paretsky is able to address numerous social, historical, and political issues in fiction that is energetic, accessible—and, of course, suspenseful. Paretsky has written close to twenty novels in the series, and has received numerous literary awards from mystery writers associations, including the Diamond Dagger (from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain) and the Edgar Allan Poe Award (from the Mystery Writers of America) for lifetime achievement. Paretsky was born in 1947 in Ames, Iowa, but when her father, a microbiologist, was given a job at the University of Kansas the family moved to Kansas. Because they were Jewish, there were limitations on where they could live due to zoning laws, so Paretsky spent much of her youth in a farmhouse outside of Lawrence, Kansas. She explores this question—and other difficulties she faced in her youth, including an alcoholic mother, a punitive father, and the resultant caretaking responsibilities she took on very early as a result—in a memoir she published in 2007. She also explores what it meant for her to come of age during the secondwave women’s movement and the antiwar movement. Paretsky earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, and her fiction is historically rich and layered. (She ultimately published a book based on her dissertation in 2016.) But this historical orientation doesn’t weigh down her prose: on the contrary, she is able to deploy it in ways that add to the suspense. In fact, Paretsky’s work serves as a powerful reminder of the many places where history is debated outside of governments and classroom—and a reminder

194

194

Creative Activism

of the sober truth that we cannot solve mysteries about the present without accounting for the past. For instance, Blacklist (2004) invokes the United States’ anti-communist hysteria and persecution of the 1950s as a lens through which to understand the social responses to the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks in 2001. Critical Mass (2013) explores the race among several countries to develop the atomic bomb, directly connecting it to current social problems. As we discussed in the interview, Paretsky’s own activist history finds its way into her novels in a variety of ways. She explores neighborhoods and how they are shaped by social hierarchies—racial and ethnic, class, education, and so forth. She invokes a recurring character, a doctor who does work for reproductive rights—before and after abortion was made legal. Her main character is a detective, and frequently has interactions with the police, which are sometimes helpful and sometimes quite upsetting. She shows how access to art in various forms is connected to power and privilege. Paretsky’s ability to resist the “good guys/bad guys” clichés of genre fiction is efficiently illustrated by her contribution to a collection of short mystery stories about the Cold War, Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War. While the book’s cover makes a familiar gesture invoking the simple “it was all the Russians’ fault” line—the “o” in “Cold” is replaced by a hammer and sickle, with no equivalent invocation of the United States government—Paretsky’s story is about HUAC persecution as much as Soviet oppression; it also efficiently raises questions of labor, imprisonment, and weaponry, both literally and symbolically. Finally, both movingly and charmingly, the story connects history and Paretsky’s own past by ending with the line, “As for the five lumpy Kiel children, one of them grew up to write about a Chicago private eye named V. I. Warshawski.”

Selected bibliography ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Indemnity Only (novel, 1982) Deadlock (novel, 1984) Killing Orders (novel, 1985) Bitter Medicine (novel, 1987) Blood Shot (novel, 1988) Burn Marks (novel, 1990) Guardian Angel (novel, 1992) Tunnel Vision (novel, 1994)

195

Detecting History—Sara Paretsky ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

●

195

Windy City Blues, (short stories featuring V. I. Warshawski, 1996) Hard Time (novel, 1999) Total Recall (novel, 2001) Blacklist (novel, 2003) Fire Sale (novel, 2005) Hardball (novel, 2009) Body Work (novel, 2010) Breakdown (novel, 2012) Critical Mass (novel, 2013) Brush Back (novel, 2015) Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing: The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England before the Civil War (nonfiction, 2016) Fallout (novel, 2017) Rubin: Your novels dig out some uncomfortable or suppressed histories. Blacklist is probably my favorite, since I’m what I often refer to as a “generationally outof-sync red-diaper baby” because my father was 25 years older than my mother. I’ve also long admired the dancer Katherine Dunham, on whom I assume you based your character.1 I find the term “historical amnesia” very useful in talking about what gets omitted from the historical record. What is the role of art in recuperating that history? Do you think fiction such as Blacklist is an antidote to historical amnesia? Paretsky: I wrote that book because I was angry in every way about the US response to the events of 9/11. I didn’t see it as an antidote to historical amnesia as much as a statement of . . . I don’t know. I don’t know how to say it in a way that doesn’t sound both shrill and uninteresting. I think it’s very tricky when you’re writing fiction that also is grounded in contemporary events. I don’t want to be Gribachev writing “Spring in the Victory Collective Farm.”2 That’s really not interesting to read or to write. But it was very heavy on my mind. I think the McCarthy era in particular destroyed the American left in a way that it never recovered from.3 There was certainly a radical leftist movement during Vietnam, but in terms of having a broad

1 2

3

Katherine Dunham (1909–2006) was a Chicago-born dancer, choreographer, and political activist. Nikolai Gribachev was a Soviet Russian writer and editor. His poem “Spring at Pobeda” (which can be translated to “Spring at the Victory Collective Farm”) was published in 1948. He received a number of prizes for his work (the State Prize of the USSR, the Lenin Prize, and the Order of the October Revolution, among others). Senator Joseph McCarthy was the leader of what came to be known as the Red Scare; hundreds were called before Congressional committees and accused of being Communists. There was also huge

196

196

Creative Activism

influence on the social scene or social contract, I don’t think we’ve ever recovered from the McCarthy era. I felt that we were in the middle of reprising that era. There were many ways in which the FBI was tracking Americans in the period right after 9/11, and, of course, culminating in the powers granted by the Patriot Act.4 There was a lot of that going on that we weren’t paying enough attention to. There were all the roundups of Muslim immigrants and deportations or detentions, reprising the internments of the Japanese on a less grand scale, but still very much a targeted xenophobic response to difference.5 Some of my family were immigrants many years ago. My father’s family were immigrants from Eastern Europe and came in response to pogroms. My great-grandfather was murdered in front of the family. My greatgrandmother sent my granny to New York for safety. I wrote about that. I used that as the lead for an op-ed piece I wrote that was published in [the English newspaper] the Guardian on just what the Patriot Act was doing to American society. I got incredible hate mail from England as well as from the United States, saying that my great-grandfather obviously was a criminal or he wouldn’t have been murdered. Rubin: In addition to the disrespect of you, that’s historically ignorant. Paretsky: One part of what has formed me as a person is that personal history. My grandparents were labor organizers with the ILGWA.6 My grandfather lost all his teeth in a strike-breaking episode. Then just looking at the effect of the McCarthy era and the way in which the whisper campaigns functioned . . .7

4

5

6

7

pressure on the accused to do what is now referred to as “naming names”—telling the Congressional committees when they were testifying about other people supposedly involved in left organizing. Some of the accused spent time in prison as a result; for many people who had been “called up” before the committee, finding and keeping work became extremely difficult. Sometimes industries themselves capitulated to the moment (such as Hollywood and many universities, who refused to work with accused communists) and sometimes FBI agents visit the accuseds’ place of employment and pressured for them to be fired. The Patriot Act refers to the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, signed by President George W. Bush in response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. It markedly increased legal surveillance, and also detention by police (especially of immigrants), During the Second World War, approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced from their homes and incarcerated in camps by the authority of President Franklin D.  Roosevelt. The Civil Rights Act of 1988 contained an apology for the internment and a payment of 20,000 dollars to each camp survivor. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union (founded in 1900) was, during the 1920s, one of the largest and most effective labor unions in the United States. “Whisper campaigns” refers to the strategy of deliberately spreading false rumor to damage someone’s reputation and frequently to cost them their job.

197

Detecting History—Sara Paretsky

197

We moved from New York to Kansas when I was 4. We encountered a huge amount of racism there and anti-Semitism. We lived in the country, because the town of Lawrence, where my dad was teaching, had zoning rules about where Jews and blacks could live, and it was in substandard housing. Dirt floors and outdoor plumbing in 1950. My parents were early Civil Rights activists in that era. Rubin: How did this affect your vision of the world, as a child? Paretsky: My parents felt that everything that they did politically, we were never to say one word about it outside the house. Because my dad was, I guess, the second Jew to be hired in a tenure-track position at the university, and we couldn’t make waves. You get this schizophrenia, keeping track of what you can say and who you can say it to. When we started seeing this again in 2001, 2002, I was just angry. Now, I’ve never had my feet held to the fire, and I don’t judge anyone who was. I don’t judge anyone for how they acted, because I have a feeling that in an extreme situation, I would be a collaborator, not a hero. Having said that . . . I have a good friend, Dorothy.8 She’s 97 now. Her husband was an actor who was blacklisted, thanks to Reagan, because he acted with Reagan in GE Theater, and Reagan was the HUAC point man in Hollywood, fingering people. Elia Kazan had been a personal friend of theirs going into the blacklist.9 I ’ve always loved this: they were saved by Pepsi-Cola. I guess capitalism triumphs in the end. They lived hand-to-mouth for decades on what she could make as a crime writer, and what he could make scrounging for roles or stage-managing. Then when he was in his seventies, Pepsi ran a series of commercials: “I drink Pepsi when . . .” In his segment, he played a grandfather surrounded by his adoring, happy grandchildren, all peppy from Pepsi. That was the number one ad in the series, and the royalties he got from that allowed them to buy their house, and to spend their very elderly years in comfort. Is America a weird country or what? Rubin: That is certainly one way to put it. Paretsky: Part of the backstory of Blacklist is people who have impeccable progressive credentials who in fact were secretly collaborating. Again, I got a lot of hate mail for the book, because of the Egyptian boy . . . I hated the fact that I had to kill him in the book. It’s the trite Hollywood ending. I wanted to write

8 9

Dorothy Salisbury Davis, suspense novelist, died at age 98 in 2014. Hollywood film director Elia Kazan became a highly controversial figure after “naming names” when he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He made a wellknown movie defending this position—On the Waterfront (1954).

198

198

Creative Activism

it in a way where he lived, but it became clear to me that the story trajectory just couldn’t handle it. I had to kill him. Broke my heart. It annoyed me for the points that I wanted to make. Rubin: What kind of hate mail did you get? Paretsky: I got all this hate mail telling me I was a traitor and a terrorist sympathizer, just unbelievable stuff. Well, actually, not unbelievable. But what was puzzling to me about it was I never got anything from the Left on the fact that, actually, my villains were supposed progressives. Nobody ever commented on that. There wasn’t a real heroic center to the book, except the guy who’s murdered to get the ball rolling, and his sister looking for justice. Rubin: In addition to the blacklist carrying over to the post-9/11 surveillance of Middle Easterners, you make a historical racial comparison in the novel, because the dancer is African American, so the story, past and present, is presented against a backdrop of institutional racism. Paretsky: In doing the research for the book, I researched the Federal Negro Theatre Project.10 Again, this friend of mine, through her, I know Hallie Flanagan’s daughter, who wrote a biography of Flanagan.11 There’s a huge archive here in Chicago for the Federal Negro Theatre Project. I think we have a collection here that’s second only to the Schomberg Collection of African American writers and artists.12 Rubin: That makes historical sense. Paretsky: Yeah. People like Ted Ward, who was mostly in New York, but he was here when the Negro Theatre Project was alive. He wrote pieces like Big White Fog.13 Then there was Shirley Graham Du Bois, who did the Swing Mikado, which was premiered here.14 Then I started reading about the Dies Committee, which I didn’t know about, as the precursor to HUAC . . .15

10

11

12

13

14

15

A “Negro” unit was formed in 1935 under the umbrella of the Federal Theater Project, a New Deal program to fund the arts during the Great Depression. Hallie Flanagan (1890–1969) was a director, playwright, and author associated with the Federal Theater Project. Her stepdaughter is Joanne Bentley, who was married to playwright and theater critic Eric Bentley, before he came out as gay at age 53. The Schomburg Center of Research in Black Culture, located in Harlem, is a library in the New York Public Library system. Theodore Ward (1902–83) was a playwright who was prominent in the Black Chicago Renaissance. Big White Fog is his most famous play, and was first mounted in 1938 by the Negro Unit of the Chicago Federal Theater Project. Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896–1977) was a writer, composer, and activist (who was married, late in life, to W. E. B. Du Bois). Swing Mikado is a musical based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, moving the setting from Japan to a tropical island and changing the music and dancing to swing. The Dies Committee, chaired by Congressman Martin Dies, Jr. (1900–72; Democrat from Texas) was established in 1938 by HUAC and tasked with investigated alleged disloyalty in the form of communist ties. It carried out this work until 1944.

199

Detecting History—Sara Paretsky

199

They were already just as ignorant. This is a long history in America of racial justice being labeled as communist. They shut down the Federal Theatre Project as a communist project, because blacks and whites acted together on stage, and that was a proof that it’s communist. It’s such an interesting and rich history, because Dashiell Hammett, who’s a very problematic figure personally in a lot of ways, but iconic in the private eye tradition, he actually served time for not ratting.16 What was the organization that he raised money for, that he was the treasurer of, that provided bail money for African American labor leaders who were being arrested? What was the name for it? I can’t remember. Rubin: The Civil Rights Congress bail fund. Blacklist also has a little history lesson about HUAC, which I enjoy very much, which is about the right not to answer questions. V.I. calls it “not ratting.” Paretsky: Hammett refused to give the list of donors to HUAC. Now there are people who are saying that secretly he was really collaborating. I think that’s just bullshit. Rubin: You called him “problematic.” Paretsky: If he didn’t rape a number of women, it was a line he came pretty close to. I don’t know. I don’t think I’m a subtle enough writer, maybe, to write about these things in a subtle way. The issues are very complicated. Rubin: I think you just showed you are a subtle writer, because, as you said, there isn’t any untainted Sir Galahad in the book. Paretsky: I always see the flaws in my books more than where they succeed. Rubin: Detective novels are obviously going to be focused on law and law enforcement. You do write, in the detective series, about cops and torture, and cops and corruption, which is coming more and more into people’s line of vision—literally, with the increasing posting of cell phone video. Your main character’s professional and personal or romantic life obviously overlap with the police. Paretsky: Her father was a cop. Rubin: Her father was a cop. She has a boyfriend who’s a cop. Paretsky: We had a series of real atrocities that were committed by the police on the black South Side, white cops, black South Side, where they ran a torture ring for twenty years with the full knowledge of the state’s attorneys, including the most recent Mayor Daley, who just turned a blind eye to it.17 16

17

Dashiell Hammett (1884–1961) was the groundbreaking author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories. Richard M. Daley (b. 1942) was mayor of Chicago from 1989 to 2011. His father, Richard J. Daley (1902–76), was mayor from 1955 to 1976.

200

200

Creative Activism

A man named Robert Kirschner, who sadly is dead now, was the deputy chief medical examiner in Cook County.18 And he was a personal friend, as well. As he tells the story, the way this unraveled and came to his attention, it’s pretty blunt and pretty forthright. He said guys—it was all men—were complaining about being tortured. He said people in custody are always complaining about police brutality. Yes, police hit people and they knock them around, but there isn’t torture going on. Then he was brought in—why or how, I don’t remember—to look at one of the suspects. He said he instantly saw that he had been tortured. There were just telltale marks where electrodes had been attached to his ears. He ultimately left the medical examiner’s office and started a group based in Boston called Physicians for Human Rights. A Chicago journalist named John Conroy is the reason the spotlight was ever kept on this.19 Kirschner was his source, and he did great investigative reporting on it. Finally, a detective named Jon Burge was sentenced to four years in a federal prison for perjury, but nobody’s ever been convicted of the torture. It went on for twenty years. Hundreds of men were just vilely, vilely tortured.20 Hardball came out of that situation. When I wrote it, I wanted V.I.’s father . . . this is just looping back around to who is the moral center . . . I wanted her father to be heroic and standing up to it. As I wrote the book and began thinking through these things more . . . He wasn’t. He wasn’t a collaborator, but he wasn’t . . . Rubin: Standing up. Paretsky: Right. It was an important artistic decision to make it more nuanced. I also wrote about it for the Japanese, about a story that came out of that . . . I don’t think it’s ever been published in the States. It’d odd that Japan and England are interested in my opinions, but American newspapers aren’t. There was a woman, a sergeant named Doris Byrd who’s retired now, an African American sergeant at this station where all this was going on. She said in an interview that she knew it was going on. She could hear the screams, and she could see what was happening to the defendants. She’d never said anything because she felt too vulnerable as a woman and an African American.

18 19 20

Kirschner (1940–2002) focused much of his work on human rights abuses. Conroy also wrote a play about the torture, My Kind of Town, which premiered in 2012. Burge was the only person convicted of the torture; he was sent to prison 38 years after the torture started. The City of Chicago settled with four men who sued that they had been tortured into confessions for 19.8 million dollars.

201

Detecting History—Sara Paretsky

201

I ’m like, I am not the person to sit in judgment on you, because I know about at least one cop, a white guy, Irish—and this is as much of an Irish town as Boston—who was set up to be murdered by his fellow officers when he spoke out against a situation not unlike that one, in a different state. I’m like, “You’re a woman. You’re African American. I don’t blame you for feeling vulnerable and unable to speak.” I don’t know what I would have done. Maybe written something and dropped it in the Chicago River, hoping somebody would pick it up and read it. I don’t know what I would do. I’m not brave physically. Rubin: You can’t know until you’re in there. We ’ve been talking about historical amnesias but also privacy and surveillance. Some combination of those makes me think about the rightto-life plot in Bitter Medicine. Doesn’t V.I. meet Lotty working on a women’s reproductive rights network? Paretsky: Yes, that was based on a group called Jane, which operated partly out of this neighborhood.21 They didn’t have a doctor on staff, although there were doctors who trained and advised them. I made Lotty the doctor who was a consultant with my mythical but historically-based group. Because I have been a reproductive rights activist and an abortion rights activist since 1970. Rubin: Jane’s activists were working before it was legal, and the book was published afterward, obviously, but it was great for you to put it out there because there is still a rhetorically-enforced silence. It’s a different kind of silence from the historical amnesia we were talking about. I remember once commenting on the radio, and wanted to talk about abortion . . . It was hard for me just to say the word! Paretsky: Yes, it is. It is. Rubin: We just don’t allow it. Even in the movie Knocked Up, one of the characters actually says “smushmortion,” but won’t actually say . . .22 Paretsky: “Abortion.” I haven’t seen the movie. Rubin: Believe me, you didn’t miss anything. Your most personal book has the word “silence” in the title, which of course makes me think of Tillie Olsen’s very personal book Silences.23 What kind of silences are you referring to? 21

22 23

The Janes Collective (the office name was the Abortion Counseling Service for Women’s Liberation) operated in Chicago from 1969 to 1973, when abortion became legal. Knocked Up (2007) is a romantic comedy directed by Judd Apatow. Tillie Olsen (1912–2007) was a writer, communist, and union organizer; Silences (1978) explores various reasons for periods of nonproductivity, including class issues and women’s domestic responsibilities.

202

202

Creative Activism

Paretsky: I think they’re multiple. They’re that kind of silence that we were just talking about, the fear of presenting one’s most strongly held principles in a public forum. It’s curious . . . I can’t quite bring it into focus what the reason is that there’s the fear of it. Rubin: What, saying those words? Paretsky: Yeah. That’s what I’m struggling with as we’re talking. Rubin: It’s hard to break out of! I once did a radio interview of someone in Obama’s administration; the interview happened to be right before the second election’s first debate. She kept telling me, “Boy, I’m really nervous.” I said, “You know, I’m nervous, too.” Then I said, “I have a 15-year-old daughter, and I’ve said to her, ‘Jessie, if Mitt Romney wins this election, you’re going to get an abortion right away, because you might not be able to get one later if you need one.’ ” This just came out of my mouth. She literally edged away from me in the elevator. Paretsky: Oh, really? That’s hysterically funny. Rubin: Bitter Medicine really moved me when it came out, because my of a political action I had just taken part in, that very year. I was just out of college, and there was this sweep of fake abortion clinics setting up. They would advertise, get women in there, and then work hard to talk them out of wanting an abortion. So we chose one for our action, and I made an appointment ahead of time and went in to scope it out. It was fascinating. I took a little jar of urine from a pregnant friend, just to see what they would do. They had magazines on the table all were picked were children on the cover, no matter what the magazine was. They stuck me alone in a dark room to watch Silent Scream.24 Anyway, once I reported on the layout and such, we went in, briefly took it over, answered the phone and gave people the phone number for Planned Parenthood until the police came, and we ran out the back. Paretsky: Where was this? Rubin: In New York. Paretsky: Wow. Right on, my sister. My gosh. I have a niece who’s a doctor in Seattle, and actually works one day a week performing pro bono abortions in Tacoma, a low-income clinic. She was a volunteer at Planned Parenthood in Albuquerque before she went to medical school. They had protestors outside their clinic. This girl came in . . . “girl.” She was your daughter’s age . . . and had been planning on terminating the pregnancy and then was persuaded by the protesters to walk away. Then she came back the next Saturday, wanting to go ahead and have the abortion. 24

Silent Stream is an anti-abortion film from 1984.

203

Detecting History—Sara Paretsky

203

Eve, my niece, said, “I thought you went off with them, that you decided to have the baby.” She said, “I thought they were going to help me raise the child. All they did was offer me pancakes.” Rubin: “All they did was offer me pancakes.” That’s beautiful, in a horrifying way. Paretsky: She would have had the baby if she’d had money, a home, a job . . . if they had been willing to help with all that. Rubin: Right! They weren’t that willing to save the baby. Why do you think detective novels have functioned so usefully as a way to work out social politics? Paretsky: It’s just because they are the natural place where law and justice and society come together. You can be Dostoevsky and write Crime and Punishment, but 99 percent of people who want to write about crime in a non-genre way aren’t Dostoevsky.25 They come off as Saul Bellow did in Humboldt’s Gift, doing it terribly.26 Saul, if you’d gotten your hands dirty and been willing to write genre fiction, even though it was a right-wing book, it could have been right-wing crime fiction that’s good. Instead, you had to have a philosophical rant that . . . Rubin: Is boring, frankly. Paretsky: Right. Rubin: How has the hardboiled genre changed by being made female–or how has the female lead been changed by being made hardboiled? Point the arrows whichever way you want to. Paretsky: This is a topic of constant discussion among popular literature critics. Some on the left feel that there is no such thing as a feminist private eye, because just by working in that form, you are automatically accepting masculine patriarchal values and norms. Rubin: What do you think about that stance? Paretsky: I don’t think of it that way, I guess. I’m not a very theory-driven person in that particular way. I think that it is more about agency and women assuming agency in a very direct way, as opposed to needing to do it through indirect or manipulative ways. Look at Miss Marple—she always gets her man, or woman, but she has to manipulate the police into following what she’s discovering, and making the arrest, and so on.27 The 25

26

27

Russian writer Fyodyr Mikhailovich Doestoevsky (1821–81) published Crime and Punishment in 1866. Saul Bellow (1915–2005) was a Jewish American (Canadian-born) writer; he published Humbolt’s Gift, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in 1975. Jane Marple, frequently referred to as Miss Marple, is the heroine of twelve crime novels by Agatha Christie (1890–1976).

204

204

Creative Activism

female private eye like V.I. or some of the others, like Carlotta Carlyle, Linda Barnes’s detective . . .28 They create hostility just by virtue of the fact that they are claiming agency as women. I think that’s at the heart of the debate over abortion, actually. The fact that we have now a national consensus on LGBT rights and on gay marriage at the same time that not just abortion rights, but also access to reproductive knowledge and methods, is being pummeled, has to do with just a fury about women taking agency and being center stage. This plays out in a lot of different ways. To me, one of them has to do with the size of the female body. I am not one to talk, because I’m too thin. We don’t take up enough physical space. I think part of it is, I’m not a threat. I’m not taking up room. Statistically, women still aren’t allowed to take up room in physical space or in social space. I don’t care how good a street fighter you are, size matters. V.I. is 5’8”. She weighs about 145, 150 pounds. She takes up room. Sorry, I’m on a rant. Rubin: An appropriate rant! I once had a really big class of undergraduates, and I asked them all to write down and pass in one thing they’d like to change about their bodies. All the men said that there was something they wanted to make bigger, and all the women said that there was something they wanted to make smaller. It was really striking. There weren’t really any exceptions. It made me feel like it really was about taking up space. Paretsky: I once gave a talk called “Martina’s Body.” I was a huge Martina Navratilova fan.29 I said I wanted a body transplant. I wanted her body. It just knocked me back on my heels when a lot of the women in the audience were really put off by that, because Martina was big. I was like, “No, she’s not big. She’s muscled.” That’s what made her such a great tennis player. She was the only one who would lift weights. Rubin: In addition to gender roles, detective novels seem to me to be deeply interested in class. This is one thing I find really useful about them. The British ones manifest this in ways that are unfamiliar to me—when they talk about how someone’s accent shows what neighborhood they came from, and what school they went to, and what their parents did for a living. But American detective novels also seem to be interested in that. Paretsky: It’s not that the poor are virtuous, but that the rich are almost inevitably evil. I have a letter from a reader saying, “I am sick and tired of you making rich people evil. Rich people are good. I’m not reading your books anymore.” I’m like, “Okay.” 28

29

Linda Barnes (1949) wrote twelve mystery books set in and around Boston featuring PI Carlotta Carlyle. Martina Navratilova (b. 1956) is Czech and American tennis player and coach.

205

Detecting History—Sara Paretsky

205

Rubin: You don’t need to make them evil. They do perfectly well on their own. Paretsky: I come from the state that gave America the Koch brothers.30 What can I say? Then Hammett, who really defined the private eye, wasn’t the first hardboiled writer, but he was the person who really gave it shape. He was such a leftist. That was his world view. I don’t know how the private eye world would operate if he had had a different idea about social strata. I also think, for me, it’s always about issues of helplessness and . . . Rubin: Power. Paretsky: Yeah. The summer that I was 19, when I first was working here where the old stockyards used to be, that’s the old . . . not melting pot, but melting pot South Side. It’s where Upton Sinclair set The Jungle.31 My first summer here, that neighborhood was called Back of the Yards, because it was behind the stockyards. If you go a mile south of Back of the Yards, you’re in this little area where you get these five-room houses, four rooms on the ground floor and an attic that was always finished and turned into the kids’ bedroom. That’s what we call bungalows in Chicago. I came here, that was the summer of 1966, the summer that Martin Luther King came here at the request of the local Civil Rights leaders who hadn’t been able to make any headway in this city, which had written housing covenants defining where African Americans could live.32 There were many other kinds of segregation going on: kids couldn’t swim in the beaches, blacks couldn’t drive buses, a huge array of things. The riots that summer, the white riots, were ferocious and in this neighborhood. I came in response to an ad put out by the Presbytery of Chicago, which was looking for college students to live in the communities and do whatever was asked of them.33 They didn’t care that I was a Jew. We were assigned at random. We were working with these kids from Back of the Yards.34 The racism was ferocious. It was their parents and uncles who were rioting and attacking the

30

31

32

33 34

Charles C. Koch (b. 1935) and David H. Koch (b. 1940) are associated with the Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the United States. They are known for their support for, and monetary contributions to, conservative political candidates and organizations. They grew up in Kansas. Prolific writer Sinclair (1878–1968) published The Jungle in 1908; the novel exposed the exploitation of workers and the revolting lack of sanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry. Martin Luther King, with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), initiated a campaign in Chicago in 1965 after being invited there by Chicago Civil Rights leaders to take part in a demonstration. King would state in 1966 that “the moral force of SCLC’s nonviolent movement philosophy was needed to help eradicate a vicious system which seeks to further colonize thousands of Negroes within a slum environment.” The Presbytery of Chicago is a local church governing body. Back of the Yards, a Chicago neighborhood, got its name from the fact that it is located near the former Union Stock Yards (which were portrayed by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle).

206

206

Creative Activism

police, beating up African American families. We were working with the kids, trying to present them with a nonviolent model of dealing with diversity. We ran fun programs, but there was a social justice message we were giving. In the middle of it all, even though I was 19 and arrogant and thought I knew everything, I was living with a family. I could see that they were just terrified and bewildered, and that this little five-room house was the only thing they owned in the entire world, and that if that was threatened, they would have nothing. I could see their helplessness, even at the same time that I was militant and judgmental. FDR, the people’s hero, hero of my childhood?35 “Redlining” is a word from the Roosevelt administration. They were the people who invented it when they started the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. They would have big maps up in the FDIC office outlining African American neighborhoods in red and excluding them from any access to federally backed mortgages. You can see that, at least for me in my books, the police always are about power and powerlessness, and who has access to it, and who needs it. The detective then becomes the effort to put some balance in the scales, because she’s wily. She’s a risk taker. In a way, she’s fearless. She’s often afraid, but she’s never going to be stopped by fear. In that sense, she’s fearless. Rubin: And always a little bit outside the system. Paretsky: Yeah. I hate to use the word “paradigm,” but she is totally within the private eye paradigm. I think her difference may be is that she faces a different set of issues. If you read the Spenser books, Susan Silverman is never going to understand the masculine code of justice, no matter how many times Spenser presents it to her.36 V.I. doesn’t have a code of justice. It isn’t a theory with her. It’s a response to life with her. I think in a way that sums up the difference between the male private eye and, at least, my female private eye. Rubin: It also seems that detective novels are by definition organized around work, because it’s her job. Paretsky: There’s a scene in one of Dorothy Sayers’s Peter Wimsey novels where Wimsey is visiting a suspicious warehouse, or something.37 The

35

36

37

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) was the Democratic thirty-second president of the United States, from 1933 to 1945. He won four presidential elections (before the number of terms a president would serve was limited). “Redlining” refers to policies and tactics that deny access to services to residents of particular neighborhoods based on the racial composition of the neighborhoods. Spenser was the private investigator of Robert B.  Parker (1932–2010); Susan Silverman was his romantic partner. Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957) was an English writer best known for her mystery novels, which introduce Lord Peter Whimsey as an amateur detective.

207

Detecting History—Sara Paretsky

207

manager tells him something to report to “Whoever has employed you.” Wimsey becomes furious that he’s thought of as someone who is employed, because he doesn’t need to work for a living. He doesn’t work for a living. He does this out of a spirit of adventure or Sir Galahadry. You’re absolutely right. It is a crucial difference between the early British crime novels and, if you look at the era of the 1920s and 1930s, the amateur sleuth versus the private eye is very much people with a lot of money and time on their hands. Instead of running soup kitchens, they’re going to solve crimes. Whereas the private eye definitely needs to make a living. Rubin: Speaking of making a living—your husband’s profession is in Critical Mass.38 You’ve talked before about hate mail. I’ll just more gently say “pushback.” Has there been pushback between the connection you make of the war industries in the US and Nazism? Paretsky: No, not at all. Oddly enough, you are the first person to mention that. Rubin: Really? I think that book has a really compelling triangle in it, because in addition to the Nazis and the war industry, there’s the drug industry in the form of the meth pit. Paretsky: I grew up in rural Kansas. We didn’t farm, but down the street from my childhood home, there are plenty of boarded-over old meth houses. Of course, everybody who lives in Missouri or Iowa knows that meth is the number one industry. There is still the notion that real crime is related to blacks in the inner cities. I’m like, “Guys, look here,” without saying, “Guys, look here.” That was what my agenda was with starting it that way. I needed a way to start it. I still was trying to make this point about that there’s just a huge amount of rural disaffection, anomie, and drug abuse. Rubin: And joblessness. I always think of Winter’s Bone, where all those people, there’s nothing else to do. They have to cook meth.39 In Blacklist, there’s a focus on public arts: the WPA, the Yiddish theatre, the Negro theatre, and so on. We don’t pay enough attention to public arts. Why do you think we need public arts? Paretsky: There are a lot of different answers to that question. You don’t need public art unless you start from a place where you genuinely believe in democracy and equality. If you don’t, then you genuinely believe that people without means don’t have a need for artistic expression or experience. If you

38

39

Paretsky’s husband, Courtenay Wright, is a physicist; Critical Mass focuses on the race to develop atomic weapons. Winter’s Bone is a 2006 novel written by Daniel Woodrell (b. 1953); it was made into a successful independent film in 2010 starring Jennifer Lawrence.

208

208

Creative Activism

do believe that, then you do need public art, because that’s how a broad base of people can experience and respond to what is an essential dimension of human life. I probably believe more strongly in this than in almost anything else, except maybe reproductive rights, and that it is hardwired into us to experience life through art, through the telling of stories, in the first place. Stories have beginnings and middles and ends, because human life has a beginning, a middle, and a discernible end. The only way that we can cope with the essential mortality, the grief that we all experience, is by turning it into a story. I fought a part of this battle in vain in Kansas, when the governor decided to end all public funding for art in Kansas. It was three or four years ago now. For every dollar you spend in a state, you get something like eight federal dollars in matching money to run arts programs. The state of Kansas turned down six and a half million dollars in federal money because that was wicked, and ended every public art program in the state of Kansas. Rubin: What was wicked? Taking money from the feds? Paretsky: Yeah, having public money. Even the fact that it wasn’t state money was unconscionable. I was there speaking before the legislature. People came from all over the state. If you live near Kansas City, you have access to a lot of music and so on. Anywhere else in that state, people are creating amazing little things in their little fire stations. They all voted for these yahoos. There they are, pleading for the arts budget to be reinstated, but they’re not going to vote the right-wing, Tea Party, Koch-brother-funded guys out of office, because they like the fact that they’re standing up to Washington. We live in our imaginations as human beings. It’s not a bad thing or a good thing. It just is how we live. We turn the little events of our daily lives into stories. We tell them in our heads. The people that we like to spend time with are the ones who are the best narrators of the events of their daily lives. Then we take it a step further with music or with painting, drama coming out of story, story coming out of drama. To deny that dimension by denying public art is a way of really creating the deltas of Brave New World. It’s a way of taking people from their earliest childhood experiences and turning them into beasts of burden instead of into human beings. Your vision of what it is to be human will decide whether you support public art or not.

209

16

“Sometimes I Get Political, Sometimes I Get Offensive”: Pushing Back According to Dallas Wayne

“Just jump in and grab it,” Dallas Wayne told me in an effort to summarize how to write country music that speaks to social realities. Wayne’s music “grabs it” so well that despite his frequent engagement of serious content, his songs are graceful, clever, and sophisticated. They are not weighed down by their topicality; instead, Wayne achieves musical profundity through tiny glimpses into ordinary lives, efficient phrases such as “rusted dreams” or “two-room flat” or “his shoulders bore the world.”1 Wayne, who has recorded twelve solo albums as well as having been featured on compilations, has written or cowritten songs in a range of registers:  heartbroken, humorous, angry, mysterious. (The latter shapes his song “I’m Your Biggest Fan,” in which it is unclear whether a man stalking a female performer kills himself or the performer at the song’s end.) In addition to being a recording artist and performer, Wayne is a charismatic radio personality. He DJs on two SiriusXM satellite radio stations—Willie’s Roadhouse, which plays traditional and older country artists; and Outlaw Country, which plays the subgenre of outlaw country music in addition to altcountry, roots rock, and other related hybrid genres. (That station carries a label to warn about explicit language.) In our conversation we talked quite a bit about the songs he plays: how he chooses them, how he introduces them on air, and the various ways that their context matters. He is quite the music historian, in fact. Born in 1956 in Springfield, Missouri, Wayne grew up with parents who sang old country and gospel songs. He began performing as a singer and guitar player in high school, and headed to Nashville in the mid-1970s. When country

1

“Rusted dreams” is from “Coldwater, Tennessee” (2006; cowritten by Robbie Fulks). “Two-room flat” is from “Something Inside” (2009). “His shoulders bore the world” is from “The Only Way to Die” (2006).

210

210

Creative Activism

music started to sound too smooth and pop for him, he moved to Chicago and performed with a bluegrass band, Special Consensus. While in Chicago, he began collaborating with outlaw country songwriter Robbie Fulks; the two would come to cowrite dozens of songs, and Fulks appears on several of Wayne’s albums. These joint endeavors continued even when Wayne lived for Finland for four years, where he released five albums. “It was basically late night phone calls and lyrics being sent back and forth,” he recalled. “Rewrites and tweaks. It was before files could be sent over the internet.” Wayne’s music is a prime example of two important aspects of country music. First is its sly wordplay. “Crank the Hank,” he sings, “and crack open the Jack”— referring, of course, to the music of Hank Williams and Jack Daniels whiskey. In a song in which a woman has finished packing up to leave the house, he notes that “she’s good to go.” But then the chorus adds, “She’s good to go—‘cause all the good is gone,” and it turns out she is leaving her husband. In a song that invokes the cliché “the bottle won’t kill you, it’s the stuff inside” he makes it clear that it is what is inside a person’s heart that is truly destructive.2 In addition to wordplay—and it is always worth saying that while they are mocked for their speech, Southerners have produced a truly sophisticated lyrical form—Wayne pays attention to labor and class; in his song “Big Thinkin’ ” (cowritten with Robbie Fulks), for instance, the narrator fantasizes that the boss will “take what I’m worth, and turn it into what I earn.” When Wayne began to DJ on satellite radio, though, the constant touring that had defined his early career was made impossible. But it also seems as though it had taken its toll, summed up by his song title, “I Hit the Road (and the Road Hit Back).” Wayne currently lives outside of Austin, and performs with the band Heybale! every Sunday with occasional shows in other locations.

Selected discography Hey Y’all (1990) Georgia Dreamin’ (1990) Buckle Up Baby (1993) Part of the Crew (1994)

2

“Crank the Hank” (2004) was cowritten with Malcolm Ruhl and John Rice. “She’s Good to Go” (2004) was cowritten with Ollie O’Shea. “The Stuff Inside” is from 2001.

211

Pushing Back—Dallas Wayne

211

Screamin’ Down the Highway (1997) Invisible Man (1999) Big Thinkin’ (2000) Here I Am in Dallas (2001) I’m Your Biggest Fan (2005) I’ll Take the Fifth (2009) Songs the Jukebox Taught Me (2016) Rubin: In country music there has always been a lot of focus on work. I am thinking of the song “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” lately, since the news of Detroit carrying bankruptcy has come out in the last few days.3 That song is about work, of course—but it’s also about headlines. Do you think the labor focus of country music makes it an especially good vehicle for topical stories? Wayne: I think it does. There’s a lot of people being pushed around these days. The best thing a person can ever hope for in this world is to be able to control their own destiny somehow. If that is taken away from you—plants closing down, you lose your job—you need to find that solace somewhere. You need to push back, artistically and symbolically. I think country music fills the bill pretty quickly on that—both exorcism and solace. The Obama line during the 2008 elections when he was talking about clinging to God and guns, that’s brutally true.4 Rubin: You are right, there are tons of tiny references in country music that could but put, symbolically, in this basket. Wayne: We have these tunes about grandpa’s moonshine still. I wonder if thirty years from now they’re going to be writing something about grandpa’s crack pipe. Rubin: That is a great historical trajectory, Dallas. Old Crow Medicine Show has an album organized around the methamphetamine crisis. And Steve

3

4

“Shuttin’ Detroit Down” was cowritten by country singers John Rich and John Anderson, both of whom recorded the song in 2009. It deals with the closing of Detroit’s auto plants in 2009 and the government bailout of banks and other financial institutions. The City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy on July 18, 2013, with a debt at 18–20 billion dollars. At a 2008 fundraiser, Obama commented, You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

212

212

Creative Activism

Earle has a song connecting making moonshine to growing marijuana.5 These references not romanticized as rebellion yet, which moonshine kind of is, but you are right, there are precedents to suggest it might be. Wayne: I’d like to be around to hear this. My pet peeve today is these songs that talk about how macho they are. A friend of mine says, “Think a tractor is sexy? Go try sitting on one of those sons of bitches. Get back to me let me know how it works for you.” Once again, I think that goes back to being aced out of a lot of things you may perceive other people have or things that have been taken away from you, or things that you parents had and you didn’t. We can’t guarantee that our kids will have a better life that what we have. A lot of that’s due to economic situations and changes. A guy used to be able to keep a job for twenty-five years, get a nice watch and pension and go home. All those things you were promised. Rubin: Right, that’s what Occupy was about. Younger people realizing we’re not going to get what we were promised. Wayne: Yeah. I can’t blame them for being pissed off by any means. The money’s been sucked like a big giant straw in a milkshake. The malt in the bottom, the good shit? That’s been sucked out by somebody else before you even get . . . Rubin: . . . to the counter. To go back to what you called exorcism or solace, I remember how many people I heard in Baltimore when I was in middle school listening to “Take This Job and Shove It.”6 Not a limited audience either. The song had an incredibly important symbolic function. The people listening weren’t going to quit; they knew that. Even the guy is the song sort of knows he can’t. Wayne: But you can say, “No!” through the song. Another great one that plays a similar role is “Oney” by Johnny Cash.7 It’s his retirement dinner, and he’s going to whip his boss’s ass. The boss doesn’t know it yet. That’s how you flip the switches inside the listener. In country music, not everybody’s going to go out and fuck around on their spouse. Rubin: Of course not. But that’s interesting too. Bringing it to the symbolic function, if a group of people keep on writing songs about being cheated,

5

6

7

Singer-songwriter Steve Earle (b. 1955) recorded the title song “Copperhead Road” in 1988. The Americana band Old Crow Medicine Show recorded Tennessee Pusher in 2008. The song was written by David Allan Coe (b. 1939) and was a hit for Johnny Paycheck (1938–2003) in 1977, staying at number one on the Billboard country chart for two weeks. Johnny Cash (1932–2003) recorded “Oney” in 1972 and reached number two on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart.

213

Pushing Back—Dallas Wayne

213

what does that mean? If a lot of people keep doing it over and over until it’s a recognizable type of song, you have to say this group of people feels cheated. Wayne: Shel Silverstein was real good at that kind of stuff.8 He would flip the bird and tell you something in a song. “The Pill” is the perfect song, too.9 Rubin: “The Pill” is a perfect song. Not just because of the early mention of contraception, but because it acknowledges women’s sexual pleasure, which was rare culturally. So why do you think certain people say “I like any music except country”? Wayne: I think it’s economic considerations. Everybody’s looking for somebody to boot around. The joke coming from Missouri is “Who do the people from Arkansas kick around?” Rubin: The economy in many ways has always depended on that hierarchy. You have to have people to pay less. Wayne: Yeah. Well, then, who’s going to build their wall? Rubin: Are you referring to the Tom Russell song?10 Wayne: I hear that song I just want to giggle. Rubin: Once I heard you say on the radio, “Just so you know the song I’m about to play has the f-word in it,” or something along those lines. Do you also have to give a warning that if you’re going to play, for instance, David Allan Coe’s “If That Ain’t Country” because of use of the n-word?11 Wayne: I won’t play that. Some do, because Coe is trying to prove a point. I can’t trust everyone to connect the dots. I love David because I know what he was trying to do. He’s arguing for alliance more than the other thing. Once again, economics trumps everything. Rubin: Yes, it does. You have a song that I think invokes Coe’s “If That Ain’t Country”: “If That’s Country.”12 It also directly connects the music with economics by calling country music “the poor man’s song,” and also points out that country fans are frequently called “trash.”

8

9

10

11

12

Silverstein (1930–99) was an award winning songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter, and children’s book author. “The Pill,” a song written by about a women’s ability to change her lifestyle and push back at household inequality after having access to birth control pills, was recorded by Loretta Lynn in 1975. The song addresses the hypocrisy and contradictions of the push to keep out undocumented workers, pivoting on the question of who will build the wall to keep out undocumented workers if undocumented workers are kept out. David Allan Coe (b. 1939)  wrote several hit songs that charted for other musicians, but has remained a controversial figure, including frequently being blamed for racist songs he didn’t record. He ultimately wrote a follow-up to the song set in a later period of his family’s life, without the word. Wayne recorded the song on his 2006 album Big Thinkin’.

214

214

Creative Activism

Wayne: Robbie [Fulks] and I wrote that together.13 I remember when we were putting that record together. We said, “OK, no cutesy stuff. Let’s just write a great record.” I was living in Finland then. We were writing the record long distance. That was before files of any size could be sent over the internet. It was basically late night phone calls and lyrics being sent back and forth. Rewrites and tweaks. Robbie calls me up and says, “I know what we said about breaking the novelty rule. I got this line in my head and it’s perfect for you coming from southwest Missouri: ‘You can kiss my Ozark ass if that’s country.’ ” I just loved the alliteration of “Ozark ass.” The song went from there. Rubin: Besides the literal sound of that line, what does saying “kiss my ass” in a song accomplish? Wayne: It’s history and face-saving about these working-class issues. Nobody wants to be disrespected. Nobody wants to be treated like shit. Are you looking down on me because of these economic issues? Because of the color of my skin? The geographical region I came from? Once again I think it goes back to this social stripping of options and dignity. Then, songs become a way to draw these people in: you’re a band of brothers that way. Now, over the weekend I heard a bluegrass song and I can’t even tell you who it was, it pissed me off so much. It’s a new bluegrass song called, “Where I’m Coming From.”14 There was this laundry list of stuff—the last one being that I’ll die before I let someone take my gun. Fucking kidding me . . . Rubin: Well that’s actually more likely, right? Just the statistic. If you own guns you’re more likely to be killed by guns.15 Wayne: Exactly, which is kind of ironic, isn’t it? Rubin: I saw online somewhere you said, “Sometimes I get political, sometimes I get offensive on the radio.” I would like to ask you how they’re related. When is being offensive strategically important? I feel like sometimes, as a woman, it’s really important not to be a good girl. Wayne: I think it’s a great way to prove a point. Rubin: Drop an F bomb, yeah. What about for you? I don’t know what being offensive on the radio exactly means to you. What point can you prove with it? Wayne: You can expose ignorance. That’s my biggest thing because I’ve literally had people come up to me and say, “Because you like this music,

13 14

15

Robbie Fulks (b. 1963) is an alt-country singer and songwriter. “Where I’m Coming From,” written by Jerry Salley and Kerry Kurt Phillips, was released in 2015 by Shane Owens. Multiple studies have concluded this; a “meta-study” published in 2011 by David Hemenway in American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, “Risks and Benefits of a Gun in the House,” gathers numerous studies and tallies their conclusions.

215

Pushing Back—Dallas Wayne

215

you must think this way.” They just automatically take it for granted. It’s like, I have to fight with you about the same shit that I’ve been fighting about for forty years about the validity of country music as an art form, mainly because you’ve made these presumptions. I will say as far as being offensive and getting political goes, on Willie’s Roadhouse I back off a little bit because with a lot of these people it’s not worth the fight. Outlaw Country’s a lot more free flowing. We’re encouraged to do so, though I have also been asked on occasion to dial it back here. I’ve even been asked by people I respect who have very strong views of their own. My boss was huge in the Occupy movement in New York. He’s a vocal, hardcore supporter, going down there every chance he got, every other day. Walking down from the office. And Willie Nelson. Willie’s another. I’ve asked Willie point blank, “How do you deal with this?” Because first day I came up to Carl’s Corner when we opened up the new studios, when I walked in the door, there was no one in the building but me and another DJ.16 I came out—this is the very first day of work—I came out and my “Texans for Obama” sticker had been ripped off the back of my car and wadded up and thrown in the parking lot right by the car, so I’d see it. I thought, “OK that’s what we’re dealing with.” After a while, I had Turk Pipkin on my show one time talking about the Nobelity Project, something I believe in strongly.17 Rubin: That was a way of speaking up. Wayne: That’s the thing. There’s a lot of people in this business that don’t speak up. When I lived in San Francisco, I said something at a party one day that had my wife laughing all the way home. Walked over to some friends of mine and I said “Please, if you could, be quiet. You are giving liberalism a bad name and me a headache.” Got about two glasses of wine. That was enough to get me started. Rubin: I think of Chely Wright as speaking up by coming out recently on the cover of People magazine.18 Wayne: That’s wonderful thing and I think it’s long overdue. It’s like the ball players who did the same thing. You honestly think these are the first ones? I think, as with any social shift that you have, there is a significant moment, and it’ll be the one where everybody says, “About time somebody did it.”

16

17 18

Carl’s Corner is a small town in Northern Central Texas founded by Carl Cornelius, a truck stop owner, for the purpose of legalizing alcohol sales in a mostly dry county. Nobelity Project is a nonprofit focused globally on the education of children. Wright (b. 1970) has had songs that charted fifteen times. The issue of People in which she came out as a lesbian was published in May 2010.

216

216

Creative Activism

Rubin: You lived in Scandinavia for a few years, is that right? Wayne: Yeah. Rubin: When you looked at the United States from the outside, did that change your music or politics? Wayne: I had never spent any amount of time in Europe when I wasn’t just going to the airport, getting in a cab, going to the hotel check-in, going to the venue, doing the gig, then heading back to the airport. As far as the dayto-day living there, every day I learned something. Pretty much turned me into a socialist. Rubin: In the United States, we hear a lot about their health care. Wayne: Yeah. When the health care argument was going on, I would tell people two things. I’m a blessed man. I have a health care option through my employer that I don’t even take advantage of because my wife has a slightly better plan at her job. I have two kids that, if it wasn’t for the seven-year wait rule, they’d be bankrupt now because of not having health care in their twenties and using the emergency rooms and doctor, and losing their credit rating. The month before I moved from Chicago to Finland, I had retinal surgery. It was a bad investment. Even after insurance it cost me about three grand. We’re talking about nineteen grand, total. I had the same surgery a year later in Finland and the cab ride to the hospital cost more. Rubin: That’s stunning. Wayne: People here say, “You got to wait six months to get an operation.” No, you don’t. You can buy a supplemental plan over in Finland for fifteen euros a week, which is about eighteen dollars. That puts you in the private clinic of 400 to choose from in Finland. I’ll say, “These are good things. It cost me more to have this done over there.” They’ll say, “What about your taxes?” You think we’re not paying 39 percent in taxes now in this country? Plus if you do that, you got credit and great health care and an educational system where your kids can go to school as far as their aptitudes will take them, with no questions asked. All they have to do is make the grades. It changed everything for me. Then I came back as things shifted, I came back to the 2000 elections. Rubin: Oh, I remember that shift. I had a tiny child at that time. I had really lengthy, inexpensive (to me) cancer treatment because I have a job with good health care. My brother, who worked construction, didn’t have anything. And the same year I was diagnosed, he died of a heroin overdose. I tried for years, but wasn’t able to get him any kind of decent treatment because the Bush administration had done away so many addiction treatment centers. I remember exactly when it happened. You could get good treatment if you could play 100,000 dollars a year . . .

217

Pushing Back—Dallas Wayne

217

Wayne: Yeah. Life’s hard enough in the best of circumstances, but when that safety net is taken away, whether it be pensions with old people, whether it be sending 450 mentally ill people to live under the bridges of Austin, whether it’s access to health care . . . Thank you, Governor Perry!19 For women who use Planned Parenthood, we will have no Planned Parenthood facilities in west Texas at all.20 If this support is taken away, there’s nothing. The promise we have as Americans is gone. Rubin: Your mentioning the mentally ill living under the bridge made me think of your song “Under the Overpass,” about a homeless and brokenhearted man—actually, it’s a great example of what I mentioned before: how romantic loss in a song can be a stand-in for other kinds of loss.21 Wayne: It started out as a joke because there’s a homeless guy in Austin that has the coolest signs. They are so creative; they’re wonderful. “Family killed by ninjas, need money for karate lessons.” I thought, “OK, I got to write a song about this guy.” Then you start thinking about this, you can’t write a funny song. This is not funny. “Oh, they burned a cross on my yard today.” No, that can’t happen. You might want to treat this just a little bit more seriously than that, because then you have an opportunity to say something.

19

20

21

Rick Perry (b. 1950) served as governor of Texas from December 2000 to January 2015; he is currently Donald Trump’s secretary of energy. Planned Parenthood clinics began closing across Texas in 2011, when the Republican-dominated state legislature eliminated funding for any clinics associated with abortion providers—whether abortions were provided at the clinic or not. “Under the Overpass” is on Wayne’s 2004 album I’m Your Biggest Fan.

218

219

Section 6

Prisons

220

221

17

“The Anti-Slavery Act of 2002”: Private Prisons and Social Justice According to Si Kahn

“Prisons have become the solution of choice to every single social issue that we have in this country,” musician and organizer Si Kahn told me. Born in 1944, Kahn has been, for the past forty years, a part-time folksinger and a full-time organizer throughout the South and nationally. But to do his profile justice, it would be wise not to try to separate those two endeavors—signing and organizing—even that much. Kahn’s songwriting and his political work, as he explains here, are intertwined thematically, historically, philosophically, and even financially. The key to understanding the profundity of these connections lies in Kahn’s insistence on the power of the ordinary: what recognizable moments from life offer as poetic material, what “plain folk” can accomplish when they set out to change their world. In Kahn’s recounting, he went mad for folk music while a teenager in the Washington DC suburbs. But his tangible introduction to radical politics came when he went South. Kahn began his organizing career when he became active in 1965 in Arkansas with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Involved in political actions in which music and singing played a central role, Kahn’s sense of the possibilities inherent in folk music expanded. Kahn explicitly links himself to the political folk song tradition perhaps most famously represented by Woody Guthrie. His own compositions, many of them persona or story songs, tend to represent the struggles of working-class people, men and women, particularly workers, farmers, and soldiers. The frequently covered, lyrically gorgeous “Aragon Mill,” for instance, which Kahn wrote in the early 1970s, is in the voice of a worker whose future has become uncertain when the mill that employed the town’s residents has closed: At the east end of town, at the foot of the hill, Stands a chimney so tall that says “Aragon Mill.” This interview was previously published in Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction, ed. J. Smethurst, R. Rubin, and C. Green. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2006.

222

222

Creative Activism

But there’s no smoke at all coming out of the stack, For the mill has shut down and it ain’t coming back.

Kahn has released seventeen albums, mostly of original songs; he has also recorded an album of traditional Civil Rights and labor songs with Pete Seeger and Jane Sapp. His most recent recording is 2012’s Bristol Bay, with Jens Kruger. Following his involvement with SNCC, Kahn was an organizer in some of the trade union movement’s most crucial modern struggles. He worked with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) during the thirteen-month, 1973–74, Brookside Strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, in which miners fought for safety measures as well as union scale wages. (The events of this strike inspired the films Harlan County, U.S.A. and Harlan County War.) He served as area director of the campaign by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (ACTWU) against J. P. Stevens in 1976–80, which won the first collective bargaining agreements for more than 3,000 workers at Stevens plants in the Carolinas. For Kahn, it was of great consequence that music was always a part of these struggles, whether it was group singing at meetings or performances of local bands at picket lines. In addition to dozens of songs, Kahn has also authored three manuals on organizing, Creative Community Organizing:  A Guide for Rabble-Rousers, Activists, and Quiet Lovers of Justice (2010); Organizing: A Guide for Grassroots Leaders (1982); and How People Get Power: Organizing Oppressed Communities for Action (1972). Most recently, Kahn is coauthor with Elizabeth Minnich of The Fox in the Henhouse:  How Privatization Threatens Democracy. Kahn is the founder and continuing board member of the Jewish Fund for Justice, selfdescribed as “the only national Jewish organization solely committed to fighting the injustice of poverty in America” (www.jfjustice.org). For about twenty-five years, Kahn was been the director of Grassroots Leadership, a team of organizers, activists, and educationists headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, who do Civil Rights, labor and community organizing, primarily in the South. Since 1999, Grassroots Leadership has focused on a Southern and national campaign to abolish for-profit private prisons, jails, and detention centers. Recently, Kahn and Grassroots Leadership collaborated with producer JoAnn Mar on a one-hour radio documentary on the privatization of the US prison system, “Crime Pays:  A Look at Who’s Getting Rich from the Prison Boom.” “Crime Pays” won a George Polk Award, one of the four highest journalism awards in the United States, along with the Pulitzer, Bradley and DuPontColumbia. In fact, Kahn has received numerous awards; the range of these awards is revelatory about the range of Kahn’s work. He has been recognized

223

Private Prisons and Social Justice—Si Kahn

223

for his music, for his writing, for his organizing. A few telling examples are the Environmental Protection Agency Alumni Environmental Safety Award (2014), which is only awarded every ten years; the Folk Alliance Special Triple Crown Award (2011) because he had the number one CD, the number one song, and was the number one folk artist of the year; and the Award for Cable Excellence (1982), which was awarded to Kahn’s musical Some Sweet Day.

Discography New Wood (1974) Home (1979) Doing My Job (1982) Unfinished Portraits (1984) Signs of the Times (with John McCutcheon, 1986) Carry It On (with Pete Seeger and Jane Sapp, 1986) I’ll Be There: Songs for Jobs with Justice (1989) I Have Seen Freedom (1991) Good Times and Bedtimes (1993) In My Heart (1994) Companion (1997) Been a Long Time (2000) Threads (2002) We’re Still Here (2004) Thanksgiving (with Annemarieke Coenders and Linde Nijland, 2007) Courage (with Kathy Mattea, 2010) Bristol Bay (with Jens Kruger, 2012) Rubin: Grassroots Leadership was been your focus for more than two decades.1 Can you tell me about the organization? Kahn: Grassroots Leadership is twenty-five years old. We are a very multiracial team of activists. We do Civil Rights, labor and community organizing in the South. There’s a dozen of us on the staff. For ten years, we’ve been working on privatization, which we fundamentally see as one of the core issues threatening democracy. Rubin: How did you arrive at privatization as the focus of the organization? Kahn: At the core of our work is the whole idea that you have to build coalitions across racial lines. We basically think, yes, separatist organizing 1

Kahn founded Grassroots Leadership in 1980 in North Carolina, with the stated goal of training social justice organizers.

224

224

Creative Activism

is critical at a certain point, whether you call it autonomous organizing or separatist organizing. People have to consolidate themselves around identity and issues. But at a certain point, you need cross-racial politics. So we’re always interested in issues that African Americans and whites can consolidate around. Unfortunately, these kinds of issues aren’t always easy to find. But privatization is a really significant one because it actually does affect people of many different races. And it actually cuts across class lines. So we started organizing around privatization in 1996. Rubin: So you started from the principle of multiracial organizing, coalitionbuilding across identity categories, and this led you to privatization as the way to “have at” it? Kahn: That’s right. We were doing hospitals and healthcare and child support enforcement and welfare. And we started doing prisons. Then in 1999, we decided that we would focus all of our energy on trying to abolish forprofit prisons. And that’s the main work we’ve been doing for the last half a dozen years. Rubin: What shape has that work taken? Kahn: There are at least half a dozen distinct prongs to the campaign. One is site fights, which oppose the construction of any private prison at a particular place. We’ve actually been successful in blocking a number of them. And we stalled a hell of a lot of them! We do this primarily in the South; we don’t have the capacity for site fights in other parts of the country, although they are building these private prisons everywhere. The southern rim has a majority of the private prisons because of the wage differentials, but it’s certainly not exclusive. There are something like thirty states that have some form of privatized corrections where there is a prison, a jail or detention center. But basically in the South, where they try to build a private prison, we go there. Secondly, we do legislative campaigns at the state level. We’ve done some work at the national level. Good luck to anything like that right now! But in a number of states, North Carolina, for example, we were able to get a law passed making it illegal to bring someone into the state to incarcerate them in a private prison. Rubin: That’s a massive victory. Kahn: Privately, I call it “the anti-slavery act of 2002.” The parallels are stunning and shocking. So we do legislative efforts. And we oppose not just new construction of privately run prisons, we oppose privatization of existing prisons. And we try to undo private prisons that are in place. In Mississippi, we actually got the Governor to shut one of the private prisons. It was astounding to us that we succeeded in this. This held up for two years

225

Private Prisons and Social Justice—Si Kahn

225

until Haley Barbour, head of the Republican National Committee, became the new Governor and reopened it.2 Still, two years down is two years down. In addition to the site fights and the legislative work, there’s obviously tremendous educational work to be done. In the last six months, I’ve been on at least a hundred different radio stations or syndicated shows talking about privatization in general, but also about private prisons. Most people don’t understand what privatization is. They confuse it with the private sector, for example. But privatization is about those things that are in what we sometimes call the public domain, the public sector, the commons, the commonwealth, the common good, the public good, the public, all these names that we call it. Those things fundamentally, in some way, belong partially to all of us. Things that are our birthright. Through privatization, they are given away, sold down the river, and put under the control and sometimes the direct possession of major multinational corporations. And that process not only takes away our common heritage, it transfers power to the corporate sector. This is part of what Elizabeth Minnich and I argue in The Fox in the Henhouse.3 Don’t think of it in terms of dollars and cents, how do we save money, how do we deliver services most efficiently. It really is about a very thoughtful and strategic corporate plan to destroy the public sector, including the public sector unions, including your union, Rachel [the National Education Association] and to substitute a corporate model for democracy. Privatization is a major tool for accomplishing this. We also run several national corporate accountability campaigns. We ran this campaign involving Sodexho, which was the major investor in Corrections Corporation of America, the world’s largest private prison corporation.4 We made contact with something like fifty different campuses, where their catering division, Sodexho-Marriott, has meal plans. We got seven of them either to refuse contracts or to throw Sodexho off campus. And we have an organizing effort in the faith community called “KEEPING FAITH: A Religious Response to the Prison Crisis,” which is aimed at mobilizing faith voices against the private prison industry. So you see Grassroots Organizing carries out a range of different types of

2

3

4

Barbour was governor of Mississippi from 2004 to 2012. He was chair of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997. Barbour also served as a lobbyist for multiple large corporations, including the tobacco industry. Kahn published The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy in 2005 with Minnich, a philosophy professor and author. Sodexho is one of the world’s largest global corporations.

226

226

Creative Activism

direct action organizing, advocacy and legislative action, public education, corporate campaigns. Rubin: Are there historical connections between your current antiprivatization work and the radical political activity you came of age in, through the organizations of the Civil Rights Movement (particularly SNCC)?5 Kahn: I do see connections. I see increasing reliance on prisons, in many ways, as a counterattack on the African American community. And certainly not only the African American community. Because while the majority of people in prison are people of color, there’s significant numbers of poor and working-class whites who are there. But to the extent that they are African Americans, which is the majority, I think it’s very much a counterattack on the African American community—for the gains of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Prisons are fundamentally about race and class. That’s what they’re about. And they are an extraordinary method of social control. Byron E. Price, at Rutgers University, was briefing our staff last week. He’s an African American, originally from Memphis. And he had charts that show that by 2017, the number of African American men in prison will be exactly the same as the number of African American men that were in slavery in 1860.6 Rubin: That’s chilling. Kahn: It’s chilling. One of the things that we say a lot in the campaign at Grassroots Leadership is that prisons have become the solution of choice to every single social issue that we have in this country. The first answer is prison. That’s where the funding goes. That’s where the political will goes. There are a million African American men in prison today, a million. One out of three African American men in his twenties is either in prison, on

5

6

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was one of the most prominent organizations in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. There were 1,981,395 African American men in slavery in 1860. Price’s chart, to which Kahn refers, makes use of a report by Graham Boyd, “The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow,” NACLA Report on the Americas, July/August 2001. Price’s chart also shows that in the year 2000, there were 792,000 in prison, equivalent to the 782,781 African American men in slavery in 1820. In the year 2005, there were 1,040,027 African American men in prison, equivalent to the 1,001,986 African American men in slavery in 1830. The statistics on prisoners are from the United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners and Jail Inmates, 2000. The statistics on slave population are from Inter-university Consortium for Political Research, Study # 00003: Historical Demographics, Economics, and Social Data; US, 1790–1970, Ann Arbor: ISPSR. For more information, see Price, Merchandizing Prisoners: Who Really Pays for Prison Privatization?

227

Private Prisons and Social Justice—Si Kahn

227

probation or on parole at this moment. This doesn’t count the people who have been there previously. Historically speaking, you almost have to admire the resiliency of the Southern white establishment. You knock one set of problems out from under them, they come up with a different system—this time driven by the private prison industry. This is very much a reinvention of the systems of social, economic and political control that, in earlier times, were exercised through segregation, through sharecropping and tenant farming, through the convict lease system and then, before that, through slavery. Rubin: Those “reinventions,” as you’ve just called them, can seem awfully literal sometimes. In Hertford County, North Carolina, a huge for-profit prison has been built on the site of the old Vann Plantation, a major slaveholding site in 1850. A state prison was built on the site of the old Celanese Corporation of America, where labor organizer George Meyers had his first industrial job in the 1930s (and acquired brown lung disease as a result).7 So your life as the executive director of Grassroots Organizing seems very much descended from your work in the Civil Rights Movement and the labor movement. How about your life as a musician? Does this political lineage have a parallel in your development as an artist? Kahn: Well, my roots as an artist are very eclectic. I’m a preacher’s kid. My old man was a rabbi, and a very good one, a politically progressive one, actually a very important one. So I grew up in his synagogue, and in a home in which we sang prayers after meals and things like that. I learned to sing from those roots. And I had an uncle who was a very significant figure in the Civil Rights Movement, named Arnold Aronson. He was the executive secretary of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.8 He and A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins started it together.9 So I had an inside view to the Civil Rights Movement when I was a teenager that few people had. I stumbled on traditional Southern folk music by accident when I was 15 years old. I was in the Library of Congress and noticed a sign for the Archive of Folk Music. I walked in and asked what they did, and came home with a record of field recordings. That discovery turned me into a totally 7 8

9

Brown lung is caused by exposure to cotton dust in poorly ventilated areas. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which turned into the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, was an umbrella organization that brought together a range of groups that was founded in 1950. Aronson (1911–98) was trained as a social worker. A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) was a labor and socialist organizer as well as a Civil Rights activist; he was the head of the 1963 March on Washington. Roy Wilkins (1901–81) was known for his leadership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

228

228

Creative Activism hysterical folkie, but bypassing the folk revival and heading straight into the roots. This was in 1959. But I guess I didn’t know that people were still doing this stuff. I knew Pete Seeger was alive, and I went to see him in concert.10 But the effect of hearing the musicians on the field recordings from the Library of Congress, the African American and Appalachian artists, who were doing this political material, deeply political material! I’m listening to Lead Belly.11 I’m listening to Blind Lemon Jefferson.12 I’m listening to Aunt Molly Jackson and Jim Garland and Sarah Ogan Gunning, and all on field recordings.13 I’m listening to McKinley Morganfield before he becomes Muddy Waters.14 To me, it’s history. History. And then, in 1965, I go south to join SNCC. And, oh my God, it’s not history, it’s alive! I suddenly discovered that this music—which, by now, I had significantly internalized: I had learned the songs and learned the histories. I found out—Oh my God, it’s on every street corner. It is a living history. At first I learned this in the African American community with SNCC. And then I go to work with the mine workers, and discover that there are still all these people up there still singing! People like George Tucker and Roscoe Holcomb who are hanging out at Highlander.15 Florence Reece shows up all the time, Sarah Ogan Gunning is still there.16 She and I ended up on a stage together at the Vancouver Folk Festival.17

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

Pete Seeger (1919–2014) was a singer, songwriter, and activist who maintained great popularity despite being blacklisted in the McCarthy era. Lead Belly, born Huddie William Ledbetter (1889–1949), was an important blues and folk singer and twelve-string guitar player who was “discovered” while in prison by folklorists John and Alan Lomax. He went on to become widely covered and was perhaps most well known for “Midnight Special” and “Goodnight, Irene.” Blind Lemon Jefferson (1993–29), called “Father of the Texas Blues,” was known for his eerie, highpitched voice. He had an early successful recording career. Aunt Molly Jackson (1980–60), Jim Garland (1905–78), and Sarah Ogan Gunning (1910–83) were all Appalachian singer-songwriters involved with union organizing, particularly among miners. Gunning and Garland were siblings; Jackson was their half-sister. McKinley Morganfield (1913–83) was known as Muddy Waters and as the “father of Chicago blues” after his migration there from Mississippi. George Tucker performed mining songs; Roscoe Holcomb (1912–81) was an Appalachian folksinger and banjo player from Kentucky. The Highlander Folk School was cofounded in Tennessee by activists Myles Horton, Don West, and James Dombrowski in 1934 as a social justice training school; it would go on to become very important for activist training in the Civil Rights Movement. Florence Reece (1900–86), who came from a mining family and whose husband was a miner, is best known for writing “Which Side Are You On?” The Vancouver Folk Music Festival was founded in 1978 and continues to be mounted in annually in July, presenting a wide range of musical traditions.

229

Private Prisons and Social Justice—Si Kahn

229

And whether it’s bashert [Yiddish for destined or fated] or whether it’s serendipity or whether it’s accidental, having become completely passionate about this music, as the music I most love, I end up in one of the places where it is still an absolutely vibrant and living tradition. And I become a part of it. Rubin: In other words, you are saying that you learned about the “real life” of the music when your activism brought you into daily contact with the communities producing and consuming the music. What role was the music playing in the movements you joined? Kahn: The strategic and tactical use of music was something you couldn’t miss. There was never a mine workers rally without a bluegrass band. Some of them knew “Solidarity Forever,” and some of them didn’t.18 They all knew one or two coal mining songs. I was in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, as part of the JP Stevens organizing campaign. We had a white country band and a black R&B band playing at every one of our rallies. Radical music is not just about singing “Which Side Are You On?” Rubin: What does make music radical? Kahn: That’s a great question. I would say this: it’s the interaction between the person who is presenting or transmitting and the person who is receiving. I got this great song when I living in North Georgia. There was a guy name Red Jones who had the jukebox concession for all of North Georgia. And when you took them out of the jukeboxes, you could go in and buy them for five cents, on 45s. And I saw this Buck Owens title.19 Buck Owens, I think, is nobody’s radical. But this song, I thought, “Huh, No Milk and Honey in Baltimore,” that’s a cool title. The lyrics go: We left the farm quite early one morn Determined to come back no more My wife had an uncle who worked every day In a nut and bolt factory up in Baltimore The day we arrived to start our new lives Our spirits started to soar And I soon had a job carrying hod On a construction job up in Baltimore.

18

19

“Solidarity Forever,” by Ralph Chaplin (1915), is one of the best-known union songs. It was written to the tune of the Civil War song “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (by Julia Ward Howe). Buck Owens (1929–2006) was a country musician hugely important in the post–Second World War Bakersfield country music scene. He became a well-known figure through co-hosting the television variety show Hee Haw.

230

230

Creative Activism

One of the only recorded examples of the expression, “carrying hod,” by the way!20 The song goes on: But the next thing I knew, my wife took the flu And the doctor’s bill soon made us poor And to make ends meet, I started to sweep The dirty old streets here in Baltimore The smell of the bay, buildings of gray Were more than I bargained for If I had my way, we’d go home today ‘Cause there’s no milk and honey here in Baltimore Isn’t that great? Rubin: I love it. I am an enormous fan of Buck Owens—and I happen to be from Baltimore. Kahn: But I think that, certainly, having said that it’s about context and the interaction, it’s also certainly true that music that presents a point of view is considered “political” now. We are now into one of my pet gripes. Virtually every time I’m on the air, one of the initial questions is, “So, you are a political musician.” And I have a very developed set of responses to this. I say, “Yes, I am. But it’s also true that all musicians are political.” And they say, “What do you mean by that?” I said, “Well, do you consider Guns N’ Roses a political band?”21 They say, “Oh, of course not. It’s just rock and roll.” I said, “But they have a very developed and very enunciated political point of view.” They happen to be misogynist. They happen to be homophobic. But those are political points of view. I object to their using the term “political” simply because my views are progressive, when people who have conservative to right wing views that they are also putting out through their music are just “musicians”. Either all of us have modifiers attached to the word “musician” or none of us do.” Yes, I write political songs. But it’s not the majority of my work. In any concert, on any CD, the majority is a combination of love songs, of family songs, of story songs, funny songs. Rubin: Of course, all of those can be political, too

20 21

“Carrying hod” refers to transport of building materials, especially bricks. Guns N’ Roses is a hard-rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1985 and headed by Axl Rose. Rose is known for being anti-immigrant, anti-gay, and racist, especially in the 1989 song “One in a Million.”

231

Private Prisons and Social Justice—Si Kahn

231

Kahn: Of course they can. And many artists do that and do it very well. The difference is I do not leave out things that people would rather not hear. So I do talk about hard times. I do talk about sexual harassment. I do talk about violence against women, against workers, against children. I just don’t leave out the things that are unpleasant. It’s my refusal to be censored, my refusal to say, “No, I’ll only present the part of life that identifies me as ‘political.’ ” I’m just presenting the whole of life as I see it rather than the parts. Rubin: That reminds me of your song “Just a Lie,” which refuses to buy into the nostalgia of “The good old days.”22 What is your favorite cover of a song of yours? Kahn: That’s so hard. That is so hard. I can give you a number of them. I adore the June Tabor/Oyster Band version of “Mississippi Summer.”23 Do you know this one? Rubin: Yes, I do. That’s some wonderful noise. Kahn: Jim Fleming, who runs a major booking agency, called me up and he said, “Turn on the radio.” [Laughter] And you’ve got those kettle drums, or whatever the hell they are, slamming in at the beginning. It’s like, oh my God! I also love Planxty’s version of “Aragon Mill.”24 Extraordinary. At least three or four times a year, somebody asks to use one of my songs in a film or a play that brings back Southern textile history. I just signed some permission for something on that. Somebody said this to me—I wish I could remember who because it’s a great line—somebody said, “As the mills disappear, the interest in mill history is flourishing.” I just was putting away a CD from a little town called Cooleemee which is just a mill town, not a union town, just a town. And they have created a historical museum about the mills. A guy did a very good CD of original songs about mill life and about working class life. It’s really good. And that’s as far as I know. I haven’t met this guy. So maybe it’ll turn out he’s a Yale graduate, a Harvard graduate, maybe. Who knows? But I’ll bet he’s just a mill kid. It has that feel to it. Rubin: While we’re talking about music and work, what about music as work? There tends in the United States to be a rather romantic view of art that doesn’t generally allow for a vision of musicians as persons performing labor for other persons. You identify yourself visibly as a member of the musicians’ union. Can

22

23 24

“Just a Lie” challenges nostalgia for a rural life by talking about how difficult those times were for average people, especially during the Depression. It was released in 2000 on Kahn’s album Been a Long Time. “Mississippi Summer” was released in 2000 by English folksingers June Tabor & the Oyster Band. Planxty is an Irish folk band formed in 1972. “Aragon Mill” mourns the cultural loss brought about by the closing of the mill in Aragon, Georgia, in 1970.

232

232

Creative Activism

you talk to me about music as job—about what it means to your work (as a musician or as an activist) to think about music as a job? Kahn: I think the important thing about organizations of artists is that they do bring that side forward. I really would hold up the work that John McCutcheon and Charlie King and John O’Connor have done in organizing my union local, Local 1000 of the American Federation of Musicians, which now has like 450 members, after starting from scratch, really trying to bring forward the artists as workers, artists as employees, artists as people with rights, and then to go for the basics.25 Insurance. Pensions. In Grassroots Leadership we have tried to confront this question of artists as workers by creating precedents for how politically progressive organizations work with artists. For example, we commissioned a poster series by Ricardo Levins Morales, who started the Northland Poster Collective in Minneapolis.26 Wonderful graphic art. So we got him to be our artistic director. But we created royalty arrangements. We negotiated permissions fees. We worked with Ricardo to try to create a contract that would be a model for other political organizations. Because by and large, progressive organizations exploit progressive artists, and don’t recognize them as doing comparable labor. Rubin: Really? What about Grassroots Leadership? Kahn: As far as I know, I am the only executive director of a progressive nonprofit organization who is covered by a union contract. The Board of Directors of Grassroots Leadership signed a collective bargaining agreement with Local 1000 for my work.27 Also, our staff is organized with Local 188, IUE-CWA.28 But I am AFM as the executive director. Rubin: That’s pretty unusual, I imagine. Kahn: Unusual, yeah. The agreement is that I perform, among many other things, musical services for Grassroots Leadership. So you can’t actually book me for a concert. You sign a contract with Grassroots Leadership for my services. All of my performance income from North America goes directly to Grassroots Leadership. I don’t even see it, let alone get any part of it. It doesn’t run through my books. It runs through the organization’s. And that’s a not insignificant part of our income. It’s not huge. But it’s usually twenty-five to thirty grand a year.

25

26

27 28

McCutcheon (b. 1952) is a folksinger and multi-instrumentalist; King (b. 1947) is a folksinger and activist; O’Connor’s music is strongly connected to the labor movement. Morales was born in Puerto Rico and moved to Chicago with his family in 1967. His artwork was been associated with a range of social justice movements. Local 1000 of the American Federation of Musicians is for traveling musicians. IUE-CWA is the industrial division of the Communication Workers of America.

233

Private Prisons and Social Justice—Si Kahn

233

Every once in a while I think, “Ooh, I could have kept it.” But I have something almost no musician I know has, which is the benefits that an employee should have. For myself and whatever dependents I have at the time, I have fully paid medical, dental, and psychiatric insurance. I have a pension, a serious pension plan. The organization contributes 10 percent of my salary to my pension. I get excellent vacation and excellent holidays. Rubin: Which everybody should have. Kahn: Exactly. Everybody at Grassroots Organizing gets the same benefits. You start with three weeks’ vacation. It takes you five years to work up to six. But I don’t consider that unfair. People who have been here five years should get a couple more weeks. And it doesn’t take you long to work up to six weeks. And I have a sabbatical, like everybody else, six fully paid months every six years. So I am delighted to be a “wage slave” as a musician. I so much prefer this. If it’s a bad year for me in terms of concert bookings, it affects the organization’s income. But as long as the organization has money, I have an income. Rubin: What are the day-to-day implications of being a musical “wage slave”? Kahn: I think this has made it much more possible for me to write than with the panic that my friends quite legitimately run into when, all of a sudden, they aren’t going to get enough gigs to get through the year. It removes a level of anxiety. Since there is not public support for artists, I hope there will be a day when a lot of politically progressive organizations simply hire people to be artists on their staff. That’s one of my dreams. Songwriting should be a job you do. I often say, “I’m a musical journalist.” I have a sense of what I am doing as professional. I believe that if you are a professional songwriter, a skillful songwriter, what you are doing is fundamentally an act of translation. In many ways, no different from, for example, translating French into another language. You start with images, emotions in one literary form, which may be speech. It may be writing. And you translate them into something else, which is song. I know that Utah Phillips has a briefcase in which he keeps news clippings that he’s going to write songs about someday.29 He takes out the news clipping, writes a song about it. Do you know my last CD, We’re Still Here?30

29

30

Utah Phillips (1935–2008) was a folk singer and labor organizer (and the son of a labor organizer) associated with the Industrial Workers of the World. The CD came out in 2004.

234

234

Creative Activism

Rubin: That’s your sixtieth birthday CD. Kahn: It’s got a song called “The Flume.” I opened the local newspaper up in the mountains. We have a cabin up in the mountains that we’ve had for like twenty-five years, a one-room cabin. I do a lot of my writing up there. And I always buy the local paper to see who’s playing, and if there’s any good cattle sales because I enjoy the auctioneers: another art form. And here was this big article about a flume that had been washed away in the great 1916 flood that had been used to transport logs twenty miles to a sawmill.31 And I went through it, underlining the key words, and sat down and wrote a song about it. And the deputy sheriff of Wilkes County called me up last year and asked if I’d come sing it at their Annual Employees Day. Rubin: Did you? Kahn: I couldn’t go. But I said, “Hey, I’d be happy to do it.” There’s a city council member who wants to make it the county song. But I sat there reading the newspaper article, underlined the key words, and wrote the song. I believe that a professional songwriter should be able to do that at any point. You may not, on a given day, want to write a song. Or you may not have something you want to write a song about. But if somebody says, “Si, write this song,” I should be able to turn it around in an hour. Maybe it’s a good song, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s a song I’d never sing. Rubin: Well, I know more about the songs you did sing again—on record—or the songs you wrote that other people sing. Can you tell me about a song you’d never sing again? Kahn: The time I met Sarah Ogan Gunning, we were at the Vancouver Folk Festival. Earl Robinson, who wrote “Joe Hill,” was on the panel.32 And Earl Robinson got into this incredibly crazy story about Bach and Beethoven. He was supposed to be talking about how he wrote “Joe Hill.” So while he was going on, I started writing a song about what he was doing. And I passed it to Utah Phillips to see if he wanted to do a verse. He didn’t. Sarah didn’t. So when my turn came up, I just sang this song about what had just happened. I came down the next morning to breakfast, and Utah was sitting there. And I sat down with him. And he said, “That was a pretty fast piece of work.” And I said, “Well, there wasn’t a whole lot of time, Utah.” He said, “You

31

32

The July 1916 flood of Wilkes County in western North Carolina killed five residents and destroyed homes, farms, bridges, and industrial buildings. Earl Robinson (1910–91) is well-known for “Ballad for Americans,” recorded by Paul Robeson, and “Black and White,” later recorded by Three Dog Night, in 1972.

235

Private Prisons and Social Justice—Si Kahn

235

reckon you’ll ever sing that song again?” And I said, “Not as long as I live.” And he said, “Remarkably good judgment on your part.” Rubin: I saw that one coming. Kahn: I have no idea where that song is. I wrote it for the moment. But I do believe that songwriting is an act of translation. And as I get interviewed, I tell people who want to be artists, you should be able to do it professionally. Supposing you are a beginning reporter on a paper. And your editor says to you, “Hey, a big semi just jackknifed out on Route 17. Go out there and give me the story.” And you said, “[Sigh] Jesus, Edna. You know, I’m not feeling the story right now. I’ve been thinking much more about political processes. I don’t think I can quite wrap my mind around it. I mean maybe in a couple of weeks if I could kind of think about it, do some meditating, it might come to me. But I don’t feel like I can do this today.” How long are you going to last? If you are a reporter, you should be able to go out and cover the wreck. Hopefully, nobody has been hurt. And you should be back there in half an hour. And the story will be written. It may not win you a Pulitzer. But it should be good enough to be edited and get in the paper the next day. As a songwriter, if you really care about songwriting, you should be able to get your skill level to where you can do that. It doesn’t mean you won’t get hit by inspiration. But that’s what it means. To be able to take a newspaper story, something somebody tells you, a request, and turn that into a song, that’s what it means to be a professional songwriter. That’s what it means to be a songwriter. If you can demystify the songwriting process, then you’ll do all right. Rubin: Who’s been your most important audience over the years? Kahn: I think my music is particularly special to the constituencies that I write about. The Editor of Bluegrass Now, his name is Wayne Bledsoe, wanted to do a major article on me. And at one point he said, “You know, my mother worked her entire life in the Eden cotton mills [in North Carolina]. I wanted you to know that.” I remember when my first CD came out. A friend of mine who worked in the Warner Robins aircraft plant was sitting there. He and his wife were sitting there listening. And he turned to her and he said, “It’s about us. It’s about us.” So, I don’t tell you those things as typical reactions, but they’re the reactions that matter to me. I get a lot of that from the Jewish community, too, because of my take on Jewishness. And certainly, within the labor movement, there are people who are like, “Damn right. Somebody is still speaking up for labor.” I was on tour in the Netherlands and Germany in January. And some kid—I mean a kid, I mean like 21 years old—came out afterwards with a clenched fist and said, “Thank you for speaking up for

236

236

Creative Activism

socialism.” Nobody in the United States has ever said that in my thirty years of performing. Rubin: Si, although you grew up in New England, all of your political organizing has been in the South. Would you say that there is something in particular that characterizes the stream of Southern radicalism? Kahn: Well, that’s a hard question precisely because I haven’t been active other places, and at heart it’s a comparative question. But here is what I do think: activists in the South pay more attention to culture. This is the heritage of the Southern labor movement, of Highlander, of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, of mine workers’ culture. So I feel that there is more of a cultural sense, and more of a sense of celebration and community. There’s much more of a tendency for people to drive long distances across state lines to see how other folks are doing, to go to celebrations. Some people from outside the South have said, “All you guys do is go to each other’s conferences.” I think there is more of a sense of solidarity and community that is partly a cultural heritage, but also partly comes from being embattled and spread out. Rubin: Do you think of yourself as a Southerner now? Kahn: No. I think Southerners are born. It’s a deep and complex culture. I think of myself somebody who lives in the South, who loves the South, who is happy to be in the South, who participates in Southern history and Southern culture and Southern change. But as Popeye said, “I yam what I yam,” which is a northern, Jewish, middle-class, intellectual activist.

237

18

“Politics through Artistic Eyes, and Art through Political Eyes”: Prison Rebellion According to Raúl Salinas

Raúl Salinas has defined himself in multiple ways: Xicanindio elder, pinto, Austin poet, global activist, performance artist, teacher. A  revered guide for emerging poets and an internationally known advocate for social justice, Salinas has, as the title of his first CD claims, traversed “many mundos.” Born in San Antonio in 1934, Salinas was raised in Austin until moving to Los Angeles in 1956. The next year, in 1957, Salinas was sentenced to prison in Soledad State Prison. He was to spend eleven out of the next fifteen years behind bars in some of America’s most brutal prisons:  Marion Federal Penitentiary in Illinois, Huntsville State Prison in Texas, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, Soledad State Prison in California. Salinas credited this time with shaping his social consciousness; as Louis Mendoza has pointed out, Salinas described his prison experience as “an educational one, with each move to another institution being seen as a different and progressively more difficult degree program.”1 Salinas’s growing consciousness in prison was part of a powerful movement within American prisons that gave birth to what Salinas and others have called the “Prison Rebellion Years,” and produced writers and intellectuals such as George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and W. L. Nolan.2

1

2

Louis Mendoza, “The Re-education of a Xixanindio:  Raúl Salinas and the Poetics of Pinto Transformation.” George Jackson (1941–71) was an activist and member of the Black Panther Party who was given a sentence of one year to life after being convicted of armed robbery in 1961. While in prison, he cofounded the Black Guerilla Family, which identified its goals as ending racism, making a dignified life in prison, and overthrowing the US government. He was shot dead by prison guards. Eldridge Cleaver (1935–98), an early leader in the Black Panther Party, is especially known for his book Soul on Ice (1968), a controversial collection of essays. Toward the end of his life, he became a conservative Republican Mormon. W.  L. Nolan, convicted of robbery in 1963, was Jackson’s cofounder in 1966 of the Black Guerilla Family. He circulated a petition in 1969 stating that prison

238

238

Creative Activism

Within the prisons, classes emerged focusing on minority history and culture— predating, as Alan Eladio Gómez has pointed out, the Ethnic Studies movement on college campuses a half-decade later.3 At Marion, Salinas developed into a sophisticated analyst of incarceration as a tactic of political repression and a prolific writer. His prison letters were published in 2006 as raúlrsalinas and The Jail Machine: My Weapon Is the Pen. Salinas also developed his artistic sensibility in prison; he first received attention for poetry while in Leavenworth in 1969, when he wrote what is arguably his most famous poem, “A Trip through the Mind Jail,” which he dedicated to Eldridge Cleaver. In this work, the poet muses upon the destruction of the neighborhood in which he grew up; the poem, characteristically of Salinas’s early work, exhibits the marked influence of jazz and a street vernacular that has begged comparisons with the Beats.4 “A Trip through the Mind Jail” was not published until 1980, and languished out of print for a long time even after that appearance, but is still considered to be a seminal work of Chicano literature. Aided by the intervention of students at the University of Washington, Salinas obtained early release from Marion Federal Penitentiary in 1972. Following his release from Marion, Salinas continued to work as a human rights activist. In particular, he developed a close working relationship with American Indian organizations; he worked extensively with the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council, and was a cofounder of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. Salinas joined his voice to many movements, though, fixing his gaze increasingly internationally for alliances, political models, and understanding of radical politics. Salinas (who frequently wrote his name as raúlrsalinas) dubbed himself the “cockroach poet,” a nickname not as self-deprecating as it seems at first glance. In Mexican folklore, the cockroach is a positive figure:  savvy, survivalist, and tricky. The popular song “La Cucaracha,” after all, was a tribute to Pancho Villa.5 Moreover, the name invokes Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Revolt of the Cockroach People,

3 4

5

guards were deliberately exciting racial divisions in the prison; he was shot to death, along with two other black prisoners, less than a year later. He was 20 years old. Alan Eladio Gómez, “Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary,” 1972, p. 30. The Beat Generation is a post–Second World War literary scene; its most famous members were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Francisco “Pancho” Villa (1878–1923) was a leader in the Mexican Revolution, which lasted from about 1910 to 1920.

239

Prison Rebellion—Raúl Salinas

239

a somewhat-autobiographical novel of insurrection.6 More recently, the first daily syndicated Chicano comic strip is Lalo Alcaraz’s politically satirical “La Cucaracha,” in which the protagonist is a cockroach.7 Until his death in 2008, Salinas’s poetry continued to connect his prison education with an internationalist vision, as in “Pueblo Querido” (1994): ex-Convictos/Activistas doing righteous gente work involved in sharing homeboy (cockroach poet) with the WORLD!

Salinas was the director of Resistencia Bookstore, located in Austin, Texas’s south-side neighborhood since 1983. In addition to stocking Latino, Native American, African American, gay and lesbian, and women’s books, the store hosts a variety of literary events including an open mic series, “Cafe Libro.” The bookstore also houses Red Salmon Arts, a literary venue and center for aspiring writers in Austin, and Red Salmon Press, an editorial collective that publishes community newsletters and has also put out several literary collections. Salinas also conducted writing clinics with young people, working through prisons, schools, and social service agencies.

Selected bibliography Books/chapbooks Viaje/Trip (1973) Un Trip through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions (via underground press, 1980) East of the Freeway: Reflections de mi Pueblo (1994) Un Trip through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions (via mainstream publisher, 1999) Indio Trails: A Xicano Odyssey through Indian Country (2006)

Audio CDs Los Many Mundos of raúlrsalinas: Un Poetic Jazz Viaje con Friends (2000) Beyond the BEATen Path (2003) 6

7

Acosta, born in 1935, was a Chicano writer and activist who disappeared in 1974. He published Revolt of the Cockroach People in 1973; the book focuses on Chicano opposition to the Vietnam War. Alcaraz (b. 1964) grew up on the Texas-Mexico border and has published several books in addition to the syndicated comic strip.

240

240

Creative Activism

Nonfiction raúlsalinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon Is My Pen (journalism and personal correspondence edited by Louis G. Mendoza, 2006) Rubin: Raúl, you are about to receive a lifetime achievement award from a Latino caucus of the Associated Writing Programs. This must prompt a certain amount of retrospection about your life as a poet. Is there a poem of yours that seems to have been the most meaningful to other activists? Salinas: Oh, “A Trip through the Mind Jail,” of course.8 I mean, that’s a classic, not because I wrote it, but because other people ran with it. A student choir presented “A Trip through the Mind Jail.” It’s been the subject of a mural. A student did a video project for some class, and she videotaped her friends reenacting it. Rubin: A choral version, a mural, a video project: it really does seem to have traveled since 1969! I’m not surprised, though. The way the poem moves from condemnation to empowerment is still so moving and relevant. And the panoply of vibrant cultural references, from Juicy Fruit gum, to la llorona, to graffiti writing, to the names of particular housing projects— those give readers a lot to grab onto. Salinas: It spans the generations. But I have some that are running favorites with the new generation. The young activists, they like, “We Hafta Shaft NAFTA.”9 And now I have one called “Loud and Proud,” which is a real, like, blasting antiwar poem.10 But those are from the past two years. And I don’t submit my work to magazines. People have to hear it or see it and say, “Hey, we want to publish you, man. Can we use this poem?” Rubin: You don’t publish your poetry? Salinas: No, not until I’m ready to do a ten-year collection or something like that. I don’t just flip out little poetry books. I mean, they’re too hard. I mean, I live them. Even the love poetry, I’ve got to live it. And it ain’t easy. You know, I’m marginal. I’m not a professional anything. Because “professional” has come to have class reekings. What’s a professional? The title that goes along with it? It’s by nature elitist. Does it mean you’re a hot shit? I don’t think I’m hot shit. So it’s by choice, of course, by choice initially,

8

9

10

This is the title poem of a collection of poetry published by Salinas (as raúlsalinas) with an underground press in 1980. The poem was released as a reading on an audio CD, Los Many Mundos of Raúlrsalinas: Un Poetic Jazz Viaje con Friends, in 2000. “Loud and Proud” was recorded with Fred Ho on baritone sax on an album titled Red Arc: A Call for Liberación con Salsa y Cool in 2005.

241

Prison Rebellion—Raúl Salinas

241

and then they just compound it and say, “Oh, he didn’t want to be part of us, anyway.” But it doesn’t matter to me, what “professional” has come to mean doesn’t matter to me, as long as I can keep producing, keep challenging the status quo. But at Resistencia Books, we’re pretty—maybe not marginal. Maybe that’s not a good term. We’re pretty autonomous. With what little trappings we have attached to us, like publishers, and utilities, we move independently. We move autonomously. We act like we’re free. Rubin: Does it feel like you’re free? Salinas: Yes. One of our elders used to say, “If you want to be sovereign, you first have to think and act sovereign.” You know? You have to give up all those powdered eggs, and all that commodity surplus, you know, long johns and shit that they throw out. You have to be independent to be independent. Rubin: So you’re trying to live without all the plastic junk in a Walmart time, huh? Salinas: No, we don’t live without it. We navigate through it. We can’t get away from it. We’ve got to buy gas. Hey, well, let’s get a credit card so we can order our books through a credit card. So we do have those kinds of things. But we’re very conscious that those things, even those few things, can trap us if we aren’t careful. And so in that regard, we’re very politically careful how we move. We try not to muddy people’s floors, or step on somebody’s issue. A new bookstore opens up nearby, oh, the biggest chain in the country. People ask, are you guys worried? No, we’re not. Oh, they’re moving in. Well, gentrification, what else is new? You know, being displaced, land dispossession, we know about that. As John Trudell says, “Welfare lines and jails, we’ve all been there.”11 And it’s our space. We are careful about our space, you know? People like to come here. Queers like to come here, because they’re not going to get beat up, or be looked at with dirty looks. In fact, somebody might give them a nice look. We’ve even had romances develop out of here. Rubin: Bookstore romances. Salinas: Revolutionary romances. But we have Middle Eastern people here, after the thing in New York [on September 11, 2001]. And we had our windows busted here that night. I mean, not as a result of that. It was just coincidental, that night. So for the whole next week, while the news was blaring, we had plywood all over our windows. And we were having poetry readings with Middle Eastern

11

Trudell (1946–15) was a significant Native American writer, musician, actor, and activist.

242

242

Creative Activism

folks. You know, we take a position. I mean, Tom DeLay is a dog.12 We’re going to say that. Alberto Gonzalez is a punk, and he’s trying to subvert the Constitution and the Geneva Convention.13 We’ve got to say it. Who in hell is Alberto Gonzalez? I mean, I’m sure his mom and dad think he’s a nice guy, but his foreign policy sucks. Rubin: Hey, please, feel free to tell it like it is. Salinas: Well, you know, Latinos are afraid to say those kinds of things. Because after all, how many times do we get somebody up there? You know? Then you celebrate, and then you mourn. You celebrate because we made it to the White House, to the Justice Department. Big fucking deal. Then we’re mourning too. Rubin: Because of who it is who made it. Salinas: Yeah, well, he’ll be the butt of the scandal. When it’s over, he’ll be the shit head that has to roll, whose head has to roll. You know, it happens all the time. So that’s the kind of folks we are here at the bookstore. And I keep that spunkiness, you know, in spite of my advancing years, and my sometimesattacks of different illnesses. I keep fighting, and so the youngsters have come to the store, they have been attracted here. I’m trying to teach them, and I am trying to learn myself. As much as I want to teach them as the old leader, I also want to learn with them how they can be leaders, and how I don’t have to be the leader—or be the one people talk to all the time. And the people around the store are really good people. We’re a very small crew. And, you know, we don’t make any money. For New Year’s, we painted the bookstore purple and lime and yellow. But we did it ourselves. And so we struggle. But we’ve got some nice books that other people don’t have. And we have poetry readings, and people feel good when they come here. We love them, you know? This is a hate-free zone. This is a sanctuary. And not just for Chicanos and Indians, you know. If you just come by the front of the store, there’s no mistaking who we are, what we stand for. But we work with the schools. We work with establishment types. That is what was wrong, back in the day, you know, having a real rigid agenda, or party line. And now we’re trying to learn 12

13

Tom DeLay (b. 1947) is a former Republican congressperson and house majority leader from Texas; he was convicted in 2011 of criminal conspiracy to violate election law, and then acquitted on appeal in 2013. Alberto Gonzales (b. 1955) was appointed as attorney general by President George W. Bush in 2005; in this role, he introduced increased surveillance and what he called “interrogation techniques” that came to be acknowledged as torture, thereby subverting the anti-torture provisions of the agreement among 196 countries that constituted the Geneva Convention of 1949.

243

Prison Rebellion—Raúl Salinas

243

from the Zapatistas, who say, “We must build a world in which all worlds fit.”14 The Zapatistas just met up with groups of lesbians and transgenders in Oaxaca, you know. They gave the revolutionaries a good talking to. The prostitutes’ union also presented. These are new things, especially in Mexico. We don’t ever want to lose sight of the fact that there are people struggling everywhere. See, that’s the thing. People tell me, “Well, you travel across the country. Would you say the movement is dead,” blah blah blah. Hell no, it’s not dead. It’s got new names. I mean, there’s environmentalist youngsters. There’s Latino women. It’s different names, different things, you know? The Iraq war is right out there. You can’t ignore that. But at high schools all over the country, they are working for non-military options for students. I mean, my God, there’s movements going on. Rubin: It’s looking more and more possible that the war in Iraq will politicize a new generation of young people. Your politicization came in the radical education that was the prison rebellion years.15 You’ve talked extensively about those years, so I won’t ask you recount all that now, but tell me—is there still revolutionary potential in the prisons? Salinas: Well, the potential is there. There’s very little else, I have to say. And I travel the country over, and I go into juvenile jails to do writing workshops, and I go into prisons to do political lectures. Right now, you know, what has happened again inside the prisons is part of what’s going on outside. We’re not able to reach prisoners easily today. I mean, there’s such an ugly gang phenomenon that just preys on the weak, and caters to people’s vices, and has consequences of death. And to those of us who went through the first phase [of prison activism], we consider that counterrevolutionary. So, what does the prison do? The prison says, “We’ve got prison gangs, man. You can’t come in, in the interest of prison security.” And so that’s why things aren’t happening now as they were then. We had people coming in to teach us. Prisons are a very microcosmic reflection of the outer society. And the times were right. It was post–Civil Rights, pre-everybody’s movement. The repression was so intense in the prisons because of the increasing numbers of political and politicized prisoners that were entering, that were filling up the jails. And then there were political prisoners from other countries. Everything was right for prisoners to begin 14

15

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation, known as the Zapatistas, is a revolutionary group based in the southernmost state of Mexico. Its membership mostly consists of rural indigenous people, and it takes its name from the leader of the Mexican Revolution, Emilio Zapata. “Prison rebellion years” (1967–72) came to be used for 132 confrontations between the incarcerated and the state, taking up, for instance, the disproportionate use of solitary confinement of nonwhite prisoners.

244

244

Creative Activism

to question their encased situations, and who put them there, and how to get out, and why. And so there was an intense educational process going on that helped to do that. Rubin: When they do let you in, what do you do on your prison visits? Salinas: What I’ve always done: talk. That’s why I’m considered dangerous. All I do is talk. All Mumia does is talk and write.16 All John Trudell ever did was talk. All Leonard Peltier did is write.17 But that’s the power. That’s the real strength. And so as Mumia says, the state would much rather give me an Uzi than a microphone. Rubin: Besides prisons, what other places do you talk? Salinas: Well, I’m a human rights activist. So I do work at all levels. I’m part of the International Indian Treaty Council, so when we have to do international work, we go and present cases to the United Nations.18 During the Nicaraguan revolution, we went down there as a fact-finding delegation, and then again as observers to the elections. We were working in Chiapas. But at the same time, all those struggles have taught us to stay local. And so we have a very local base that reaches out. And our base is culturalized. Rubin: What do you mean by “culturalized”? Salinas: We view our politics through artistic eyes, and we view our art through political eyes. We try to keep sort of a balance. Rubin: Where does your poetry come into this balance? Salinas: Poetry is so effective that in most dictatorships, the first to go are the poets. Poetry is a very strong medium of expression and of reaching people. It’s utilitarian. It’s portable. It’s also expedient. We don’t have much time. So poetry’s my main weapon. Rubin: How do you bring this weapon to the community? Salinas: Well, I don’t teach poetry. I just do creative writing clinics for marginal communities on alternative campuses and juvenile centers. I do readings, but

16

17

18

Mumia Abu-Jamal, born Wesley Cook (1954), was former member of the Black Panther Party and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists when he was convicted of the murder of a Philadelphia police officer. Initially sentenced to death, he appealed the sentence numerous times and it was ultimately commuted to a life sentence without parole. While in prison, he has continued to published books and articles of social commentary. Leonard Peltier (b. 1944) is a Native American activist sentenced to two life terms in prison for allegedly shooting two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. His conviction has remained controversial, and Amnesty International has identified his conviction on its “Unfair Trials” list. The International Indian Treaty Council includes indigenous peoples from the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. It was formed in 1974 with the goal of protecting the rights, lands, and cultures of the groups it represents.

245

Prison Rebellion—Raúl Salinas

245

I get them to read more. It’s about empowering them. And so I get them to write, and to read. But it’s not just writing and reading and writing and poems. It’s about life. We make them think. The state decides who’s deviant, who’s retarded, who’s a slow learner, who’s a gang banger. They do the classifying. We do the un-classifying. Rubin: That’s harder, huh? Salinas: Mm-hmm. In my intensive clinics, I bring in the Native ceremonial element, too. So I don’t like anyone—principals, guards—to come in and mess with it when I am doing an intensive clinic. I’m always very demanding about being left alone. They aren’t going to kidnap me. They aren’t going to hurt me. With the youngsters, who might have a short attention span from boredom, or from being badly prepared, poetry is the best medium. We’ll get them to tell us—to tell us one word. “Grandma.” Good, now tell us another word. “War.” Or “poverty.” Then we step back and figure out how to make art from it. Rubin: Raúl, you were born in San Antonio, and grew up in Austin, sort of on a border between a Chicano neighborhood and a black neighborhood. How did African American culture matter to you, in terms of your artistic and political development? Salinas: Well, first, in my artistic development, of course I began to listen to the sound, and very much influenced by the music, and I am to this day. Very early on, I was influenced by the African American community—because the music then led to the politics, and then just being a part of the African American community. And then once I went to prison, I saw how brutally they were treated. I mean, we were all treated brutally, but African Americans especially, in Huntsville, Texas—they were picking cotton, right? I mean, it was plantations. Also, as a prisoner, of course, George Jackson was my teacher, like he was so many other prisoners’ teacher.19 And he gave us dignity and self-worth. He said he wanted to change the criminal black mentality into a revolutionary black mentality. All of us tried to make that transformation, to follow those guidelines. Rubin: Were there particular organizational structures that were meaningful to you, during this time of transformation? Salinas: When I was released, I went to Seattle, and there I worked with the MPLA [People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola] group, and then with the African National Congress.20 19

20

George Jackson (1941–71) was an activist and member of the Black Panther Party who was given a sentence of one year to life after being convicted of armed robbery in 1961. While in prison, he cofounded the Black Guerilla Family. He was shot dead by prison guards. The MPLA has been in leadership in Angola since its liberation from Portuguese colonizers in 1975. The African National Congress was founded in South Africa, led the anti-apartheid struggle there, and is now the country’s governing party.

246

246

Creative Activism

Rubin: How did the Chicano movement fit in here? Salinas: The Chicano movement to me, and some of my comrades—after much analysis, and with all the awakening that it brought about, it was still a reformist movement, including wanting to either get into the electoral process or create a third party which wasn’t necessarily revolutionary, but patterned after the other two. So there were elements of Chicano movement, such as myself, who moved into the American Indian movement, and began to do more international work. Rubin: Can you give me some examples of that international work? Salinas: Well, the Zapatistas are the main one. Everybody is working on that right now, because the elections are coming up in Mexico. The Zapatistas have issued a Sixth Declaration, which created a lot of discussion—and is still creating it. Rubin: The Sixth Declaration is the initiation of the “Other Campaign,” or political struggles existing outside the electoral process, right?21 Salinas: That’s right. Now groups are traveling all over the country, talking about it, and how to bring in communities into the movement, or rather, to get away from the whole concept of leader-activist. Rubin: To get away from the concept of leader-activist? What would be the better model? Salinas: A community worker, responding very directly to the needs of a marginal community, grassroots, marginal communities. Rubin: Why do we need to get rid of the idea of leaders? Salinas: Well, for a lot of reasons, one being that the opposition always seeks out the leader or the spokesperson. In many of our cases, what that led to was incarceration or assassination. And many times, if we didn’t do our work, and left somebody to pick up the pieces, then the movement was, so to speak, dead—or at least curtailed. And also because, you know, human beings are human beings, and egos are egos. And leaders, you know, the media pumps them up. Then the establishment crushes them down. Rubin: Or co-opts them. Salinas: Yeah, well, that’s the final analysis. So yeah, it’s about empowerment, first of all, and getting away from frameworks that are paternalistic. Rubin: What do you think a radical artist can accomplish, in terms of creating these new frameworks? Salinas: What a radical artist can accomplish is to create audiences. In my case, my audiences are the people I work with, so it’s all come back to our

21

The “Sixth Declaration” was presented in 2005 to declare a global vision.

247

Prison Rebellion—Raúl Salinas

247

determination to build communities. We can break down barriers, including those created by the pop culture iconography. Then we try to articulate the language of causes into music and art and poetry. We have messages to convey. And if we convey them through the vehicle of art and music and poetry, the audience might pick up some things, in terms of survival. Rubin: Do you have a favorite poem of your own? Salinas: To me, they’re all my children. Rubin: So you have to love them all equally. Salinas: Some are lean and lanky. Some are too talkative. Some rattle on and on and on. And some are too short, and some fat, squatty, dark, light. But I love them all. They’re my poems.

248

249

19

“From My 6 x 9 Cell”: Prison and Painting According to Anthony Papa

Anthony Papa’s life was completely changed by one decision. In need of cash, he let himself be talked into carrying an envelope with drugs inside from one person to another. It turned out to have been a set-up:  the person who pressed him to deliver the envelope, which contained four and a half ounces of cocaine, was an undercover cop. Papa was arrested at the destination, and because of the current draconian (and since disbanded) Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York, he received a sentence of fifteen years to life—the same sentence he would have received for second-degree murder. Papa spent twelve years behind bars before receiving a pardon. But while he was incarcerated, Papa had been introduced to painting by another prisoner. After his release, he became a serious artist, an advocate against the “war on drugs,” and a writer and social commentator. The Rockefeller Drug Laws were instituted in 1973 and named after Nelson Rockefeller, who was governor at the time and desired to present himself as tough on crime. It set up the penalty Papa received for possessing more than four ounces of cocaine, heroin, morphine, and even marijuana, which is now in the process of being legalized. When instituted, the law was considered the strictest drug policy in the United States. It quickly came under criticism from a striking range of people: both left- and right-wing political commentators, Civil Rights activists who pointed out that African Americans were disproportionately convicted under the law, addiction counselors who argued that treating a medical problem with imprisonment is illogical and cruel, and even, ultimately, relatives of Rockefeller. Papa was born in 1960 in New York City. Before he was arrested, he owned an auto-repair shop and had never been in any kind of legal trouble. It would not have been at all surprising if his incarceration had transformed him in a negative way. Of course, it was harmful; in his two volumes of memoirs, 15 to Life: How I Painted My Way to Freedom (2004) and This Side of Freedom: Life after Clemency

250

250

Creative Activism

(2016), Papa details the anxiety, creative blocks, damaged relationships, and self-doubt that he faced upon his release. But from the beginning, he worked hard, through his art and many other ways, to call attention to the negative effects of incarceration for drug use. He has, over the years, worked jointly with politicians, actors, filmmakers, writers, and journalists; he has written and spoken in multiple venues. Currently Papa works as the manager of media and artistic relations for the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit agency based in New York that defines its goal as ending the “war on drugs”—a government policy usually dated to 1971, when then-President Richard Nixon declared in a press conference that drug use was “Public Enemy Number One.” (It is worth noting that many American addicts at the time had become addicted while serving in Vietnam.) The Drug Policy Alliance estimates that currently, the US government spends fifty-one billion dollars annually on “war on drugs” initiatives.1 Instead, the group advocates for treatment programs, programs to reduce the harm of drug use (such as syringe access programs to reduce the rate of HIV), drug education for young people, and focus on harm reduction. Papa continues to cite his prison experience as defining his artistic vision. In his current artist’s statement, he notes, “My life choices forced me to discover my hidden artistic talent. In the same way I try to make that intuitive connection with the viewer of my art by living through my work, breaking down barriers that separate us from truth.”

Selected exhibitions Whitney Museum of American Art (“Mike Kelley” Retrospective), NYC Hudson River Gallery, Ossining, NY New York Theological Seminary Gallery, NYC Outsider Gallery, LIC NY Northern Westchester Center for the Arts, Mt. Kisco, NY The Herbert Mark Newman Theatre, Pleasantville, NY Inframundo Gallery, NYC Lunatarium, Brooklyn, NY Cheim & Read Gallery, NYC

1

http://www.drugpolicy.org/drug-war-statistics.

251

Prison and Painting—Anthony Papa

251

Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NYC Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA C24 Gallery, New York, NY Rush Arts Gallery, NYC Rubin: How did you first get involved in drug activity? Papa: It was a big mistake, and it was compounded by a bad law of mandatory minimum sentence, according to the Rockefeller Drug Law.2 In 1985, I made the biggest mistake in my life when I got involved in drug activity. I met a guy on the bowling team. He asked me if I want to make a fast buck. He knew I was strapped for cash because I kept coming late to my bowling league. And my team leader, he asked me why, and I said, “Well, my car keeps breaking down.” “So why don’t you fix it?” “I don’t have money.” He said, “Well, why don’t you make some money?” And from that point on he kept asking me if I wanted to meet this guy, who’s actually a drug dealer in the bowling alleys of Westchester County. Finally one day I said, “Yeah.” I was strapped for money, and fighting with my wife, things were bad. I owned a small radio repair business, an installation and repair shop, and things were bad. And holiday times are when you are desperate . . . Rubin: Yeah, but it also sounds like he was pretty determined to bring you around to working for the dealer. Papa: He kept asking. And when he had asked me to do it, the first few times I said no. But he kept asking. And at last, when he asked again, I said, “What do I have to do?” So I got a call from this guy who’s a friend of my bowling team leader. “All you got to do to make a fast 500 dollars, you bring an envelope from the Bronx to Mount Vernon.” I said okay. He said, “You know, if it works it can be a steady thing.” So the carrot dangling on the string, I went for it. I met him, I brought the envelope to Mount Vernon, I walked into a police sting operation. Twenty cops came out of nowhere. I was placed under arrest. I did everything I could do because I didn’t know the system and I wound up getting served with two fifteen-to-life sentences for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense. For 500 bucks, I ruined my entire life. So I was thrown into Sing Sing Prison.3

2

3

The Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed in New York State when Nelson Rockefeller was governor; they were signed into law in 1973. The law made the penalty for selling more than two ounces of an illegal drug or possessing more than four ounces a minimum of fifteen years in prison and a maximum of twenty-five years to life. Sing Sing Correctional Facility is a maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York.

252

252

Creative Activism

Rubin: What was it like for you in there? What would you say got you through? Papa: When I was there I was lost. I didn’t know what I was going to do to survive. It was a living nightmare! What I discovered was my talent as an artist through another prisoner. The way I met him was one day I was walking on the tiers in the prison and I smelled paint, and I followed the odor. And then I went around the tier to the other side of my housing unit, where I looked in the cell, and I saw these paintings. And it looked a museum! It looked like Rembrandt, it was amazing, these portraits hanging and maybe a dozen or so paintings in the cell. And there was a guy with his back toward me with an easel painting. And I was amazed and after a while the guy sensed someone was looking in so he turned around. He got out quickly and came outside of his cell—it was open—and he said, “What are you looking for? What are you looking at?” It’s like, in prison there are certain rules of survival, of prison etiquette, and one of the rules that I broke was I stared in the cell. So that was a sign of disrespect. Disrespect at this time was a level of the rule of law in prison. You know you’ll get killed for that. So he came out and actually wanted to start like a fight with me. So I explained to him, “Look,” I said. “I don’t want to fight with you. I said I’m admiring your art, you’re a great artist.” I’m all excited, but I had to behave. Then he totally changed. He said, “You ever painted before?” I said, “No.” He said, “You want to try?” I said “Sure.” So he went in and he got me some watercolor paint and brushes. And I wondered to myself, sat up all night and then painted the ugliest piece you have ever seen. But it ignited this flame in me. I wanted to create something beautiful. And so I started a job in the hobby shop in the prison where he taught me how to paint. Rubin: When did you start connecting your painting to your social vision? Papa: Well, after about a year or two. I met this woman Vicki through an art show the hobby shop instructor had two times a year—the prisoners from Sing Sing contributed work to the art show. I sent her a couple of paintings, impressionist-type of pieces like a woman in white fully dressed on the beach. And she said, you know these are nice but there’s more to painting than women in white fully dressed. And so she sent me a book about the Mexican muralist Mario Orozco Rivera.4

4

Rivera (1930–98), a longtime member of the Mexican Communist Party, was also a singer and composer who recorded for albums in the USSR. He was a proponent of the notion that art is inherently political.

253

Prison and Painting—Anthony Papa

253

So there I discovered art as a political weapon. The art for the oppressed against the oppressor! That’s when I got in to my political art, and then I started making statements in my painting about the prison industrial complex. The death penalty, abortion, I took on all these different issues painting from my 6 x 9 cell up the river in Sing Sing. I painted for a couple of years. I used the art as a tool to survive to transcend the negativity of imprisonment. And at that point, I joined this art class. They hired an art instructor, so I was in this class for about a year or two. Then he had a heart attack, he died. So class shut down. Rubin: Oh, no! What happened? That class must have been so important to you—and probably to the other students in the class, too. Papa: I came up with an idea of writing the governor, Governor Mario Cuomo, and the commissioner to request that the art program be reinstated. I got a letter back from the governor’s office telling me that the budget was reduced. They took away all the art and music programs in prison. They said, “Why don’t you volunteer in the art program yourself?” So I did. I came up with this proposal to the warden of Sing Sing asking him to let me run the program and I submitted and they accepted it, and I started teaching art in prison. It was an amazing experience, to see the transforming of power of art! I couldn’t believe how art affected people. For example, there was this Oriental guy from another part of the prison who wound up in my class and another guy who was his enemy, and they used to fight each other with knives. After three weeks in the class together they were painting each other’s portraits. And you know, at that point, I knew art was important in my life and I always had this idea, this dream, that sentenced to fifteen-to-life, I exhausted all my state and federal remedies, my legal remedies, so I had no way of really getting out. But I always thought that in some way my art would set me free. Rubin: Well, your book is subtitled, “How I Painted My Way to Freedom.” How did that come about? Papa: One day, I was walking to my program and the Special Subject Supervisor approached me gave me this letter. It was from the Whitney Museum curator, Elisabeth Sussman, asking to borrow a painting from a prisoner to be in a retrospective of Mike Kelley.5 When I saw this letter, you 5

Sussman is currently the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan. Mike Kelley (1954–12) was a collage and assemblage artist from a working-class family who was also part of the Detroit noise band scene.

254

254

Creative Activism

know, I said, “This is the way I’m going to get out of prison.” So I said, “Sure, I want to be in the show.” I gave him the photos of my work. Ninety-nine percent of materials you saw in art catalogs were considered contraband, no wood, no sharp objects, no liquids, inflammables—they think we can make a bomb or stab somebody with a brush. It was like a platonic view of the prison, the prison administration had. But at that point Mike Kelley accepted the selfportrait that I had done one night in 1988. I picked up a mirror and saw the individual who spent time in a cage without the views of life. Then I picked up a canvas and I painted a self-portrait, which portrayed the reality of being in prison. That painting wound up seven and a half years later at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Elisabeth Sussman mounting the Mike Kelley exhibit that was picked for his installation, which showed a connection between artistic and criminal activity. Basically, it was a huge installation of portraits of famous people—authors, playwrights, writers with quotes from them. And as you went down the corridors of portraits, it narrowed down to this pillar and on the pillar was my self-portrait. From there, I got a lot of exposure on my case in 1995; then in 1996, at Christmastime, I was informed that I was given executive clemency by Governor George Pataki. So I literally painted my way to freedom, which is the subtitle of my book, 15 to Life. Rubin: Let’s talk about that book a bit. Do you see art, more collectively, as something that seeks to paint all of us to freedom? Papa: Yes, for sure. Well for me, it was a really tangible way. I was in prison and my idea was to use my art to paint my way to freedom, and I did. As an artist now, it’s “freedom” in a different sense—as a vehicle for social change. As an activist artist, I see the artist in the role of the social commentator. When I got out . . . Rubin: You didn’t stop painting, of course. Papa: I didn’t stopped painting. When I was in prison, I also got a degree from New York Theological Seminary. I studied liberation theology.6 That went hand in hand with my art, and then I used the art as a vehicle. I was going to become involved in ministry but I found that by being an artist I reached a wider audience. When you went to one of my shows, it was more of a happening. I opened up discussion about my place, my story, serving

6

Liberation theology interprets Christian theology with a focus on freeing the oppressed. It became well known in the 1950s in Latin America.

255

Prison and Painting—Anthony Papa

255

a fifteen-to-life sentence as first-time nonviolent drug offender. And from there people talked about the issues involved in the “war on drugs.”7 That’s how I became a political artist: through my incarceration and my eventual freedom through art. I continued to paint, I continued to use my story as a way of introducing people to the “war on drugs” and what it means. Rubin: And it seems very profound to me that that painting was a selfportrait because you could say that the Rockefeller laws defined you by one bad choice. And now you have a self-portrait and a memoir where you’re defining yourself. Papa: Right. Rubin: I am finding that very moving. I’m a little choked up, actually. Give me a couple of seconds here. OK, I’ve also noticed that in your paintings you’ve consistently made use of the symbolic power of the flag. For instance, there is one with somebody holding a flag in their arms through the bars of a cell, and there is an installation with an upside down flag. Papa: Yeah, it was at John Jay College of Criminal Justice where the flag became a repeated theme.8 They invited me to participate in a conference and they asked me to do an art installation. I said sure. I asked, “What venue?” And turned out to be in the lobby of the school and I said, “Wow! I’m going to do an installation in a cop school.” And I really enjoyed it. Rubin: That is certainly an example of the venue contributing to the meaning of the art. Although, actually, that is certainly true of the art in prison as well. Papa: It was funny in John Jay, because as I was building a repetitive theme of an upside-down American flag, as I was putting these flags up upside down and using a pair of handcuffs to combine two flags, I started getting comments from students and faculty saying, you know, that I was disgracing the flag. So eventually security came and stopped me from building the installation. These five guards—security guards—were surrounding me and it gave me a flashback that I was back in prison, on an institutional cell search, when they were looking for drugs and contraband. I said that the professor gave permission for the installation, and that I wanted to call her. And then we got together with her. And then we went to the president of John Jay, Jeremy Travis. After about forty minutes had passed, he came back said that I had a constitutional right to show my art. So I went on with the 7 8

The term “war on drugs” was popularized by Richard Nixon in 1971. The John Jay College of Criminal Justice, located in midtown Manhattan, was founded as part of the City University of New York in 1965.

256

256

Creative Activism

installation at John Jay College. They had to keep a security there because they were afraid that I was going to get into a confrontation. It was an amazing event. Rubin: Part of the installation was inspired—or maybe I should say counters— Judge Judy’s horrifyingly cruel comment that the way to deal with addiction is “give them dirty needles and let them die.”9 Papa: “Give them dirty needles and let them die.” I took that and made a visual interpretation of it. I built a coffin on a stand, draped with the New Jersey flag and hundreds of dirty needles. Another one was tribute to this 17-year-old who was sentenced to two years in prison for a single joint, one marijuana cigarette.10 I wanted to use my art to make people aware of the draconian nature of the “war on drugs,” and the prison reality of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Rubin: And it doesn’t work anyway. There are contradictions even on the most micro level. Several people have told me you could get anything in prison. Papa: Yeah, in Sing Sing, if you didn’t have a drug habit going in, you will leave with a drug habit. Because there were so many drugs. Anything you want, you could get in Sing Sing. It was unbelievable—there was an area called Times Square where it was like the Wild Wild West because anything goes there. You could buy any type of drug, you could put a hit out on somebody, you could hire somebody for sex, you could buy a McDonald’s hamburger. The sales were transformed into different businesses. You wanted to buy a leather purse, you go to somebody that had a leather shop. You want to get something high end you go to Vitale. It was unbelievable at the time. Rubin: Have you ever been back to the prison in a non-prisoner capacity? Papa: The only time I’ve been back to Sing Sing was one time, after I auctioned my book in 2004. It was produced in auction, and eventually the producer, Brian Swivel, hired a screenwriter, Mike Jones. Swivel asked me, “Would you go back to Sing Sing?” He wanted me to go to Sing Sing to see where I lived for the time I did in prison. Rubin: How did you set that up? Papa: I was at an event in 2009 when Governor Paterson signed an overhaul of the Rockefeller drug laws.11 It was at a Queens rehab center,

9

10 11

Judy Sheindlin (b. 1942) hosts a courtroom-based reality show that began in 1996. She made this comment when asked for her opinion about giving addicts access to clean needles to lower the spread of blood-borne diseases such as HIV during a 1999 trip to Australia. Mitchell Lawrence, the teenager who received this sentence, was from Massachusetts. David Paterson (b. 1954) was the first African American governor of New York. Elected as lieutenant governor, he was sworn in as governor in 2008 after Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned amid a prostitution scandal.

257

Prison and Painting—Anthony Papa

257

and I met the Commissioner of Corrections, Brian Fischer, there. He was actually the former warden of the Sing Sing.12 I introduced myself, he knew me, and he hugged me. And I said look, I pulled out an article from Hollywood newspaper, talking about how these producers auctioned my book rights for a film. And I said, “Look, we would like to take a tour of the prison.” Rubin: That’s kind of a . . . heavy request. Was he surprised? Papa: He said, “You mean you want to go back to your cell?” And then I said, “Yeah.” He says, “All right.” So we got set up with this carte blanche visit. It was amazing; in a three-hour tour I saw more of the prison than I did when I spend my twelve years in prison. I went everywhere, and it was an amazing and scary, scary event because I still saw people there that I left behind. Rubin: There must be so many ways that could be painful—even if you just felt guilty because they are still in there and you are not. Papa: That happened when I saw them. I wore a hat and sunglasses, actually, because I didn’t want to be recognized because I was freed. That was the only time I went back in. I’ve been in other prisons, working with different organizations like a group in Michigan, PCAP, with Buzz Alexander, he works with the students of University of Michigan.13 I’ve done talks at juvenile facilities. One of the most amazing life-changing events I’ve experienced is when I was invited to go to Spofford Correctional Facility in the South Bronx, a youth facility.14 When I went there, I was amazed to find a mini-wall, like at Sing Sing, but much shorter with barbed wire. It looked like a correctional institution. When I went in I thought I heard the guard say, “Assume the position!” And I went against the wall and spread my arms and legs and then he just looked at me like, “What are you doing?” He hadn’t even asked. And I was just sent into the flashback. Rubin: Transported you to another place. I’m really, really sorry. Had that happened before—or after? Papa: That’s not the first time that happened. It actually happens a lot. These demons that you drag along with you after incarceration, they escape at times when you have no control. For example, sitting and going on a subway just coming out of prison, you’re holding on to rail somebody bumps you 12 13

14

Fischer, who retired in 2013, spent his entire career in the corrections industry. PCAP stands for “Prison Creative Arts Project.” William “Buzz” Alexander is a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Arts and Design. The Spofford Juvenile Center, renamed the Bridges Juvenile Center in 1999, was closed in 2011; it was known for its terrible conditions:  no air conditioning, infestations of vermin, and inadequate lighting. Upon its closing, the commissioner of the New York Administration for Children’s Services called the building “Dickensian” and referred to its closing as a “red-letter day.”

258

258

Creative Activism

and you get a flashback. You’re back in prison and you get bumped and you just lose it for a second. Rubin: I’m sorry you have to carry that. You were very strong to continue speaking at the juvenile facility. Papa: So I was in the juvenile facility, and went into this lunchroom. And I saw these 10-year-old boys and girls dressed in prison gowns. It blew my mind. One kid looked like he was about 15, and he was doing a life term. When he turned 18, he was going to go on the max prison for murder. And he asked me about being raped. He asked me, was I ever raped in prison? And I was like wow! They ask some tough questions. But that put me on the track of what I wanted to do when I came out, gave me direction. Because there’s two things you can do when you serve a long sentence. You either put it behind you, which most people do, and go on with your life. Or you face it head-on and you use it as a tool to change the system. Rubin: You’ve clearly picked the second option, for which I am grateful. What was your process? Papa: Well, as I said, I studied liberation theology. I wanted the challenge the principalities of power. I wanted to change the system. I wanted to actually go on a rescue mission and save those who are left behind after sentencing under the Rockefeller Drug Laws. And I dedicated my life to do so. I actually started a group: Mothers of The New York Disappeared.15 When I came out in 1997, I joined with the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, and we started this group in New York State to fight the Rockefeller Drug Laws.16 Former prisoners, family members, loved ones and those incarcerated were with us at our first protest, at Rockefeller Center at 58th Street, symbolic of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rockefeller Drug Laws in 1998, and all the New York press showed up. And I turned to my partner Randy Credico.17 And I said, “This is how we’re going to change the Rockefeller Drug Laws—by putting a human face on the issue.” We were creating these stories, we used this little 10-year-old girl, who’s like Shirley Temple, she is an amazing speaker. Her mother is

15

16

17

The name riffs on the Central American organization Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, whose children had been “disappeared” under military dictatorships between 1976 and 1983. The Fund was organized in memory of prominent Civil Rights lawyer Kunstler (1919–95); among its focuses is an examination of the racial dimensions of the “war on drugs.” Credico (b. 1954) began his campaign against the Rockefeller drug laws in 1991. He ran against Andrew Cuomo for governor in the 2014 Democratic primary election, and controversially headlined a New  York Republican fundraiser in 2016, having formed a group called “Sanders Supporters for Trump.”

259

Prison and Painting—Anthony Papa

259

doing twenty-to-life, she was an addict. Eventually she got out. At that time public opinion was against changing the Rockefeller Drug Laws, but as we continued to put these true stories out, we put a human face on the issue, public opinion changed. At one point, 80 percent of New Yorkers wanted to change the laws. This is when politicians got involved. Before, when I went to Albany and met with politicians, it was like the public view was, “They work. We’re going to keep them to fight crime, dah, dah, dah.” But behind the doors they admitted they didn’t work, they admitted that they needed to change. But they thought if they tried to change them, they would lose their jobs. Rubin: So, if I am understanding correctly, your organization had to adapt its strategy to political reality. Papa: Yes, that’s right. At that point it was like, we’re not going the change the laws from the top down. We need to change them from the bottom up. You got to get the asses and the masses in the street to make noise in order to make change. And that’s what we eventually did. That’s how we got historical reform of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. We teamed up with Andrew Cuomo who is now governor, with politicians, with movie stars, everybody joined us. We worked hard. And I kept on using my eye as a vehicle. My book party, for example, was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004, and was hosted by Andrew Cuomo. It was an amazing experience. The first time my painting appeared at the Whitney at the Mike Kelley show in 1995, and this time I appeared alone with my painting. And it was an amazing experience meeting all these politicians who showed up. It was an event that used my art once again as a vehicle to talk about the drug laws, especially the Rockefeller drug laws. Rubin: What can you accomplish in painting that you can’t in those other ways? Papa: Well you reach a wide and broader audience. An audience that you would not necessarily meet through different means. The organization I work for, the Drug Policy Alliance, every two years we have an art exhibit called Reform. We’ve had it for five years so far. And we team up with artists—I mean big-name artists—who join us. So every two years, the Drug Policy Alliance launches this event, and we go to different galleries, whatever gallery we can get space at, and we have this big art exhibit using art as a vehicle to talk about the “war on drugs.” Rubin: You have a full-time job now. Are you still able to paint? Papa: I still paint, but it takes a hell of a longer time to finish a piece. I mean, when I got out I remember the New York Times did a profile of me. I’ll never forget it. This guy followed me around for five weeks. He would follow me everywhere.

260

260

Creative Activism

Rubin: Did he drive you nuts? Papa: He did drive me nuts, and when the piece came out I couldn’t believe it. It was called “Tony Papa’s Creative Block.” In prison it was Picasso, outside it was another matter. And all he talked about was this “creative block” that I had, which is true: when I came out, I lived with my mother. I had an easel by my bed, ready to go, but I did not touch it. So they kept asking me, “Why don’t you paint?” I was just was missing something. Eventually I found out what I was missing. Rubin: What were you missing? Papa: I was missing the pain. Rubin: I am worried that you—not just your art—somehow still think you deserve the pain. Can you tell me what made you realize the connection between your art and pain? Papa: I realized this when I was preparing to shoot for Oz, in the opening scene.18 They took me to a series of six cells made out of wood. And I went in the cell and they filmed for like eight hours this opening, there’s just a prisoner in the cell and he is painting. All of a sudden he loses it, he wrecks his cell, he picks up the painting and punches a hole through the painting and then Oz starts. I was left in the opening through the first season. But if you blink your eye, you miss me. Rubin: That’s not gonna happen. You’ve left your mark.

18

Oz is an HBO-produced prison drama that ran from 1997 to 2003.

261

Section 7

Transformations

262

263

20

“It’s All Connected”: Service According to Betye Saar

“I view my creative process as a spiral,” wrote Betye Saar in a 2002 introduction to a gallery exhibition. “[W]hile I am working on one series, I am attracted to other materials that will develop into another series.”1 This concept of “spiral” provides a rich lens for examining Saar’s work, which could also be said to exemplify Hegel’s historical spiral: the often derogatory historical images Saar returns to in her collages, assemblages, and installations have spun forward to the viewer, their continuing racist power both revealed and altered by the artist’s interrogation. The multiple award winning artist (most recently, she is the recipient of the 2014 Edward MacDowell medal) describes her work as “autobiographical and personal, metaphysical and ritual, and political,” adding, “It’s all connected.” Indeed, Saar’s work makes this abundantly clear—especially the part about connections. Sometimes this is quite literal: she is best known for her assemblages, in which she combines objects she gathers from a variety of sources—junk stores, yard sales, trash heaps—effecting thereby unflinching commentary. Her continuing artistic insistence on these harrowing juxtapositions, her series work (such as a collection of paintings on vintage washboards), and her repeated use of motifs across various projects create powerful patterns that form the scaffolding of her oeuvre. Saar’s artistic patterns, in turn, insist that we confront social and political patterns, that we direct our attention to institutions as well as individuals: institutional racism, mass incarceration, the double-edged sword of African American entertainment. In other words, much of Saar’s work is about accumulation—of meaning for the viewer, of wealth for the exploiters of African American labor, of layers of historical liability. Perhaps the most useful way to grapple with the totems Saar continually and compellingly insists we study is by bringing to bear Stephen Henderson’s brilliant application of NASA terminology to black poetry; NASA uses the abbreviation 1

In Service: A Version of Survival, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery catalog.

264

264

Creative Activism

“mascon” to refer to “massive concentration” of matter, while the poets, Henderson argues, use certain images—graveyards, trains—because they contain “massive concentration of black experiential energy.”2 In addition to refusing to ignore deeply troubling mascons, Saar is particularly adept at facilitating and amplifying conversations. Sometimes the conversation is literal: Saar has created installments or situated pieces in such a way that viewers’ active involvement is invited—for example, in the form of notes or objects left on a table. Sometimes the conversation happens through juxtaposition of elements in the works themselves—for instance, a black musician in a cage, startling in its presentation of a dialectic between creativity and captivity. Sometimes the conversation is implicit in Saar’s sly combination of vernacular forms with so-called high art forms. And sometimes the conversation occurs through Saar’s use of others’ words in her own art—for instance, one of her washboard paintings has the words, “We was mostly ‘bout survival,” which runs as a sort of headline above a photograph of a black cowboy in The Black Book, a 1972 collection of words and images, historical and contemporary, painful and celebratory.3 Saar’s visual work is, in a word, speakerly. Saar frequently returns to the question of labor, with pieces that take up stolen labor, family labor, sexual labor, and artistic labor. She has been, for more than forty years, interested in service. Her most famous work by far is her 1972 assemblage “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” in which the familiar “mammy” figure is holding a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other; in our conversation, she would tell me that the piece shows that Aunt Jemima has moved from one type of service to another. A 2000 exhibition called “In Service: A Version of Survival” has a deeply historical focus on the jobs black Americans have been limited to at particular times—until Saar insists we also ask how, and whom, the images of those jobs have served, and continue to serve, in addition to whose clothing was washed or shoes were shined by the figures Saar’s assemblages depict. Saar was born in Los Angeles in 1926, and the city, with its various geographies, has retained a shaping influence on her work. She spent most of her childhood in Pasadena, in a house built by her father, who died when she was six, remaining in that house until she graduated from UCLA with a degree in design in 1949. She has lived for most her adult life in the hilly Laurel Canyon neighborhood of central

2 3

Henderson introduced the term in his 1973 book Understanding the New Black Poetry. The Black Book was edited by Middleton Harris with assistance from Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith; Bill Cosby wrote the introduction.

265

Service—Betye Saar

265

Los Angeles, where she moved in 1961 with her husband, Richard Saar, whom she married in 1952, and her oldest daughter, Lezley Saar—also an artist—who was not quite a year old at the time. By the time Saar moved there, Laurel Canyon had established itself as a bastion of artists of various stripes:  Louise Brooks, Orson Welles, and David Niven lived there. A half-dozen years after Saar moved to Laurel Canyon, the neighborhood began to play host to musicians of the LA’s flashy rock-and-roll scene:  members of the Byrds, the Monkees, Frank Zappa, and Joni Mitchell moved in. Saar’s recycling of objects dates to these early Laurel Canyon days; she recalls that shortly before she moved to the neighborhood, it suffered a dramatic fire, so that when she and her family arrived, “it was wild, and sort of barren.” Years later, when the children explored the neighborhood, they would find pieces of melted glass, which she would sometimes use in her work. Before she was married, Saar worked as a social worker with the elderly. Her first foray into art was designing cards. Then she went back to school to get to work on a master’s degree, and was, as she puts it, “seduced by printmaking.” Saar created prints invoking her Laurel Canyon environs, representing her three children—and sometimes she recycled them into other projects. This would turn out to be her transition from design and printmaking into collage and assemblage. Recently, she has turned to creating installations, which she describes, movingly, as being “like walking into one of my little assemblage blocks.” Her studio remains beside her Laurel Canyon home of more than fifty years, above a redesigned garage. Eager to picture a thoughtful Betye Saar curating odds and ends across the decades that other people might discard without a second thought, I asked her to tell me some of the found objects I might have seen recently in her studio. She tells me, “A salt-shaker, a scale, clocks.” A word that comes up often in her discussion of her work is “recycle”—but, as George Lipsitz points out, these redeployments “defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics,” because instead of losing energy as they are transformed from one state to another, Saar manages to “imbue them with increased dynamism and power.”4

Selected exhibitions California State University, Los Angeles, CA (1973) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (1975) 4

Scholar George Lipsitz wrote this in his introduction to a catalog of Saar’s 2011 exhibit Cage.

266

266

Creative Activism

Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT (1976) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (1977) Baum-Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (1979) Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (1980) Baum-Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (1981) Monique Knowlton Gallery, New York, NY (1981) Quay Gallery, San Francisco, CA (1982) Canberra School of Art, Canberra Connecticut, Australia (1983) Georgia State University Art Gallery, Atlanta, GA (1984) Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (1987) Taichung Museum of Art, Taichung, Taiwan (1988) Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (1990) Objects Gallery, Chicago, IL (1991) Joseloff Gallery, University of Hartford, CT (1992) Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, CA (1993) Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA (1994) Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA (1996) Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA (1997) Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York City, NY (2000) Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., Princeton, NJ (2002) University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI (2005) Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA (2006) Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands (2015) Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA (2016) Rubin: You’ve cited “autobiographical” as one of several interconnected impulses for your creative process, so let’s start there. How did your early years shape your work? Saar: In some ways, death changed the direction of my work. First, the death of my father, and then the death of my great-aunt, which left me a trove of things that she brought with her from Kansas City, handkerchiefs and dresses and gloves. That’s kind of the foundation for my autobiographical work, and more feminine work, without being feminist. Just beautiful and loving and family-related. Then, the death of Martin Luther King, and that was my segue into political work. Rubin: Your more overtly political art is often deeply uncomfortable to look at; the most in-your-face reason for this is your frequent inclusion of familiar racist representations of African Americans. What brought you to that?

267

Service—Betye Saar

267

Saar: Oh, I had been collecting derogatory black images for a long time. I go into thrift stores or to the junk store to find these things. Rubin: What is the difference between a junk store and an antique store? Saar: In the antique store everything is costly; a junk store is more like, maybe a Goodwill or a garage sale, where everything is just dumped in boxes, and you sort through that. One maybe is more “precious” than the other, but you can find good things in both places. Rubin: I always feel sort of alienated from antique stores. You’re supposed to have a lot of money, and then you’re not supposed to touch those things ever, even if you buy them . . . Saar: Yeah, and everything is set up very pretty. Many people like that, but I like it where it’s a hodge-podge. It’s more suggestive. So, I was looking at the derogatory images that I collected, and I’m saying to myself, “It’s really sad there’s nothing here that shows black people as people. They’re always a cartoon or a caricature.” Or else the images are like a National Geographic “documentation” where they’re nude from the top, and in a “native” situation.5 But there’s nothing positive about us! Why would black people have any kind of self-respect, when first they’re slaves, and then even after slavery, they’re still treated like slaves? Rubin: That might actually be the point of these images—to prolong slavery on a visual or symbolic level. Saar: We still served in the kitchen, in the form of a cookie jar, or the salt and pepper shaker, or these other objects that had colored people, black people, still in the kitchen. Still serving. So I started working with those images, and began considering, “How can I change that?” Then after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I said, “Suppose Aunt Jemima becomes a revolutionary person?” Instead of the broom, she’s carrying the rifle, and in the other hand, she has a hand grenade. In her stomach is a postcard of a black woman holding a baby. Now most people think, “Oh, she’s just holding a baby,” but this baby is a special baby, because it’s “mulatto.” You look at the face, it has “negroid” features, but white skin, which meant that Aunt Jemima was also a slave. A sex slave. It was important for me to point that out.

5

For a full critique of the photographic type Saar is referencing, see Stephanie Hawkins, American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination; and Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes:  The Example of National Geographic.”

268

268

Creative Activism

Then there’s the black power fist.6 And behind her is a patchwork of the images of the Aunt Jemima that are on pancake flour. I think because of the repetitive quality of that patchwork, they included it in the Andy Warhol Show, because it was one of the artistic directions he went in—repetitive images.7 You know, I’m still very pleased that piece was included in the show. That somebody saw it as that way. That’s my iconic piece. When I’m gone, she’ll still be in a book. Rubin: That is certainly the first piece of yours that I ever saw, when I was in college in New York. Saar: The gallery where I’m showing now is in the Chelsea area, so we walked over to the Chelsea market, and that was really fun. There was one booth that had these beautiful t-shirts, and I was admiring them, and the young woman was there. I said, “Oh, are you the designer?” She said, “Yes, this is my work.” I said, “I really like this one, I’m going to buy this one,” and I was signing the check. She said, “Wait a minute! Are you Betye Saar?” I said, “Yeah.” “I studied you in school!” Just like you said. Rubin: That’s delightful. Saar: Yeah, and it’s that piece she knew. People say, “Well, don’t you get annoyed that people don’t recognize that you do other kinds of work?” I said, “No, because they know that piece.” Besides, she brings a heavy message. Rubin: And she could lead you to the other pieces. She’s the Betye Saar gateway piece! Saar: Yeah. By creating that piece, I became part of the Civil Rights Movement and part of the feminist movement. She’s served me well! Rubin: I would say that she’s served us all well. Saar: I continued to do pieces like that, continued to collect those images. I also created personal pieces, using old photographs, using my aunt’s handkerchiefs—I felt that as a feminist, you don’t always have to be militant. It’s okay to be feminine and still be a feminist in your head, or in your heart. Rubin: So you’re saying that we’ve been talking about two kinds of work: work that is in your face, and work that is in your heart. Saar: They are related. The personal pieces were a way for me to present black people as human beings, as families, as getting dressed up for a party, or

6

7

Perhaps the most visible use of what Saar calls “the black power fist” was the salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos during the medal ceremony at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. The salute circulated widely in a photograph taken by John Dominis. This exhibition, at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2013, was called “Regarding Warhol: Fifty Years, Sixty Artists.”

269

Service—Betye Saar

269

going to a party, or just sitting with their children. I also found in showing those, that people would say, “Oh, yeah, I remember, my mom used to have a nose like that,” and it’s like they don’t even see that it’s black skin. Rubin: It seems to me that capturing the everyday can be just as moving as startling viewers with the unexpected. Are there other key shifts your work has taken? Saar: In two years, I turn ninety. I’m not saying, “Oh, my days are numbered,” because you never can tell. But I know that there are still things that I want to do. There are still things that I want to say and present to people. People can read, people can write, people can dance and do all sorts of other things, but a visual object usually sticks in your brain differently, and carries on. So, I decided that it wasn’t enough to make an object and to put it on the wall and have it for sale. It was too commercial in a way, so I said, “I want to create spaces.” I decided, “That’s what I’m going to concentrate on in my eighties—making installations.” The first one that I really did was called “Red Time,” and it was 2011, when Southern California, through the Getty Foundation, had the art world present works from 1940s, 1960s, up to the 1980s. That group project was called Pacific Standard Time. All the museums, and many galleries, participated in that. I was included in maybe eight different exhibitions, with one piece in each. I wanted to contribute something in this new terrain—having a space to walk into. “Red Time” is created from an early print, a phrenology print, and found objects. If I went into a thrift store and saw something, if it was red, I would just buy it and put it in there. Rubin: Why red? Saar: I don’t know. Red is challenging to me. It is a hard color for me to wear. It’s an emotional color. Violence, blood, passion. I think I chose it because of that. Also because I wanted the personal challenge of working with something that made me uncomfortable. This last year, I did an installation called “The Alpha and Omega,” which is this kind of teal blue.8 It is more passive, and I’m more comfortable with it. Rubin: Does exhibition space itself shape your creative process? Saar: My current exhibition is called “Red Time/Eastern Standard Time,” and it is organized around the political pieces, because the gallery’s other current show is about uprising—a celebration of the Civil Rights Movement.9 In my

8 9

Alpha/Omega showed at Roberts & Tilton in Culver City, CA, in 2013. Red Time/EST showed at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York, NY, in 2014.

270

270

Creative Activism

part, many of the pieces, really almost all of the pieces, contain derogatory images. Many of them have that black crow on them. Rubin: Your series of washboard paintings also works with these images. Saar: I did two separate series working with these derogatory images. The washboard series was the first one. It was called, “Workers and Warriors.” The washboards, you know, are quite beautiful if they’re worn. Sometimes they’re brass, sometimes they’re wood that’s carved, handmade washboards . . . I just found all sorts of wonderful ones. Rubin: I love that the washboards already come with a layered narrative, because not only did people do work with them, but they were able to turn them into instruments, and make music with them—make them “talk” culturally. Which is, it seems to me, parallel to what you are doing.10 Saar: Yes, that is a function of the washboards. Some of the labels of the washboards, for instance, one called “Do Right,” created such a contrast to what the task was, and such a contrast to the racism they also represent. The first washboard pieces I did had a lynching photograph on them. There’s a quotation on the very first one: “Oh these cold white hands manipulating they broke us like limbs from trees and carved Europe upon our African masks and made puppets.”11 Rubin: What are some other images you projected onto the washboards? Saar: There’s one where I used the Aunt Jemima figure on it. It was called “Extreme Times Call for Extreme Measures.” The title of the washboard is “Busy Bee,” and I have a little tin figure, and she has a little broom sweeping and maybe a little rifle or something. Usually I put a rifle or a hand grenade or something to symbolize the turn-around for the figure. People say, “Well, why are you advocating violence?” I say, “It’s not advocating violence, but a drastic way of getting attention.” Rubin: We haven’t solved it yet. We’ve just got to keep talking about it, and we have to get people’s attention to do that! Saar: You have to keep bringing the attention back, because things like this happened, and are still happening. Art is also my weapon. And my therapist, and my balm to solve depression. As an artist, I try to present my side of it, and hope somebody else sees it and gets some sort of emotional experience from that. That’s why I like the

10

11

A further “layer” of conversation happens currently in the form of serious collectors of vintage washboards. The quotation is from “The Puppets Have a New King” (1974), a posthumously published poem by Henry Dumas, an African American poet, writer, and Civil Rights activist from Arkansas (1934–68).

271

Service—Betye Saar

271

idea of doing things as an installation. It’s like walking into one of my little assemblage blocks. You walk right into it, are surrounded, especially with the red color, which is so powerful and reflective. In this particular environment, there was a little red settee; you could sit down. Actually with the lights, your skin became red. Just the glow of it, and I thought, “This is pretty cool.” It doesn’t work for everybody, but it works for enough people that they remember it. Rubin: We have talked about a couple of recurring images—Aunt Jemima, the crows, the washboards. Can you tell me about the service trays? Saar: That was a series called “In Service, a Version of Survival.” A lot of people who came [to the United States] from Ireland came as indentured servants, and they had to work off their time to become free, or to live here as a citizen.12 I used the serving tray and built a collage on that. Many of them also had “pickaninnies” on them or other derogatory images on there, or sheet music.13 One of them is called “Two Black Crows,” and that’s one of the trays that’s there. Rubin: Your work in series really piles up the evidence, about what happened and what is still happening—I think it’s key, actually, that you sort of enact, artistically, an assertion that these manifestations of racism are not “oneoffs”; rather, they are a repeating system that you express through repeating tropes: washboard, crows, serving trays . . . Saar: I did the washboard as a series first, and then the trays. Then I turned to cages to express containment. You still have a sense of freedom, but then the bars are there. You can still see the other side, but you’re not there. Michelle Alexander, in The New Jim Crow, describes racism as a cage.14 There’re people outside the cage, there’re people inside the cage. That’s why I did that series. In one of these cages, I combine the scale, the clock, the cage, and the little . . . Rubin: Server. Saar: Servant on top. Rubin: Yes, of course. You are commenting on servitude, not looking for a polite gender-neutral way to describe the person who brings your meal in a restaurant! Sorry . . . Your assemblages remind us that patterns are important, and if there are these powerful and painful historical patterns,

12

13 14

More than half of the white immigrants to the American colonies arrived under indentures, and many were never able to attain freedom from these “contracts.” The origin of the term “pickaninny” is unclear. See Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence. Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness was published in 2010.

272

272

Creative Activism

there need to be artistic patterns to call attention to this. Looking at your assemblages, the notion of the “unique” seems sort of pallid and embarrassingly precious. Are there any other historical patterns you point to through artistic patterns? Saar: There are pieces where I’ve integrated many of the symbols we’ve talked about, because this is all the stuff we collect: the obligations, the objects, the obsessions. Let ’s see. There is one that’s more about the diaspora. There’s a stack of books that have the history of what happened, and then the reality of what happened. This little glass jar has a diagram of the slave ship with bones in it.15 It’s about the transition from Africa, and how it’s told differently in a book than it is by maps. Also, I’m not only interested in African art, but in oceanic art and Buddhism. Buddha’s a figure that I use in a lot my work. Sometimes I have a piece and it has the Jewish star, it has a Buddha in it, it has a Mexican Milagro. Put it all together, it’s the real world, you know? Rubin: You have also demonstrated an interest in ritual. Saar: Oh, that was an interesting revelation . . . In the 1930s, the 1940s, I was in school, and for black people, anything about Africa was embarrassing. You just wanted to be like everybody else in the United States, so I never had much experience with looking at African art or anything like that. Then one day, I went to Chicago for an art conference. At that time, David Hammons was living in Los Angeles, so we took the red-eye to Chicago, which had been his home as a kid.16 After our meeting, we went to the Field Museum.17 It was our first jaunt to the Field Museum. I had never been there, but it’s so wonderful, and the whole ground floor at that time was African art, oceanic art, Egyptian art. We were just blown away by it. There was one robe that was just like a rectangle with a hole cut in it—the head, went through the hole—and it was the chief ’s robe. It was covered with little tiny wad balls of hair. Every person in the tribe donated a ball of hair, and it was sewn on that thing. I looked at that and I got a shiver, because it had so much power. He wore that, because he represented everyone. 15 16

17

The assemblage is titled “The Challenges of Fate.” David Hammons is an artist associated with New York and Los Angeles and his work reflects his commitment to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Hammons’s work is akin to Saar’s in its expression of resistance to different forms of bondage—physical, social, work-related, political. The Field Museum of Natural History originated from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—which, fascinatingly, included live exhibitions of “primitive” human beings, which resonates greatly with Saar’s various cages. Renamed for its largest benefactor, Marshall Field, in 1905, it is one of the largest natural history museums in the world.

273

Service—Betye Saar

273

That ’s where I think David Hammons got really interested in using hair as art. Both of us were just floored by that exhibit: the use of feathers and bones, and the altars, and all the things they would put together. That’s where that creative part came in, and making art as ritual. Rubin: Does ritual come into your own art? Saar: I was doing things that were about the United States, and then I said, “Well, let’s go back and see what was there,” before the diaspora, before the slaves were shipped here. How can you know where you are now unless you know where you’ve been? You go back to the ritual. I ’m not that much of an academic person; although I looked at books on African art and maps, it still had to come from my feeling about it. I made up rituals. Then Arnold Rubin wrote about power and display, about what African art had power and what art or materials were used for display.18 Like cowrie shells around the body, that’s display. A call of a lion, that’s power. I began to think of my art and my collecting, about what had display and what had power. As I remember, Rubin wrote about rugs, and how when they were woven, the borders were the display, the protection. In the center, especially with prayer rugs, that’s where the power is, because that’s where you said your prayers, or that was where a certain piece of furniture was placed. So my work, my little boxes, became very geometric, with certain design elements on the sides. Then, in the center, there might either be a photograph or some other thing that I felt had power, or it was the strongest part of the spatial display that I was working with. In this way, many of the objects I used became ritual items. I started doing these assemblages that were altar pieces. There would be a little table, and something on top of it. I remember the experience of building one piece. It was a square box that chalk used to come in, and it was kind of blue from the chalk that was there. Then I put another box on top of it, and another box, and then I wanted to put it on a table so it looked like a little portable altar, and I couldn’t find a table. In Southern California there had been many Gypsies, and they would take whatever wood they could find and make garden furniture to sell, and palm fronds was one of their materials.19

18

19

Arnold Rubin, African Accumulative Sculpture: Power and Display. Rubin, an art historian who taught for more than twenty years at UCLA, writes about assemblage as a way to achieve affect or power. “Gypsy” is an exonym that many California Romani use to self-identify, though others find it offensive. A discussion of the term is included earlier in this volume in the interview with Eugene Hütz.

274

274

Creative Activism

You know how the frond comes down and the leaves come out, and it almost looks like an elephant’s foot or something? I found a little table that was made from palm fronds, so I put that on top. When it was on display at the Studio Museum, we had it on a platform, and people could contribute something to that to make it like an altar, something like in a Catholic church in Mexico, or any place where you would put candles, where you’d put charms, milagros.20 People put stuff down. Postcards, coins, whatever. Then in the 1980s, when Los Angeles hosted the summer Olympics, I placed it so people would come by buses on tour from going to the Museum of Contemporary Art. People would draw something and leave it, people would leave something from their pockets, a ticket stub from an event, for instance. It became an accumulative piece; it kept growing. I did that with several other pieces so that the viewer would be part of the ritual. Rubin: I like that—breaking down that exclusion people sometimes feel from the museum environment through a literal inclusion of their experience. Saar: It’s not “precious art,” but something that people can feel. Rubin: What about some of the flags you’ve used? Flags are also a repeating pattern in your pieces. Saar: The American flag, yeah, especially the old flags, I’ve used to represent “the American way,” is what they say. Like on the washboards, these little miniature pins of the flag. Paired with the washboard, the message is that there’s still dirt and crud at the basis of this country. That’s what racism is, and you have to clean up your act. Here’s the washboard, here’s the way it’s been. Clean up your act. Rubin: You’re throwing down the gauntlet. Saar: Well, when you see it, you call it out. Rubin: Did you work with any arts organizations? Saar: Well, in Los Angeles, in the early days, in the 1940s, there were no art museums. We had one museum, the Los Angeles Museum.21 It functioned as a natural history museum, because it had all the dioramas. And it had furniture. A couple of times a year, they opened it up, and there was an art show. We didn’t have an art museum until the 1960s. We were late in getting 20

21

The Studio Museum in Harlem, founded in 1968, was the first museum in the United States devoted to the work of African American artists. In addition to its exhibitions and permanent collections, the museum mounts a number of educational programs. The Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art was founded in 1910. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which had been part of the LAMHS, became a museum in its own right in 1961, and moved into its own building in 1965. It is currently the largest art museum in the United States.

275

Service—Betye Saar

275

an art museum; Los Angeles did not have a separate art museum until the 1960s. They only had rooms in not even that many galleries. Of course, after the Second World War, people from all over came to California, because they’d been in the Army. Because of the GI bill, they started studying art. All the golden boys—Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses—all those people went to school there, UCLA or USC.22 Then galleries had to be there; those artists had to show their art. Now, New York had lots of art organizations. In LA, because it’s so spread out, in order for black artists to show their work, they had to kind of stick together. Two brothers, Dale and Alonzo Davis, had space and they made a gallery.23 The people who came to that gallery and kind of hung around it: that would be an art organization, but it wasn’t formal, like paying dues or something. In Chicago, in Detroit, maybe in New York, maybe in Atlanta, there were loose groups like that, of black artists. Once every couple of years, they would have a conference, and everybody would come from different places, and that’s when David Hammons and I came from LA. That group, we had a party and maybe sold little pieces of art or something to get our airfare together. Even now, there may be other art groups, but because Los Angeles is so spread out, there’s a downtown section, and then the west side section, and the south part. The Brockman Gallery was sort of midtown in a way, but in an area that is mostly African American community, now blending into Hispanic. Then there was Venice Beach—that was where the white guys, the stars, were based. Even the big galleries are there, LA Louvre and all those galleries at that point. Now, of course, it’s been maybe thirty years that we’ve had the California Afro-American Museum, and that’s a state-owned museum. It’s a museum of art and history. It has the history of black people as well as their art, and it serves a lot of functions. There’s always an art exhibit; they get a lot of

22

23

Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934) is an artist and sculptor whose work is associated with the road-trip subculture of the 1950s. Ed Moses (b. 1926) is an abstract artist central in the shaping of the West Coast post–Second World War art scene. Los Angeles natives Dale and Alonzo Davis founded the Brockman Gallery in 1967, after they found themselves unable to break into the LA arts establishment to show their work upon graduating from college with art degrees. The Brockman gallery was dedicated to exhibiting the work of African American artists and as such was centrally located in a black cultural boom in the 1970s. The gallery showed the work of a number of important artists at various stages in their careers— David Hammons, Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White, Romare Beardon, and Melvin Edwards, among others.

276

276

Creative Activism

organizations that they buy or borrow art from. Then they have a permanent collection, and then they have events, lectures, films, some performance, because they have a stage there. That ’s the hub, because it’s right in the center of Los Angeles, in the downtown area. That seems to be thriving. Rubin: What about political organizations? Saar: I remember when I went to UCLA, and there was a junior Communist group. I went to a couple of those meetings, and then I knew some artists that were involved with the Communist Party. A dancer, and a couple of writers and an artist, and with friends, I went to those things. I didn’t really get fully interested in politics until the Civil Rights Movement, when you saw it on television. Rubin: That was important, wasn’t it? Those images circulated through television, so much more quickly and broadly than before. Saar: Television just really opened up everything for everybody. You saw women being blown down by hoses! If you just turn a regular hose on it hurts, but if you have a fire hose . . . and the dogs, and the brutality of it all. I remember the house that my aunt and uncle bought for my mother and my sister and brother to move into, and it had a big back porch kitchen, a utilitarian thing, and it had a little toilet and a sink there. I said, “That’s so weird. Why do they have a toilet there, because the bathroom’s right over there,” and that’s why, because the help could not use their toilet. Rubin: It’s not fire hoses, but there’s something sort of brutal about that. Saar: I know. It’s a simple thing. Rubin: It’s not just inconvenient, it’s making you sort of an animal or something, you have to be sent outside. Saar: Less than human. They’re the ones that cleaned the toilet. They can’t use the toilet. Art forgives. That’s the way I’m saying it. I’m unloading it all on my art, and that gives me freedom. But it also reminds. Rubin: It writes the record, so forgive is not the same as forget. Saar: The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, when I created it, I was still really hurting from the murder of Martin Luther King, and all the atrocities that were going on at that time. Rubin: Aunt Jemima is now the voice, instead of being the servant, right? Saar: She’s the revolutionary, yeah. Instead of the servant . . . Well, she’s serving in another way.

277

21

“I’m a Bit of a Threat”: Immortality According to Roz Kaveney

Roz Kaveney frequently introduces herself as follows: “I was reared Catholic but got over it, was born male but got over it, stopped sleeping with boys about the time I stopped being one and am much happier than I was when I was younger.” The powerful efficiency (not to mention self-knowing and subversive cleverness) that characterizes this self-representation gives a marvelous glimpse into Kaveney’s literary work, which is seeded with clues and messages to knowing readers. A range of transitions, in fact, figures in Kaveney’s various kinds of writing and her political work. Born in 1949, Kaveney grew up on a housing estate. She then studied at Oxford University until, as she put it, I was just about to present the M-Lit version of my thesis when I discovered an article in a new issue of a learned journal, published in Eastern Europe. It had literally just come out about three weeks before I was due to present my thesis. It was 95 percent duplicating my thesis. And I mean, oh, that was that! I had no more money to do an M-Lit on a different topic in a year. Without the M-Lit I couldn’t get a grant to do a Ph.D.

In college, she shared an apartment with poet Christopher Reid, whom she calls “probably the best poet of my generation by quite a long way.”1 Kaveney has also produced an impressive range of books:  her own novels, poetry, anthologies, fan fiction, critical work, newspaper columns and reviews, a fantasy encyclopedia, and translations of Cattulus and Sappho. With her usual humorous self-commentary, she described the translation project to me as follows: “And here I  am, somewhere near the half-way mark of this project—if you allow for the longer poems I have still to tackle. Now I have written a translation of Sappho’s original, a translation of Catullus’ translation of Sappho, and a poem 1

In addition to being an award winning poet, Reid (b. 1949) is a writer of nonfiction and a cartoonist.

278

278

Creative Activism

about me translating him translating her.” Kaveney is a member of the Midnight Rose Collective, a group of speculative fiction authors who have contributed to shared world anthologies.2 Her work is strikingly intertextual, subtextual, and metatextual, with historical and literary references seeded throughout: to Homer, to Brecht, to Voltaire, to Cortes. But the references do not weigh down her work, which is best described as both cagey and dramatic. Although Kaveney completed her transition by 1980, she has continued to be stalked and threatened (on Twitter, for instance, and elsewhere) for her activism and openness about her identity, especially by TERFs (trans excluding radical feminists). Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire:  The Making of a SheMale, which argues that transsexuality is a patriarchal plot to infiltrate women’s space, was published in 1979—almost exactly when Kaveney was transitioning. “Trans people were thrown off the bus so long ago; what they are trying to do is to stop us getting back on it,” she commented. On and off the page, she has not allowed herself to be silenced, refusing, for instance, to bury the fact that for a while she supported herself though sex work and taking up trans rights activism in a range of locations. The interview with Kaveney took place at a science fiction/fantasy conference (“con” is how they are known to participants) in a hotel near London’s Heathrow Airport; for this reason, over the course of our conversation people occasionally walked past us in costume.

Selected bibliography ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

●

2

Tales from the Forbidden Planet (as editor, 1987) More Tales from the Forbidden Planet (as editor, 1990) Temps (contribution of superhero story, 1991) Eurotemps (contribution of superhero story, 1992) The Weerde: The Book of the Ancients Book 2 (editor and contributor, 1993) Encyclopedia of Fantasy (contributing editor, 1997) Reading the Vampire Slayer—The New, Updated Unofficial Guide to Buffy and Angel (nonfiction, 2001) From Alien to the Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film (nonfiction, 2005) In an interview in this collection, fantasy writers Will Shetterly and Emma Bull also talk about shared world writing.

279

Immortality—Roz Kaveney ● ●

●

●

● ● ● ● ● ●

279

Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films (2006) Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film and Television from “Heathers” to “Veronica Mars” (2006) Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit, and Steel (as editor, with Jennifer Stoy, 2010) Nip/Tuck: Television That Gets under Your Skin (as editor, with Jennifer Stoy, 2011) Rituals: Rhapsody of Blood, Volume One (novel, 2012) Dialectic of the Flesh (poetry, 2012) What If What’s Imagined Were All True (poetry, 2012) Reflections—Rhapsody of Blood, Volume Two (novel, 2013) Resurrections—Rhapsody of Blood, Volume Three (novel, 2014) Tiny Pieces of Skull (autobiographical novel, 2015)

Rubin: This convention is expressly inclusive—there is a note to that effect, and an extensive anti-harassment policy, on its web page. How did that come about? Kaveney: Well, all cons basically are. The science fiction community has been amazingly inclusive from the get-go. There have always been trans people. I transitioned in 1979. I was already in the fandom, and I stayed in the fandom, and nobody said a dicky-bird.3 I was one of the first trans people, but I wasn’t the first. It happened that I had the singular good fortune that I started to transition at the same time as a trans guy who was also active in fandom, so we were in the position of having each other’s back. Rubin: When did you first encounter the self-styled “radical feminists” who would come to be known as TERFs (trans excluding radical feminists)? Kaveney: In 1974, long before I actually transitioned, my ex-flatmate became a political lesbian and a radical feminist. She was storing some of my stuff, because I’d moved out and moved from Leeds to London, and couldn’t take everything with me. In the interim, before I could get back up to reclaim my stuff, she had become a radical separatist and a political lesbian. When I turned up to collect my comics collection, she told me through a locked door that she’d burned it. Rubin: Oh, no! Not the comics collection.

3

The phrase “in the fandom” is frequently used by people who consider themselves part of the science fiction/fantasy community through activities beyond reading literature or seeing movies.

280

280

Creative Activism

Kaveney: Now, think of the date. Think of what my comics collection had in it. I’d been buying Marvels since the mid-1960s. Rubin: Oh, that’s just so cruel. Kaveney: When people say, “Why did you hate radical feminists?” I say, “Because they burnt my comic books.” They had a meeting and decided it was completely wrong for me to be storing my comics collection in her attic, and therefore it should be burned. It was a collective act by, as it happened, a group that were very influential in the formation of radical feminism in Britain. So, as far as I’m concerned, it is directly personal. Rubin: It is personal, but more than personal. I object as a historian! Kaveney: They . . . bless them, they don’t get that. And they don’t realize that I was very much involved in insuring they lost in their campaign banning people from the Lesbian and Gay Centre.4 I have consistently fought for my own community, but because I don’t make a public role of it, they’ve only in the last few years started to realize that I’m a bit of a threat. I get to write attacks on them in the Guardian and other places, but I don’t show all my cards. I became respectable within British feminism, partly because I had a late transition because of the influence of my feminist friends, and they all felt guilty. Rubin: Did anti-trans animosity spill over into your writing career from your political one? Kaveney: I was the publisher’s reader at Virago for a couple of years in the 1980s. I’d been involved with various feminist scholarship projects, like The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English. Germaine Greer threatened to withdraw if I was there.5 Lorna Sage told her, “Well, you must do what you wish.”6 Greer’s been doing this stuff since the get-go. Again, I take that personally. Greer has tried to get me fired. Greer has personally insulted me. Rubin: In addition to her viciousness to trans people, she comes across as rather erratic. Kaveney: I don’t know what it is with Greer. The thing is that those politics, and the absolutism of those politics, have always been deeply damaging. My view has always been that there’s something deeply and philosophically wrong and corrupt about the foundations of that school of thought. Partly 4

5

6

Lesbian activist Sheila Jeffreys (b. 1948) spearheaded a move in the 1985 to ban bisexuals and lesbian practitioners of SM from the London Lesbian and Gay Centre. Germaine Greer (b. 1939), a writer about gender issues and feminism, has been vocally anti-trans; for instance, in 1996, as an administrator of Newnham College she fought against the appointment of Australian academic Rachael Padman to a women-only institute, claiming that she was not, in fact, a woman. This led to a very public outing of Padman as transsexual. Lorna Sage (1943–2001) was an English author and literary critic.

281

Immortality—Roz Kaveney

281

it’s neglect of intersectionality. I never knew that word until that word became current. Rubin: It can be a very useful word. Kaveney: It’s a very useful word. The other week I got to stitch up Julie Bindel.7 She was doing this whole “Oh, this is just some poncy way of talking invented by academics” performance. I said, “I think you’ll find that’s not the case.” I said, “Let’s not let me and you dispute this. Let’s use Twitter.” I just hash-tagged, “How I first heard of intersectionality,” and put it out in the world. Everyone said, “She’s talking nonsense.” A couple of Afro-Caribbean activists said it was created by a working-class American woman of color, without a shadow of dispute.8 Also, there’s the whole version of purity feminism that was reinvented by people like Mary Daly.9 Rubin: How has your transition, and responses to it, entered your writing? Kaveney: In the early 1970s and in the mid-to-late 1980s I wrote a novel which has never been published though it’s quite likely it’s going to see print quite soon.10 It’s a fictional memoir of the time during the early stages of my transition when I was living in Chicago. The world possibly wasn’t ready for any trans-novel except an “Oh the pain, oh the agony” novel. It was a novel in which several of the characters were trans. It didn’t make a particularly big deal of it. And actually, there’s a bit at the end that may sound like foreshadowing because it’s about someone dying, in fact, as a result of misplaced industrial silicon injections. It reads like foreshadowing, but it wasn’t. It was just that I met someone who was dying, and it was at the end of my trip. That novel is much more linear than Rhapsody of Blood. But it does share that technique of constantly telling stories that aren’t part of the main action. Because it’s a memoir, my heroine spends a lot of time hanging around in bars and cafés while other people tell her stories. Rubin: It’s fascinating that both your autobiographical novel and your fantasy novels involve shifting identities. How did you move toward writing speculative fiction? 7

8

9

10

Bindel (b. 1962) is an English writer who has focused on violence against women and anti-trans work. For instance, she wrote “Gender Benders, Beware” in the Guardian in 2004—one of many quite vicious condemnations of transsexuals she has authored. Kimberlé Crenshaw (b. 1959) is an American scholar and activist; she introduced the notion of “intersectionality” in the 1980s to describe overlapping aspects of identity, arguing that identity is formed through the overlaps and not through adding up distinct elements. Mary Daly (1928–2010) was an American radical feminist, an academic, and a theologian. She taught at Boston College for more than thirty years, where she sparked controversy that led to her retirement for refusing to allow men in her upper-level women’s studies classes. The book was published in 2015 and titled Tiny Pieces of Skull.

282

282

Creative Activism

Kaveney: From the mid-1970s onward, I was reviewing for various fan and semi-professional science-fiction, critical magazines. First, for the British Science Fiction Association’s magazine, and very rapidly thereafter for Foundation, the scholarly critical magazine.11 So I started to build a reputation as a reviewer of science fiction. I also often reviewed other genre material, not just science fiction. Often crime, because I was quite interested in crime fiction. I was very busy with political work throughout this period and in the buildup to the 1997 election became overwhelmed, I guess, which is one of the other reasons why I wasn’t doing much writing.12 Then in 1999 I got seriously ill and had to stop doing politics. I decided to amuse myself during convalescence by working on what became Reading the Vampire Slayer. I managed to sell that project and deliver it rather quickly and even do a second edition later on. I started off writing fan fiction in order to ingratiate myself with the fan culture because I didn’t want to be seen as an interloper, writing a quite academic book about Buff y and patronizing people a lot younger than me.13 And I realized that I enjoyed the irresponsibility of fan fiction! There was no pressure. I wasn’t trying to have a career, I was just writing for the sake of it. My writer friends slightly got on my case in the first half of the naughts about the fact I was wasting my time on fan fiction. I said, “Ah, but you don’t understand—I need to work on fan fiction because it’s clearing out a certain constipated quality in my work. When I come back to writing my own fiction, as I will quite soon, real soon now boss, you will see that there will be a lightness attached. There will be a jouissance as we like to put it. A jouissance that I got from writing fan fic.” And, of course, the trouble was that having said that, I felt obliged to deliver. So I actually sat down and thought, “So what do I know about? I know a lot about random bits of history and I know a lot about power and responsibility.” And I realized that one of the things I wanted to write about was immortality and the personal consequences of being amazingly longlived and outliving everyone you know. That is also how I was feeling in 11

12 13

The British Science Fiction Association was founded in 1958. Foundation:  The International Review of Science Fiction was established in 1972 with the aim of taking science fiction very seriously as a form, and widening its audience. The British General Election in 1997 saw a landslide victory for the Labour Party, led by Tony Blair. “Fan fiction” is the term for amateur writers who produce their own fiction involving characters from movies, books, and TV shows of which they are fans. The form grew strikingly in the internet age, when it became much easier to distribute.

283

Immortality—Roz Kaveney

283

the naughts because between the time I turned 50 and the time I turned 60, I lost a staggering number of close friends to various illnesses. And so I had to give my central character something to be immortal to do, because I decided that if you were going to be immortal you would need a reason to be immortal—otherwise you’d get bored. Whereas if you actually have a duty, you’re living forever in order to do something. Rubin: What were your artistic goals in writing Rhapsody of Blood? Kaveney: One of the secret truths about Rhapsody of Blood is that it’s a noir detective book. I really wanted to bring a noir material into epic fantasy. Rubin: Like Jim Butcher or Simon Green.14 Kaveney: On the one hand, I didn’t want to write a deeply sensitive intellectual novel that I think everyone vaguely expected from me. Rubin: Well, it’s fairly intellectual. It’s got a lot of references to mythology and folklore. Kaveney: Oh yeah, but on the other hand someone hits something every three or four pages. Rubin: That’s true. Yeah. And they crack wise. Kaveney: They crack wise, and there are fights and there are monsters. It is very much written to that formula that Raymond Chandler articulated—you know, whenever the action lags, someone comes through the door with a gun.15 That’s sort of how these things work. Reflections is very largely about the French Revolution. That’s because one of the great massacres had to be a ritual of blood. And obviously it couldn’t be any of the twentieth century ones because that would be tasteless. Rubin: Speaking of historical references, you have two stories that I’ve read about music, and they both have Stalin in them. The one about the violin and Reflections. Kaveney: Oh yes, that does! I completely forgot that he gets mentioned in “Brandy for the Damned.” I’m obsessed with the history of Marxism. What can I say? My abortive Ph.D. was on William Morris.16 I was very—I’m

14

15

16

The American writer Jim Butcher (b. 1971) and the British writer Simon Green (b. 1955) each have a popular series of fantasy-detective novels: Butcher’s Dresden Files series and Green’s Nightside series. Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) was an influential detective fiction novelist and screenwriter. In 1950, he published an article titled “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which he wrote, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” Morris (1834–96), who was part of the British Arts and Crafts movement, was a textile designer, writer, translator, and Marxist activist.

284

284

Creative Activism

still—fascinated by that very idiosyncratic, very British version of Marxism that he and another Marx were working on.17 Rubin: I love William Morris! He also thought things should be beautiful, in daily life. Kaveney: And it’s not just utopianism. There’s deep vein of practicality in Morris’s approach to Marxism. I was fascinated by it, still am. And I also wanted to write about religion because, as you may have noticed, I write quite a lot about religion in the newspapers. But I’m also quite hostile to the new atheism, partly because of my deep contempt/frustrated love for Christopher Hitchens.18 Hitchens and I were university contemporaries and I knew him quite well in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We were friends of a sort. And we sort of grew radically apart, and then we briefly came together over the death of a friend in 1999, and then he behaved so appallingly over the war, and I wrote that post publicly dissociating myself from him forever.19 But I guess I’m probably a bit more cynical about the way the world is than most people who write fantasy. Because I’ve watched good people become politically corrupt. I’ve worked very closely with people and watched them go to the bad, which is part of my characterization of Jehovah in these books. Rubin: But wait a minute. When you’re talking about Jehovah being characterized in that way, are you saying the book is allegorical? Kaveney: Not allegorical but the experience of, for example, watching various people who’ve got caught-up with New Labour.20 It’s not allegorical but it’s based on real-world experience. Rubin: I see. Okay, then why is Cortes a character in the book?21 Kaveney: Because I wanted to put front and center the fact that some people are just quite bad without any magic, any rituals . . . I just needed a great killer in there. Rubin: He’s an imperialist killer. 17

18

19 20

21

Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx (1855–98) was the daughter of Karl Marx; born in England, she was a founding member of the Socialist League in 1884, of which Morris would come to be a prominent member. Hitchens (1949–2011) was an English writer who spent the last thirty years of his life in the United States; he was known for his confrontational approach and his public antitheism. Hitchens’s vocal support of the Iraq war (launched in 2003) alienated a large number of his readers. “New Labour” was the term used by the British Labour Party when it was under the leadership of Tony Blair (1997–2007) and Gordon Brown (2007–10). Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano (1485–1547) was a Spanish explorer and soldier who brought large portions of what is now Mexico under the rule of Spain, defeating the Aztec Empire.

285

Immortality—Roz Kaveney

285

Kaveney: I enjoyed letting Maura beat the hell out of Cortes. Rubin: I enjoyed reading about Maura beating the hell out of Cortes. Kaveney: The other thing about Rhapsody is that while I was working on it, I drifted back into writing poetry completely unexpectedly. Though in retrospect, who was I kidding because Rhapsody, while it’s a swashbuckling action, is also a very poetic novel. I started writing poetry again. I hadn’t expected that would ever happen. The fantasy writer and poet John M. Ford died, and I wrote a memorial poem.22 I was very deeply moved by his death because he was someone I didn’t know all that well, but was very fond of, and we meant to get to know each other better. I was a huge admirer of some of his work in British fiction and poetry. And I wrote a poem. And I posted it and said, “Well, Mike was a poet and this is my poor attempt to do something because I’m not a poet.” And a lot of the comments said, “You say you’re not a poet? Are you kidding?” So I wrote a couple of public poems for occasions like the Trans Day of Remembrance and the anniversary of Stonewall.23 Each time I thought, “I’ll just write one more poem.” And then I realized actually I really liked writing poetry again. I actually had something to say. I had never felt this before. About a year later I started writing formally. Rubin: I find your formalist poetry very moving because it is organized around constraints of form and freedom within. Kaveney: Much as I would like Rhapsody of Blood to be the great fantasy novel that is still read in a hundred years’ time, I doubt that that will happen. I suspect the poetry is probably more important, in the great scheme of things. I’m actually slightly arrogant about the poetry. Rubin: We’ve talked about your work on Buff y the Vampire Slayer. There are also vampires in your own writing, and many other books, movies, television shows, and so on. Why have there been so many recent fictions about vampires? Kaveney: It’s partly because they’re an expression of the desire everyone has to live off other people. I mean, it is one of the great truths about our civilization. As Orwell says, we all live off the people who mine coal.24 We all live on the backs of people in the “third world.” And it behooves 22 23

24

John Michael Ford (1957–2006) was an American speculative fiction writer, poet, and parodist. Trans Day of Remembrance occurs annually on November 20 and memorializes victims of antitrans murders. The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, was the site in 1969 of a riot in response to arrest of patrons during a police raid. The riot is often cited as an important event in kicking off the gay and lesbian liberation movement. Orwell (1903–50), an English novelist, essayist, and journalist most known for Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), published the essay “Down the Mine” in 1934.

286

286

Creative Activism

us to acknowledge that fact. But a lot of the time people don’t want to acknowledge it, and that’s why people are obsessed with vampires. Rubin: That’s a fascinating take, given the power relations in our current global economy. Kaveney: Yeah. We are all, in a sense, vampires. And we are not very keen on accepting the fact. Rubin: So we make vampirism very romantic. Kaveney: Yeah. So we fetishize it. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to completely demystify vampires. Having spent several years working on Buff y, I couldn’t not write about vampires somewhere in this book, and similarly about elves. I am sick and tired of elves. Because they are obnoxious posh people. Rubin: There’s quite a lot of class-based observations in Rituals. Kaveney: Oh yes. Rubin: Well, you know we Americans don’t talk about that much at all. Kaveney: I know you don’t. Delusions of America! Now, I am in this ridiculously anomalous position that is much more likely with people my age: I was sucked through the whole thing of having a scholarship at Oxford from, as they say, humble beginnings. And yet Oxford is not a place to which . . . a lot of us adapt. So a lot of people read me as awful lot posher than I am. Rubin: I’m with you there. Kaveney: In my first year of graduate work, I found myself sharing a flat with two people with serious personal fortunes. I gradually realized just how much more money they had. And I grew up on a housing estate attached to various prisons where my father was a prison guard. But I learned to adapt. I also knew, from my teens, that I would sooner or later transition, so acquiring a certain skill at adaptation struck me as a very good idea. And so I learned to pass quite early as considerably posher than I actually am. And that’s why class is one of the key things in my work. I started off with quite radical politics. I then became someone who worked in the system. For a long time, I was a member of the Labour Party. Then I left the Labour Party at various points and sort of drifted back in and then left again. My political action was partly through feminism, partly through coliberation, partly through trans-community stuff, and partly just generally anti-censorship stuff. Over the last decade my politics, as you will have noticed from my poetry, have swung rather radically to the left. It’s actually been one of the consequences of spending a lot of my time hanging out with people in their

287

Immortality—Roz Kaveney

287

twenties. I’ve been the honorary aunt of a lot of very political people on Twitter. Young radical journalists like Laura Penny.25 I can no longer swallow the compromises that people make. For instance, I never actually knew him personally, but I knew him just once removed—your former president, Mr. Clinton, who was my contemporary at Oxford and dated several of my friends. I never met him but I ate cookies that he baked. Rubin: Were they good cookies? Kaveney: They were very good cookies. You know, I was very happy after eating them. Rubin: I see. Kaveney: “I experimented with marijuana but I did not inhale.” The reason he didn’t inhale is that the crumbs would’ve got up his nose. I do think that Clinton believed he could work within the system and make compromises for the sake of the greater good. I think there are occasional signs that he bitterly regrets a lot of the compromises he made. What he’s said about the Defense of Marriage Act, and what a mistake he thinks it was.26 And “don’t ask don’t tell.”27 Rubin: Don’t forget NAFTA.28 Kaveney: He did a lot of things that he thought he had to do and it all turned to ashes in his mouth. I get the impression that he a very unhappy man as a result of all of this. That’s the myth in my head about him, anyway. I may be completely wrong. But everything is getting worse and compromises are harder to swallow. Rhapsody of Blood is very much a book about that in a sense. It’s not allegorical but it is written out of deep pessimism. Rubin: I really was very struck by your inclusion of the line about the blood in the pyramid steps. It’s a powerful way to invite the reader to think about labor.

25

26

27

28

Laura Penny (b. 1986) is a British radical feminist journalist and blogger who has also published several books. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Clinton said, “I realized that I was, you know, over 60 years old. I  grew up in a different time. And I  was hung up about the word. And I  had all these gay friends. I had all these gay couple friends. And I was hung up about it. And I decided I was wrong.” “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a US policy regarding LGBT Americans in the military; it went into effect in 1994 and was repealed in 2010. It barred lesbians, gays, and bisexuals who were in military service from revealing their sexual orientation. North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in 1994; it eliminated trade barriers among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The AFL-CIO has pointed out that after the agreement was put into place, 700,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in the United States because the plants were moved to Mexico.

288

288

Creative Activism

Kaveney: Yeah, it’s another reference to Brecht. Who built the pyramids? It’s the slave that built pyramids. It was not Ramesses that built the pyramids.29 Rubin: Brecht is a great pivot here, since his work was banned by more than one government. I wanted to ask you about your political work on that issue. Kaveney: I cofounded the UK chapter of Feminists Against Censorship.30 Once I did that—and I’d put a lot of energy into that censorship stuff for two, three years—I moved on, because my feeling is that you shouldn’t do these things for a long time, unless you absolutely have to. Rubin: Among other things, it will wear you down. Have you read Gail Dines’s most recent book?31 Kaveney: Dipped in, wasn’t new. Rubin: She’s so obsessed with particular acts. After I described that aspect of the book to my son, he left a rewrite of an Ace of Base lyric on my computer: “I read Gail Dines / and it opened up my eyes / I read Gail Dines / Anal’s demeaning / Even if that’s your leaning.”32 And I don’t want to sound obsessive, after objecting to burning the comics as destroying a historical record, but it’s also tough for me how ahistorical she is. Kaveney: It’s this really half-baked recycling of bad studies that were commissioned by bad people, and this weird cooperation between that sort of feminist and the religious right. Rubin: I know. That’s really creepy. Kaveney: And the police. I mean, I obviously can’t prove this, but I am pretty clear that at one point, Sheila Jeffreys was working quite closely with various fundamentalist Christians inside the police.33 There was this big show-trial in the 1990s of gay SM-ers in the UK that is called the Spanner Trial.34 A group of gay men who’d been having SM orgies and sending videos

29

30

31

32

33

34

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was a German playwright, poet, and director; he wrote “A Worker Reads History” in 1936. Ramesses was the name of the Egyptian pharaoh who ordered the pyramids built. Feminists Against Censorship was founded in 1989 in the United Kingdom by Kaveney and activist Linda Semple. The organization’s strongest focus was on censorship of sexually explicit materials and defending people’s rights to determine their own sexual preferences. Gail Dines (b. 1958)  is a British-born professor at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts, and a prominent anti-pornography activist. Her most recent book is Pornland:  How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (2010). The group’s song is called “The Sign,” released in 1993. The original lyrics are, “I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes, I saw the sign / Life is demanding without understanding.” Jeffreys (b. 1948) is an English scholar who lives in Australia. She is mostly known for her antitranssexual views, calling sex reassignment surgery “mutilation.” The Spanner Trial (1987) was the result of Operation Spanner, carried out by police in Manchester, United Kingdom, which led to the conviction of a group of gay men for participating in consensual BDSM sexual activities.

289

Immortality—Roz Kaveney

289

through the post got busted, and were charged with assault. And some of the bottoms were charged with being accomplices in assaulting themselves. They went down, and they lost a series of appeals, too. It became such a cause célèbre. It was a long time before they tried prosecuting anyone for that again, because we fought it all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. I got Liberty to take it; that’s one of the reasons I ended up becoming Deputy Chair of Liberty.35 But back to Jeffreys, there were details in that case which didn’t come out until it went to court, when they came out in a fairly distorted way. For instance, there was a quite specific allegation that one man had nailed another man’s penis to a piece of wood. Interestingly, I’d come across a reference to that a couple of years earlier, before that became public, in one of Sheila Jeffreys’s books. The only way she could have got that is from the police. She was clearly in direct communication with the vice squad, cooperating with police in prosecutions of gay men. Nice. Of course, actually what was going on, as came out in the appeal, was that the guy had had an eyelet in his foreskin. The nail was going through a pre-prepared eyelet. Jeffreys was very involved in the attempt in the mid-1980s to ban SM lesbian and gay groups from the London Lesbian and Gay Centre.36 That was my big political occupation post-transition, actually, because though they weren’t, on that occasion, going after the trans community, it was only because the trans community had gone into deep withdrawal from politics for the most part. I regard it as a solidarity thing. They were also going after bisexuals. She ’s dangerous and unpleasant. The trouble is, because of this Brennan woman, Catherine Brennan, they actually have some money, because Brennan is personally very rich.37 She’s partner in a law firm in Baltimore, but defends payday loan people. Rubin: Baltimore is my hometown! I want people to associate it with John Waters or Thurgood Marshall, not Brennan. Kaveney: Well, Brennan recently offered a sizeable—I think a four- or fivefigure—donation to any LGBT organizations who would drop the “T.” Rubin: What’s it to her?

35 36

37

“Liberty” is a shortened form of “National Council for Civil Liberties.” The London Lesbian and Gay Centre was established in 1985 by the Greater London Council, a government administrative body. Catherine Brennan (b. 1971)  is a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” (TERF). She has worked vociferously and controversially against trans rights, publically naming a trans minor on her blog, for instance.

290

290

Creative Activism

Kaveney: Oh, transitioning is evil and wrong, and we’re all evil, scary men, or deranged women, who need to be stopped. Brennan hangs around on Twitter, not only telling transwomen that they’re men, but regularly assuming that anyone who defends her victims is trans, and therefore she’s also constantly misgendering people who aren’t trans, simply on the assumption that no feminist who wasn’t trans could possibly not hate trans people. She lives in a realm of delusion. There was a very unpleasant row earlier this year, where some people behaved very stupidly. Essentially, the journalist Suzanne Moore, in otherwise quite good piece, complained about women being expected to have the body of a Brazilian transsexual.38 Rubin: I remember that. A lot of people . . . Kaveney: Actually got very upset! Suzanne Moore has a lot of trolls of her own. A lot of the men who would normally troll Suzanne Moore and make rape threats, made rape threats “in defense of the trans community.” Nothing to do with anyone trans, but of course we took the blame. I, meanwhile, was patiently trying to explain to Suzanne, whom I do know, that really, this was kind of a dumb thing to say, because we know she meant well, but a lot of people get very upset, because last year, 160 trans women were murdered in Brazil alone. Rubin: There was just tragic news out of Jamaica.39 Kaveney: Yeah, where someone was literally torn to pieces in the street for being trans. In a situation where people, mostly, if not exclusively in the third world, and mostly, if not exclusively, people in the African American and Hispanic communities in the States, are being murdered, it ill-behooves feminism to make it worse. Actually, in the last five years, there have been a couple of killings even in the UK that we know about. They were both people that I didn’t know, but they were both people . . . One was someone who’d been at university with a bunch of people I knew. The other was like one-removed acquaintance away. She was known to my ex-flatmate, and was a close friend of my ex-flatmate’s best friend. That’s pretty close to home. Yes, we do get kind of upset about that. People do actually not necessarily behave sensibly or well over that, because people: it could be us. I am now a respectable elderly literary person. When I was young, I did a lot of stupid stuff. I got raped several times. I got beaten up several times.

38 39

Suzanne Moore (b. 1958) made the controversial comment in 2013. On January 21, 2013, 16-year-old Dwayne Jones was killed by a mob after attending a dance dressed in women’s clothing. He had, by then, been forced out of his family’s home and was living with transgender friends in an abandoned and crumbling house. The crime was never solved.

291

Immortality—Roz Kaveney It is a solidarity issue. Yes, a lot of trans people do take risks, but fewer people have to, partly because of the rise of information technology. I mean, you know, back in the 1970s, even the middle-class graduate trans women I knew in some sense, were in danger. That doesn’t happen so much anymore. I’m not saying it never happens, but . . . People are getting killed, so really, we do not need all of this stuff that legitimizes us as less than human. Rubin: No one does.

291

292

293

22

“Folklore, Fakelore, and Fucklore”: Metamorphosis According to Emma Bull and Will Shetterly

Will Shetterly and Emma Bull are proof that art defines the world. In their case, this is quite literal. They have introduced a writers’ “shared universe,” Liavek, in which they and an impressive range of writers have set fiction: Jane Yolen, Charles de Lint, Alan Moore, John M. Ford, Patricia Wrede, and numerous others. But reading their work is frequently a valuable reminder of this significant function of art even when it is carried out on a more figurative level. In fact, both Shetterly and Bull locate life-saving impulses and capabilities in spaces associated with art: in a band in Bull’s 1987 novel War for the Oaks, in a bookstore in Shetterly’s 1991 novel Elsewhere. Shetterly and Bull are both well known as fantasy and science fiction writers—but they also both resist categorization. For instance, Bull—a significant and early innovator in the “urban fantasy” subgenre—has also written historical fiction (Freedom and Necessity, with Stephen Brust in 1997—an openly socialist novel), a “weird Western” (Territory, in 2007), and “hard” science fiction (Bone Dance, in 1991). Shetterly has written books that have been marketed for children, young adults, and adults; it is an indication of his respect for all of these audiences that it is not necessarily easy to tell them apart. In addition to fiction, Shetterly and Bull have produced art in numerous other forms: comics, musical recordings, screenplays, nonfiction. Both Bull and Shetterly have blogs, Dark Roast, and It’s All One Thing respectively, and both of their blogs are wide-ranging and considerably less limited to self-promotion than one might expect. Shetterly’s blog is markedly more political in nature, and he takes some controversial stances, in particular insisting that what has come to be called identity politics does not adequately acknowledge economic

294

294

Creative Activism

class as the base of identity formation. Fascinatingly, Shetterly quotes Boots Riley—also interviewed in this collection—on his blog in this regard: When black neighborhoods are compared with white neighborhoods of similar income levels, you see similar rates of crime. The fallacy of comparing white neighborhoods with black neighborhoods is in lumping together wealthy and upper-middle-class neighborhoods (categories that not many black folks are in) with middle- and low-income ones. But that’s not how the world works. Poor white people in Memphis aren’t kicking it with rich ones in Bel Air.1

Shetterly and Bull, a married couple, currently live in Minneapolis, which delightfully manifests itself in War for the Oaks, in which Bull creates a magical creature that seems to be based on Prince. (In fact, in a smooth tip of her hand, Bull has a band in the book perform a Prince song.) Bull, born in Torrance, California, in 1954, spent a lot of her youth in motion because her father was in sales and was transferred every couple of years. It is quite possible that this youthful experience gifted her with the focus on setting that is characteristic of her books. She pays close attention to costuming in her own work (she and Shetterly made War for the Oaks, for instance, into a short film). During the interview, she also commented emphatically on the historical accuracy of costuming in several television shows. Shetterly was born in 1955; his family moved in 1959 to Florida, where they established a tourist attraction called “Dog Land.” The family gathered different breeds of dogs—up to one hundred at a time—to exhibit for visitors. Dog Land was featured in a number of publications, including National Geographic (in 1964); Shetterly himself wrote about the location in his 1997 book Dogland , which blends autobiographical elements with fantasy and occult. He has frequently described the book as the work he is most proud of, and published a sequel ten years later, called The Gospel of the Knife. Shetterly ran for governor in 1994 as a candidate of the Grassroots Party, which was formed to support drug legalization. “If you believe in causes, you’re not concerned about winning,” he told me. “You’re concerned about progress.”

1

“It’s All One Thing” (April 9, 2016), http://shetterly.blogspot.com/2016/04/boots-riley-explainswhy-class-trumps.html. Riley’s words originally appeared in Creative Time Reports in a piece called “Guns Don’t Kill People, Capitalism Kills People” (April 9, 2016). It was also published by the British Guardian on the same day.

295

Metamorphosis—Emma Bull and Will Shetterly

295

Selected bibliography ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Cats Have No Lord (Shetterly, 1985) Witch Blood (Shetterly, 1986) War for the Oaks (Bull, 1987) The Tangled Lands (Shetterly, 1989) Falcon (Bull, 1989) Bone Dance (Bull, 1991) Elsewhere (Shetterly, 1991) Nevernever (Shetterly, 1993) Finder (Bull, 1994) The Princess and the Lord of Night (Bull will illustrations by Susan Gaber, 1994) Dogland (Shetterly, 1997) Freedom and Necessity (Bull with Steven Brust, 1997) Chimera (Shetterly, 2000) Thor’s Hammer: Voyage of the Basset #4 (Shetterly, 2000) Territory (Bull, 2007) The Gospel of the Knife (Shetterly, 2007) Liavek Anthology series (coedited by Shetterly and Bull: volumes in 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, and 1990) Rubin: You both write quite a bit about transformations—for instance, Wolfboy in your novel Nevernever, Will, and the phouka in War for the Oaks, Emma.2 What resonates so strongly about that? Are you searching for, as Obama put it, change we can believe in? Bull: I identified pretty early that that was one of my obsessions. I actually noticed that I was dealing with emotional and physical personal transformations and transformations of societies. I have a certain optimism that when people work together, no matter how much they fight, no matter what differences there are among them, just the act of communicating to each other what it is that they want out of their world will produce a better world. One of the things that I was saying when I wrote Bone Dance is that if you get enough people together who are motivated to do something, that

2

The narrator of Nevernever, a teenager named Ron, becomes Wolfboy when he is turned into halfwolf, half-human by an elf. The phouka in War for the Oaks, a central character, is a shapeshifting character (man or dog, in the novel) taken from Celtic folklore.

296

296

Creative Activism

changes the world. I really wanted, at the end of that book, to say this wasn’t just an individual story about this one person who went through this and got out of it alive, and now he knows something. It rippled out into the whole world. It was clear that the state of being that existed at the beginning of the book was not going to continue. I don’t necessarily always believe that the personal is political, but I believe that the political is an amalgamation of many, many people’s personal. People will try to make things better. Once they know that things are broken they can pretty much transform anything. Shetterly: And as an artist I think transformation is story. To my mind a story fires on all cylinders when the transformation is happening on the plot level, the character level, the relationship level—in as many different places as possible. Rubin: One of those places is the body. That’s socially important right now.3 Shetterly: Yeah, not one that we thought of at the time but, yeah. Bull: People caught up pretty darn quick on that one. The sense that “Yes, I can physically be who I really feel like I am.” Shetterly: I don’t know where I got my interest in symbolic transformation. As a lover of fantasy and somebody who didn’t exactly consider myself a socialist at the time—I was more a hippie—I was aware of a kind of tension around my loving these stories about people who become nobility, who don’t transform their societies, they only transform themselves. Until I finally realized that metaphorically that’s still true to what I believe. That you can tell a story in which somebody becomes a king and what that really means is an externalizing of an interior enlightenment there. I used to bristle at the notion that I was a child of the 1960s because I was young in the 1980s; I was 14 in 1969. I was much more a wannabe hippie than an actual hippie. But I was surrounded by it! It was a time that we did believe in transformation. We sincerely thought, all right, we can get rid of racism by the end of the decade. The values of the Summer of Love could be realized.4 Having said that, I think there’s a group of people in every generation that have that kind of naïve optimism and it might be that you need that naïve

3

4

The interview took place during a moment characterized by visible transgender rights progress and visibility, such as a ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applied to transgender employees. The Summer of Love (1967) is the name given to a large gathering (an estimated 100,000 took part) of young people in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco as part of a cultural revolution.

297

Metamorphosis—Emma Bull and Will Shetterly

297

optimism in order to go all out for social progress. Sort of saying, “All right, I’m going to spend my time marching and making signs and writing letters and getting hated by people because I’m doing these things . . .” Bull: Sitting in and getting pepper sprayed. Shetterly: Yeah. I was going to say that it seemed like it was easier to find the community but I think it’s actually that I was lucky enough to be in a place where the community existed that encouraged that. Bull: In a lot of places, it was much harder to find a community of likeminded individuals. Shetterly: Oh, yeah. Bull: The Internet didn’t fix everything or connect all of the activists. But it certainly made it easier if you were in Rockton, Illinois, and you wanted to know one person—even one person—who thought the same way. That can be overwhelmingly important. Rubin: What about collectivity in writing? There are multiple forms it can take, of course—in your work, for instance, there are books that are coauthored, or coedited, or books set in a universe that more than one writer uses. I ask because researching musical culture in the 1960s, I found myself coming to the conclusion that living in communes was a really important way the music developed the way it did, because people would jam, and exchange riffs, and try each other’s instruments, and teach each other songs and styles, and so on. Is there a writerly version of this? Bull: It’s certainly crucial for musicians to know other musicians. It’s absolutely essential. You have to know what’s going on. You have to exchange ideas with other musicians. You have to sit with them and play and say, “Ooh you do it that way!” You do the same thing as a writer. Talking with other writers, but also reading other writers’ published works. People say that writing is a lonely activity. Yes, when you’re actually sitting down in front of the keyboard, with the pen and the paper, yeah, that’s just you. But what you bring to it is all of your interaction with all of the books you’ve read. Here in the Twin Cities there has always been a very active science fiction and fantasy reader and writer community. A while back, we were part of— we helped found—what we eventually had to name the Interstate Writers Workshop (which, of course, is a reference to the IWW).5

5

The IWW stands for International Workers of the World, a labor organization founded in Chicago in 1905; members were also known as “Wobblies.” The Interstate Writers Workshop, the members of which were known as “Scribblies,” included Patricia Wrede (b. 1953), Steven Brust (b. 1955), Pamela Dean (b. 1953), and Kara Dalkey (b. 1953).

298

298

Creative Activism

We had to name it that because our publisher wanted to talk about how all these people that they published were in this writers group. They asked, “So what’s the name of the writers group?” We said, “Well, we actually refer to ourselves as writer’s snob group.” There was a pause on the other end of the line and the editor in chief said, “You’re going to have to change that.” Shetterly: We should actually back it up a bit to explain why we called it the writer’s snob group. We had formed one writing group, but it turned out that it wasn’t really a committed group of people. It was kind of like your first band, and you would simply say, “Hey wait a minute, we could do better.” We created the second group and then people were quoted saying we were all elitist. So we decided to call ourselves the writer’s snob group. It was the very immature thinking one does . . . Bull: Yes, it really was. But it was a very collectivist community in the science fiction field at the time. It was a group of people who figured if you were doing something, you were doing it with the group and for the group. So there was a huge controversy at the time about the new group. “Well, wait, you’re having a private party. This isn’t an open invitation party?” That was just the whole idea of collectiveness. Having that group to read manuscripts with and to talk about writing and to talk about why it is important to you as a reader to get this out of a story and why am I not giving that. That had a tremendous effect on my work, an expansion. It was like this fabulous upper-level seminar in writing in which you just got a lot of smart people together. We were all at about the same level in our careers doing the same kind of breaking-in stuff. It was one of the things that taught me more about writing than anything I’ve ever done. I found that I have two modes of writing. I have my particular fiction that I mantle over like a hawk with a dead mouse: “Don’t come near this!” Those are the stories that I want to be entirely my own and I don’t feel good about opening up too early. I’ve also had some of the most satisfying experiences that I’ve had as a writer though collaborative projects like the Liavek collections, which Will and I edited but which were not set our universe.6 The world-building behind the stories was entirely collaborative. We got a bunch of people together, and we said, “What if we did this? Oh, yeah, that would mean Lexie would do that. Let’s see, we need religions, all right, you go make up some religions, we’ll talk about them.”

6

The Liavek collections are set in a shared universe, a city named Liavek. Bull and Shetterly have contributed short stories to the collections, which include work by numerous writers, including Alan Moore (b. 1953), who is primarily known for comic book work. Moore’s contribution was later published as a comic book, Alan Moore’s Hypothetical Lizard (2005).

299

Metamorphosis—Emma Bull and Will Shetterly

299

As soon as I had this idea, I kind of felt like it needed to have more writers than me and it was Will who said well obviously it’s a web fiction project, that’s what this is. As soon as he said that I knew that there had to be a writers group and we had to have collaborative creation process. I went out and found them. I asked Elizabeth Bear because I know she’d be exactly the right person.7 It’s just been a really satisfying experience to have that kind of brain trust and work with these people that I respect. They make me smarter. Rubin: You’ve raised an online series, Will—how do you think the internet has shaped your writing—in terms for form, content, reach, income, however you want to approach it? Shetterly: People talk about blogging as a distraction and I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If you at look at the correspondences of a lot of writers, they were sort of churning out free words at comparable rates. It was just that they were sending them off to one friend, or a few people, rather than posting them for whoever happens to stop by. Is it a distraction? I think it’s probably operable. Bull: It is a distraction. But it’s also a way to focus your thoughts in order to say things in a way that you can look at them and think, “Do I really believe that?” before hitting “post.” “Is that really what I meant to say? I believe that, huh. Yeah, I could see that.” Shetterly: I’m very torn about pseudonymity, but I think if somebody’s trying to be a commercial artist, I think their pseudonymity is a useful thing. Because the Internet makes it much harder to separate your political life from your artistic life. I am trying to decide now if that’s true, because I’ve never been good at separating them. Therefore am I bad on the Internet just because I’m bad at it. To be an artist you have to be able to keep being an artist. If you’re not independently wealthy, that means that anytime you make a statement, it’s going to limit your audience. Because people want confirmation. They think, “I’m an Obama supporter and this person’s an Obama supporter so therefore I will read this person’s story about dragons.” You go, “What do dragons have to do with Obama?” They don’t, but they have to do with the environment, the way in which you’re receiving the art. Rubin: What about surveillance culture. How does that fit into online presence? Or your fiction, for that matter?

7

Bear (b. 1971) has won multiple awards for her work in various genres of speculative fiction.

300

300

Creative Activism

Bull: Oh, yeah. I’m thinking about how one of the frustrations with Bone Dance—so many of the things that I did in Bone Dance—is there was a huge technological advance right after I wrote and published the book. Many of the things that I would have put in the book if I were writing it now didn’t exist then. The whole idea that there was a CCTV camera everywhere—I’m a lousy futurist, I didn’t have any notion about what was going on. The whole idea of surveillance culture—I don’t know how to come to grips with it because so much of what I love about current technology is also a central part of surveillance culture. I love my smartphone. I love Google. It just changes my life, it’s terrific and . . . Oh my God, if someone wants to know everything about it they can find out everything about me. I think that privacy rights are going to be one of the most important fights in the 21st century simply because we now have technology to invade everyone’s privacy at a moment’s notice. Have you read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother?8 Rubin: Yes. It’s chilling. Bull: Yeah. Along with all of the other things though we have not really quite dealt with yet regarding human rights and civil rights, we are going to have to confront privacy rights head-on, in political, social, and cultural ways. It’s going to be really interesting. Shetterly: I heard something recently suggesting that that’s a huge generational difference in terms of what people expect of privacy; well, at least as far as advertising goes. Apparently, for us it’s creepy when a retailer says, “Oh, you like Delany, you might like this.”9 How do you know I like Delany? Rubin: Oh, I hate that. It reminds me of a scene in Minority Report, when the main character walks into store, and a woman on a big screen asks him, “How are those three ribbed sleeveless shirts working out?”10 Bull: And then they constantly ask if you want to leave feedback. No, I do not want to leave feedback now. No. Rubin: No, I paid for it, that’s my part of the transaction! Bull: Did I send it back? No? Then I must’ve liked it. Rubin: Amazon.com once said to me something like, “You might be interested in this modernist novel about African American communists who were writing science fiction.” They just nailed it too much . . . I was so uncomfortable! Bull: One of the horrible things is because of that atmosphere of fear that the war on terror is engaged in and creating, is the “if you see something say 8

9

10

Doctorow (b. 1971) is a Canadian science fiction novelist, journalist, and blogger; he is interviewed earlier in this collection. Little Brother (2008) takes up surveillance and high schoolers’ resistance of it. Samuel R. Delany (b. 1942) is an innovative and multiple award-winning science fiction writer who is also known for his memoirs of life as a gay African American in New York. Minority Report (2002) is a science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg (b. 1946); it is based on a short story of the same name by groundbreaking science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928–82).

301

Metamorphosis—Emma Bull and Will Shetterly

301

something” idea that all of the amateurs out there are going to do a better job somehow of observing threats. I’m looking at particularly the case of the Tsarnaev brothers.11 If you look at it from the point of view of a novelist, what you see is an angry young man who can’t find his place in the world and the little brother who looks up to him. If you reframe this as a story about a bank robbery gone wrong, everybody would go . . . Rubin: “Well, that happens.” It would even seem kind of romantic, yet tragic. Bull: That was a terrorist act and so they’re terrorists, and somehow that supposedly makes it different. It doesn’t make it different. It’s still a young guy who’s really frustrated and trying to find his place and the younger brother who looks up to him and thinks that’s the way to go: “I’ll follow him anywhere.” The horror of the thing was brought home to me when I was reading the news coverage of it, and I realized that younger brother, when they were getting the older brother, had been shot by the police and had to get away. Jumps in the truck and drives off and drives over his brother’s body. I would never dream of anything that horrible—it’s just heartbreaking. Rubin: The whole thing was heartbreaking. I’m still completely heartbroken. Bull: If I was an actor and I needed to have something to make myself cry on a moment’s notice I would think about it. You see it differently if you’re used to telling stories, I think. One of the jobs of the people who tell stories is to be able to say, “Look at it from over here.” Rubin: Emma, that is incredibly profound. Thank you for articulating that! It is going to stay with me. I am thinking now of how many events we would all see differently if we also had to train ourselves to approach them from a variety of perspectives. Bull: Such as, “From this perspective that doesn’t look like the war on terror, that looks like a really sad story.” You would lose an awful lot of the flagwaving and the “Hoorah, hoorah for us!” Shetterly: I wonder if the concerns about privacy are a manifestation of a shift to an obsession with safety, like the free-range kids movement, which is reacting to this sort of this hyper-protectiveness that was not a part of our generation.12 11

12

The Tsarnaev brothers, Tamerlan (1986–2013) and Dzhokhar (b. 1993), were responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, in which three people were killed and hundreds were injured. Tamerlan was killed in a shoot-out with the police, and Dzhokhar was captured shortly afterward, convicted, and sentenced to death. Free-range parenting is a practice that encourages independence in children and leaving them increasingly free of parental supervision as they grow up. Pediatrician and writer Benjamin Spock (1903–98) is credited with articulating the approach, and a 2009 book with the term in its title, Free-Range Parenting: Giving Our Kids the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry (by Lenore Skenazy) brought a great deal of attention to the approach.

302

302

Creative Activism

Bull: Yeah, the idea of a “play date.” Rubin: I don’t use that phrase. Shetterly: One of my frustrations with capitalism is that the point of capitalism is not to redirect trends but to profit from them, which often reinforces them. The only good side of that is sometimes that burns them out. We’ve exploited all that can be taken from that. How do you burn out fear of strangers? There’s a lot more money to be made from making us more afraid than from telling us that statistically we’re in pretty good shape. That’s what I think is behind the drug war. There’s this very simplistic notion of safety. Rubin: Yes, simplistic and motivated. And in order to create this obsession with safety, people have to be instructed that they are not safe. “Security theater” has internal contradiction; we won’t feel happy about it unless we don’t feel safe.13 Going from the future back into the past, Emma, what about the Western genre you dipped into with Territory? There is a fascinating range of commentary about the politics of the Western. What happens when you add in an element of the fantastic? What does it mean to change the past—even theoretically? Bull: Oh, a whole ball of wax opened up. Well, a couple of times when I was writing people were saying, “Are you sure you don’t just want to make this a straight historical novel? Because you’ve done all this research and you know all these things about Tombstone.”14 For me the fun thing that happens with fantasy is that if you’re injecting this nonfactual stuff into a historical work, it frees you up to be able to say an awful lot of absolutely honest things about history. One of the things that I loved about doing this—and would probably have loved about writing a straight Western but it would’ve annoyed the heck out of my audience—is that there are so many things that have become part of the myth of the West that are conveyed in the Western genre. I think they’re almost obligatory in the Western genre, which is one of the reasons the Western is having trouble surviving as a literary genre. Science fiction and fantasy did a great job of always reinventing themselves and reexamining themselves, saying, “What haven’t we dealt with? What ways haven’t we used to tell these stories?” 13

14

Security theater refers to a practice of adopting measures for the purpose of creating a sense of safety even though the measures do not actually increase safety. Tombstone, Arizona, has been the setting of numerous films, such as Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), Hour of the Gun (1967), and Tombstone (1993). It has also been the setting of television shows, mentioned in song lyrics, and developed a robust tourism industry with reenactments, tour guides, and so forth.

303

Metamorphosis—Emma Bull and Will Shetterly

303

I think an awful lot of the problem with the Western is that it wants to keep reproducing the effect that it has had for fifty years, rather than asking, “How do we write a really good Western for the twenty-firstcentury urban dweller?” One way is to play fair with the history and all of the myth. The history of the West is a very communal place. The society in the West was not the one strong individual doing everything for himself. My God, nobody would’ve gotten past the Mississippi if that were true! That’s the Western myth—that there’s the one strong individual and the story will always be about the one strong individual and not about the community and not about the interaction among the forces that shape that landscape. That makes me sad because there are a few Western writers who are getting it right. They get kind of lost in the background noise of, “Oh, the Western is dying.” It doesn’t have to! Dorothy Johnson, she’s fabulous—she published in the 1940s and 1950s in places like The Saturday Evening Post, and she’s the person who wrote The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which is one of the greatest Westerns of all time.15 It opens up the whole idea of what really happens behind the hero narrative. What’s the backstory on the hero narrative? Is it really what you think it is? Shetterly: One of the reasons why Dorothy Johnson wrote such atypical stories was because she lived out there. Rubin: That leads me up to something I wanted to ask you, Will—I was just thinking how young adult fiction might be the only real body of fiction I can think of that’s written so exclusively by one group of people for another group of people. Shetterly: With the exception of S. E. Hinton . . .16 Rubin: There are very few exceptions. Shetterly: Very few. Rubin: When you write for kids and “young adults,” how do you avoid being condescending? Young people are extremely sensitive about that. Bull: Yeah, they can spot that. Shetterly: They can. Okay, at a practical level I think for me it’s that you don’t write the kids’ book. It’s that you try to write about young people, which is a different thing. I think when people are writing kids’ books they’re actually

15

16

Johnson (1905–84) was best known for her Western fiction, which included children’s literature; she also wrote nonfiction. Hinton (b. 1948) is best known for The Outsiders (1967), which she wrote when she was still in high school.

304

304

Creative Activism

writing adult books because they’re writing books for parents and librarians. The kids only come afterward. The books that created the genre were written by people who were simply writing about kids. Bull: I think it’s instructive to look at Peter Pan, which is really an adult saying to kids, “You know that this is really what’s going on, right? Yeah, I thought you did.”17 It’s the book saying “Okay, the adults miss a lot but we see it, don’t we.” This is sometimes literally true. Diana Wynne Jones was a wonderful kids’ writer and just an all-around wonderful writer.18 She was at a booksigning once, and a woman and her son came up to her to have a book signed. The woman was complaining that she didn’t think that this was a kids’ book, that it seemed to have an awful lot of things in it that she didn’t understand and it was just too complicated. Her son looked at Diana Wynne Jones and said, “Don’t worry, I get it.” Diana Wynne Jones knew that that was who she was writing for. She wasn’t writing for his mother, she was writing for him. I think one of the most useful critical terms that I’ve come across in the last ten years is “agency.” One of the things that’s really great about young adult literature and mid-grades literature and all of the subcategories of literature for kids is writing about kids with agency, writing about kids who to a greater or lesser extent are in control of their destiny in that book. Because when you’re a kid, you want to be in control of, geez, something. Even if no one will let you be in control of anything at least you can read fiction in which people are in control of their lives, decisions, and actions. Rubin: You know, that is a striking insight. I want to think about it, because it might apply to any readers, but it seems quite revelatory about kids and fiction. Although I imagine there is a lot of behind-the-scenes controlling of what publishers will put in YA books. Shetterly: I had a joke that I couldn’t have on the hardcover of Elsewhere but then when the paperback got released to the mass market, they put the joke back in. Bull: The hardcover was published as a YA book by Harper Grace. Rubin: What’s the joke? Shetterly: In the bookstore there was a section labeled “Folklore, Fakelore and Fucklore” and that got cut from the kids’ version.

17

18

Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up was written by Scottish novelist J. Barrie (1860– 1937) as a play in 1904 and a novel in 1911. Jones (1934–2011) was British novelist, playwright, poet, nonfiction writer, and anthologizer who is well known for her children’s literature, particularly Howl’s Moving Castle (1986), which was made into Japanese animated movie in 2004.

305

Metamorphosis—Emma Bull and Will Shetterly

305

Rubin: Like the kids don’t know that word! When she was quite small, my daughter put forward a theory that adults don’t really think of kids as people. To test her theory, I stopped referring to kids as “kids” and made myself refer to them as “people.” I would say things along the lines of, “People that age like to . . .” and it was really hard. It proved her right, because it just felt really strange. Shetterly: Oh, the first time that I realized that I went to a small town where there was a curfew for kids. I’d never been aware of that elsewhere. Bull: I knew about that because after I learned to drive, my driver’s license ceased to be legal at curfew. That was when I was a teenager. Shetterly: It just always seemed wrong to me. Later, when people talked about different kinds of oppressions, there was never talk about youth oppression. Bull: Generally, fear mistrusts its youth. It’s like, “Oh my god, here comes a bunch of teenagers down the street. I better move to the other side.” Rubin: It seems that many people are terrified about teenagers gathering anywhere. If they occupy any public space, even if it’s just outside, people find it really alarming. Shetterly: I reread The Outsiders now because it did sort of—that was one of the oppressions that seemed to be in the mix. Bull: Yeah, it wasn’t just class that Hinton was concerned with. It was a general feeling of yeah, well, rich or poor, your concerns don’t matter because you’re just high school kids. Rubin: Speaking of youth, you both have quite moving inclusions in your writing of what you might call “chosen families.” I think that really touches me because of the way word “family” has been a sort of conservative ideological touchstone—as in “family values.” Bull: Yeah. And when you enlarge the idea of family, the idea of family values also expands. Rubin: Will, you concretize this sort of expansion of the idea of family by including a commune/squat in Elsewhere. Right now anything that is nonbiological in that way comes across as sort of radical. Shetterly: Now I’m trying to figure out where did that come from, that sense that create your family. Bull: Maybe our willingness to make communal art comes out of that, or maybe that comes out of the comfort with communal art. A lot of what I think of as my extended family came from the various artistic things that I’ve done. Musicians I’ve been in bands with—I’ve recognized that when you’re in a band with somebody, you’re also in a marriage with them. Functionally it’s a marriage relationship, with all of the things marriages take and all of the allegiances that come with it. It is a family relationship. It’s a

306

306

Creative Activism

relationship where you say, “Yeah, I am sufficiently close to that person that if they call at 3:00 in the morning and they need something I will go over to their house and I will do it.” Shetterly: One of the things that Emma and I both value highly are male/ female friendships that are not sexual. It’s kind of odd to say this given how things ended up, but it’s because for about five or six years that was our relationship. We were just artistic pals and rarely thought about each other in that way. Both of us have this reaction that what’s valuable is that the brother and sister . . . Bull: The partnership, the friendship.

307

Contextualizing Timeline 1832—Russian author Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) publishes his first successful short story collection, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. 1879—Tombstone, Arizona, is founded in then-Pima County, Arizona Territory, by prospector Ed Schieffelin (1847–97). Its history has been depicted many times in popular media, including the movies Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), Hour of the Gun (1967), and Tombstone (1993); the town boasts a robust contemporary tourism industry. 1884—Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx (1855–98) cofounds the Socialist League in England. 1890—The United Mine Workers (UMW, later UMWA) is founded in Columbus, Ohio. 1896—The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) is founded in Cincinnati, Ohio. 1896—José Rizal (b. 1861), a Filipino nationalist, is executed by the ruling Spanish Army for his relationship with the Katipunan revolutionary group. 1899—The Second Battle of Manila marks the beginning of the PhilippineAmerican War, lasting until 1902. According to the State Department’s historical division, the war “resulted in the death of over 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants. As many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, and disease.” Skirmishes would continue until 1913. 1900—The International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) is founded in New York City. 1905—The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is founded in Harlem, New York. 1906—Writer Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) publishes The Jungle. 1910—The Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art is founded.

308

308

Contextualizing Timeline

1911—Scottish novelist J.  M. Barrie (1860–1937) combines two of his plays (Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up [1904], and When Wendy Grew Up—an Afterthought [1908]) into Peter Pan and Wendy. 1912—The Russian Futurist movement begins with the literary/arts group Hyleae and the publication of their manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. 1912—The African National Congress (ANC) is formed as a black resistance movement. 1912—The West Virginia Mine Wars begin. 1921—Unionizing mine workers fight US military and private strikebreaking forces in what would be called “The Battle of Blair Mountain.” 1925—George Hay (1895–1968) starts what would become The Grand Ole Opry radio program on Nashville’s WSM radio. 1926—Betye Irene Saar is born in Los Angeles, California. 1929—Detective writer Dashiell Hammett (1884–1961) publishes his first novel, Red Harvest. 1930—Mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976) publishes her first full novel featuring the character Miss Jane Marple, The Murder at the Vicarage. 1931—Florence Reece (1900–86), wife of union organizer Sam Reece, writes “Which Side Are You On?” after being harassed by anti-union forces in her home. 1931—Kay Musical Instrument Company is founded by Henry Kay Kuhrmeyer. Known for low-priced and mid-priced folk instruments, Kay also manufactured “house branded” instruments for department stores such as Sears and Montgomery Ward. 1932—Billy Edd Wheeler is born in Whitesville, Boone County, West Virginia. 1934—Al Capp’s Lil Abner comic strip, featuring a cast of stylized “hillbillies” living in the mountain town of Dogpatch, is introduced. 1934—British author George Orwell (1903–50) publishes the essay “Down in the Mine.” 1934—The Highlander Folk School is founded in Tennessee by activists Myles Horton, Don West, and James Dombrowski as a social justice training school; it would go on to become an important nexus of activist training during the Civil Rights Movement.

309

Contextualizing Timeline

309

1934—Raúl Salinas is born in San Antonio, Texas. 1934—Under the administration of President Franklin D.  Roosevelt (1882– 1945), the passage of the National Housing Act of 1934 introduces a legal apparatus by which housing and home mortgages are made more affordable. The act introduced the practice of “redlining,” whereby loan officers would divide areas they would provide coverage to, often along racial boundaries. 1935—The Federal Theater Project and its segregated unit, The Federal Negro Theater Project, are founded through the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal arts program with Hallie Flanagan (1890–1969) serving as its first head. 1936—Playwright and lyricist Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) publishes “A Worker Reads History.” 1938—Keorapetse Kgositsile is born in Johannesburg, South Africa. 1938—The Negro Unit of the Chicago Federal Theater Project mounts the most famous play by Theodore Ward (1902–83), Big White Fog. 1938—The Dies Committee, first chaired by Congressman Martin Dies (1900– 72, D-TX), is established by House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to investigate supposed communist ties. It was in operation until 1944. 1940—Maxine Hong Kingston is born in Stockton, California, to first-generation Chinese immigrants. 1940—Woody Guthrie (1912–67) writes “This Land Is Your Land” as a response to Irving Berlin’s (1888–1989) “God Bless America.” 1942—The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an organization dedicated to fostering nonviolent civil disobedience in challenging racial segregation, is founded in Chicago, Illinois. 1942—Ama Ata Aidoo is born in Saltpond, Ghana. 1943—Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry, collected by George Korson (1899–1967), is published. 1944—Si Kahn is born in State College, Pennsylvania. 1947—Sarah Paretsky is born in Ames, Iowa. 1948—The South African apartheid era begins following the election of Daniel Francois Malan to the office of prime minister. Malan campaigned on the

310

310

Contextualizing Timeline

introduction of an institutional system of race-based oppression that would become known as “apartheid” (which translates as “apartness” or “separation”). 1949—Roz Kaveney is born in the United Kingdom. 1950—The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, an umbrella organization that brought together a range of activist groups, is founded. 1950—John Sayles is born in Schenectady, New York. 1950—Crime/detective writer Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) writes the article “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which he argues, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” 1950—Paretsky’s family relocates to Lawrence, Kansas. 1951—The Civil Rights Congress (founded in 1946) is barred from providing bail for its Communist members, severely decreasing its power. 1953—South African leftist newspaper New Age is founded with a focus on journalism, fiction, and poetry that exposed the horrors of apartheid. Having acquired the assets of the Communist-oriented Johannesburg Jewish Worker’s Club, it would be shut down in 1962 after a state-sanctioned crackdown. 1954—Emma Bull is born in Torrance, California. 1955—President Dwight Eisenhower sends military advisers to South Vietnam to aid in the training of South Vietnamese troops. The following year, after the departure of the French from the region, the US Military Assistance Adviser Group (MAAG) assumes full responsibility for South Vietnamese military training. 1955—Will Shetterly is born in Columbia, South Carolina. 1956—The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (PMLA) is formed in then-Portuguese Angola. The group was a major belligerent in the anticolonial Angolan War of Independence (1961–75). 1956—Dallas Wayne is born in Springfield, Missouri. 1957—First Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah (1909–72) declares Ghana’s autonomy from British rule. 1957—Diane Gilliam Fisher is born in Columbus, Ohio.

311

Contextualizing Timeline

311

1957—Salinas is sentenced to incarceration at Soledad State Prison outside of Soledad, California. 1958—Sarah Schulman is born in New York City. 1959—Shetterly and his family relocate to Florida, establishing a local attraction called “Dog Land.” 1959—Kahn discovers American folk music after walking into the Archive of Folk Music at the Library of Congress. 1960—Students and members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organize a series of nonviolent sit-in actions in Greensboro, North Carolina, in an effort to challenge existing segregation laws. 1960—Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is formed on the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor campus. 1960—Robert Lopez (El Vez) is born in Chula Vista, California. 1960—Abe Rybeck is born in Wheeling, West Virginia. 1960—Anthony Papa is born in New York City, New York. 1960—The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is formed through a grant by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in response to the Greensboro and Nashville sit-in actions. 1961—Kgositsile enters exile from South Africa after pressure resulting from the crackdown on New Age. 1962—Cesar Chavez (1927–93) and Delores Huerta (b. 1930)  cofound the National Farm Workers Union (later the United Farm Workers Union). 1962—Following a split with the Communist Party of the United States, the Progressive Labor Movement (later the Progressive Labor Party) is formed. 1963—During the Birmingham Campaign of the Civil Rights Movement, organized by the SCLC, images of African American protesters (including many children) being attacked by police with dogs and firehouses are transmitted across the country, opening the eyes of many to the reality of the struggle for rights in the South. 1964—Aidoo’s first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, is mounted. It would be published the next year.

312

312

Contextualizing Timeline

1964—The public burning of draft cards by twelve men in New  York City becomes one of the first visible moments of anti–Vietnam War protest. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution is passed, giving President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–73) much greater powers to directly enact and control warfare than previous presidents. 1964—Shetterly’s family attraction, “Dog Land,” is featured in National Geographic magazine. 1965—In an attempt to receive the federal minimum wage for their labor, farm workers organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the United Farm Workers begin strike, boycott, and nonviolent resistance actions against grape growers in California. 1965—While incarcerated at Folsom State Prison in Folsom, California, Eldridge Cleaver (1935–98) writes a series of articles for Ramparts magazine on his own transformation from criminal to Marxist revolutionary. These would later be edited into the book Soul on Ice (1968). 1965—The Broadside Press is established in Detroit, Michigan, by poet Dudley Randall with the mission of publishing works by African American political/ cultural allies. Authors published by the Press include Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and Sonia Sanchez. 1965—Ollie “Widow” Combs lies down in front of a bulldozer meant to stripmine her Kentucky farm. 1965—Kahn becomes active in Arkansas with SNCC. 1966—President Lyndon B.  Johnson signs the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) into law, allowing citizens to request full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased government documents. 1966—Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton cofound the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (later Black Panther Party, BPP) in Oakland, California. The BPP’s original stated goal was to protect members of their community from police violence, and it was later broadened to include organized social programs. 1966—George Jackson (1941–71) and W.  L. Nolan (1950–70) cofound the Black Guerrilla Family, a Marxist-Maoist prison organization whose goals were ending racism, allowing a dignified life in prison, and overthrowing the US government.

313

Contextualizing Timeline

313

1967—After graduating with art degrees and not being able to get their work shown in mainstream galleries, brothers Dale and Alonzo Davis found the Brockman Gallery, dedicated to exhibiting the work of African American artists. 1967—S. E. Hinton (b. 1948) publishes her first novel, The Outsiders, while still in high school. 1967—Johnny Cash and June Carter record “Jackson” for Columbia Records. The single eventually reaches number two on the Billboard Country singles chart. 1967—The “Prison Rebellion Years,” a term used to describe a series of 132 confrontations between the incarcerated and the state, begins. 1968—James Brown (1933–2006) records “Say it Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” 1968—Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah (b. 1939) publishes his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. The novel is reprinted the following year with an introduction by Aidoo. 1968—The American Indian Movement (AIM) is formed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to address Indian sovereignty and tribal issues, as well as police harassment, racism, and mistreatment by the government. 1968—John Sabraw is born in Lakenheath, England. 1968—Civil Rights leader/organizer Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68) is assassinated by James Earl Ray (1928–98) while standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Betye Saar cites this event as the beginning of her focus on political work. 1968—At a medal ceremony for the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, Mexico, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise the “black power fist,” propelling the gesture into national attention. 1968—The Studio Museum in Harlem, the first museum devoted to the work of African American artists, is founded. 1969—Riots in response to a police raid of New York City gay bar the Stonewall Inn spark what is considered to be the modern LGBTQ-rights era. 1969—Salinas first receives attention for his prison poetry after writing “A Trip through the Mind Jail,” which he dedicates to Eldridge Cleaver.

314

314

Contextualizing Timeline

1969—Kgositsile’s first book of poetry, Spirits Unchained, is published by Detroit’s Broadside Press. 1970—Paretsky begins work as an abortion and reproductive rights activist. 1970—Members of the Ohio National Guard fire on a group of antiwar protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four. The event would become the inspiration for Neil Young’s song “Ohio,” recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (1971). 1970—After five years, the boycott organized against grape growers by the United Farm Workers ends, resulting in a collective bargaining agreement between growers and workers that would affect over 10,000 workers. 1970—W. L. Nolan and two other inmates are shot dead by corrections officer Opie G. Miller at Soledad State Prison. First incarcerated in 1963 for robbery, the previous summer Nolan had circulated a petition to file a lawsuit against the prison’s superintendent, Cletus J. Fitzharris. 1970—George Jackson’s Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson is published. 1970—The National Chicano Moratorium Committee, an organization dedicated to antiwar organizing in the Mexican American community, holds an anti–Vietnam War protest in Los Angeles, drawing between 20,000 and 30,000 participants. Fighting breaks out after a group of protestors is forced into Laguna Park, resulting in 150 injuries and 4 deaths, including journalist/activist Ruben Salazar (1928–70). 1970—Salinas writes his first chapbook, Viaje/Trip. 1971—Raymond Lawrence “Boots” Riley is born in Chicago, Illinois. 1971—Abbie Hoffman (1936–89) publishes Steal This Book. 1971—Cory Doctorow is born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 1971—The “war on drugs” begins after Richard Nixon’s declaration that drug use was “Public Enemy Number One.” The “war on drugs” is marked by increased federal and state expenditure to deal with drug use/distribution and an overhaul of federal and state drug laws. 1971—Kahn writes “Aragon Mill” about a mill in Aragon, Georgia. The song is in the voice of a worker after the mill’s closing.

315

Contextualizing Timeline

315

1971—Following a botched escape from prison, George Jackson is shot dead by corrections officers. 1971—Salinas is released from Marion Federal Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, following intervention by University of Washington students. 1972—Eugene Hütz (Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikolayev-Simonov) is born in Boyarka, Ukraine. 1972—Saar’s assemblage “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” premieres. 1972—Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb publish The Hidden Injuries of Class; the book argues that within class-based social hierarchies, various groups develop self-destructive strategies for dealing with class antagonisms, the only solution being a dramatic rediscovery of human dignity. 1972—Kahn’s first organizing manual, How People Get Power:  Organizing Oppressed Communities for Action, is published. 1973—The daytime television soap opera All My Children airs the first on-screen legal abortion. 1973—A labor dispute between mine workers and the Duke Energy Company results in 180 miners going on strike. The event is the subject of Barbara Kopple’s documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and Tony Bill’s television movie Harlan County War (2000). 1973—The Roe v.  Wade decision is reached, granting women permission to pursue abortion services. 1973—Oscar Zeta Acosta writes The Revolt of the Cockroach People, a fictionalized account of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium. 1973—The Rockefeller Drug laws are put into place by New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller (1908–79). The laws introduced mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession and were, at the time of their passing, the strictest state drug laws in the nation. 1973—Stephen Henderson (1925–97) publishes Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech & Black Music as Poetic References, in which he introduces the critical phrase “massive concentration of black experiential energy.” 1973—The American Psychiatric Association (APA) declassifies homosexuality as a mental disorder following activist campaigns and public pressure.

316

316

Contextualizing Timeline

1974—Kahn records his first album, New Wood. 1974—The International Indian Treaty Council, dedicated to protecting the rights, land, and cultures of indigenous peoples from the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, is formed. 1975—South Vietnamese capital Saigon falls to North Vietnamese forces following full US troop withdrawal, marking the end of direct American participation in the conflict. 1975—Still in exile, Kgositsile returns to Africa to teach creative writing at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. 1976—Lopez and Javier Escovedo form The Zeros, a pioneering West Coast punk band, while attending Chula Vista High School in Chula Vista, California. 1976—Kingston publishes her first book, The Woman Warrior:  Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. The novel was awarded the National Book Critics Circle’s General Nonfiction Award the same year and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (given to pieces of writing that confront issues of racism and cultural diversity) for nonfiction in 1978. 1977—Aidoo publishes her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy. 1977—Leonard Peltier (b. 1944)  is convicted of two counts of murder and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life in prison for the shooting of two Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) agents during the AIM’s conflict with the FBI on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota (1975). Salinas becomes a cofounder of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee (now the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee). 1977—David Allan Coe (b. 1939) releases his seventh album, Rides Again, on Columbia Records. The album features the song “If That Ain’t Country.” 1977—Widow Combs is invited to the White House for the signing of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. 1978—The Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrows the US-backed regime of Anastasio Samoza. Salinas participates as a member of a fact-finding delegation from the International Indian Treaty Council. 1978—Prince (born Prince Rogers Nelson; 1958–2016) releases his debut album, For You, on Warner Brothers Records.

317

Contextualizing Timeline

317

1978—Tillie Olsen (1912–2007) releases her third book, Silences. 1979—Kaveney begins her process of gender transitioning. 1979—Janice Raymond (b. 1943) writes The Transsexual Empire: The Making of a She-Male, published by Beacon Press. Highly controversial, Raymond’s book argues that transsexuality is a patriarchal plot to infiltrate women’s space. 1980—Salinas’s first book of poetry, Un Trip through the Mind Jail y Otras Excursions, is published as a chapbook. 1980—Bull, Shetterly, and other writers form the Interstate Writers Workshop (IWW), known colloquially as the Scribblies (both the acronym and the nickname are humorous references to the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905). 1980—Kahn founds Grassroots Leadership in Charlotte, North Carolina, as “a resource and training center for social justice organization building.” 1980—Wheeler’s second play, Mossie and the Strippers, is written. The main character is based on the actions of Widow Combs. 1981—H.R. 3955: The Family Protection Act dies in Congress. 1982—Schulman joins the Women’s Liberation Zap Action Brigade. Zap actions had been used by LGBTQ groups throughout the 1970s to bring public attention to LGBTQ issues. 1982—Mumia Abu Jamal (b. 1954, Wesley Cook) is sentenced to death for the murder of Officer David Faulker in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, despite contradictory evidence. Jamal was a member of the Black Panther Party from a young age and worked subsequently as a journalist, eventually being elected president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. He published extensively while in prison. 1982—The William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences is founded at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The Institute “exists to address the social and health consequences of war through cultural programming, research, education, advocacy and outreach support globally.” 1982—The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington, DC.

318

318

Contextualizing Timeline

1983—Salinas opens Resistencia Books, Casa de Red Salmon Arts, a combination bookstore and community center, in Austin, Texas. 1983—Julio Salgado is born in Ensenada, Mexico. 1984—Jack Duane Dabner directs the antiabortion film The Silent Scream. 1984—Schulman publishes her first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story. 1984—Kahn and David Tobin found Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ), selfdescribed as “the only national Jewish organization solely committed to fighting the injustice of poverty in America.” Kahn served as its first board chair. 1985—Actor Rock Hudson (1925–85) is confirmed to have AIDS. He is refused entry on a Paris-bound plane from Los Angeles, instead being told to pay $250,000 to charter a private flight. He died later that year. 1985—Sayles’s fifth film, Matewan, is released. The plot focuses on the 1920 miners’ strike in Matewan, West Virginia. 1985—The United Fruit Company, a guerrilla theater company, forms out of a political affinity group of queer male activists. The name references one of the group’s first uniting issues, the US intervention in Central America, which became a popular issue among activists following the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), whose administration renewed financial and military support for right-wing authoritarian governments against democratically-elected socialist governments and revolutionary groups. 1985— After delivering a drug envelope for what would be known later was a sting operation, Papa is served with two fifteen-to-life sentences for his first offense and placed in Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. 1985—Lesbian activist Shelia Jeffreys (b. 1948) leads a campaign to ban bisexuals and lesbian practitioners of non-normative sexual acts from the London Lesbian and Gay Centre, founded the same year. 1986—Explosions in one of the reactor’s core at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, Ukraine, USSR, result in the leakage of large amounts of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere, causing 31 direct deaths and the relocation of 116,000 individuals. 1986—Postcolonial writer and theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiang’o writes Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.

319

Contextualizing Timeline

319

1986—John Porter East (1931–86, R-NC) commits suicide. 1986—Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) writes the fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle. It would be adapted into an animated film by Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki (b. 1941) in 2004. 1987—Hip-hop group Public Enemy release their debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show. 1987—Schulman and filmmaker Jim Hubbard (b. 1951) found the Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival (now the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival). 1987—AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) is founded by a group of direct-action oriented activists at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York City. 1987—Lopez curates an Elvis-themed exhibition at the La Luz de Jesus Folk Art Gallery in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. 1987—Bull publishes her first novel, War for the Oaks. 1988—Doctorow drops out of high school and briefly moves to Mexico to begin writing. 1988—Blue-collar television sitcom Roseanne premiers. 1989—Senator Jesse Helms (1921–2008, R-NC) leads a Congressional effort to restrict the content of art produced using National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants. His effort ultimately failed, despite taking away grant monies from renowned artists. 1989—Rybeck becomes founding artistic director of the Theater Offensive, a Boston-area group dedicated to presenting works by LGBTQ artists. 1989—Kaveney cofounds the UK chapter of Feminists Against Censorship in response to the resolution of the National Council for Civil Liberties condemning pornography. 1990—The First Gulf War (Persian Gulf War) begins when President George H. W. Bush (b. 1924) deploys the US military to Kuwait to expel the invading forces of Saddam Hussein (1937–2006). 1990—Schulman publishes her fourth novel, People in Trouble, noted as the first novel to portray the AIDS activist movement.

320

320

Contextualizing Timeline

1990—OutWrite ’90, the First National Lesbian and Gay Writers Conference, begins in San Francisco. It would be held regularly until 1995. 1990—Rybeck attends his first demonstration advocating for gay marriage at a cathedral in Boston’s South End. 1990—Theater Offensive mounts its first major production, Blame It on the Big Banana. The play centers on a troop of radical drag queens who travel to Nicaragua under a fictional Sandinista government. The show was mounted the same weekend that planned elections occurred in Nicaragua, resulting in a Sandinista loss after the US government gave $49.75  million in aid to their opposition. 1991—The first anthology by the science-fiction writers collective Midnight Rose Collective, Temps, is published. 1991—While working for the United Parcel Service (UPS), Riley and fellow worker E-Roc form the Coup. Their first recording, The EP, is released later that year. 1991—Aidoo cofounds, with African American poet Jayne Cortez (1934–2012), the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA). 1991—Kingston loses her home and the only copy of a manuscript titled The Fourth Book of Peace in a forest fire. 1992—Hütz’s family, after moving around following the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Disaster, settle as refugees in New York City. 1992—Schulman cofounds the Lesbian Avengers, a direct-action oriented group. 1992—Out on the Edge Festival of Queer Theater is launched. 1992—Activist and dancer Katherine Dunham (1909–2006), then aged 83, begins a hunger strike to protest the discriminatory treatment of Haitian migrants under US foreign policy. 1993—The Coup release their first album, Kill My Landlord. 1993—R v. Brown, commonly referred to as “the Spanner Case” (in which a group of gay men were tried for assault for participating in consensual sadomasochistic acts), is resolved. The court ruled that consent is not a valid defense if bodily harm is still involved.

321

Contextualizing Timeline

321

1993—A retrospective of found-object collagist Mike Kelley (1954–2012), called “Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes,” opens at the Whitney Museum, curated by Elisabeth Sussman. Papa contributes a self-portrait he had done in 1988. 1994—Rybeck starts the True Colors:  Out Youth Theater program to create collaborative art with local communities and their youth LGBTQ populations. 1994—The anti-LGBT legislation commonly known as “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” in which openly gay military service members were barred from service, is put into effect. 1994—Shetterly runs for governor of Minnesota as a candidate of the Grassroots Party, founded to support drug decriminalization efforts. 1995—At age 11, Salgado and his family migrate to the US, settling in Long Beach, California. 1996—Congress passes the Communications Decency Act, the first attempt by the government to regulate explicit materials on the internet. 1996—Papa is granted executive clemency by then-Governor George Pataki (b. 1945). 1996—Grassroots Leadership begins organizing against privatization in healthcare, child support enforcement, and welfare. 1996—Kimberlé Crenshaw edits Critical Race Theory:  Key Writings That Formed the Movement. 1996—Congress passes the “Defense of Marriage Act,” defining marriage to be between one man and one woman. 1997—Hütz forms Gogol Bordello in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. 1997—Home Box Office (HBO) premiers Oz, a dramatic program credited with raising awareness of prisoner issues. 1997—John Sayles’s film Men with Guns is released. The plot focuses on characters rediscovering and understanding the political history of their intentionally-unnamed Latin American country. 1997—The 1997 General Election in the United Kingdom sees the Labour Party under the leadership of Tony Blair (b. 1953) gain a majority after eighteen years in opposition, ushering in the birth of the “New Labour” movement.

322

322

Contextualizing Timeline

1998—Saar’s series “Workers and Warriors: The Return of Aunt Jemima” is shown at the Michael Rosenfield Gallery in New York City. 1998—Papa founds Mothers of the New  York Disappeared, a grassroots organization dedicated to fighting the Rockefeller Drug Laws. 1999—Gogol Bordello release their first studio album, Voi-La Intruder. 1999—Fisher’s first volume of poetry, a chapbook titled Recipe for Blueberry Cake, is published. 1999—Lorna Sage (1943–2001) et  al. edit the Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English. Germaine Greer (b. 1939), one of the editors and an antitrans feminist, threatens to leave the project if Kaveney is involved. 1999—The International Trans Day of Remembrance is founded by Gwendolyn Ann Smith to remember those murdered as a result of transphobia. 1999—Grassroots Leadership begins focusing all of its energies on abolishing for-profit private prisons, jails, and detention centers. 2000—The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), a nonprofit organization, is formed in New York with the goal of bringing about an end to the “war on drugs.” Papa currently serves as the organization’s manager of media and artistic relations. 2000—Former fanzine Boing Boing relaunches as a weblog. 2000—Third debate of the 2000 presidential election is held at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Ralph Nader, the Green Party’s candidate, is not allowed to participate. 2001—Barbara Ehrenreich publishes Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. 2001—Filmmaker Marjorie Chodorov directs El Rey de Rock ‘n’ Roll, a documentary film on the life and career of El Vez. 2001—The four coordinated terrorist attacks of September 11 kill 3,000, injuring an additional 6,000, and inflicting an estimated $60 loss in property damage. The attacks serve as the catalyst for the invasion of Afghanistan later that year. 2001—Salgado graduates from David Starr Jordan High School in Long Beach, California. 2001—The first iteration of what would be referred to as the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, the “Immigrant Children’s

323

Contextualizing Timeline

323

Educational Advancement and Dropout Prevention Act of 2001,” is introduced in Congress. The Act’s intention was to establish criteria by which the children of immigrants were protected from deportation. Various federal versions of this bill have been debated but never passed. 2001—Wheeler is inducted into Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. 2002—Wheeler is inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame. 2002—Schulman and Jim Hubbard cofound the ACT UP Oral History Project. 2003—Sayles’s fourteenth film, Casa De Los Babys, is released. The plot focuses on six women who travel to Mexico to adopt children. 2003—Doctorow publishes his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It would later be awarded the Locust Award for Best First Novel (2004). 2003—Bruce Schneier writes Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World; the book introduces the term “security theater” to refer to measures presented as aiming to improve security without actually taking steps to achieve that goal (armed guards at airports, random searches on public transit). 2003—The United States and its allies invade Iraq with the objective of overthrowing the Ba’athist government of Saddam Hussein. The invasion lasted from March 20 to May 1 and was followed by a military occupation. 2003—Paretsky publishes her twelfth novel, Blacklist. 2004—Papa publishes his first memoir, 15 to Life:  How I  Painted My Way to Freedom. 2004—Anti-trans writer Julie Bindel (b. 1962)  writes the article “Gender Benders, Beware” for the Guardian. 2004—Fisher’s book of poetry Kettle Bottom is published. 2004—Harvard Professor of Public Health Policy David Hemenway (b. 1945)  publishes his policy-opinion book, Private Guns, Public Health. Hemenway argues that there is a relationship between private gun ownership and an increase in public gun violence. 2004—SiriusXM launches its Outlaw Country channel (May). As of 2010 it was the only country music channel to contain explicit language. 2005—Kahn coauthors (with Elizabeth Minnich) The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy.

324

324

Contextualizing Timeline

2005—Kahn and Grassroots Leadership collaborate with JoAnn Mar on “Crime Pays: A Look at Who’s Getting Rich from the Prison Boom,” a one-hour radio documentary. It won the 2005 George Polk Award for Radio Programming. 2005—Etsy, an online craft and vintage commerce site, is founded. Fisher uses Etsy to sell quilts and form connections with other quilters. 2005—Liev Schreiber (b. 1967) directs Everything Is Illuminated, based on the novel of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer (b. 1977). The film costars Hütz. 2005—Alberto Gonzalez (b. 1955) is appointed as attorney general by President George W.  Bush, becoming the highest-ranking Hispanic American in the executive branch. He would be responsible for broadening surveillance programs and the use of “advanced interrogation techniques” (commonly acknowledged as torture) against terror suspects. 2006—Riley and former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello (b. 1964) form the rap/rock supergroup Street Sweeper Social Club. 2006—Australian activist Julian Assange (b. 1971) founds Wikileaks, an online platform dedicated to collecting, displaying, and preserving source documents related to various political issues. 2006—Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg (b. 1984) in 2004, expands its network from Ivy League college students to any individual with a valid e-mail address. 2006—Paretsky receives the British Crime Writer’s Association’s Diamond Dagger Award for Lifetime Achievement. 2006—Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, a collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry written by individuals who were affected by war in various ways (including military service members, medics, deserters, and peace activists) is published. 2006—Dallas Wayne records his thirteenth album, Big Thinkin’. The album features the song “If That’s Country,” a response to David Allan Coe’s “If That Ain’t Country.” 2006—Turk and Christy Pipkin found the nonprofit Nobelity Project with the goal of bettering the lives of children across the globe through education and other outreach programs.

325

Contextualizing Timeline

325

2007—Papa exhibits work related to the effects of the drug war at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York. 2007—Wheeler is inducted into the West Virginia Hall of Fame. 2007—The Kanawha Project at Ohio University is founded. The project’s goal is to encourage cross-disciplinary work focusing on environmental literacy and activism in the Athens, Ohio, area. 2007—Sabraw’s exhibition “Scale” debuts at the Kennedy Museum of Art in Athens, Ohio. Collaborators include NASA, the Space Science Telescope Institute, and SETI. 2007—Paretsky publishes her first memoir (and second nonfiction book), Writing in an Age of Silence. 2008—Former Chicago Police Department detective Jon Burge is arrested for obstruction of justice and perjury relating to testimony he gave regarding the mistreatment and abuse of suspects by Chicago police officials. It would be revealed that the city of Chicago essentially ran a torture warehouse during the tenures of Richard J. Daley (1902–76, mayor 1955–76) and Richard M. Daley (b. 1942, mayor 1989–2011). 2008—Street artist Shepard Fairey (b. 1970)  gains attention after designing a poster depicting then-presidential candidate Barack Obama with the word “hope” underneath. 2008—Queer artist/activist Favianna Rodriquez (b. 1978)  is named by Utne Reader as one of the “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Rodriquez is well known for a poster featuring the text, “I’m a slut. I vote. So does everyone I sleep with. And you’re about to be more fucked than I am” (2012). Salgado has collaborated with Rodriquez on his “Culture Strike” series. 2008—Salinas dies from liver disease complications in Austin, Texas. 2009—Then-Governor David Paterson (b. 1954)  signs an overhaul of the Rockefeller Drug Laws. 2009—Vogue Evolution, a queer dance troupe from New York City, competes on America’s Best Dance Crew season 4. 2009—Blogger and reality show host Lenore Skenazy writes her first book, FreeRange Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with

326

326

Contextualizing Timeline

Worry. Her approach was first articulated by pioneering public pediatrician and writer Benjamin Spock (1903–98). 2010—Salgado graduates from California State University, Long Beach, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism. 2010—British street artist Banksy (legal name unknown) directs the documentary film Exit Through the Gift Shop: A Banksy Film. 2010—Arizona passes the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (known as Arizona SB 1070), a strict and broad piece of immigration policy including provisions under which migrants were to carry their paperwork on their person at all times and police officers were to determine the status of an individual during any stop, detention, or arrest. The act has been the subject of many legal appeals and protests. 2010—Sayles’s seventeenth film, Amigo, is released; it focuses on early stages of the Philippine-American War. 2010—The adopted parents of a 7-year-old Russian boy send him back to Russia on a plane, claiming psychological issues. A 2012 ruling ordered the couple to pay $150,000 in child support. 2010—Professor Gail Dines (b. 1958)  publishes Pornland:  How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. 2010—Chely Wright (b. 1970)  comes out as a lesbian on the cover of People magazine. 2011—Occupy Wall Street begins in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, New York City. In the ensuing wave of Occupy actions sweeping across the country, Occupy Oakland organizes a general strike. 2011—The number of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras reaches 30 million in the United States and 1.85 million in the United Kingdom. 2011—The clothing company American Apparel releases an ad featuring a young, white female model holding onto the arm of a Latino male. The caption reads, “Robin, a USC student, studying public relations, with Raúl, a California farmer in Denim and Chambray.” 2011—Salgado and other activists cofound the group Culture Strike, dedicated to fostering connections, providing space and funding, and leading public

327

Contextualizing Timeline

327

campaigns for artists whose works depict issues related to undocumented and queer communities. 2011—Paretsky receives the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for lifetime achievement. 2011—Kingston’s first memoir, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, is published. 2011—Wheeler receives an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Warren Wilson College. 2011—Radical feminist journalist Laura Penny (b. 1986) writes her first book, Meat Market: Female Flesh under Capitalism. 2011—Under the governorship of Rick Perry (b. 1950, governor 2000–15, RTX), Planned Parenthood clinics begin closing across Texas after the state passes legislation eliminating funding for clinics associated with abortion providers. 2012—Kingston speaks at Joiner Center in memory of poet, short story writer, and Vietnam-era peace activist Grace Paley (1922–2007). 2012—Salgado creates illustrations for the anthology Papers:  Stories by Undocumented Youth. 2012—Salgado and other undocumented activists mount a tour of ten states on a vehicle named the “Undocubus.” Ending at that year’s Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the goals of the tour was for the participants to be open about their undocumented status, encouraging others in the community to do the same. 2012—President Obama announces the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy. 2012—Gogol Bordello licenses a new song, “Let’s Go Crazy,” to the Coca-Cola Company for use in advertisements surrounding the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) 2012 European Championship, held in Kiev, Ukraine. 2012—In Macy vs. the Dep’t of Justice, the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission ruled that intentional discrimination against a transgender individual because of their gender identity violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 2012—Journalist David France (b. 1959) directs the feature-length documentary How to Survive a Plague about the early years of the AIDS epidemic. In

328

328

Contextualizing Timeline

an interview for Vulture with E.  Alex Jung, Schulman accused the film of whitewashing LGBTQ activism in the early years of the epidemic. 2012—The Pride Youth Theater Alliance (PYTA), a national network dedicated to cultivating LGBTQ youth theater programs, is founded. The PYTA is currently housed by the Theater Offensive. 2012—Florence + The Machine cover Wheeler’s song “Jackson” (with Josh Homme) for their MTV Unplugged album for Island Records. 2012—Kaveney publishes Rituals: Rhapsody in Blood. 2012—Lawyer Catherine Brennan (b. 1971) starts her controversial, anti-trans, Gender Identity Watch blog. 2012—George Zimmerman (b. 1983)  lethally shoots 17-year-old Trayvon Martin (1995–2012) in Sanford, Florida. Following a trial where Zimmerman claimed his rights to shoot Martin rested in Florida’s “stand your ground” laws, he is acquitted of second-degree murder. 2013—Gogol Bordello member Oren Kaplan files suit against Hütz on behalf of himself and the rest of the band, alleging financial impropriety. 2013—Sabraw’s “Chroma” series begins. With sustainability in mind, the pieces in the series utilize pigments and materials that interact naturally. 2013—Media mogul, and the only black female billionaire, Oprah Winfrey (b. 1954) is denied a look at a designer handbag by a Swiss shopkeeper who tells her that the bag is “too expensive.” 2013—The US government charges Edward Snowden (b. 1983) with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 while working as a contractor for the National Security Administration (NSA); he collected and subsequently leaked classified documents related to surveillance programs. 2013—The Boston Marathon Bombing, killing three and injuring hundreds, is committed by Tamerlan Tsarnaev (1986–2013) and his brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (1993–). The resulting manhunt saw a shootout with police in Watertown, Massachusetts, where Tamerlan was killed; Dzhokhar was captured shortly thereafter and sentenced to death. 2013—Dwayne Jones, a 16-year-old, is killed by a mob at a dance in Jamaica, where he was wearing women’s clothes. The crime remains unsolved.

329

Contextualizing Timeline

329

2014—Documentary filmmaker Yaba Badoe (b. 1955) writes and directs The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo. 2014—Kahn receives the Environmental Protection Agency Alumni Environmental Safety Award. 2014—Saar is awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to American arts and culture. 2015—Ellen Brodsky releases her first feature-length documentary, The Year We Thought about Love, about the True Colors theater program. 2015—Doctorow writes “Why Is It So Hard to Convince People to Care about Privacy?” for the Guardian. 2015—Kaveney publishes the autobiographical novel Tiny Pieces of Skull. The work was originally written throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It received the Lambda Best Trans Fiction Award (2016). 2016—True Colors: Out Youth Theater program receives the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award. 2017—Principal photography is concluded for Riley’s directorial debut, Sorry to Bother You. Thanks to Andre Diehl for his work on this timeline.

330

331

Bibliography Introduction Al-Saidi, Afaf Ahmed Hasan. “Postcolonial Literature: The Concept of the Self and the Other in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians: An Analytical Approach.” Journal of Language Teaching and Research 5:1 (January 2014), 99–105. Blackmon, Douglas. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Cannon, Lou. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. New York: Public Affairs, 2000. Crawford, Margo Natalie. Black Post-blackness: The Black Arts Movement and TwentyFirst Century Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2017. European Roma Rights Center. Attacks against Roma in Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the Slovak Republic. July 15, 2012. http://www.errc.org/article/attacks-againstroma-in-hungary-the-czech-republic-and-the-slovak-republic/3042. Exit Through the Gift Show, dir. Banksy. Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2010. Flank, Larry. Voices from the 99 Percent: An Oral History of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers, 2011. Geyl, Pieter. Napoleon: For and Against, trans. Olive Renier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949. Green, James. The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015. Grice, Helena. Maxine Hong Kingston. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006. Grimes, William. “Studs Terkel, Listener to Americans, Dies at 96.” New York Times. November 1, 2008 (B1). Hari, Johann. Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Harris, Middleton, ed. The Black Book. New York: Random House, 1974. Lazarus, Neil. “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism.” The European Legacy 7:6 (2002), 771–82. Lipsitz, George. “Betye Saar’s Cages: Conjuring Freedom in an Age of Incarceration.” Cage: A New Series of Assemblages & Colleges, by Betye Saar. New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2011. Meeropol, Abe and Earl Robinson. “The House I Live In.” Performed by Paul Robeson. Ballad for Americans. New York: Vanguard Records, 2006 [1945]. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962.

332

332

Bibliography

Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso Books, 1995. Sayles, John. “In Search of the Philippine-American War Film.” Berkeley Daily Planet. August 18, 2011. http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-08-17/article/ 38277. Terkel, Studs. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. New York: The New Press, 2005 [1970]. Terkel, Studs. Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. Tertz, Abram (Andrei Sinyavsky). Lyubimov, trans. Manya Harari as The Makepeace Experiment. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1989. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945.

Section 1: Coal Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. New York: Puffin Books, 2014 [1868 & 1869]. Black, Linda. “Louisa May Alcott’s Huckleberry Finn.” Mark Twain Journal 21:2 (Summer 1982), 15–17. Brosi, George. “Versatile Is Billy Edd Wheeler.” Appalachian Heritage 36:1 (Winter 2008), 20–3. Capp, Al. The Best of L’il Abner. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Wilson, 1978. Cash, Johnny and June Carter. “Jackson,” by Billy Edd Wheeler and Jerry Leiber. Carrying on with Johnny Cash and June Carter. Columbia Records, 1967. Cordial, Paige, Ruth Riding-Malon, and Hilary Lips. “The Effects of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining on Mental Health, Well-Being, and Community Health in Central Appalachia.” Ethnopsychology 4:3 (September 2012), 201–208. Deitz, Roger. “Billy Edd Wheeler: Major Songwriting in a Miner’s Key.” SingOut! 52:4 (March/April/May 2009), 34–41. Fisher, Diane Gilliam. Kettle Bottom. Florence, MA: Perugia Press, 2004. Flatt, Lester and Earl Scruggs. “Jackson,” by Billy Edd Wheeler and Jerry Leiber. Town and Country. Columbia Records, 1965. Gambino, Megan. “Toxic Runoff Yellow and Other Paint Colors Sourced from Polluted Streams.” Smithsonian. July 25, 2013. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/sciencenature/toxic-runoff-yellow-and-other-paint-colors-sourced-from-polluted-streams17561886/. Green, Archie. Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Green, Chris, ed. Coal: A Poetry Anthology. Frankfort, KY: Blair Mountain Press, 2006. Green, James. The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015.

333

Bibliography

333

Kingston Trio. “Jackson,” by Billy Edd Wheeler and Jerry Leiber. Sunny Side! Capitol Records, 1963. Korson, George. Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943. McCrumb, Sharyn. The Songcatcher. New York: Dutton Adult, 2001. Palmer, M. A., E. S. Bernhardt, W. H. Schlesinger, K. N. Eshleman, E. Foufoula Georgiou, M. S. Hendry, A. D. Lemly, G. E. Likens, O. L. Loucks, M. E. Power, P. S. White, and P. R. Wilcock. “Mountaintop Mining Consequence.” Science 327:5962 (January 8, 2010), 148–9. Smith, Duane. Mining America: The Industry and the Environment. Boulder: The University Press of Colorado, 1994. Stevenson, Sheryl. “Postcolonial Appalachia: Bhabha, Bakhtin, and Diane Gilliam Fisher’s “Kettle Bottom.” CEA Forum 35:1 (Winter–Spring 2006). http://files.eric. ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1097327.pdf.

Section 2: War and Peace Carson, Diane and Heidi Kenaga, eds. Sayles Talk: New Perspectives on Independent Filmmaker John Sayles. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999. Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001. Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Dir. Amy Heckerling. Universal Pictures, 1982. Flashdance. Dir. Adrian Lyne. Paramount Pictures, 1983. Franklin, H. Bruce. Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Jordan, June. Who Look at Me. New York: T. Y. Crowell & Co., 1969. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage Books, 1986 [1922]. Kgositsile, Keorapetse. Introduction. Black Arts: An Anthology of Black Creations, ed. Ahmet Alhamisi and Harun Kofi Wangara. Detroit: Black Arts Publications, 1969. Kgositsile, Keorapetse, Don Mattera, and Lebogang Mashile. Beyond Words: South African Poetics. London, UK: Flipped Eye Publishing, 2009. Khoo, Poh Cheung. The Politics of War in Leslie Marmon Silko and Maxine Hong Kingston: Warriorhood and Identity in Laguna and Chinese American Literatures. National University of Singapore, 2002. Lembecke, Jerry. The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: NYU Press, 2000. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Knopf, 1993 [1970]. Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Plume/Penguin Books, 1993.

334

334

Bibliography

Morrison, Toni. Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1997. Neruda, Pablo. Residence on Earth, trans. Donald D. Walsh. New York: New Directions, 2004 [1933, 1935, 1947]. Rowell, Charles H. “‘With Bloodstains to Testify’: An Interview with Keorapetse Kgositsile.”Callaloo 2 (1978), 23. Sayles, John. “In Search of the Philippine-American War Film.” Berkeley Daily Planet. August 18, 2011. http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-08-17/article/ 38277. Smith, Gavin, ed. Sayles on Sayles. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1998. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Mariner Books, 2003 [1982].

Section 3: Borders Batman. Dir. Tim Burton. Warner Brothers, 1989. Cahn, Claude, ed. Roma Rights: Race, Justice, and Strategies for Equality. New York: International Debate Education Association, 2002. Doctorow, Cory. “Why Is It So Hard to Convince People to Care about Privacy?” October 2, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/02/ why-is-it-so-hard-to-convince-people-to-care-about-privacy. Doctorow, Cory. “Unchecked Surveillance Technology Is Leading Us toward Totalitarianism.” International Business Times. May 5, 2017. http://www.ibtimes. com/unchecked-surveillance-technology-leading-us-towards-totalitarianismopinion-2535230. Everything Is Illuminated. Dir. Liev Schreiber. Warner Brothers Independent Pictures, 2005. Exit Through the Gift Shop. Dir. Banksy. Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2010. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gogol, Nikolai. Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol (Vol. 1), ed. Leonard J. Kent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 [1831]. González, Marcial. “A Marxist Critique of Borderlands Postmodernism: Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Chicano Cultural Criticism.” Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003. Kennedy, Channing. “Undocumented Artist Gives American Apparel’s Farmer Ad a Political Twist.” Colorlines. June 1, 2012. http://www.colorlines.com/articles/ undocumented-artist-gives-american-apparels-farmer-ad-political-twist. Newton, Lina. Illegal, Alien, or Immigrant: The Politics of Immigration Reform. New York: NYU Press, 2008. Papa, Anthony. “Eugene Hütz of Gogol Bordello Featured in Animation, Globalization, by EarSay.” Huffington Post. April 9, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthonypapa/eugene-huetz-of-gogol-bor_b_1260494.html.

335

Bibliography

335

Patel, Lisa and Rocio Sanches Ares. “The Politics of Coming Out Undocumented.” Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change. New York: Routledge, 2014. Rubin, Rachel. “Call and Response: Interview with El Vez.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 16:2 (Spring 2004), 213–20. Schwab, William A. Right to Dream: Immigration Reform and America’s Future. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2013. Scott, James. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Silverman, Carol. Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Section 4: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality Aidoo, Christine Ama Ata. “Introduction.” The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, by Ayi Kwei Armah. New York: Collier Books, 1968. The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo. Dir. Yaba Badoe. Fadoa Films, 2014. Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004. Crowe, Barbara, ed. Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader. New York: NYU Press, 2000. Feldman, Douglas and Julia Wang Miller, eds. The AIDS Crisis: A Documentary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Hambly, Barbara. Knight of the Demon Queen. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 2000. HARDtalk. Interview with Ama Ata Aidoo, hosted by Zeinab Badawi. BBC. July 20, 2014. How to Survive a Plague. Dir. David France. Public Square Films, 2012. James, C. L. R. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. London: Allison & Busby, 1977. Jung, E. Alex. “Writer and Activist Sarah Schulman on The Normal Heart, Being Friends with Larry Kramer, and the Whitewashing of AIDS History.” Vulture Devouring Culture. June 1, 2014. http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/writer-sarahschulman-on-the-normal-heart-larry-kramer.html. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Curry Ltd., 1986. Rybeck, Abe. “I Am: Trans People Speak—Abe, A Trans Ally.” https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=W04ll5fpIog&t=163s. Schulman, Sarah. “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing.’ ” New York Times. November 22, 2011, A31. Sennett, Richard and Jonathan Cobb. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Knopf, 1973.

336

336

Bibliography

Thal, Ian. “Fuse Stage Interview: The Theater Offensive Brings Lenelle Möise’s Expatriate to Boston.” The Arts Fuse. September 27, 2012. http://artsfuse.org/69871/ fuse-interview-the-theater-offensive-brings-lenelle-moises-expatriate-to-boston/. United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. Dir. Jim Hubbard. 2012. Washington, Mary Helen. The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

Section 5: Economic Justice Bardacke, Frank. Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers. New York: Verso, 2012. Binelli, Mark. “ ‘Doing What’s Right, Not What’s Legal’: Boots Riley on Occupy Oakland.” Rolling Stone. January 30, 2012. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ news/doing-whats-right-not-whats-legal-boots-riley-on-occupy-oakland-20120130. The Global Intelligence Files (Wikileaks). “Re: [CT] US/CT—Occupy Oakland November 2.” https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?viewemailid=1641873. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five with Melle Mel and Duke Bootee. “The Message.” New York: Sugar Hill Records, 1982. Hemenway, David. “Risks and Benefits of a Gun in the House.” American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine 5:6 (November 2011), 502–11. Hoffman, Abbie. Steal This Book. New York: DaCapo Press, 2002 [1970]. Hughes, Langston. “Ballad of the Landlord.” Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Vintage Classics, 1995 [1940], 402. Ice Cube. War & Peace Volume 1. Los Angeles: Priority Records, 1998. Joyce, Colin. “Fox’s Interview with Boots Riley of the Coup Didn’t Go As Planned.” Spin (August 25, 2014). http://www.spin.com/2014/08/boots-riley-the-coup-foxinterview-video-cleveland-communism/. Kaplan, Laura. The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Musser, Jim. “Dallas Wayne—That’s How I Got to Springfield.” No Depression. October 31, 2000. http://nodepression.com/article/dallas-wayne-thats-how-i-got-springfield. Olson, Tillie. Silences. New York: The Feminist Press, 2003 [1978]. Paretsky, Sara. “Miss Bianca.” Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014. Porsdam, Helle. “‘Embedding Rights Within Relationships’: Gender, Law, and Sara Paretsky.” American Studies 39:3 (Fall 1998), 131–51. Reddy, Maureen T. Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 1988. Williams, Brian. Interview with Edward Snowden. NBC, May 28, 2014. The Wire. Series created by David Simon. HBO, 2002–2008.

337

Bibliography

337

Section 6: Prisons Acosta, Oscar Zeta. Revolt of the Cockroach People. San Francisco, CA: Straight Arrow Books, 1973. Adams, Frank with Myles Horton. Unearthing the Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1975. Blackmon, Douglas. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Drucker, Ernest. The Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America. New York: The New Press, 2011. Gómez, Alan Eladio. “Resisting Living Death at the Marion Federal Penitentiary, 1972.” Radical History Review 96 (Fall 2006), 58–86. Jung, Courtney. “The Politics of Indigenous Identity: Neoliberalism, Cultural Rights, and the Mexican Zapatistas.” Social Research 70:3 (Summer 2003), 433–61. Kahn, Si. Si Kahn Songbook. Milwuakee: Hal Leonard Publishing Co., 1989. Kahn, Si and Elizabeth Minnich. The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2005. Mendoza, Louis. “The Re-education of a Xixanindio: Raúl Salinas and the Poetics of Pinto Transformation.” MELUS (Spring 2003). Moore, Marat. “The Wide Reach of Si Kahn.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 18:1/2 (Spring/Fall 2012), 27–30. New York Civil Liberties Association. “The Rockefeller Drug Laws: Unjust, Irrational, and Ineffective.” 2009. Papa, Anthony (with Jennifer Wynn). 15 to Life: How I Painted My Way to Freedom. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2004. Papa, Anthony. This Side of Freedom. Charleston: Anthony Papa via CreateSpace, 2016. Price, Byron. Merchandizing Prisoners: Who Really Pays for Prison Privatization? Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006. Tuhus-Dubrow, Rebecca. “Talking with Anthony Papa.” The Nation. December 27, 2004. https://www.thenation.com/article/talking-anthony-papa/. Zaw, Khaing, Darrick Hamilton, and William Darity Jr . “Race, Wealth and Incarceration: Results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.” Race and Social Problems 8:1 (March 2016), 103–14.

Section 7: Transformations Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010. Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan, originally published as Peter and Wendy. New York: Modern Library, 2004 [1911].

338

338

Bibliography

Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: NYU Press, 2011. Bindel, Julie. “Gender Benders Beware.” The Guardian. January 30, 2004. https://www. theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/31/gender.weekend7. Brennan, Cathy. You Think I Just Don’t Understand You, But I Don’t Believe You (blog). https://bugbrennan.com/. Caulfield, Norman. NAFTA and Labor in North America. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” Atlantic Monthly (December 1944), 53–9. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989), 139–67. Dines, Gail. Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Boston: Beacon Press, 2011. Dumas, Henry. “The Puppets Have a New King.” Poetry for My People. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971, 17–22. Embser-Herbert, Melissa Sheridan. The U.S. Military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy: A Reference Handbook. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007. Hawkins, Stephanie. American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual Imagination. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Henderson, Stephen. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Music as Poetic References. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Hinton, S. E. The Outsiders. New York: Viking Press, 1967. Jones, Diana Wynne. Howl’s Moving Castle. New York: Greenwillow Book, 1986. Lipsitz, George. “Betye Saar’s Cage: Conjuring Freedom in an Age of Incarceration.” Cage: A New Series of Assemblages and Collages, by Betye Saar. New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2011. Lutz, Catherine and Jane Collins. “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic.” Visual Anthropology Review 7:1 (2008). McPhee, Michele R. Maximum Harm: The Tsarnaev Brothers, the F.B.I., and the Road to the Marathon Bombing. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge Press, 2017. Rubin, Arnold. African Accumulative Sculpture: Power and Display. New York: The Pace Gallery, 1974.

339

Index Abu-Jamal, Mumia (Wesley Cook) 244 abortion activism 201, 202–3, 204 subject matter 64, 65 n.12, 202 Ace of Base 288 Acosta, Oscar Zeta 238 Adams, Douglas 116 Adias, Joey 145 African National Congress (ANC) 7, 79, 87, 245 Aidoo, Ama Ata 4, 10, 163, 164–73 bibliography 164 on Cleopatra 170 on feminism 163 on Ghanaian history on nativism 167 professional background 164 on western imperialism 168 on women’s body images 169–70 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) 139, 150, 152, 159, 160, 161 AIDS epidemic and activism 9–10, 139, 142, 143, 146, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 160 Al-Saidi, Afaf Ahmed Hasan 10 Alcaraz, Lelo 239 Alcott, Louisa May 29 Alexander, Michelle 271 Alexander, William “Buzz” 257 Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) 222 Amazon.com 300 Ameen, Mark 152 American Apparel advertisements 123, 131–2 American Federation of Musicians 232 American Indian Movement (AIM) 238 American Psychiatric Association 159 Americana 20 Amigo 6, 57, 58, 61, 65 Amnesty International 244 n.17

Anderson, John (politician) 143 Anderson, John (singer) 211 Anderson, Maggie 52 anti-Communist blacklist 155, 155 Approaches to Poetry Writing 80 “Aragon Mill” 221, 231 Armah, Ayi Kwei 173 n.17 The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo 164 Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities 69–70 Atkins, Chet 33 “Baby Let’s Play Safe” 91 Badoe, Yada 164 Baker, David 47 “Ballad for Americans” 234 n.32 “Ballad of the Landlord” 178 Baraka, Amiri 166 Barbour, Haley 225 Barnes, Linda 204 Barrie, J. 304 n.16 Batman (1989 film) 125 Baudrillard, Jean 116 Bear, Elizabeth 299 Beat Generation 238 n.4 The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born 173 Been a Long Time 231 n.22 Bellow, Saul 203 Bengston, Billy Al 275 Bentley, Eric 198 n.11 Bentley, Joanne 198 Berea College 19, 20, 25 The Bible: Leviticus 99 The Big Chill 58 Big Thinkin’ (album) 213 n.12 “Big Thinkin’” (song) 210 Big White Fog 198 Billy Edd USA 19, 32 Bindel, Julie 281 Bitter Medicine 201, 202 “Black and White” (song) 234 n.32

340

340 Black Arts: An Anthology of Black Creations 80 The Black Book 2, 264 Black Boy 7, 82 Black Panther Party 188–9, 237, 244, 245 n.19 Black Power Movement 188, 272 n.16 Blacklist 194, 195, 197–8, 207 Blackmon, Douglas 12 Blair, Tony 282 n.12 Blame It on the Big Banana 139 Blind Lemon Jefferson 228 Bone Dance 293, 296, 300 Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) 145 Boston Marathon bombing 301 Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) 4–5, 190 “Brandy for the Damned” 283 Brecht, Bertolt 288 Brennan, Catherine 289–90 Bristol Bay 222 British Labour Party 284 British Science Fiction Association 282 Broadside Press 79 Brockman Gallery (Los Angeles) 275 Brodsky, Ellen 136 The Brother from Another Planet 57 Brown, James 8 Brust, Stephen 293, 297 n.5 Buff y the Vampire Slayer 285–6 (see also Reading the Vampire Slayer) Bull, Emma 13, 14, 293, 295–306 on Internet privacy 300 selected bibliography 295 on the “war on terror” 300–1 on the Western genre 302–3 Burge, John 200 Bush, George W. 37, 38 n.4, 196, 216, 242 n.13 Butcher, Jim 283 Cannon, Lou 9 Capp, Al 24 n.4 Carter, Jimmy 143 Carter, June 5, 28 n.9 Casa de los Babys 58, 62, 65 Cash, Johnny 5, 20, 28, 33, 34, 212 Center for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 40

Index Central American political activism 139–40, 146–7 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 178, 179 Chan, Jeffrey Paul 69 Chandler, Raymond 283 Changes: A Love Story 171 n.14, 171 n.16 Chao, Manu 98 Chaplin, Charlie 106 Chaplin, Ralph 229 n.18 Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs 12 Chavez, Cesar 14, 91, 93, 94, 95, 99, 187 Chernobyl disaster 102 Chicano movement 246 Childress, Alice 155 n.14 Chin, Frank 69 China Men 72 Christie, Agatha 203 n.27 Cirque du Soleil 145 City of Hope 62, 65 Civil Rights Movement 12, 155, 185, 226, 227, 228 n.15, 268, 269, 272 n.16, 276 The Clash 183 Cleaver, Eldridge 237 Clinton, Bill 287 closed-circuit television (CCTV) 117, 300 Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry 26 coal industry regulations 5 “Coal Tattoo” 23, 26 The Coasters 32 Coe, David Allan 212 n.6, 213 Collins, Judy 20, 31 The Color Purple 74 “The Coming of the Roads” 24, 26, 27 Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) 149 Communication Workers of America 232 Communications Decency Act (CDA) 119 communism (USA) 186–7, 199, 276 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) 185 Conroy, John 200 “Copperhead Road” 212 n.5 Corman, Roger 57 Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Hernán 284–5 Cortez, Jayne 164

341

Index Cosby, Bill 2 n.2, 264 n.3 Coulter, Ann 67 The Coup 3, 11, 177 Crawford, Margo 7 Creative Commons 113, 114 Credico, Randy 258 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 281 n.8 Crisp, Quentin 145 Critical Mass 194, 207 Crosby, Stills, and Nash 52 n.12 Cuomo, Andrew 258 n.17, 259 Cuomo, Mario 253 Dagg, Anne Innis 115 The Daily Mail (UK) 117–18 Daley, Richard M. 199 Dalkey, Kara 297 n.5 Daly, Mary 281 Darin, Bobby 5 Davis, Dale and Alonzo 275 Davis, Dorothy Salisbury 197 n.8 DeLay, Tom 242 Dead Prez 189 Dean, Pamela 297 n.5 Defense of Marriage Act 287 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) 129 Department of Homeland Security 113, 120 Deutch, Murray 33 Dies, Martin 198 n.15 Dies Committee 198 n.15 Dilemma of a Ghost 163 Dines, Gail 288 Doctorow, Cory 4, 8, 14, 113, 115–22, 300 on Disneyland 117 on school censorship 119–20 selected bibliography 114 on surveillance 118 on technology 121 on U.S. labor situation 122 Doestoevsky, Fyodyr Mikhailovich 203 Dogland 294 “don’t ask, don’t tell” 287 Dorsey, Sean 141 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom 113, 116 Dreadful Wind and Rain 46 DREAM Act 124, 128

341

DREAMers Adrift 124, 128, 129 Dresden Dolls 145 The Drifters 32 Drug Policy Alliance 250 Drug Policy Alliance 259 Du Bois, Shirley Graham 185, 198 Dumas, Henry 270 n.11 Dunham, Katherine 195 Dunye, Cheryl 156 Dworkin, Andrea 156–7 Earle, Steve 211–12 East, John Porter 159 Ehrenreich, Barbara 67 El Vez (Robert Lopez) 2, 8, 14, 91, 92, 93, 94–9 El Vez Calling 92 El Vez es el Rey de Rock ‘n’ Roll 92 on the music industry 95 selected discography 93–4 (see also Lopez, Robert) Elsewhere 293, 304 Emery, Ralph 29 environmental activism 35–6, 38, 39 “Esta Bien, Mamacita” 91 European Roma Rights Centre 8 Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, 108 n.11 “Everythang’s Corrupt” 189 n.27 “Everything Counts” (story) (see No Sweetness Here) Everything Is Illuminated 105 Exit Through the Gift Shop 8, 126 Expatriate 136 “Explosion at Winco No. 9” 45 Facebook 126, 127, 127 n.5, 143, 179–80 Fairey, Shepard 127 Falwell, Jerry 92 The Family Guy 66 Fast Times at Ridgemont High 64 Favianna (see Rodriguez, Favianna) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 196, 244 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 206 Federal Theater Project 198, 199 Feeding the Flame 137

342

342 15 to Life: How I Painted My Way to Freedom 249, 253 Feminists Against Censorship 288 Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago) 272 The Fifth Book of Peace 72 Fisher, Diane Gilliam 6, 14, 45, 47–54 academic background 52 quilting work 51, 53, 54 selected bibliography 46–7 “Five Million Ways to Kill a CEO” (song) 177 Flanagan, Hallie 198 Flashdance 66 Flatt & Scruggs 20, 28 Flatt, Lester 28 n.11 Florence and the Machine 5, 27 Ford, John Michael 285 “The Flume” 234 “For Cecil Abrahams” 80 for-profit prison system 223–5, 227 For the Win 121 The Fox in the Henhouse 225 free-range parenting 301–2 Freedom and Necessity  293 Fulks, Robbie 210, 214 Furman, Roger 2 n.2, 264 n.3 Galactic 177 Garland, Jim 228 Geertz, Clifford 96 n.7 Genocide and Juice 189 The Gentrification of the Mind 157 Geyl, Pieter 1 “Ghetto Vet” (song) 73 G.I. Ay, Ay! Blues 93 Gimbel, Norman 31, 32 Ginsberg, Allen 142, 238 n.4 Gogol Bordello 4, 8, 97, 101, 102, 103, 106 Gogol, Nikolai 101, 108 Gómez, Alan Eladio 238 Gonzalez, Alberto 242 The Good Wife (TV series) 157 Gore, Al 37 The Gospel of the Knife 294 Graciasland 92 Gramsci, Antonio 20 Grandmother Flash and the Furious Five 177–8 n.3

Index Grassroots Leadership 222, 223, 225–6, 232, 233 Grassroots Party 294 Green, James 6 Green Day 96 Green, Simon 283 Greensboro sit-ins 185 Greer, Germaine 280 Gribachev, Nikolai 195 Grice, Helena 7, 70 “Guantanamera” 62 n.7 “The Guillotine” 184 Gulf War (1991) 114 Gunning, Sarah Ogan 228, 234 Guns N’ Roses 230 Guthrie, Arlo 31 Guthrie, Woody 221 Gypsy Punks 3 “Gypsy Part of Town” 109 “gypsy” (term) 109–10 (see also Romani culture) Habell-Pallan, Michelle 91 Hambly, Barbara 15 Hamilton, Lawson 25 Hammett, Dashiell 199 Hammons, David 272–3 Hardball 200 Hari, Johann 12 Harlan County, U.S.A. 222 Harlan County War 222 Harris, Middleton A. 2 Havens, Richie 5 HBO 160–1, 178 n.6, 260 n.18 Helms, Jesse 155, 159 The Hidden Injuries of Class 150 “High Flyin’ Bird” 19, 20 Hinton, S. E. 303 Hitchens, Christopher 284 Ho, Fred 4, 240 Hoffman, Abbie 76, 182 n.16 Holcomb, Roscoe 228 Homer 76 n.12 The Honeymooners 66 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) 155 n.14, 194, 197–9 “The House I Live In” 178 n.5 How to Survive a Plague 149, 160 n.23

343

Index Hubbard, Jim 150 Huckleberry Finn 29 Hudson, Rock 151 Hughes, Langston 155 n.14, 178 Hütz, Eugene 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 101, 102, 103–11 selected discography 102 “I Am” 80 “I Hit the Road (and the Road Hit Back)” 210 “IJustWannaLayAroundAllDayInBedWit hYou” 183 I Love a Broad Margin to My Life 71 “I’m Your Biggest Fan” 209 “I Want to Get Married” 138 Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War 194 Ice Cube 73, 189–90, 191 n.30 Iceberg Slim 178 “If I Can Take a Hint” 137 “If That Ain’t Country” 213 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) 187 n.24 “Immigrant Punk” 101 immigration struggles 128–9, 187 n.24, 196 Arizona SB-1070 131 n.12 “Immigration Time” 93 international adoption controversies 63–4, 65 International Indian Treaty Council 244 International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) 196 International Workers of the World (IWW) 297 The Interpretation of Cultures 96 n.7 Interstate Writers Workshop 297–8 Iraq war 38, 243 Israeli apartheid 102, 150, 153, 190 Israel/Palestine and the Queer International 150 “Jackson” 20, 27, 28, 32, 33 Jackson, Aunt Molly 228 Jackson, George 237, 245 Jackson, Michael 98 the Janes Collective 200 n.21 Japanese internment camps in USA 196 the Jefferson Airplane 5, 20

343

Jeffreys, Sheila 280 n.4, 288, 289 “Joe Hill” 234 Johnson, Dorothy 303 Jones, Diana Wynne 304 Jordan, June 83 Joyce, James 76 n.12 J.U.F. 109 n.12 June Tabor & the Oyster Band 231 The Jungle 205 “Just a Lie” 231 Justified (TV series) 30 Kahn, Si 3, 12, 15, 221, 222, 223–36 discography 223 folk singing history 228 incarceration data 226 labor organizing 229 labor organizing manuals 222 labor songs and impact 235–6 on political music 230 prison activism 222–5 on privatization 225 on Southern radicalism 236 on working artists 232–3 Kanawha Project 39 Kaveney, Roz 4, 13, 14, 277, 278, 279–91 on anti-trans violence 290, 290 n.39 on discrimination 280, 281 and fan fiction 282, 282 n.13 on Marxism 283–4 on political evolution 286–7 on religion 284 selected bibliography 278–9 and TERFs 278, 279 transgender history 278 Kay Musical Instrument Company 21 Kazan, Elia 197 Kelley, Mike 253–4, 259 Kent State University 52 Kerouac, Jack 238 n.4 Kettle Bottom 6, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 54 Kgositsile, Keorapetse 7, 79, 80, 81–7 on music 82–3 selected bibliography 81 “Kill My Landlord” 178 King, Charlie 232 King, Martin Luther 34, 205, 266, 267, 276 Kingston, Maxine Hong 7, 14, 69, 70, 71–8 academic background 70

344

344 awards 69 n.1 selected bibliography 71 The Kingston Trio 28, 33 Kirschner, Robert 200 Knocked Up 201 Koch Brothers 205 Kruchenykh, Alexei 107 n.9 Kruger, Jens 222 Kuntsler, William 258 n.16 Kyrie 47 Labor struggles 66, 222 “Land of 7 Billion Dances” 184 Lanier, Jaron 121 “Laugh/Love/Fuck” 181 Lazarus, Neil 10 Lead Belly (Huddie William Ledbetter) 228 Lee, Peggy 31–2 Leiber, Jerry 30, 31–2, 33 Leonard, Elmore 30 Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival 150 Lesbian Avengers 9, 149–50 “Let’s Get Crazy” (song) 102 “Letter from Havana” 81 Leventhal, Harold 31 Levitt, Morris 2 n.2, 264 n.3 LGBTQ activism 135, 137, 141, 142, 144, 145, 150, 204 “anti-bullying campaign” 154, 154 n.11 discrimination against 280 sodomy laws 154 n.10 Lianna 58 the Liavek collections 298 The Liberation of Aunt Jemima 264, 276 “The Liberation of Lonzo Williams” 178 The Life of Riley 66 Limbo (1999 film) 57, 65 Lipsitz, George 13, 265 Little Brother 113, 116, 118, 119, 120, 300 Litvinenko, Alexander Valterovich (Sasha) 64 Li-Young Lee 52 London Lesbian and Gay Centre 280, 289 n.36 “Long Island Iced Tea, Neat” 184 Lopez, Robert 4, 8, 14, 91, 92 (see also El Vez)

Index “Loud and Proud” 240 Love of Shopping Is Not a Gene 115 Lumumba, Patrice 79 Lyubimov 2 MacKinnon, Catharine 156 n.17 Madonna 101 The Makepeace Experiment 2 n.2 Malcolm X 79 Maldonado, Leiomy 144 “Man in the Mirror” 98 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 303 Marcuse, Herbert 154 Martha and the Vendellas 181 n.15 Martí, José 62 Martin, Trayvon case 165–6 (see also police violence) Marx, Jenny Julia Eleanor 284 n.17 Marx, Karl 284 n.17 Matewan 6, 48 n.6, 57, 58, 65, 67 Mattea, Kathy 5, 20 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 79 McCarthy era 11, 31 n.17, 195–6, 228 n.10 McCrumb, Sharyn 30 McCutcheon, John 232 “Me and Jesus the Pimp in a ’79 Granada Last Night” 182, 183, 184 Mello, Leona 49–50 Men with Guns 59, 60 Mendoza, Louis G. 237 The Mere Future 153 “The Message” 177–8 n.3 “Mexican American Trilogy” 8, 91 “Milk” 45, 49 mining: practices 24–5, 26, 43 songs 20 struggles 6, 43, 45, 46, 47–8, 51, 67, 222 Minority Report 300 “Mississippi Summer” 231 Moïse, Lennell 136, 145 n.13 Mommy Is Coming 156 Monitor Records 19, 31, 32 Moore, Alan 293, 298 n.4 Moore, Suzanne 290 the Moral Majority 9 Morales, Ricardo Levins 232 Morello, Tom 177, 189 Morganfield, McKinley 228 Morris, William 283–4

345

Index Morrison, Toni 74 Moser, Dana 138 Moses, Ed 275 Mossie and the Strippers 20 Mothers of the New York Disappeared 258 mountain-top removal (MTR) 5, 24, 27, 67 MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Algeria) 245 Muddy Waters (see Morganfield, McKinley) Muñiz, Ángel González 46 Muskat, Tamir 109 n.12 My American History 158 “My Favorite Mutiny” 178 My Kind of Town  200 Nabokov, Vladimir 2 Nader, Ralph 37 Namibian War of Independence (see South African Border War) National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 40, 263–4 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 184, 185, 227 n.9 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 155 National Institute of Health (NIH) 161 Navratilova, Martina 204 Nelson, Willie 215 Neruda, Pablo 79, 81 Nevernever (novel) 296 The New Jim Crow 271 New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival 9 Newman, Harold 19 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America 67 Nixon, Richard 12, 250, 255 n.7 “No Milk and Honey in Baltimore” 229–30 No Sweetness Here 170 the Nobelity Project 215 Nolan, W. L. 237–8 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 287 Northland Poster Collective 232

345

Obama, Barak 97, 129 n.9, 211 Obama, Michelle 136 Occupy movement 3, 10, 11, 15, 178, 179, 184, 184 n.20, 212, 215 Occupy Wall Street 3, 15 Ochs, Phil 93 O’Connor, John 232 “Ode to the Little Brown Shack Out Back” 28 The Odyssey 76 “Ohio” 52 n.12 Ohio University 35 Ohio State University 46 Old Crow Medicine Show 211 Olsen, Tillie 200 “Oney” 212 Oppegard, Tony 23 Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA) 164 Orwell, George 285 The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s 155 n.14 Our Sister Killjoy 164–5, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172 The Outsiders (novel) 303 n.15, 305 Ovington, Mary White 185 n.21 Owens, Buck 229–30 Owens, Shane 214 n.14 Ozomatli 181 Pale Fire 2 Paley, Grace 71, 74 Palmer, Amanda 145 pan-Africanism 86 Papa, Anthony 12, 14, 249, 259, 251–60 creative block 259–60 drug experiences 251–2 incarceration background 249, 251–2, 256, 257 John Jay College art installation 255–6 and liberation theology 254, 258 Oz appearance 260 prison artwork 252–4 selected exhibitions 250–1 teaching work 257–8 “Paper Planes” 183 Papers: Stories by Undocumented Youth 124, 130 n.11

346

346 Paretsky, Sara 11, 14, 193, 195–208 on public art cuts in Kansas 208 selected bibliography 194–5 on U.S. anti-Semitism 197 Parks, Rosa 178 Passion Fish 65 Pataki, George 254 Paterson, David 256 Patriot Act (USA PATRIOT Act) 113, 196 Patterson, William 155 n.14 Paycheck, Johnny 212 n.5 Peltier, Leonard 238, 244 Penny, Laura 287 People in Trouble 9, 151 Perry, Rick 217 Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up 304 n.16 Philippine-American War 59–62 Phillips, Utah 233, 234–5 Physicians for Human Rights 200 Pick a Bigger Weapon 181 n.14 “The Pill” (song) 213 Pink Flamingos 138 n.3 Pipkin, Turk 215 “Piss on Your Grave” 191 Planned Parenthood 159, 202, 217 Planxty 231 police violence 180, 199–201 (see also Martin, Trayvon case) “The Politics of Coming Out Undocumented” 129 n.10 Presley, Elvis 5, 8, 20, 31 n.19, 91, 92, 93 Preston, John 152 Pride Youth Theater Alliance (PYTA) 136 Prince 181, 294 prison activism 222, 243 prison and slavery statistics 226 n.6 prison conditions 257 n.14 Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) 257 Progressive Labor Party (PLP) 185, 186 “Pueblo Querido” (poem) 239 Pure PolyEsther: A Biblical Burlesque 137 Putin, Vladimir 64 Rage Against the Machine 177, 189 The Ramones 96 Randall, Dudley 79 Randolph, A. Philip 227 Rat Bohemia 151

Index raúlrsalinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon Is the Pen 238 Raymond, Janice 278 Reading the Vampire Slayer 282 Reagan, Ronald 9, 97, 143, 159, 197 Red Dawn 186 Red Scare 195 n.3 Redel, Victoria 52 redlining 207 Reece, Florence 228 Reflections 283 Renzi, Maggie 4 Republican Party 159, 226 Retting, Otis 79 Return of the Secaucus 7 58 “The Reverend Mr. Black” 32 Revolt of the Cockroach People 238–9 Rhapsody of Blood 281, 283, 285, 287 Rich, Adrienne 46 Rich, John 211 Riefler, Guy 35, 36, 39 Riley, Boots 2, 3, 10, 14, 177, 178, 179, 180–91, 294 college banning of 179, 179 n.12 on communism 187, 188 on nationalist movements 190 on the police 180 school activism 187–8 screenwriting 179 selected discography 180 on social class 294 social media 179–80 songs on sex work 182 Rivera, Mario Orozco 252 Rizal, José 62 Robeson, Paul 155 n.14, 234 n.32 Robinson, Earl 234 Rockefeller, Nelson 249 Rockefeller drug laws 249, 251, 255, 256, 258–9 Rodriguez, Favianna 127–8 Roe v. Wade 159 Romani culture 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 273 n.19 (see also “gypsy”) Romney, Mitt 97, 202 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 196 n.5, 206, 207 n.35 Roosevelt, Theodore (Teddy) 61

347

Index Rose, Axl 230 n.20 Roseanne 66 Rubin, Arnold 273 Russell, Tom 213 Russian Futurism 107 n.9 Rybeck, Abe 9, 10, 135, 136, 137–48 on guerilla theater 139 (see also Theater Offensive, True Colors: OUT Youth Theater) Saar, Betye 2, 13, 14, 263m, 266–76 on African art 272, 273 and Aunt Jemima imagery 264, 267–8, 270, 271, 276 on black artists history 275 Black Power imagery 268 on indentured servitude 271 installations 269 and Laurel Canyon community 265 and Los Angeles museums 274–5 photographic references 267 n.5 religious iconography in artwork 272 selected exhibitions 264, 265–6, 268 n.7, 268 nn.8–9 Sabraw, John 6, 14, 35, 36, 37–44 academic background 37–8 activist background 37 Chroma series 41 environmental activism 35–6, 38, 39 Scale exhibition 39 selected collections 36–7 Sage, Lorna 280 Salgado, Julio 8, 14, 15, 123, 124–32 and Culture Strike 131 protest art 123–4 selected publications and exhibitions 124 Salinas, Raúl 4, 12, 14, 237, 240–7 human rights activism 244 incarceration 237, 245 on prison conditions 243 on repression of poets 244 Resistencia Bookstore 239, 241, 242 selected works 239–40 Samuel, Raphael 1 Sandinista government (Nicaragua) 140 Sapp, Jane 222 “Saturday Night” (song) 181 “Say It Loud, I’m Brown and I’m Proud” (song) 91, 99

347

Sayers, Dorothy 206–7 Sayles, John 4, 6, 14, 48 n.6, 57, 58, 59–67 selected filmography 58–9 Schulman, Sarah 9, 10, 149, 151–61 abortion activism 149, 156, 159 on gentrification 158 Palestinian activism 150, 153 selected bibliography 150–1 The Screamers 96 Scott, James 104 n.2 Scott-Heron, Gil 178 Scruggs, Earl 28 n.11 The Secret of Roan Inish 57 security theater 302 Seeger, Pete 31, 222, 228 Semple, Linda 288 n.30 “sex positive” feminism 182 Sheindlin, Judy (Judge Judy) 256 Shetterly, Will 13, 14, 293, 296–306 on capitalism 302 on identity politics 293–4 selected bibliography 295 on youth oppression 305 Shimmer 153, 154, 155 “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” 211 Silverstein, Shel 213 Silver City 57 Simone, Nina 79 The Simpsons 66 Sinatra, Nancy 5 Sinclair, Upton 205 Sinyavsky, Andrei 2 n.2 Slatefall 20 Smith, Gavin 57 Smith, Patti 96 Snowden, Edward 179 Sodexho 225 “Solidarity Forever” 229 Some Sweet Day 223 Some Time in the Sun 60 “Song of Myself ” 70 Sontag, Susan 72 The Sophie Horowitz Story 149 Sorry to Bother You 11, 184 Soul on Ice 237 n.2 South African apartheid 84–5, 171, 190, 245 n.20 South African Border War 7 n.9

348

348 Southern Christian Leadership Conference 185, 205 n.32 Space Science Telescope Institute 40 Spanner Trial (UK) 288–9 Spirits Unchained 79 Split Britches 145 Spock, Benjamin 301 n.11 “Spring at the Victory Collective Farm” 195 Springsteen, Bruce 58 Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America 149 Stafford, William Edgar 47 Steal This Album 182 n.16, 191 n.30 Stoller, Mike 30, 31–2, 33 Stonewall uprising 9, 141, 146, 285 Storey, Moorfield 185 n.21 Street Sweeper Social Club 11, 177, 183 Stross, Charles 121 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 226, 228 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 185, 221 Studio Museum in Harlem 274 Summer of Love (1967) 296 Sun Wukong 76 n.13 Sunshine State 65 Super Taranta! 104 n.3 “Suspicious Minds” 93 Sussman, Elisabeth 253, 254 Swing Mikado 198 “Take This Job and Shove It” 212 Tambo, Oliver 87 n.7 Television (punk rock group) 96 Territory 293, 302 Tertz, Abram (Andrei Sinyavsky) 2 the Theater Offensive 9, 135–6, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 146 (see also Rybeck, Abe) “They Can’t Put it Back” 25–6, 27, 34 Thiang’o, Ngũgĩ wa 165 “Think Globally, Fuck Locally” 8, 97 This Side of Freedom: Life After Clemency 249–50 Thoreau, Henry David 70 Three Dog Night 234 Ties That Bind 157

Index Tiny Pieces of Skull 281 n.10 Tomata du Plenty (David Xavier Harrigan) 96 Tombstone, Arizona: subject and film location 302 Trans-Continental Hustle 101 Trans Day of Remembrance 285 transgender activism 13, 296 n.3 The Transsexual Empire: The Making of a She-Male 278 “A Trip Through the Mind Jail” 238 Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book 70, 72, 76 n.12 Trudell, John 241, 244 True Colors: OUT Youth Theater 136, 141, 144, 146 (see also Rybeck, Abe) Trump, Donald 5, 155, 217 n.20 Tsarnaev, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar 301 Tucker, George 228 Turkel, Studs 1, 65 Tutankhamen 116 n.6 Tutu, Desmond 171 Twain, Mark 29 Ulysses 76 n.12 Un Trip Through a Mind Jail 240 “Under the Overpass” 217 UndocuQueer 124, 125 United Artists Records 33 United Farm Workers Union (UFW) 93, 94 n.2, 187 United Fruit Company (theater group) 135, 139, 146 United in Anger: A History of ACT UP 160 United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) 222 United Nations 244 USA PATRIOT Act see Patriot Act Vancouver Folk Music Festival 228, 234 Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace 70, 74 video game sweatshop 121 Vietnam War 60 n.4, 60–1, 70, 72, 73, 76, 195 and myths 74 n.9 Villa, Francisco “Pancho” 238 “Violet” 182, 183 Vogel, Paula 145

349

Index Vogue Evolution 144 “Voice of Art” (YouTube series) 127 Voigt, Ellen Bryant 47 Walker, Alice, 74 War for the Oaks 293, 295 War on Drugs 249, 250, 255, 256, 258 n.16, 259, 302 Ward, Theodore 198 Warren Wilson College 20, 22, 47 Washington, Mary Helen 155 n.14 Washington University 37 Waters, John 137, 138, 156, 289 Wayne, Dallas 4, 11, 14, 209, 211–17 on Finnish health care 216 on guns 214 key songs 209 n.1, 210 n.2 selected discography 210–11 Special Consensus 210 wordplay in lyrics 210 “Wear Clean Draws” 191 The Weavers 31 Wells Fargo prison profiteering 12 n.12, 124 We’re Still Here 233 West Virginia Mine Wars (1912–1921) 6, 47, 48 n.6 (see also mining) “What History Means to Me” 46 What’s Up, Doc? 156 Wheeler, Billy Edd 4, 5, 14, 15, 19–34 accolades 20 discography 21 humor books 19 mining background 22–24 plays 20 “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” 120 “Where I’m Coming From” 214 Whitman, Walt 70, 142

349

Whitney Museum of American Art 253, 254, 259 Who Look at Me 83 n.5 Wick Poetry Program 52 Widow Combs 20 WikiLeaks 178, 179 Wildner, Eleanor 50 Wilkins, Roy 227 The William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences 71, 72 William Moses Kuntsler Fund for Racial Justice 258 Winfrey, Oprah 168 Winter’s Bone 207 The Wire 178 The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts 69, 70, 72, 74, 77 “Wonderlust King” 101, 104 Woodrell, Daniel 207 n.39 Workers and Warriors 270 Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do 65 The World Bank 121 n.14 World War II 70, 72, 77 Wrede, Patricia 293, 297 n.5 Wright, Chely 215 Wright, Richard 82 The Year We Thought About Love 136 “You Ain’t Nothing but a Chihuahua” 92 Young, Neil 5, 20, 52 n.12 Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Zapatistas) 243, 246 the Zeros 91, 96

350