LOVE & RAGE

Anastasia Murney

Dear comrade

How are you? I’ve been thinking about you these past few days, wondering what you’re up to and when you’ll be back.   

I’ve been reflecting on what you said last time we spoke: we do the same things over and over again while expecting different results.

I mean, I think you’re right. I’ve been stuck in the same old rhythms. Sometimes I get so annoyed that I can’t imagine and do more things. Other times, I think the building blocks of movement work shouldn’t be taken for granted. To be honest, I love a big protest march and the illicit feeling of walking in the middle of the road. It’s a thrill I never get sick of. I like speaking in the collective voice. Tom makes me feel old when I talk about the ‘people’s mic’ from the rallies during the war. Basically, someone starts yelling ‘mic check’ to get everyone’s attention. Then, as someone gives a speech, every few lines are repeated. So, it’s like a vocal ripple effect. It’s also an embodied, social infrastructure. What does it mean to pass the words of your comrade through your own body and onto the next person? It’s act of faith, I think.   

At the same time, I am as disillusioned as you are. We walk in a cordoned off space, following a prescribed route with a police chaperone. This is the safety valve effect. Let the oppressed blow off steam and the revolution will be deferred. So, perhaps the fact that a protest march makes me feel good is a reason to stop. But I feel a bit conflicted here. Too often, the work of politics is presumed to be sober and serious. I am sick of those Marxist bros (you know the ones) who criticise people for indulging in ‘feelings’ over ‘strategic gains.’ I was listening to an interview with a healthcare activist in the United States, who kept insisting: there is a formula and it works. I don’t believe that, do you? I remember what Peter said to me the other week, if anyone comes to you with a blueprint for revolution, tell them to fuck off.

It seems clear that our tactical repertoire is steeped in nostalgia – mass rallies, petitions, civil disobedience. Everyone wants to recreate the iconic scenes of the civil rights movement or the anti-Vietnam war movement, aspiring to a million strong March on Washington. Except these things never really worked. Not in isolation. We’re stuck with the fetish of scale (bigger is better) and the lionising of nonviolence as the answer. You’re read that Peter Gelderloos book, right? He argues that pacifist activists like Martin Luther King Jr derived a lot of their power from the spectre of militant resistance and the presence of armed black revolutionaries. At the same time, some people (like Andrew) are seduced into these macho fantasies of confrontation – punch a Nazi, etc. I mean, given how bad things are getting, I think we need to be keeping our toolbox as big and as varied as possible. But I also think we need to know who we are without enemies and antagonists.

And then there’s the internet and social media. I have read, written and signed more open letters than I can count. I know you have too. The open letter gives rage and despair a comfortable place to live online. You log on, sign your name. You park the rage, and click onto the next thing. It’s the safety valve again. I don’t want to be too flippant though. I know social media is a lifeline for a lot of people. Most days, I scroll through Instagram and see bodies, ruins, blood, and tear-streaked faces. I tell myself: you must listen. You are a witness. These are vital testimonies and you must honour them. The rage, the letters, the testimonies, all of it accumulates and stalls online. It reminds me of that line from Rafeef Ziadah’s poem, We Teach Life, Sir (2011), “today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits.”   

I guess I’m wondering if we have overinvested in speech. Or at least, a particular type of speech. It’s like when journalists platform actual Nazis, fascists, and genocide enablers. They tell us they’re going to ask the ‘tough’ questions. All of them are hoping for a once-in-a-generation Frost/Nixon style showdown. It’s so arrogant. All of this stuff rests on the belief in a magic combination of words – say the right words in the right order at the right time and justice will be unlocked. But what if words don’t work anymore. What if there is nothing that can be said to stop this injustice.

Do you know, I was sitting with Tom at the picket for Palestine outside Albo’s office last week and the lady who works at the church next door walked past. Have you met her? We exchanged niceties/miseries. It’s so terrible, can’t believe it, our politicians are spineless, etc. Then, she said something along the lines of: if people can’t donate money, they should pray. There’s nothing more useful than prayer! Well, Tom and I laughed about it later. But this is the problem, right? Why can’t a prayer be a protest? In Britney’s memoir, she talks about reclaiming her faith as the final push that helped her to escape the conservatorship: “you can’t fuck with a woman who knows how to pray.”

Look, I guess a prayer is another version of searching for the right words in the right order to unlock something. But it’s not a syntax of capture and pinning down – the ‘gotcha’ moment. It’s more open, infinite, even. Sometimes, at night, I read the same sentence out loud three or four times. I turn it around and around in my mouth, as if tasting it from different angles. I allow the words to tumble out in a rush, and then I try to speak as slow as possible. I savour each word and let the silence seep in around them.

I won’t lie, silence scares me. I think we’ve developed a cultural phobia around silence. I mean, the messaging in our movement is unequivocal: silence is violence. Silence creates erasure and forgetting. I don’t think I can forgive some people for their silence right now. I know you have similar feelings. But silence is many things; it’s multi-dimensional.And I’m not willing to pass it off to the perpetrators. 

In short, I think there’s a lot we’ve forgotten how to do. Or to quote Gelderloos, we have inherited memories that are not our own. I think we need to resist the pre-prepared ‘outrage’ space that has been assigned to us and be more unpredictable. This is their gotcha moment and it works to contain us. So, throw the playbook out the window and come and sit with me. We’ll face the silence together. That’s what I say. 

Tell me what you think about all this. I hope you agree with me but I also hope you don’t.

Write back soon.

Love & rage,

Annie

Anastasia Murney is a writer and sessional lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.