Read & Riot
Page 19
Vera, from the shop floor next door, comes to visit Nina. Vera is young and feminine. She has thick, long brown hair, girlish manners, a slim figure, and D-cup breasts. Vera sits down with a plastic cup of coffee and gazes at Nina for hours. Vera will later tell me she has not actually fallen in love with anyone during her six years in the colony, but this is not true.
Nina doesn’t like dainty girls like Vera. She likes the kind of girls you can get into trouble with. Nina sometimes has fast and furious sex with Liza, a seasoned prisoner from another shop floor. Liza has curly blond hair burned to red, a gruff voice, and one of the most brazen gazes in the colony. When rumors of these encounters reach Nina’s steady girlfriend, Katya, the head prisoner of my residential unit, there is an explosion. Dishes, benches, and flowerpots go flying.
* * *
I have been summoned to the prison colony’s security department.
“You got magazines in the mail, but I am not handing them over.”
“Why not?”
“They promote homosexualism,” the female security officer snaps. She scratches the word “faggots” on the rainbow-colored cover of my magazine. “Tolokonnikova, are you aware that not only the theory but also the practice of homosexualism has been banned in the colony?”
That’s how it all ended. For having a connection with me, Nina was placed in a solitary confinement cell for two weeks. When she got out of there, we did not speak anymore.
The dialectic of theory and practice.
Heroes
bell hooks
bell hooks is the godmother of postcolonial feminism. She started her first book at nineteen when studying at Stanford on a scholarship from her segregated Kentucky hometown. She has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Yale; Oberlin; and the City College of New York and has written more than twenty books.
A pioneer of intersectional feminism, she started to use this term in the 1980s, a long time before it became popular. In 1984, she dropped a bomb, a book named feminist theory: from margin to center, in 1989 another: talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. bell hooks is one of the first to point out that the focus of feminism should not be sex only, but rather the intersectionality of race, economics, and gender.
In feminism is for everybody (2000) she writes, “Imagine living in a world where we can all be who we are, a world of peace and possibility. Feminist revolution alone will not create such a world; we need to end racism, class elitism, imperialism.” In her 1985 feminist theory she writes, “Most women active in feminist movement do not have radical political perspectives and are unwilling to face these realities, especially when they, as individuals, gain economic self-sufficiency within the existing structure.”
I always thought that to be a decent artist you should master the fine art of giving a name. Eloquent, precise, it should have the potential to become commonplace without being commonplace. By giving names you learn about economy of words.
hooks was born Gloria Watkins, and her pseudonym is a tribute to her great-grandmother. She decided not to capitalize her name because she wanted to focus on her work rather than her name, on her ideas rather than her personality. hooks’s name is a perfect representation of her writings: nonhierarchical, poetic, and explosive. Inclusiveness wins over elitism; all letters are equal.
* * *
Look at the titles of hooks’s books. Aren’t they perfect poetry?
ain’t I a woman? black women and feminism (1981)
breaking bread: insurgent black intellectual life (1991, cowritten with brother Cornel West)
feminism is for everybody: passionate politics (2000)
where we stand: class matters (2001)
we real cool: black men and masculinity (2004)
soul sister: women, friendship, and fulfillment (2007)
* * *
In 2000 hooks released all about love: new visions, and it’s fucking striking. It somehow manages to combine class analysis, anthemic calls for solidarity and compassion, psychotherapy, postcolonial feminism, the high pleasure of serving others, and cries for sister- and brotherhood. Praise of communal spirit goes hand in hand with longing for individual freedoms.
Love is love without sexual interest. hooks uses psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s definition of love from his book The Road Less Traveled (1978). Aware his definition might be inadequate, Peck says love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
The personal is political, so hooks effortlessly jumps from questions of sexual pleasure to analyzing the mechanism of radical political change. Indeed, there are no successful mass people’s movements without sincere, dangerous commitment to loving those around you and, thereby, a readiness to sacrifice yourself for their sakes. Remember how Nina Simone eulogized Martin Luther King Jr. in her song on his death? “King of love is dead,” she says.
THE CLOSING STATEMENT
HOPE COMES FROM THE HOPELESS
At this stage of History, either one of two things is possible: either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others; or, alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control.
NOAM CHOMSKY, MANUFACTURING CONSENT
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
URSULA K. LE GUIN, THE DISPOSSESSED
The stakes are as high as they could be. We may destroy ourselves and destroy the planet. So we need thinking that goes beyond existing boundaries. We need to question the status quo. We need political imagination.
You can’t know the answer before you ask the question. And we should make a collective effort to find the answer. As a matter of fact, nobody can expect to have full knowledge about anything when you enter the international waters of piracy. There can’t be unchangeable sets of rules when you’re entering the unknown. What there should be is an active and alive mind, a heart that’s in the right place, and good intentions.
I made a vow to be open and understanding even to those who condemn me, I promised myself to always give the benefit of the doubt before judging. I don’t judge quickly because I know from experience what it means to be a witch who has to be burned at the stake. I know how it feels when you’re used as a scapegoat. It’s scary. There is no dialogue when you’re an outcast. You’re dispossessed of your right to talk, to think, to have joy or pain . . . to live. You’re dehumanized, you’re portrayed as an enemy, you’re an object among other objects.
I choose to be the Idiot, Dostoevsky’s character, who promised himself that no matter what the circumstances he’d remain open, sympathetic, kind to people around him. We’re all searching, always asking, and we can never be perfect, we climb and we fall, we’re going through pain and sometimes causing pain too. I may say, write, or do stupid things, not knowing that it can hurt somebody. And I am sorry for that.
It’s okay with me if I sound childish. I prefer to try, to risk, and to burn. I choose to live like a kid; kids are not afraid to admit that they don’t know some things, and they have endless curiosity and willingness to learn. When my daughter does something that hurts me, she comes to me and says, “Give me a hug.”
Many of those who wanted to beat me or destroy me really just needed a hug. I faced a mercenary who was hired by my government to physically hurt me, and he did burn my eyes. I stood in front of him and kindly asked, “Why did you choose to do that? It’s painful. It hurts. You hurt my eyes. Why?” And then I saw a human behind his eyes, but he was confused and did not have any coherent, human answer to the question.
All human beings want to believe they have dignity. If you answer dehumanization with more dehumanization, it’ll be easy for your opponent to ignore your words and feelings, stigmatize you, put you in prison, take your life away.
It’s physically painful to
see the hurricane of hatred, lies, and hypocrisy that is politics right now. It’s normalized to deceive, to be insincere and nontransparent. As long as you’re not caught, it’s fine. And more often, they don’t care if they are caught.
I’m tired of doublethink. They’re petty liars, all those people who sit in the White House and quote the Bible but never follow Christian virtues of not judging, of simplicity and honesty.
We’re tired of lies. Truth really does have some kind of ontological, existential superiority. That’s why so many people support Bernie Sanders, who is making a moral political revolution by simply being a politician who refused to sell his dignity, whose deeds follow his words and who indeed serves the people, not corporations, friends, and his own pocket. He does what a politician should do. Isn’t it pathological that a politician who’s honestly and consistently doing his/her work is an exception?
We need a miracle to get out of here. And miracles are real; they have happened to me before. Unconditional love, for example, or solidarity, or courageous collective action. Miracles always happen at the right moment in the lives of those with a childlike faith in the triumph of truth over falsehood, of those who believe in mutual aid and live in keeping with the gift economy. You cannot buy the revolution, you can only be the revolution.
Any corrupted power structure is built on lies. To quote Václav Havel, “It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie.” It’s a choice that has to be made: do not live within the lie.
* * *
I’d like to leave you with some things that I may (or may not) have learned from doing political artistic actions.
I have learned: A combination of Zen, willpower, calmness, and persistence.
Martial artists know everything about the power of this elixir. When you’re fighting, you don’t want to be trapped by fear or rage, hiding and escaping instead of calmly playing chess in the ring. You want to win with your wits.
I have learned: To feel good about others being mad at me.
You can hardly imagine how many people I irritate. Overall, it’s a good sign for a (wo)man of political action when they call you a criminal or an outcast.
It’s not just opponents who’ll be mad at you. When you knock on doors and ask people to participate, some of them will tell you to go fuck yourself. That’s fine. So go fuck yourself—it helps to relax and to get your thoughts together and keep going.
I have learned: To be grateful, to throw out those greedy expectations about life and people around me.
Working with volunteers helps to develop an extremely useful attitude: don’t expect that anybody has to do a favor for you or your cause. But if they do, you’re genuinely happy. I’m amazed and thankful every single time somebody decides to help with the cause I’m working on. It means that they trust me and get inspiration from working with me. In itself, it’s the biggest reward you can get. Sometimes you lose a battle, or an action that you’ve been preparing for weeks is stopped, prevented by police listening to your phones. Under those circumstances it’s hard not to be angry or frustrated. But, hey, you met so many incredible generous and loving humans while you were working on the action.
I have learned: To give myself fully to the action I do.
Those who own the power and who use this power to screw us up are watching us: they’re not going to give us even an inch if we don’t show persistence.
I have learned: I’m not ashamed of who I am.
If I seriously cared what everybody thinks about me, I would have accomplished nothing. Today, you’ll be called a horny piece of hysterical vagina. Tomorrow, they’ll devote to you a glossy ten-pound magazine, where they say, “She dealt with body and sexuality issues.” And then you will know that both things are equally dull.
I was told: don’t march in the rally under feminist banners—you’ll be hated for that, because our country is not ready to understand feminism, Russians think feminists are angry ladies who have not been fucked for years and want to kill all men, blah, blah, blah. They said to Bernie Sanders: don’t call yourself a socialist, rural America is allergic to this word. But still, after generations of Cold War propaganda against commies, Americans were about to vote for a socialist. You keep doing what you do, and you let the world change its opinion of you.
If you are not proud of who you are, nobody will be.
I have learned: I’m not trapped in thinking nobody cares about what I do.
Get rid of the messiah complex. You cannot solve the world’s problems alone. If you think so, you are Trump. Your activist effort is a unique and important part of a global chain reaction and, ergo, it has to be done. Or: think globally, act locally.
I have learned: To reject political gaslighting.
Experts, economics magazines, think tanks, Ivy League colleges, parliamentarians, Putin—they all politically gaslight us, try to manipulate our thinking and persuade us we are wrong. They say that everything is fine and we’re creating problems out of nothing. They want you to feel that you’re not educated, you’re not aware enough to have an opinion and act on it. Who knows the quality of people’s lives better than the people themselves?
I have learned: To be dumb.
Like Bernie Sanders says, if I were not dumb, I would have stopped my political activity a long time ago. Because “there is no point, you will never change it,” as they say. But I’m dumb, so I act.
* * *
All rules, including those on these pages, may be (and possibly should be) thrown away. These rules should be treated as just another Pussy Riot punk prayer, which I have performed to open myself up to a miracle, a (failed) attempt at being a revolution. A rigid interpretation of any rule or advice kills the spirit of freedom, and it’s the last thing that should happen.
I believe we should follow what Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote at the end of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
6.54. My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
Wittgenstein conceded that his own propositions are at some level incorrect, but they could still be useful. I would endorse this idea about any set of rules.
No matter how you perform your acts of civil disobedience—rallying, occupying, painting, making music, or stealing and freeing animals from the zoo—go do it, tear the fabric of submission to pieces.
And know this: if everyone who tweeted against Trump showed up on the street and refused to leave until he left, Trump would be out of office in a week. The powerless do have power.
Answer for “Find three slogans that don’t belong to Paris 1968”:
Your body is a battleground, Barbara Kruger
I shop therefore I am, Barbara Kruger
Music is my hot hot sex, CSS
AFTERWORD BY KIM GORDON
We are lucky to know you, Nadya. We should bond with you in order to absorb through osmosis your experience living with a greedy, power-hungry, authoritarian, narcissist type. Show us the lessons you have learned growing up in your oppressive political climate so that we may learn how to deal with ours, which every day becomes scarier and more challenging in its potential. As you describe in the book, there is a mirroring effect between our two nationalistic cultures. Trump wants to be Putin. Putin wants to be more Putinesque. Your book is a combination Girl Scout (this organization we have here in America to breed nationalism and crafts, but also DIY) and how-to manual on revolutionary actions. It is serious but has the playful feel of a Mission: Impossible show, where the mission is heard on a tape recorder. The voice says, “Should you choose to accept this mission . . . This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.” As you say at the end of the book, essentially, don’t follow my rules—they are a way in or a way out. The action is not an absolute; it is a beginning forwa
rd. And you quote Wittgenstein:
6.54. My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
Everyone is looking for the next cultural revolution. Hand in hand with situationalism came punk, but one was born of hippie culture, the other anti-hippie. People are always looking to music for this—music of the ’60s, punk, Nirvana (from the underbelly of indie)—but only if it is taken up as a populist motion. Noise and experimental fringe music, which are truly about freedom of expression, are not ever going to be mainstream—or are they? It becomes a problem of art for art’s sake, or is it an action against programmed songwriting? The point of your book seems like, Stop waiting for something and make it happen. Stop romanticizing about the past—it’s in the action, no matter how awkward it is. Like sex, it sometimes feels awkward, but only if you think about it that way.
AFTERWORD BY OLIVIA WILDE
When I was asked to play Julia in the stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, I struggled with how to flesh out a character who had always seemed to me a frivolous floozy without any real commitment to revolution. She wanted to fuck, drink coffee, and eat chocolate all the time, which I naively misunderstood to mean she wasn’t as brave as Orwell’s tragically self-sacrificial Winston. Of course, once I dived deeper into the material and appreciated the depth of Julia’s rebellion, I realized how wrong I was. I also realized who would be my main inspiration for my performance: Nadya Tolokonnikova. Just like that, Julia cracked open for me like an egg.