Up Against the Wall Motherf**er

by Osha Neumann

  In the Third World, those who are exploited as producers are courted as consumers. Luxurious commodities are advertised on crumbling walls where donkeys drowse and pigs root for rubbish. The West sucks product from the Third World and sends back addicting images of an unobtainable lifestyle. One form that resistance takes to this flood of colonizing images is fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is born of disgust with what passes in the West as progressive, modern, and rational.i We, the privileged drop-outs in the West, had our own critique of what passes for reason and progress. But while fundamentalists in the Third World extol a return to traditional values, we had nothing to which we wanted to return. We were inventing a new way of being, incommensurate in every way with the lives our parents led. Our revolution would be a spontaneous outburst without precedent, expressed in a language that mobilized the imagination towards the goal of an utter and complete renewal of the world.

  We tried to build an ersatz counter-culture on the spot—with mixed results. Though we rejected the authority of the past, we searched the pre-industrial world for models on which to base our post-industrial lives. We were a tribe, a clan, a band of nomads. We were Indian mystics, Tantric monks, or Mexican brujos. We were moving resolutely back to the future.

  With drugs we went spelunking into the branching caves of our unconsciousness and rocketing out into infinite space. We dissolved into a shower of atoms. We merged with fish and birds and clouds and folds of fabric. I first took acid at Bryn Athen, an organic farm in Vermont run by folks who were friends with some of the Motherfuckers. I sat down in the grass of a pasture with Yeshi. As the acid came on I saw the hills begin to move like the backs of dinosaurs. Later we fucked and my body exploded into incandescent particles of pleasure. Afterwards, as we lay together on an open sleeping platform, I worried that the people walking by in the distance were a disapproving posse of “Vermont Freudians.” Not everyone’s trip was so benign. During a riot on St. Marks Place, a kid running from the police in a demonstration told me he saw his body riddled with bullets and his blood running onto the pavement. And within a fortnight of Angry Arts week, a young boy newly arrived on the Lower East Side, went up onto the roof, saw wings sprouting from his shoulder blades, and jumped to his death on the sidewalk.

  The Motherfuckers fought with the police and experimented with LSD, attempting by any means necessary to break through old habits of obedience and perception. Common sense was a facade. Nothing common made sense. I felt we were immersed in unreality like a fetus in its amniotic sack. We needed to break through that sack to be born again out of the “belly of the beast.” We were the children of that beast turning on our mother—destroying her, ripping her apart in the process of our birth. We were fucking her from inside out. One current of the counter-culture was about blissed-out being. But the Motherfuckers seemed to be about penetration, the penetration of the prisoner through the wall of his cell, the penetration of the birthing infant through the vagina, the penetration of the rapist, angry and violent. Revolution as sex crime.

  Revolution as sex crime? What madness.

  Three times, while the first and second Intifadas were raging, I traveled to Palestine. Each time Palestinian doctors led us through hospital wards, where silent mothers sat by the bedside of their children. We would stop first at one bed, then another. The doctors would hold back the sheets so we could see the wounds. They would ask those children who were awake and not in too much pain to explain what had happened to them. I remember a twelve-year-old boy telling us how the Israeli soldiers methodically broke all his limbs, first his arms, then his legs.

  On my first trip to Gaza, our delegation met with doctors who drove us to the Jabaliya refugee camp. They guided us through narrow alleys, twisting between bare concrete walls that led to a succession of small courtyards. From the courtyards, doorways opened onto a succession of rooms. The rooms were dark and smelled of blood. In each of the rooms that we visited we met people who showed us their wounds. In one room we met six Palestinian women lying on mats. They had all been beaten. Defying taboos they began to undo their black embroidered dresses. They showed us their arms, blue with bruises. In another room a woman showed us a dark bloodstain on the wall where Israeli soldiers had shot her husband as he sat next to her on the couch.

  How could I tell the children in the hospital, the women in Gaza, or the exhausted Palestinian doctors who so patiently answered all our questions that I had been a Motherfucker? Or that violence was a means of getting in touch with reality?

  In the Third World, and in the ghettos of the First, the colonial power that attacks the family also attacks the body politic. It sets itself up as the illegitimate head of household. It is the enemy of the motherland and of the mother. The revolutionary in the Third World fights for the right to grow up, to come to full manhood or womanhood, to be respected, to parent the next generation, to inherit the home.

  In Central and South America, revolutionaries love their mothers. I traveled to Nicaragua while the Sandinistas were in power. I saw posters showing a revolutionary fighter embracing his mother and urging respect for the mothers of the revolution. The Mothers of the Disappeared and the Mothers of Revolutionary Martyrs are given the highest place in the revolutionary pantheon. I imagine that guerrillas hiding in safe houses, or clinging to the sides of volcanoes, long for their mothers and their deepest wish is to give them a better life, to protect them, and keep them from harm’s way.

  Central American revolutionaries defend the mother. They are strengthened by her love, and saved by it from guilt at defying the paternal authority of the dictator. I was angry at my mother. I could not invoke her love in my struggle with the system. In struggling against the system I renewed my struggle against her. I rebelled against her and longed for her maternal embrace.

  I have heard it said that the phrase, “The personal is political,” first gained currency in the women’s movement of the early Seventies. But under a banner emblazoned with that slogan, we Motherfuckers whipped ourselves toward ever more encompassing commitment. We strove to break down the barriers between our personal and political life, with the paradoxical effect that the personal was made visible at the same time that it tended to disappear into the politics. I don’t think I was the only one aware that the emotions we poured into our politics were derived, in part from our personal histories. We were driven as much by private need as by moral imperative. But we did not care to dwell on that distinction for fear of creating a separation that would leave our politics without the fuel of passion, and our personal lives without the possibility of redemption.

  The Motherfuckers were not unique in striving to obliterate the line between the personal and the political. In many parts of the movement, activists exposed the most intimate details of their daily life to criticism and correction. Old living arrangements were obstacles to the revolution. We experimented with new ones. We formed communes and lived collectively. We conducted campaigns to smash monogamy, couplism, heterosexism, and the nuclear family. We permitted a totalitarian intrusion of the “movement” into personal life. We condemned privacy. Everything was open to public scrutiny and comment—from the way we brushed our teeth to the way we fucked.

  But in all of this examination of personal life, secrets were kept. And in those secret places contradictions festered. Proclaiming that it was time to give ourselves unreservedly to the roaring flood of revolution, we hid the anchors that bound us to the past. Proclaiming that we were prepared to collectivize all our possessions, we who came from the middle class concealed from our working class brothers and sisters the trust funds and inheritances we knew would come our way. We fooled ourselves as much as we fooled the enemy. We planted private gardens. And when our secrets became too many and the hold of ideology waned, we quietly left the movement to resume work on deferred personal agendas.

  In the Sixties we tended to call the institutionalized power we were fighting, together with the ideological and cultural baggage that went along with it, “Th
e System.”26 We thought of it as a monolith. In the intervening years “The System” has become, if anything, more monolithic while our movements of opposition have disintegrated, and seem to have lost the thread of common purpose. I have learned to celebrate diversity—and am glad for it—but have more difficulty finding the basis for unity. The possibility of a shared truth has been called into question. Reason is too closely associated with dead white men to be considered a reliable guide in matters of the heart—or politics. I and many others have soldiered on, but for many years we have not been moist with hope. We inhabit a dry arroyo with the name of a terrible woman: “TINA—There Is No Alternative.” We shout into the emptiness, “A Better World is Possible” and wait for an answering echo.

  “What’s left?” I’ve wondered. What’s left of the left?” In my worst moments, it seems only shards and fragments.

  For me and many of my comrades transitions have not been easy. When the Sixties ended somewhere in the early Seventies we entered a period of lost momentum. We left a period of revolutionary enthusiasm, no matter how misguided it may have been at times, and entered into an extended doldrums, a lull between the storms. Our vision clouded, our flock dispersed. I’m still called an activist, although I don’t much like the term. What sort of “activity” do activists do? We do not call a violinist an “activist” though her fingers hold the bow and move “actively” up and down the neck of her instrument.

  For the activist all causes are interchangeable. Racism, environmental destruction, imperialist wars, sexist advertising, each is proxy for all the others. “Flower in the crannied wall,” mused Tennyson, “if I could understand / what you are, root and all, and all in all, / I should know what God and man is.”27 For the activist, each cause is a flower in a crannied wall that unfolds into a universe within which it is linked to all others.

  There is always a tension between politics’ collective thrust and the irreducible aloneness in which we inhabit our subjectivity. We all carry truths that do not fit in, that undermine our commitment, that contradict our professed beliefs. We carry them as symptom and obsession and secret anxiety. In times of uncertain direction and muted resistance, powerful currents of opposition are not available to pull us from our isolation.

  Stranded on the shore by the receding tide of revolution, many of us survivors of the Sixties left “the movement”—or felt that the movement had left us—and returned to career paths we had abandoned in our inflamed enthusiasm for the struggle. What use was a career if we were destined to die on the barricades? Many of the children of the middle class went back to school, obtained degrees, and entered professions. Meanwhile the movement splintered into many movements: liberation movements of women, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, and the disabled; movements to oppose the use of nuclear power and the development of nuclear weapons; movements to protect the environment; movements to support guerrilla struggles in Central and Latin America; and each time the United States went to war, a movement to stop that war. While the movement splintered, the system we opposed did not. The Soviet Union collapsed. For all its faults, it had represented an antipode to global capitalism. Control of all aspects of human life on this planet fell increasingly into the hands of one superpower and the multinational corporations whose interests it faithfully serves and defends. Not until the series of demonstrations against the institutions of consolidated global capitalism that began in November 1999 in Seattle, did I feel that there was again a movement that could become the shared expression of our collective dream of liberation. And then came 9/11. We’d rallied outsides the citadels of capitalism. Mohammad Atta and his crew, with their volatile mix of fundamentalism and jet fuel, blew them up. The twin towers crumbled into dust, and I knew our job had been made more difficult.

  For the Motherfuckers and huge sections of the movement it was not enough to join hands, sway back and forth, and sing with half shut eyes: “We shall overcome someday.” Our slogan was “Freedom Now!” Freedom could not to be deferred. “Now” meant right now. The experience of freedom needed to be part of the struggle for freedom. A movement for freedom which modeled what it meant to be free would grow by shining example.

  The key tactic for incorporating the experience of freedom into the struggle for liberation was civil disobedience. When we disobeyed the authority of the state, there came briefly into existence a space we experienced as a zone of genuine freedom. In everyday life the forces of repression are omnipresent but generally invisible and unfelt. Violence is held in suspension like droplets of water in a cloud. Civil disobedience precipitated those forces out of suspension. They arrayed themselves against us, and in so doing assumed a definite shape and occupied a definable space. Once that space was defined, we could take our stand outside it. Where we took our stand—be it at the segregated lunch counter, the doorway of the army recruiting center, or the corner of St. Marks Place and 2nd Avenue—was liberated territory.

  Many of us felt for the first time what it meant to be free, at precisely the moment that our freedom was taken way from us. In jail, locked behind bars, we felt vulnerable and at peace. Singing freedom songs as the handcuffs were placed on our wrist, we felt joy and fear together. Torn from family and friends, we felt community. We had chosen life and it surged through us in the face of death and danger. We felt real. The moment had an undeniable self-evident rightness. The experience was addictive.

  The power of these experiences sustained the civil rights movement and inspired the antiwar movement. They were a gift we cherished. But they were a deceptively simple gift. A movement could not offer people such moments without a means for fulfilling their promise. Once the genie was out of the bag, we did not want to put her back. People could not be convinced to settle for less. The thirst for liberation gave energy but undermined form. Few structures and organizations have survived from the Sixties. We never developed a strategy, a political culture or an organization that could preserve the promise of those moments. Liberation requires, as Antonio Gramsci wrote in his Prison Diaries, a “long march through the institutions.” The movement will have to defer some promises while retaining its intransigent core. Such a movement can not be built overnight. We have yet to create a movement that can preserve the molten promise of freedom while tempering it so that it becomes hard and durable. We do not yet have a movement that can bridge the gap, a gap perhaps of generations, between the foretaste of freedom and its realization. We can not simultaneously shout “freedom now” and “freedom not quite yet.”

  The white counter-culture of the Sixties, with the anti-war movement at its political core, drew converts by the promise that within it one could experience what it meant to be free. The movement was a liberated zone. Liberation meant liberation from the stultifying restrictions of bourgeois life, from parents and surrogate parents. It meant sexual freedom. It meant we could slough off our old identities as a snake sloughs its skin. We could grow our hair long; throw away our button down collars and pantyhose; dress, not for success, but for revolution; and choose a new name, a nom de guerre. Our images of personal transformation came from a variety of sources. The Southern Civil Rights movement was one. The guerrilla movements of Latin America were another. Che and Fidel left the comforts of home and took to the mountains. When they came down out of the mountains, bearded, cigar smoking, dressed in green fatigues, they looked different and they had been changed—changed utterly. A “new man” had been forged and tempered in battle.

  In strange amalgam, the image of the revolutionary transformed by the revolution fused with acid fueled visions in which all things melted and morphed, all permanence dissolved, and nothing withstood change. “Better living through chemistry” proclaimed a tongue in cheek poster of the time. LSD would dissolve the old self and allow a radical new being to emerge. With typical American hubris we believed we could be anybody: Zen monk, Mexican brujo, Sioux medicine man.

  We imagined ourselves the heroes in a revolutionary version of a Horatio Alger story. Ho
ratio’s heroes pulled themselves up from rags to riches by tugging on their bootstraps. We thought we could transform ourselves by pulling in the opposite direction—down from the heights of privilege, away from its constraints, and into the future. All that was required was the willingness to set off on the adventure.

  The movement’s emphasis on the transformation of personal life was charismatic, but, at the same time, it limited participation. Not everyone was ready for an intrusive political movement that accepted only total commitment. Not everyone was prepared to have his or her bedroom and bathroom transformed into a terrain of political struggle. The more global and universal the definition of the revolutionary project, the fewer, ultimately, were those who could—or would—meet its stringent demands. The perfect recruit for the revolution was a young rootless dropout, with lots of time on his or her hands and no commitments. The movement became the whole of life for those who joined it. It was a life cut off from the daily life of ordinary working people, with jobs, families, and children.