by Olivia Laing
On Simone’s thirty-second birthday, 21 February 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated during a lecture at the Audubon Ballroom by three members of the separatist Nation of Islam, the organisation he’d left the previous year, in part because he wanted to collaborate with other civil rights groups. To her abiding regret, Nina had never met him, but she knew his pregnant wife, Betty Shabazz, who soon afterwards moved next door to her in Mount Vernon along with her six daughters; two of whom, the twins Malikah and Malaak, were born after their father’s murder.
A month after Malcolm’s death, Simone cancelled a string of lucrative dates in New York and flew to Alabama with her band for the concert at the culmination of the third Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights (in Alabama at the time, black citizens could register to vote on two days of the year. Each registration took an hour). That night Nina played on a stage made, in lieu of any other materials, from empty coffins donated by a local black mortuary. Whatever it took, up there in her plaid skirt, giving love and fury back to an exhausted and footsore crowd of twenty-five thousand, pressed together in the drenching rain.
The talk in those days was of revolution: not if but when. Like Reich in the aftermath of the Vienna riots, Nina couldn’t understand why everybody didn’t rise up and fight. She no longer believed that there was any possibility of freedom being handed over peacefully by people who bombed churches, murdered activists and openly mourned slavery. If you wanted it, you’d have to take it. As she pointed out, the Ku Klux Klan weren’t non-violent, and nor were the police.
The movement didn’t just give her a purpose. It was also a way to channel her own complicated private feelings into something larger. She could alchemise her depression, her abiding sense of ugliness, both legacies of racism, and convert them into anthems of joy and pride like ‘Ain’t Got No/I Got Life’ or ‘Young, Gifted and Black’, which was written for Lorraine. But the constant touring took a toll, and the bad feelings kept seeping back. Many nights she couldn’t sleep at all, the lyrics she’d just sung tracking endlessly through her head. It was all very well acting as a conduit for the energies of thousands of people, but what did you do when they went home and you were left in a dressing room alone, staring at your own spectral face in the full-length mirror? Drink helped, or seemed to, as did pills: ‘sleeping pills to sleep + yellow pills to go on stage’.
Sex was a better medicine, the only thing, she once wrote, that let her be a warm and open human being. In her diary she acknowledged her desire for both sexes, charting too the descent of her relationship with Andy. He was cold, he worked her like a dog, he made her beg for affection and sometimes he hit her. She found his violence shattering and unendurable, just as Dworkin would when her husband began to beat her in Amsterdam a year or two later. ‘They don’t know that I’m dead and my ghost is holding on’, Nina wrote in an undated note in her journal. Reality winked in and out. While she was on tour with Bill Cosby in 1968, Andy found her in the dressing room, putting brown make-up in her hair. She was hallucinating and when she looked up at him, for a minute she could see clean through his skin. Years later, she was diagnosed bipolar and put on medication, but in the 1960s the only thing she had was work, never mind that the world was degrading around her as she sang.
Malcolm X’s autobiography was published in November 1965, nine months after his death. She loved it, but the part about his education in a progressive prison was bitter, considering prison was already being deployed as a tactic to destroy the movement. Rustin and his contemporaries had used arrest as a technique of non-violent resistance, the cry of fill the jails presenting the state with non-compliant bodies as a physical problem to solve. But in the late 1960s, the state reconfigured imprisonment as a weapon, instituting drastically longer sentences, often on false charges. The threat of prison had a chilling effect on people’s willingness to engage in activism and marked the beginning of today’s era of mass incarceration and long-term solitary confinement, both of which disproportionately affect people of colour.
Many of the civil rights organisers who weren’t in jail were subject to an FBI programme of surveillance, infiltration and discreditation known as Cointelpro, which was explicitly designed to undermine and sabotage the movement. In what was by no means their most malevolent act, the FBI bugged Martin Luther King’s hotel rooms for two years, creating an audio record of the affairs he’d been so frantic to conceal that he’d stopped working with Rustin rather than risk them being leaked to the press. In an anonymous letter sent on 21 November 1964, the Bureau warned that the audio tape would be released to the media if King didn’t commit suicide before the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to him three weeks later. Filthy, evil, animal were among the words used to address him.
By the late 1960s, Simone felt as if all her former comrades were either dead, ‘exiled, jailed or underground’. Langston Hughes was dead. Lorraine Hansberry was dead of pancreatic cancer at the age of thirty-four (her friend Baldwin suspected, à la Reich, ‘that what she saw contributed to the strain that killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a man’). Malcolm X was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Huey Newton was in prison. Stokely Carmichael was under surveillance and hobbled by a travel ban.
The last blow was the worst. Nina was preparing for a show on Long Island when she saw people huddled around a tele-vision. 4 April 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, the newscaster informed her, and there were riots in one hundred and twenty-five cities, among them Washington, Detroit, New York, Chicago. Like Malcolm, he was thirty-nine. Three days later, with America still in flames, Nina played at the Westbury Music Fair. She sang ‘Mississippi Goddam’, and she also sang a song her bass player had written for King, which, she told the audience, they had only learned that day. She repeatedly broke off to address the audience, sometimes openly sobbing. ‘Do you realise how many we have lost?’ she asked them. She listed the dead, many among them her own close friends. ‘We can’t afford any more losses. They’re shooting us down one by one.’ This is was what was roiling inside her when she recorded ‘22nd Century’ three years later: frank despair.
*
Say you wanted a better world. Say you fought for it, and say that it unravelled, that people were irrevocably damaged, that there were deaths. Say that the dream was freedom. Say that you dreamt of a world in which people were not hobbled or hated or killed because of the kind of body they inhabited. Say that you thought the body could be a source of power or delight. Say that you imagined a future that did not involve harm. Say that you failed. Say that you failed to bring that future into being.
From feminism to gay liberation to the civil rights movement, the struggles of the last century were at heart about the right to be free of oppression based on the kind of body you inhabited: able to live where you pleased, work where you pleased, eat where you pleased, walk where you pleased without the risk of violence or death; able to have an abortion, kiss in public, engage in consensual sex without the threat of a prison sentence. The victories that did arise were hard-won, but they weren’t permanently secured, and already they are vanishing away.
Perhaps Freud was right. Perhaps there is something atavistic in humans, an irrepressible will to violence, an instinctive desire to generate notions of us and them, to enforce borders between good and bad bodies, and to obsess over purity, degeneration, miscegenation and pollution. And yet the dream of the free body doesn’t go away. It buzzes in the air. It smells of honey. While I was writing these pages I went to dinner with a friend who works as a teacher in Hong Kong. He described the protests that took place at the end of 2019 and he said that some of his students were facing prison sentences just for carrying a mask, for walking down the wrong street. Many things had been banned, including the word protest, so when they communicated with each other the students used the word dreaming instead. I know that dreaming is dangerous, one of them told my friend, but dreaming gives me hope.
What does freedom mean to you, t
he film-maker Peter Rodis once asked Simone. In the footage, she’s sitting on the floor in her house in Mount Vernon, leaning up against the couch, wearing a brown batik print dress and big hoops in her ears. Her hair is short and her face amazingly expressive. It’s 1969, so she is thirty-six years old and at a very low ebb, in that painful space between King’s death and her escape from the United Snakes of America, though she looks full of life. ‘What’s free to me?’ she asks, fiddling with her dress. ‘Same thing it is to you. You tell me.’ The interviewer laughs and says no, and then she laughs too. She puts her hands around her knees and shakes her head slowly. ‘It’s just a feeling. It’s just a feeling . . . I’ve had a couple of times on stage where I really felt free, and that’s something else.’
She pulls herself more upright, swivels round to face the camera. ‘That’s really something else.’ Her hands are up now, palms out, tracking the space in front of her. ‘Like, like.’ Then she gets it. ‘I’ll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear! I mean really, no fear.’ She looks almost shocked by what she’s saying, puts her hand to her head. ‘If I could have that half of my life,’ she shakes her head again, ‘no fear.’ In a softer voice: ‘Lots of children have no fear. That’s the closest way, that’s the only way I can describe it. That’s not all of it, but it is something to really, really feel.’ The interviewer starts to stutter a new question but she is completely caught up in examining what she’s just articulated. She looks down, still shaking her head, laughing a little. As he continues to speak she abruptly leans forward and reaches out her hand. ‘Like a new way of seeing! A new way of seeing something.’
Like Reich, the tragedy of Simone’s later life is not that she struggled with alcohol or mental illness. It’s not that she had periods of poverty, lived in unhappy exile, was sometimes violent or gave performances that descended into chaos. It’s that the freedom she fought for did not come to pass in her lifetime, not as she had hoped. When she was asked about the civil rights movement in the 1990s, while she was living in France, she said bitterly: ‘There is no civil rights movement. Everybody’s gone.’ And yet even at the very end of her life she was singing the old songs. São Paulo, Brazil, 13 April 2000. Monumental now, hair braided into a topknot, she sits at the piano and sings ‘The King of Love is Dead’, power still flooding through her ravaged, unmistakable voice. Right at the end, she breaks off to speak directly to the crowd. ‘This is 2000 now,’ she tells them. ‘No more time for wasting time about this racial problem.’ She repeats it three times, like a spell. ‘No more time, no more time. No more time.’
Reich’s dream, Dworkin’s dream, Nina’s dream: none of these better worlds have yet transpired. There is no republic of unencumbered bodies, free to migrate between states, unharried by any hierarchy of form. It’s impossible to know if it will ever be achieved, but if I’m certain about anything at all, it’s that freedom is a shared endeavour, a collaboration built by many hands over many centuries of time, a labour which every single living person can choose to hinder or advance. It is possible to remake the world. What you cannot do is assume that any change is permanent. Everything can be undone, and every victory must be refought.
I still don’t believe in orgone boxes but I do think Reich found his way to two durable truths. I think the weight of history abides in our private bodies. Each of us carries a legacy of personal and inherited trauma, operating within an unequal grid of rules and laws that depends upon the kind of body we were born into. At the same time, we are porous and capable of mysterious effects on each other’s lives. If, as Angela Carter said of Sade, ‘my freedom makes you more unfree, if it does not acknowledge your freedom’, then surely the opposite is also true. This is what differentiates the marchers in Charlottesville from those in Washington in 1963 or from the Black Lives Matter protesters gathered in cities across the world in the spring of 2020. Contrary to what the white supremacists might think, claiming the right to deny other people their liberty is not a freedom movement, and nor is refusing to wear a mask designed to protect other people’s health.
When I listen, as I often do, to ‘22nd Century’, I feel fear move through my body like a contaminating fog. If I look into the future, I too see ashes. I’m afraid every day of what lies ahead, especially the cruelties that will inevitably occur as resources diminish. There is so little time left. Already, the soil is poisoned, the glaciers melting, the oceans full of plastic; already a new plague has exposed the drastic inequalities in how our lives are valued and protected. Every day as I’ve sat down to write there have been more stories about bodily harm on account of bodily difference. Precarious bodies, bodies as a brutalised, limitless resource. I’m devastated by what is happening, and by how difficult it, it being capitalism, is to change. It’s not the world I want, in which difference is cherished: not a planet like a prison, but a planet like a forest.
Violence is a fact, and yet whenever I’ve sat in Joe’s Pub watching Viv or listened to Nina Simone sing, I’ve felt the room expand around me. This is what one body can do for another: manifest a freedom that is shared, that slips under the skin. Freedom doesn’t mean being unburdened by the past. It means continuing into the future, dreaming all the time. A free body need not be whole or undamaged or unaugmented. It is always changing, changing, changing, a fluid form after all. Imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to inhabit a body without fear, without the need for fear. Just imagine what we could do. Just imagine the world that we could build.
Notes
CHAPTER 1: THE LIBERATION MACHINE
5 ‘the acceptability of homosexuality . . .’: Local Government Act 1988.
6 ‘He listened, observed, then touched . . .’: Peter Reich, A Book of Dreams (John Blake, 2015 [1974]), p. xi.
9 ‘vibrating soundless hum . . .’: William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (John Calder, 1964 [1959]), p. 207.
9 ‘the message of orgasm . . .’: William Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded (John Calder, 1968), p. 76.
12 ‘that most optimistic of sexual liberationists . . .’: Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse: Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Basic Books, 2007 [1987]), p. 179.
12 ‘I just know that something good is going to happen’: Kate Bush, ‘Cloudbusting’, Hounds of Love (1985).
13 ‘My body is talking louder . . .’: Katie Roiphe, The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End (The Dial Press, 2016), p. 44.
13 ‘the people I had been raised among . . .’: James Baldwin, ‘The New Lost Generation’, in Collected Essays (Library of America, 1998), p. 663.
CHAPTER 2: UNWELL
26 ‘His body was a graveyard of buried emotions . . .’: Edward St Aubyn, At Last (Picador, 2011), pp. 171–2.
28 ‘open, lost, hungry . . .’: Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 51.
29 ‘an adventurer’: Sigmund Freud, ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, 1887–1904 (Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 398.
30 ‘I have become convinced that sexuality . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (Panther, 1968), p. 44.
31 ‘He looked straight at you . . .’: Wilhelm Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud (Pelican Books, 1975 [1967]), p. 47.
31 ‘still at an uncodified, experimental stage . . .’: Christopher Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron (Fourth Estate, 2012), p. 22.
36 ‘My body froze . . .’: Norton Grim and Me, dir. Tony Gammidge (2019).
36 ‘almost wholly inadequate . . .’: Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks 1964–1980 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), pp. 233–4.
37 ‘rigidity and antisexuality . . .’: Jonathan Cott, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview (Yale University Press, 2013), p. 41.
38 ‘I was my mother’s iron lung . . .’: Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, p. 220.
38 ‘My earliest childhood decision . . .’: David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death (Granta, 200
8), p. 23.
38 ‘The lesson was: stay away from bodies . . .’: Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, p. 217.
39 ‘leaky’: David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, p. 29.
39 ‘bordered on the unbearable’: ibid., p. 34.
39 ‘One pushes and pulls and pokes . . .’: ibid., p. 35.
39 ‘I feel like the Vietnam War . . .’: ibid., p. 35.
40 ‘Cancer = death’: ibid., p. 29.
41 ‘it is my impression . . .’: Denis Donoghue, New York Times, 16 July 1978.
41 ‘gloomy . . .’: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and its Metaphors (Penguin Modern Classics, 1991), pp. 97–8.
41 ‘opaque’: David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, p. 33.
41 ‘I felt my tumour . . .’: Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, p. 223.
41 ‘I feel my body has let me down . . .’: David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, p. 36.
43 ‘Let the bitch die’: Lorena Munoz-Alonso, ‘Adele Mailer, Visual Artist Once Stabbed by Husband Norman Mailer, Dies at 90’, Artnet, 26 November 2015.
43 ‘a murderous nest of feeling’: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p. 23.
44 ‘I’m allergic to the couch’: Safe, dir. Todd Haynes (1995).
45 ‘I . . . love . . . you?’: ibid.
45 ‘I’ve been under a lot of stress’: ibid.
46 ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, Carol’: ibid.
48 ‘Her book literally states . . .’: Tod Haynes, Bomb 52, Summer 1995.
48 ‘Ultimately, what was it in people . . .’: Julia Leyda, ed., Todd Haynes: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2014), p. 91.
49 ‘A demonic pregnancy’: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p. 14.
50 ‘A healthy person is one who can say . . .’: Kathy Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’, Guardian, 18 January 1997.