Organize, educate, educate, organize

Organize. Organize and educate. That is what you must do. In the face of apathy and ignorance, organize and educate. For generation after generation.

The speaker is a fictional version of Eleanor Marx, youngest daughter of Karl and Jenny. She says this early on in the novel I'm currently reading, The Daughter: A Novel Based on the Life of Eleanor Marx by Judith Chernaik. I've wanted to read this for some time and recently found it in the university library. The book was published in 1979 and this single copy has only been checked out once before. I feel sad for it, I find myself sort of cradling it comfortingly after its long lonely sojourn on the shelves--and that's before I even know if I'm going to like it or not. I hope I will. The only other fictional appearance of Eleanor Marx I've come upon is in Sara Waters' wonderful first novel Tipping the Velvet. I already loved this book to pieces but then when I got to the part toward the end when the main character falls in with a group of socialist women in 1880s London, goes to a political rally and meets Eleanor Marx, oh boy did I swoon or what! Whether this book will have anywhere near that effect remains to be seen.

Earlier this week I read Red Dirt by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a leftist historian. It's a memoir of growing up poor in 1940s and 50s Oklahoma, much concerned with class and race and social issues. The most interesting parts, for me, come early on when she talks about the history of that state, about what deep roots radical movements have there, about the IWW and the socialists, about the Green Corn Rebellion and resistance to imperialist war, and how KKK terror was employed to suppress all this working-class organizing, and before that how the Native nations that had already been driven out of their lands further east were assailed by a treaty-breaking land grab--and in all this, the role of her people, the Okies, who they were and where they came from and their historic role in this country and before they came here in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland. Fascinating stuff from a deeply class-conscious writer.

I've been sticking to my resolve to maintain this blog's focus on literary matters, so I have refrained from posting links, rants or anything else about the current horrors wrecking the world, chief among them at the moment the !@#$#*$&$^&$!@!*&$$* BP oil spill, the company's singleminded devotion to PR and profit, and the government's utter inaction in deference to its Big Oil masters. I trust y'all are up on this latest, most urgent reminder yet that capitalism has got to go before it kills us all, and are hooking up with the local manifestations of national mobilizing efforts to demand an all-out, fully funded cleanup effort along with criminal prosecution of the greedy, murdering oil executives. Privately, in the writing corner of my life, I'd already been at work on a sci-fi-ish story set in the 2020s, and last week I found myself folding the BP disaster into it as having proven to be the pivotal turning point in the destruction of the planet and at the same time, necessarily, in the rising up of revolutionary struggle. This, the second part, may be my wishful thinking. Or it may be not that far from what will come. What must come, of that we can be sure.

I'll be putting fiction writing aside for a bit starting this weekend, because I've got another assignment that I've got to spend some time on. In a couple weeks I'm giving a labor history class at the Marxist School of Theory and Struggle here in NYC. I'll be speaking and leading a discussion on the labor upsurge of the 1930s, and on the National Labor Relations Act and related concessions by the ruling class in that period. The occasion is the upcoming 75th anniversary of the signing of the NLRA (July 5, if I remember right) and, more generally, the current unemployment crisis that is in some ways worse than the Great Depression. There's such a crying need for renewed labor struggle that it behooves us to study the last great manifestation of it in this country. It's been a long time since I've done this sort of presentation. I'm rusty. I think I need to reread the wonderful primer Labor's Untold Story by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, and bone up with some other reading as well, not to mention rereading the NLRA itself. Then write a lecture. And think about questions and discussion points.

So. The reduced frequency of my posts here will probably continue for the next little while.

Yeah, well, we know war is hell, but ...

... it is a hell created by U.S. imperialism, at least in the case of all the invasions carried out and wars fought by U.S. forces in the last 60 years or so. If a novel conveys the first point, the horror of war as experienced by the invading soldiers, without the second, the political context and the culprit and especially the effects on the invaded nation, does it have anything to offer to those of us who wish for a literature of meaning, of relevance, of social conscience? Is it important at all? Can it aspire to literary greatness? Will it prove worth remembering?

I don't think so.

I was reminded of this because a friend pointed me to this recent Huffington Post piece by Rick Ayers, a commentary on the novel Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. There are flaws to this piece, but I think it's still a good contribution because of its basic points, which I'd sum up as something like this:

1. The U.S. war against Vietnam was a world-historic crime.
2. This novel does not acknowledge that or portray anything even close to its whole reality.
3. All the reams of gushing reviews, all the wild praise Matterhorn has received, as a result of which it holds the #9 spot on today's New York Times bestseller list, is based on a reactionary sensibility oriented toward shrugging off the historic truths about the Vietnam war in service of a renewed patriotism in defense of imperialism's current wars.

I may have veered toward my own orientation there in the third point, so I'll finish making it now. What can be the current relevance of a novel focused on the horrors of the Vietnam war as experienced by U.S. GIs if that novel, among its many other omissions, does not provide any equivalent examination of the experience of that war by the Vietnamese participants and civilians? The only effect of such a fictional approach must be to engender sympathy for the GIs. And while the GIs, in that war as in the current U.S. wars, are among the victims, if the only portrayal is of their suffering, what political agenda does it serve? That of the warmongers, which might seem contradictory but really is not. It's a novelization of the slogan cooked up by the promoters of the Iraq war at its outset and since: "Support our troops." This slogan disguises itself as neutral on the war, as merely caring about the welfare of the soldiers who carry out the mission. Of course it is not neutral. Of course it means support the war. Embedded in it with that "our" is the reprehensible notion that those sent, as now, as cannon fodder for imperialism's unending drive to maintain control over Mideast oil represent "us," the mass of people, the workers and oppressed, when in fact they are not our troops at all. They are the capitalist class's. As they were in Vietnam, and if fiction about the Vietnam war places blinders around its readers' eyes so they don't see that, it is reactionary art, it is in fact a piece of revisionist propaganda reeking of bourgeois ideology.

When Matterhorn came out a month or two ago and I read the rapturous reviews, I knew immediately that it would be of this ilk and so I had no desire to read it. I'm glad Ayers did, though, so that he could publish this critique.

The point is made sharply in the recent anthology Liberation Lit by Tony Christini, in his excellent essay "Fiction Gutted: the Establishment and the Novel." Christini writes about "award-winning story writer Benjamin Percy, one of the first writers (sanctioned by the literary establishment, that is) to write in any way about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, in 'Refresh, Refresh' (which appeared in Best American Short Stories 2007 and was called the story of the year by novelist Ann Lamott)." Percy's story concerns a boy waiting for emails from his father who's a soldier in Iraq, and how those emails stop coming and the boy keeps hitting "refresh" hoping for another email, hoping to stave off the horrible news he knows is coming. Christini quotes Percy as saying: "I certainly have strong political feelings. But I try not to let them command my fiction. ... I don't want people to come away from my story as if they've come away from an editorial, with a ready-made message shoved down their throat. ... Part of the goal of 'Refresh, Refresh' was to write a war story that didn't say, war is good, war is bad. I instead wanted to say, this is war. And in doing so, I tried to show both sides."

Christini comments:

What escapes Percy's regard here (and T.C. Boyle's and George Saunders' in similar comments, as well as that of central establishment writers like E.L. Doctorow and Philip Roth and so on, who are often perceived as rather political) is the power and vitality, the value and art, of partisan fiction. Percy makes no note (and seems to imply the opposite) that "strong political feelings" can be expressed as liberatory overt partisan fiction in very accomplished and highly aesthetic ways far from "a ready-made message shoved down [a reader's] throat," as if ostensibly nonpartisan fiction is any less "ready-made," including Percy's own "Refresh, Refresh" given his decision to "show both sides": apparently meaning "war is good, war is bad." Partisan fiction, according to Percy, is "fraudulent and manipulative," but depictions of "war is good, war is bad" are even-handed, which must no doubt prove equally instructive and comforting to both the invaders and the invaded, occupied peoples of the smashed land of Iraq. And so it is that status quo fiction is far less upfront and often in denial--far less willing and capable of declaring what it actually is, ideologically. There are plenty of ways a literary subjective fiction can reveal objective criminal reality. Status quo art, however, avoids doing so, except marginally, in a great number of ways, even though it practically has to go out of its way to cheat reality, to vitiate it of urgent conditions, revelation or phenomena, let alone explore progressive or revolutionary realms and possibilities.

Later, Christini asks "how many recent antiwar novels can be named," or novels that portray any of a number of other bitter truths. "Name the muckraking novels," he challenges, "or vivid polemic novels ... " of recent publication. Why can't we? "Writing powerful quality liberatory fiction is in many ways unthinkable and disallowed in the circles of literature, exceptions aside."

Checking in

I'm just swinging by to say hi, I haven't forgotten you, my millions of blog fans ...

Several matters have converged that account for the recent paucity of posts. One is simply that I'm trying to stick to my guns about, as announced here a couple weeks ago, only posting when I feel I have something actual to add to the conversation on any given issue, and, more particularly, when I have something to add that relates to literary matters since that's the ostensible focus of this blog. The main reason I haven't had a chance to craft any substantive posts is that I'm sticking to a writing schedule with way more discipline than is usual for me. The result is little to no time and even less brain power left for blogging. There's this or that other reason too. I do have several potential posts brewing, though, so do keep checking in.

Here's a throwaway for now. A few days ago I read Philip Pullman's new novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. My rating: bleh. I don't know what I was expecting but it was more than what I got. I hugely loved the His Dark Materials trilogy--golly, what a rip-roaring story that was, what godawmighty fun to read--so I was eager for Pullman's next book. I knew it was to be his take, again, but in a different way, on religion, but jeez I guess I assumed it would be a great gripping twisty tale like Lyra's. Not at all. It is instead, as best I can make out, his all too earnest effort at knocking some sense into the head of any Christians whose heads might be susceptible. And maybe also his offering to those ex-Christians like himself who've sought a sadder but wiser take on the Jesus legend. In other words you'd have to be, I think, rather invested in the whole project of Christianity in one way or another, love it, hate it, be all twisted up over it, you'd have to be churchy or formerly churchy in order for this book to speak to you. Or so I'm guessing. All I really know is that it left me cold. A disappointment.

As ever, onward.

Shame on Atwood & Ghosh

If Ghassan Kanavani's fiction is an example of what literature can do to open minds and expand consciousness, the work of two other authors, Canadian Margaret Atwood and Bengali Amitav Ghosh, has at least always leaned toward the side of the exploited and oppressed. No more. This past Monday, the two accepted the $1 million Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University.

Not only did they travel to Israel and accept the prize, along with the big big bucks. They gave a joint speech explicitly rejecting the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement and the direct appeals to them from Palestinian students to honor the boycott and refuse the prize. Atwood amplified on the speech by telling reporters, "We [artists] don't do boycotts." How self-righteously fake, from a writer who publicly opposed apartheid in South Africa. And what a strange principle this must seem to those who are currently building the boycott of Arizona. No, the reality is that what Atwood and Ghosh don't do is this boycott.

Let's be clear. These two authors may wish to appear above the fray. They have in fact taken a side. The side of the oppressor nation. To their eternal shame.

Rather than go on sputtering in outrage, I direct you to this excellent analysis at Pulse, headlined "Ghoshwood's Mendacity," where Robin Yassin-Kassab does a much better job than I could at exposing the hypocrisy, double standard, cowardice on display.

Atwood is supposedly a feminist writer. ... I wonder what Atwood would say to the struggling women of Palestine--the poets, journalists, protesters, stone throwers, organizers, the widows and bereaved mothers--were she to meet them. But she won't meet them. They aren't sipping wine at the Tel Aviv reception; they are locked up in their ghettoes and mourning their dead. They are wondering how to educate their children when their children don't have enough to eat, when they can't find pencils in the market, when the local school is a smouldering pile of debris.

I urge you to read the rest of this very thoughtful commentary. Yassin-Kassab also links to the Atwood-Ghosh speech so you can see for yourself.

I'll just add two quick points of my own.

One is directed to anyone, artists and academics especially, who might be inclined toward sympathy for the oppressed Palestinian nation but have reservations about the boycott. Perhaps you think it's not the best tactic. Perhaps you feel you can do more to support Palestine by going to Israel and doing what you can there, or working with Israeli universities or the like. I've seen such comments here and there. Listen: the Palestinian people are asking you to boycott. Who are you to put yourself above them and reject their appeal? How can you believe you know better than the organized movement that speaks for Palestine? During the time of the anti-apartheid movement, did you reject the appeal of the African National Congress, did you decide the ANC didn't know what it was doing and come up with your own tactic, did you defy the boycott and go to South Africa? Of course you didn't. You respected the request made by those fighting for liberation. You can do no less for Palestine--if you're still on the side of those fighting for liberation.

Otherwise you're on the other side. As Atwood and Ghosh have now declared themselves to be.

It's a tiny thing, but I'm removing Atwood and Ghosh books from my recommended list at the right-hand column of this blog. I'll sell those I own and donate what little cash they bring to organizations that support the cause of the Palestinian people.

Al Nakba

Today is the anniversary of Al Nakba, which means the catastrophe. On May 15, 1948, the Zionist settler state of Israel was officially established based on the expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians from their native land. Today, at the absolute least, let everyone who cares for human justice renew their commitment to the struggle to free Palestine and win the right to return for the refugees and their descendants.

It's coincidental that my most recent attempts to wrestle with questions about fiction's role in the class struggle were prompted by reading Ghassan Kanafani's book Palestine's Children, especially the long story "Returning to Haifa." I have two other books related to this issue near the top of my to-read piles and I'm interested to see how they'll affect my ongoing effort to address these questions.

One is hot off the press, and it's nonfiction so strictly speaking doesn't fit the ticket, but it might still be worth folding into this discussion if it turns out to be all it might be. That's a big if. The book is Shifting Sands: Jewish Women Confront the Israeli Occupation. The big question is which Israeli occupation the title refers to. Is it only the post-1967 occupation, the one that even many liberal Zionists oppose often for the purely pragmatic reason that the 1967 expansion and all it has wrought have turned out to undermine the security of the Israeli state? Or is it the actual entire occupation, the 1948 imposition of the supposed Jewish state on the expropriated land of the Palestinian nation? If the former, the collection will fall short even if it includes well-meaning humane commentary. If the latter, well then we'll have a worthwhile document in our hands.

The other book I hope to get to is the novel Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury. First published in Lebanon in 1998 and finally published in English translation in this country in 2006, Gate of the Sun has been hailed as a masterpiece, the great fictional treatment to date of the tragedy of the Nakba.

On this matter of the uses of literature, I must keep sounding the reminder that reading can never substitute for life. As I wrote in an earlier post in this series, nothing can compare, for example, to the experience of being on strike for raising class consciousness. The issue of Palestine, however, poses a challenge, since most people in this country other than Palestinian-Americans and other Arab-Americans don't have any direct engagement with it. Well, they are linked to it closely in many ways--U.S. tax dollars propping up Israel, U.S. military funding to kill Palestinians, all of it to maintain an imperialist-allied outpost on behalf of Big Oil--but in their day to day lives most people in the U.S. have no direct knowledge or experience of it. All most people here know is what they read or see on TV and almost everything they read or see on TV is pro-Zionist. So it seems that there may be a uniquely important job for fiction on this topic.

To be, as always, continued.

25 years ago: Philadelphia fire

Earlier this year I read and blogged about John Edgar Wideman's remarkable book Fanon. I have several other of his books and I intend to work my way back through the work of this brilliant writer. One of them is Philadelphia Fire. I'm thinking about it today because this is the 25th anniversary of one of the terrible racist horrors in the bloody annals of the many racist horrors committed by the police forces in this country: the Philadelphia police department's firebombing of the MOVE house on Osage Avenue, which killed 11 people including five children. Philadelphia Fire is a novel based on that event. Of course, I remember the actual day, and the days after, the outrage and grief, and I know the fight to win justice for the victims, and freedom for the MOVE 9 imprisoned after another police attack some years previous, continues. These cases are closely tied to the ongoing and increasingly urgent struggle to free death-row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. This is not about commemorating an obscure quarter-century-old historical event, but about reminding ourselves of a current living raging battle, and so I'm not suggesting reading a novel as a substitute for engagement in that battle. But, as I keep trying to figure out a good way to prove, fiction has its place, and anyway, I'm very interested in John Edgar Wideman's take on what happened on Osage Avenue, so I do hope to get to this book soon.

For today, here's this on the case of the MOVE 9.

And just like that, they're gone

Aah. They're gone. How lovely the unpopulated streets, how quiet the park. No lines at the little deli below my office when I picked up a bagel and coffee this morning. No noise, no cloud of cigarette smoke fouling every walkway.

Don't get me wrong. I may not be Miss Congeniality but my department's students seem to feel I do right by them. Hey, believe it or not, I was even honored, with speeches, flowers, gifts, the whole shebang, at the holiday party a couple years back.

But for university workers, there's no better moment than the morning you realize the campus has emptied out for the summer. Especially if you work at a joint that charges outrageously obscenely high tuition so that the student population is heavily weighted toward the privileged classes. So let me bask in it a bit. Let me say it again, let me gloat. They're gone!

Which has nothing to do with my work load. On that front this is the worst time of the year. There's tons of end-of-semester stuff to do, and graduation details, and for the upcoming year there are course assignments and teacher appointments and payroll paperwork and course cancellations and there's the whole admissions megillah that has to wrap up swiftly now and then the new student orientation and shepherding the newbies through their first registration and on and on. But it's easier, somehow, to tackle the work load when the place has quieted down and emptied out.

It reminds me a little of when I was a city bus driver, many years ago in Michigan. That was a very stressful job because you had to keep to a schedule regardless of traffic, weather, loading and unloading passengers and dealing with all their issues. Time points were everything, so we were all always tense and tight, hunched over those big round steering wheels, trying to get to each stop at the appointed time. There was a little joke we had among us. I imagine it's still a favorite of bus drivers everywhere. If only there were no passengers, we'd say. If only we didn't have to stop constantly and sit there while they got on and off. If not for the passengers we'd have no trouble meeting our time points.

Ba da boom. Pretty much how I feel about students here at the U. If only there were no students with their constant problems, questions, issues, I could get my job done just fine.

Well, now they're gone. Now I can work.

Which also means I may be able to get my mind back to some of the points I've been on the verge of making here on the blog for a while, regarding literature and political struggle. I don't blog on the job--I do it on my lunch hour, or in the evenings--but I hope it's not a fireable offense that my thoughts do wander toward more important things while, say, I'm filling in the little circles on the grade sheets or photocopying the registration reports. So let's see if those ponderings don't lead me back here with a thought or two soon.

LGBT writers, let's boycott Arizona!

It's now been a little over two weeks since Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the odious anti-immigrant state SB 1070. The law criminalizes undocumented immigrants, along with anyone who associates with or aids them in any way, from giving an undocumented child a ride to school to offering prenatal medical services to an undocumented woman. Most alarmingly, SB 1070 requires police and all government employees to detain people based on "reasonable suspicion" that they are undocumented immigrants.

This latter clause has become widely known as "breathing while Brown."

If you are or appear to be Latino/Latina, you are subject to arrest. Your very existence is a crime. Unless you carry on your person legal documents proving citizenship, actually even if you do, you can expect to be rounded up at any time, held for hours in jail before being released at best and at worst subjected to the horrors of this country's system of immigration detention, a network of nightmarish prisons currently holding tens of thousands of adults and children whose only crime is being alive on the wrong side of a border that was created when the United States stole more than one-half of the nation of Mexico some 150 years ago.

A righteous outcry has arisen in response to the Arizona law. It is being compared to the Jim Crow South and before that the Fugitive Slave Act, to apartheid South Africa's pass laws, to Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws. It ought to also remind us of what we have faced as LGBT people--violence at the hands of bigots and police, harassment, discrimination, our very selves banned by law in most states until the Supreme Court's Lawrence vs. Texas decision just seven years ago, our relationships not legally recognized to this day, all of it compounded by racism against LGBT people of color.

The day the governor signed SB 1070 a national boycott began. No travel to, no business with, no support of any kind for any Arizona enterprise until the law is overturned. The boycott has broad backing. Along with the National Council of La Raza and virtually every other Latino/a organization, key supporters include the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights--a coalition whose members include the AFL-CIO, NAACP, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Organization for Women, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Asian American Justice Center, and scores of religious groups. Alpha Phi Alpha, the biggest African American college fraternity, has moved its upcoming national convention from Phoenix to Las Vegas. Many professional athletes support the boycott.

On the literary front, two writers have taken the lead. Award-winning novelist Tayari Jones published an open letter canceling her scheduled appearance at an Arizona writers' conference this summer. And poet/novelist/memoirist Rigoberto Gonzalez, one of the leading lights of LGBT literature, issued an impassioned call for everyone who cares about equality to join the boycott.

I've been an activist for many years, and one thing I know is that wherever there is a mobilization for social justice, LGBT people are always there in the thick of it. Now it's time once again to take a stand. Let's heed the call sounded by Tayari Jones and Rigoberto Gonzalez.

Sisters--brothers--others: LGBT writers, poets, journalists, let's boycott Arizona!

What does this mean in practice? Don't go to Arizona. Don't do readings there, or book signings. Don't attend writers' conferences or other literary events. If you're scheduled to participate in or speak at one, cancel. Try to get your publisher to pull your books from the shelves of Arizona bookstores.

It's not all don'ts. There are do's too. Join marches and rallies against SB 1070. For those of the butch persuasion, by which I mean those who follow sports, and really everyone else, walk the picket line at your city's baseball stadium if the Arizona team comes to play.

On top of this, we as writers can contribute something special. We can write! Stories. Poems. Essays. Opinion columns. Organize readings supporting the boycott at bookstores, community centers, campuses. Let's do what we do best, use words, to express solidarity against racism and build the boycott.

From the Montgomery bus boycott initiated by Rosa Parks to the first boycott of Arizona when that state refused to observe the national Martin Luther King Day holiday, there is a long, honorable history to this tactic as a means to apply pressure against oppressive institutions. Now it is in play once again, this time in service to the effort to overturn the abhorrent, unconstitutional, racist Arizona SB 1070. The LGBT community must be partners in this fight. Especially we writers.

Spread the word: no human being is illegal! Let's offer up our voices to this urgent cause.

Even fantasy must be grounded in reality

Of course, my fanciful imaginings of whole cities reading Ghassan Kanafani's fiction and finding their eyes newly opened on the question of Palestine and that making all the difference rely on some assumptions. One is that literature can affect consciousness, or more particularly, that left or revolutionary literature can counter the bourgeois consciousness that pervades almost everyone's brains hereabouts. (It's one thing for the uber-capitalist Ayn Rand to work her proto-fascist magic on impressionable suburban youths with The Fountainhead; this is a case of a novel merely nudging already formed bourgeois consciousness further along on the same class continuum. It's a different level of magnitude altogether, it seems to me, a hugely harder task, for a novel to effect a consciousness shift in toto.) Another is that all this upended consciousness would matter, that the fiction reader, newly enlightened, becomes at least a potential actor on the stage of the class struggle. There may be several more assumptions embedded in my daydream of yesterday as well. One of the things I want to try to do as I keep stumbling along this path is tease them out and test them and try to figure out which of them might be true. The ultimate issue being literature's place in the struggle for revolutionary change.

A flight of fancy

I've got a few minutes to continue my last thought.

What if Palestine's Children were chosen as the book to be promoted to a whole city's population, to all read one month, with all the concurrent events and activities at libraries and so on that usually go with this? The mind boggles. Millions of people, or even a fraction of that, tens of thousands, let's say, but lots of them young, let's say, for these reading campaigns are generally aimed at high schoolers above all, anyway lots and lots of folks, many of them young, reading a wrenching story that portrays through fiction the reality of what the creation of the settler state of Israel meant for that place's indigenous inhabitants, the Palestinians. It would be like the biggest front-page newspaper exposé ever. I haven't explicitly addressed the power of fiction, and I will, although not today, but I don't think there can be any doubt of what a massive, sudden, shocking dose of new information this would amount to.

From there we can extrapolate what the potential might be. Once people knew. Once the official version had been overthrown via the heartrending story of Said and Saffiyah. What the potential might be to get people to take the next step. To act. In solidarity with Palestine.

It will not happen. There's not a city in the country that would tiptoe anywhere close to Kanafani's fiction. Not a chief librarian or English Department chair or arts center coordinator who would dare, I don't think. But what if there were a librarian, or a teacher, or a community center staffer, or a writer, or just a reader or group of readers, who would take the bold step of proposing such a thing? What if someone wrote a letter to a big city's arts commissioner, or wrote an Op Ed, or found a way onto a radio show, and said, hey, I just read a great book and I think we should make it the choice for next month's One City, One Book?

What if, in other words, there were a way to build a struggle around this simple demand? That the people of this city should have the right to know about and read this book? Would it be a mere provocation? Would it get a hearing at all, anywhere? Would it at least get the word out about this great book that everyone who cares about justice and liberation should read?

These are flights of fancy. I know. I'm not proposing fiction as itself a vehicle of struggle. At least I don't think I am. I do think more and more, though, that literature is, can be, should be, one weapon in the arsenal.

What literature can do: the case of Palestine

I worked late last night and am using comp time to start work late today so I have a few minutes to blog, finally. Finally to return to my intermittent effort at tackling some of the Big Questions that are the whole basis for this blog. Questions about literature and the class struggle, how the two intersect or don't or should or could or can't. Don't get too excited -- I do only have a few minutes so as usual I can take only a dip in the shallows of these very deep waters but that, also as usual, will have to do.

The question that rises most often in my own mind is what use literature is for the class struggle. I've been fiddling with a number of vague notions about possible answers. One reason I haven't fulfilled my repeated promises to address this issue here is that I haven't managed to sharpen those notions into something less vague. But this morning I think I can take a stab at it, and the reason is Palestine.

I just finished reading Palestine's Children by Ghassan Kanafani, the writer, journalist and leading figure in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was assassinated by the Mossad in 1972. The book consists of a number of short stories and the longer story or novella "Returning to Haifa." While all the stories are deep, true and affecting, this last piece is devastatingly powerful and with its power points the way, I think, to at least part of the answer to these questions I've been asking.

The story tells of a middle-aged couple, Said and Saffiya, who go to Haifa in the days after the 1967 war when, for the first time since April 1948, the Israeli state permits its former inhabitants to enter the city. Said and Saffiya were among those who were driven out -- from their home and from their city, literally driven into the sea -- and while they have survived as refugees they have never stopped yearning for their home and the impossible loss they suffered when they were ousted from it and never till now allowed to go back. For their loss went beyond walls and possessions or even sentiment, tradition, memory. Their 6-month-old baby was left alone in their home that day in 1948, and they never knew what became of him.

Now they find out. A Jewish couple, survivors of the Nazi holocaust, were given Said and Saffiya's house in Haifa -- and with it, their infant son Khaldun. While the woman at first had qualms about the whole sordid business and tried to talk her husband into leaving "Israel" and going to Italy, ultimately they stayed. They raised the child as their own, renaming him Dov. By the time his real parents come back he is a young man, and a member of the Israeli army. Presented with the reality of his heritage but filled with the ideology of Zionism with which he has been inculcated, he rejects, even insults, his Palestinian parents. They leave, brokenhearted but with a renewed understanding of what was done to them and their people and a renewed, clear-eyed commitment to the armed struggle to reclaim their homeland.

With "Returning to Haifa" I think Kanafani shows how literature can serve the struggle. For one thing, it is a document that testifies to the perfidious crime of Zionism, the violent, murderous expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land, their homes. It tells a truth that was long suppressed. For Palestinians, it must have been when first published and must still be precious for telling this truth. For others, from whom the truth about the creation of the Israeli settler state has been withheld, all those good-hearted people who have been suckered into supporting Israel because it's supposedly somehow a guarantee against another anti-Jewish holocaust, this story is an opportunity to start hearing some reality. For Jews in Israel, those few who can bear to open their eyes to honesty, open their minds, open themselves to the fact that they have been lied to utterly, that they have been and continue to be used as cannon fodder in a racist project on behalf of Big Oil, reading "Returning to Haifa" must be a revelation. Or would be, for it's hard to imagine that any do.

And what of U.S. Jews? I thought about this as I read this book on the train and in the park over the last few days, wondered what any Jewish New Yorker might think when they saw the cover with its title Palestine's Children. For those who hew to the gospel of Zionism, the very word Palestine is inflammatory, implying as it does that, yes, there is a nation that, yes, holds claim to that land. But the happy fact is that the lock-step allegiance to Israel and its foundation the racist ideology of Zionism is no longer absolute among U.S. Jews. The suffering of the Palestinian people and the widespread worldwide support for their cause have, over these last 20 years or so, broken the chokehold Zionism once had. Still, it remains dominant here.

For people of any nationality or ethnicity, especially workers and the oppressed, whose bent is to feel sympathy and solidarity with those fighting for national liberation, against racism, for social justice, the natural instinct has to be to stand with the Palestinians. If only they have a chance to hear the Palestinians' story. In this country that's no small thing, for the Zionist version of the so-called Middle East conflict is standard. It's very hard for another narrative to break through. A narrative like Kanafani's in "Returning to Haifa," fictional to be sure, but deeply honest and true. What if one of those "one city one book" campaigns took up this book by this author? What if tens of thousands of people read this deeply affecting story about the expulsion of the Palestinians?

What to do, what to do

If I had my druthers, if I could close my eyes and spin three times and land on the precise right spot, I'd find myself in Jerusalem, Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem--the occupied West Bank--for the Palestine Festival of Literature. PalFest 2010 gets under way on Saturday, May 1.

Last year the Israeli occupying army shut down the festival, or tried, unsuccessfully, for participants simply moved to another venue and carried on. This year festival organizers are no doubt prepared for anything as they "assert the power of culture over the culture of power."

Of course I can't be there. But there's a mighty good place to be here on May 1. I refer, naturally, to the May Day March for Worker and Immigrant Rights, an action that has taken on added urgency in light of the fascistic anti-immigrant law newly enacted in Arizona. I hope everyone who possibly can joins us in rallying and marching for multinational unity against the racist terror. If you're in the New York area, come to Union Square at 12 noon. There are similar rallies taking place in most major cities, so please find your way there too. There is after all a time for reading and writing, and a time to put on our marching shoes. May Day is for marching.

First, though, tomorrow night, if I can push myself, I'm planning to go hear the climatologist Dr. James Hansen along with environmental journalist Heather Rogers whose new book Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution might be worth a read. Neither is a revolutionary or advocates revolutionary action on climate change, although both as I understand it do see how extremely urgent the crisis is, so I'll be interested to hear how they confront this contradiction if indeed they do.

So that's what I wish I were doing and what I will be doing in the coming days. What I won't be doing is rush to the blah-fest currently taking place here in New York, the annual floating-in-cash-and-expensive-as-crap bloat known as the PEN World Voices Festival. Let me back up, because I didn't mean to sound that snide. I just leafed through this year's program, and look, it's not horrid. In fact there are some worthy offerings, including new work by Arab playwrights, a talk by Sherman Alexie on "the artistic, political and economic responsibilities of writers in the digital age," etc. It's not that it's monochrome, either, for it does includes some writers of color and from a number of countries. It's just that, on balance, it does not in fact offer anything close to what its title advertises: the voices of the world. Which would be the voices of workers and the oppressed. PEN is a construct of the bourgeois literary establishment devoted to promoting bourgeois literary values. It will never provide a platform for a revolutionary literary voice; in fact it often propagandizes against such voices, for instance those in Cuba. So while the glit-lit crowd wines, dines and opines, let's the rest of us march -- and write -- and organize -- in solidarity with the real world's voices, especially those of our sisters and brothers in Arizona. On May Day 2010.

The Arizona boycott takes a literary turn

As the movement to beat back the racist fascist Arizona law SB1070 picks up steam and the second boycott of that state (first time around it was because Arizona refused to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Day as an official holiday) builds, we're starting to see some action from literary corners.

Today the great novelist Tayari Jones published a letter she sent to the Pima Summer Writers Conference in Tucson, at which she'd been scheduled to appear this year. In the letter she canceled the engagement to protest the Arizona law and support the boycott. Read it on her blog. It's beautiful.

Meanwhile, in a development that reminds me of the creation and explosive growth of the website Poets Against the War in the days just before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, hundreds of people, soon to be thousands, I'd bet, have signed on to a new Facebook group called Poets Responding to SB 1070. New poems are being added pretty steadily. There is some powerful work up there. If you're on Facebook, you ought to join this group. If you're a poet, how about writing something for them?

Got my hot little hands on ...

... three shiny books and I'm excited! I've been carefully conserving the bookstore gift certificates I got over the holidays -- yes, four months ago, and I still have a good chunk of them left, how's that for discipline? -- so last week I bit into one of them and ordered some books online. Three of them arrived today and I'm excited about each. Each comes highly recommended, and they couldn't be timelier, none of them.

187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007 by Juan Felipe Herrera. This is a collection of poetry, memoir, and unclassifiable work. Check this out, from the description from the back cover: " A sustained manifesto of resistance and affirmation, this hybrid collection of texts tells the story of what it's like to live outlaw and Brown in the United States." Hello, Arizona? I believe he's talking to you!

Palestine's Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories by Ghassan Kanafani. I've wanted to read Kanafani's work for some time. I've heard it's wonderful. Kanafani was a beloved leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who was assassinated in Beirut by the Mossad, the Israeli death-square secret police, in 1972. It's an exciting prospect to read fiction whose writer said, "Politics and the novel are an indivisible case." Yes! Can't wait to get to this.

Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. This is a memoir of growing up poor in Oklahoma "from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era" by a radical left activist and historian. A comrade of mine read this and recommended it to me some years ago and I'm happy to finally have it in my hot little hands.

A corrective, on China

There are so many novels published in this country that portray the 30 or so years after the 1949 Chinese Revolution, and especially the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s to early 1970s, as a time of unparalleled horror and inhumanity that it's practically an industry in itself. A sub-industry within the larger U.S. publishing industry, devoted to convincing people -- and then re-convincing and re-convincing because these sort of Big Lies must needs be pounded into people's heads again and again -- that the effort to build socialism in China was a foul and nefarious project. That Mao Zedong was a murderous monster on the order of Adolf Hitler. And that Chinese communism was a particular enemy of the arts, of thought, of humanism.

It's all hogwash, as is its counterpart the mini-industry of novels that slander the Cuban Revolution, as well as literary propaganda against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a sorry little sub-genre that seems to be lately emerging. But it's highly effective hogwash. How could it not be? Its purveyors have a monopoly on readers' attention. No contrary argument -- no stories of the glorious accomplishments of the Revolution -- has a chance of publication. It's funny how the U.S. bourgeois literary establishment's ironclad rule that art can't be political, that quality fiction must not serve a political agenda, is suspended in these cases. Turns out it's ironclad only as regards revolutionary literature.

I've made this complaint before. But here's something new: a book that cuts through the fakery and provides factual truth about the Revolution, -- as well as about its literary and intellectual detractors, their background, class allegiance, and animosity to the working class.

The book is The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy by Minqi Li, which I'm currently reading. Professor Li considers the revolution in China to be by now completely undone, utterly overtaken by capitalism, a view I don't share, but I do share his optimism about the inevitable worldwide move toward socialism. And I do share, in fact I find quite exhilarating given the paucity of such information and analysis available in books published in this country, his take on the greatness of the Chinese Revolution and all it accomplished. Furthermore, in the first section of this book, which is as far as I've read so far, he presents an extremely astute unpacking of the class character of the opposition to the Revolution, opposition that, especially in the realm of the arts, cloaks itself in nice words like "democracy" and "freedom" and so on but that is actually, insidiously, and demonstrably on the side of inequality, exploitation and oppression -- that is, capitalism -- not least because its own class interests are definitively on that side.

Li is of the generation of Chinese students who were swept up in, and he himself did take direct part in, the so-called pro-democracy movement of the late 1980s that culminated in the events at Tiananmen Square. He spent some years in prison. Unlike most of his cohort who continued along the pro-capitalist road after 1989, Li decided to study Marxism, and was won over to the cause of working-class revolution. During his prison time he read most if not all of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and others. He read all three volumes of Capital three times! Ever since, he has made a deep study of the actual, concrete history of China during and after the Mao years. It's so refreshing, such a corrective to the corrosive outpouring of untruth to which we've been subjected for over 20 years now, to read his commentary on the events of the late 1980s in China. He calls out the crap about "democracy" and clarifies that that word was and remains a subterfuge covering the real goal, which is free-market capitalism. The only "freedom" sought, he explains, was and is the freedom to exploit workers in the drive for capital accumulation.

His characterization of the Cultural Revolution and of its opponents, including the student generation of which he was a part, is a particular contribution. For example, one of the supposedly wretched crimes of the Cultural Revolution, a charge leveled repeatedly in fiction and non, is how professionals and intellectuals were made to leave their university or other urban lives and go into the countryside to work with the mass of agricultural workers. Yes, they were uprooted from their cushy positions and, horror of horrors, moved to where they might do some actual good. An excerpt from Li:

Mao Zedong critically observed that the Ministry of Public Health only worked for "fifteen percent of the total population" in the cities and it should be renamed as "the Ministry of Urban Gentlemen's Health." Mao pointed out that medical examination procedures and treatment used by hospitals were not appropriate for the countryside and that the training of doctors was designed to serve primarily the urban elites. ...

During the Cultural Revolution, the entire national health care system was radically decentralized. Urban hospitals and medical schools established clinics and local teaching institutes in the rural communes. Mobile medical teams were dispatched to the countryside. ...

Before the Cultural Revolution, the education system was based on formal exams and conventional grading systems, with the aim of training students for professional careers that would serve the interests of the urban elites. During the Cultural Revolution, primary schools were extended to even the most remote rural areas and primary and secondary school enrollment surged. Peasants were given a greater say in selecting teachers and teaching materials. Tuition fees, entrance exams, and age limits were abolished. Spare-time and work-study education programs were set up. The basic idea was to combine education with productive labor, to relate learning to students' real life, and to direct education toward local conditions and local needs. University students were admitted only after having completed years of productive labor and were required to return to work in their home areas after graduation, so that university education would not become a path for careerist students seeking to join the elite class.

If, like me, you've suspected that these U.S.-published and highly celebrated novelists with their sad tales about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in fact come from or are the descendants of the old privileged classes in China who just hated the effort to lift the workers and peasants and bring about equality, it turns out you're right. Here is Li on the class character and background of these counterrevolutionary intellectual/artistic/literary critics, specifically including those who left China for the West. And remember, he himself was part of this current, as he acknowledges.

In the 1980s, the word "intellectual" broadly referred to anyone who had gone through higher education in China, including university teachers, engineers, doctors, writers, artists, and university students, who were to become China's emerging urban middle class. Traditionally, intellectuals were a privileged social group in China. Their material privileges were significantly reduced (though not completely eliminated) during the period of Revolutionary China. Most Chinese intellectuals in the 1980s were from families that had been capitalists or landlords before the Revolution. Their resentment against the Revolution (especially the Cultural Revolution) was strong and they often did not hide their contempt and hatred for ordinary workers and peasants.

The intellectuals favored the growth of market relations. They hoped to have greater material privileges with greater degrees of social and economic inequality. They also hoped that through greater integration into the global capitalist market, they would have better opportunities to emigrate to the core states [of world capitalism, e.g., Europe and the U.S.] or to earn higher incomes by working for transnational corporations, so that their incomes and living standards could approach their counterparts in the core states. Toward the late 1980s, many of them openly called for full-scale privatization and a free-market capitalist system.

While the intellectuals and the ruling elites shared the broad objective of transition to capitalism, there was no agreement on how political power and the economic benefits of capitalist transition were to be divided between them. The intellectuals were dissatisfied with the fact that as wealth was gradually concentrated in the hands of bureaucratic capitalists and private entrepeneurs, they did not have a share of this newly accumulated capitalist wealth. Many of them complained that their income did not grow more rapidly than that for the urban workers.

All of these were behind the intellectuals' call for "freedom and democracy." In effect, the Chinese urban middle class was demanding a bigger share of the power and wealth as China moved toward capitalism. Some intellectuals explicitly called for "neo-authoritarianism," citing Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea as models, that is, they advocated a capitalist model that would be repressive toward the working class but could secure "property rights" for capitalists and "civil liberty" for intellectuals.

There's more, just wanted to offer this taste. And this reminder, also confirmed in Li's book: there is a building Left movement in China today. We hear little to nothing about it in this country, inundated as we are instead with laments for the bosses' and landlords' losses during the high period of the Revolution. It is there, though, and it is on the rise, coinciding with the final crisis of capitalism now under way worldwide.

And the winner is: Nazi-inspired fashion!

There is a TV show that epitomizes much of what's wrong with this oh so fucked up culture. It is so so wrong in so many ways. It is called Project Runway and one of my dirty little secrets is that I watch it. Even though I keep telling myself never again, I keep coming back, cringing, cursing, averting my eyes, yet as ineluctably drawn to it as is Michael Kors to his tanning bed. And so yes, last night I watched the finale. And what I want to ask is this.

How can it be that one of the three finalists said his collection was inspired by "German and Russian military uniforms from the 1940s"? And that no one batted an eye at the fact that, to take him at his word, at least half of his inspiration came from the fucking Nazis?!? He's all like, "Well yeah they were fascists and carried out a genocide that killed like a gazillion people and I guess they were kind of really mean, but wow did they ever dress cool! Like check out their amazing sense of style! And that's all that really matters, isn't it?"

He seemed equally clueless about the bizarre contradiction that by claiming he was also and somehow at the same time inspired by the opposite -- the uniforms of the heroes of World War II, the soldiers who defeated the Nazis, those of the Soviet Union -- he trivialized the immense sacrifice of the USSR and the over 20 million of its people who died in that cause.

Well who cares anyhow. All that matters is fashion, right?

So there it was. A Nazi-inspired designer strutting his Nazi-inspired designs down the fabulous runway at the fabulous Mercedes Benz (yeah, I know, you gotta love the irony) Fashion Week in fabulous Bryant Park. And there they were, apparently undisturbed. You've got your Teutonic ice queen "supermodel," whatever that means, Heidi Klum, hosting the show, she whose granddads perhaps wore some of those cool cool Nazi uniforms. You've got your judge, fashion designer Michael Kors, some of whose relatives some of Heidi's likely helped wipe out. You've got your Tim Gunn, who wouldn't have lasted a hot minute at the hands of those well-dressed SSers. And none of them seems to have been troubled in the least.

In fact, they picked this guy as the winner. So there you have it. Project Runway hearts Nazis.

I know this entire posting contradicts what I wrote yesterday about plans to tighten up the direction of this blog, but sometimes a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do.

Linking vs. thinking

I'm having a quasi-existential ... crisis is too strong a word ... moment, let's call it a quasi-existential moment of reconsideration about my reading-writing-blogging life. Mostly the blogging part. Or that's the only part I care to comment on here. I had a whole list of links that I was going to post here next time I got a chance but instead I just dumped them all. One or two of them had some slight literary aspect but nothing of much import, and nothing about which I have anything unique to say. The others were all newsy, current-eventsy: the Zionist attempt to ban a pro-Palestinian LGBT group from marching in this year's Pride parade in Toronto, the stupendously appallingly racist anti-immigrant law just passed in Arizona as well as the furious organizing against it, more on the world climate change conference in which 20,000 people took part this week in Cochabamba, Bolivia. All of which I'd gleaned from other websites at any of which you can find better, fuller information than I'd offer here. Get a grip, I told myself as I tried to muster up a blog post consisting of these links and accompanying brief commentary. This is not the purpose of this blog.

This blog is supposed to address questions about literature and the class struggle. The former, literature merely, this writer said this blah blah blah that writer wrote that blah blah blah and all such petty-bourgeois blather, well, it's available on many other sites. The latter, the great project of the revolutionary overturn of the racist, oppressive, exploitive system that is destroying the planet, well, I subscribe to it with all my heart and soul and I take part in it to the best of my ability, but there are many fine places to read about it and, more to the point, many urgent ways to join it. There's one particular aspect of the socialist movement that is or should be the purview of this blog, and that's the literary angle. A small corner. I want to occupy it better, if it's worth occupying at all.

My proposal is to regroup. Rethink. And then return refreshed and with, I hope, a more focused approach. Who knows what this will mean in practice. Maybe not much. Fewer postings, probably. More rants, perhaps. I'd also like to do some more interviews, offer up a guest blogger or two. Whatever shape it takes I will try to keep Read Red in shape. To the point. The point being rumination about books, reading, writing and fighting for change. Less linking and more thinking.

Writers for Mumia

The struggle to save the life of and free political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, the revolutionary writer imprisoned on death row in Pennsylvania for nearly 30 years now, is at a critical juncture. Since the most recent court ruling against him, the state could move to set an execution date at any time. The last time they tried that, back in the 1990s, his supporters thronged to Philadelphia for a mass demonstration whose anger and energy convinced the racist cops and prosecutors to back off.

The next step in the struggle at this point is to go to Washington, D.C., this coming Monday, April 26. At a news conference and rally, Mumia's supporters will demand that the Justice Department open a civil rights investigation into the case.

Two days before the D.C. actions, this Saturday, April 24, is Mumia's birthday. Here in New York City, there will be a gathering of writers, poets, musicians and activists to wish him long life and share our words, our art, our energy and our organizing ideas for continuing this long fight that will not end until our brother is free. I'm happy to say that I'll be taking part. I'll read a poem or two. Possibly, if it's not too long, the middle one of these three that were published six years ago in the Mississippi Review, because it has to do with Mumia. I'll bring along a couple of others in case there's time. Which there probably won't be. Look at the lineup! The event is sponsored by the National Writers Union along with the New York Coalition to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, and it takes place at St. Mary's Church in Harlem, site of many peace-and-justice events and home church of Rev. Luis Barrios, a great friend to all who fight for a better world. I'm really looking forward to it.

If you're not familiar with Mumia's case, or you are but want to learn more, you might want to head over to leftbooks.com to order some of his books.

Save the libraries, and the planet

Library gashers: In January I noted that NYC Mayor Bloomberg's vicious budget-cutting plan would result in many branches of the Queens library system being closed on Saturdays. Turns out it's worse than that. According to a piece in the Queens Courier, a little neighborhood tabloid I picked up at the supermarket Saturday, "the proposed budget cuts of $14.1 million would drastically cut the service hours of Queens Public Libraries, in addition to the loss of 350 jobs." Twenty-four branch libraries would be closed four days a week! Another 24 branches would be closed five days a week! This just sickens the gut, does it not? Billionaire Bloomberg gashes city services sitting pretty in his Upper East Side townhouse. You can sign a petition to save the Queens Library here. Nothing wrong with that. But oh my dear sisters and brothers, it's going to take a lot more than petitions to start beating back all these attacks -- on public education, on abortion rights, on immigrants and more -- all these attacks on our class. Pretty soon now. Any time now. Folks are going to start really fighting back.

Mother Earth rescuers: Sooner than the big-business befoulers of the planet might expect, in fact, on the climate change front. Like right about now. This afternoon saw the opening session of the World People's Conference on Climate Change & the Rights of Mother Earth, in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Called and convened by Bolivian President Evo Morales as a counterweight and corrective to the dismal failure at Copenhagen last year where the U.S. sabotaged any and all attempts at moving the world toward real action to save the environment, the Cochabamba gathering brings together real representatives of the world's working class, peasants, and oppressed peoples. There is great hope that a real working plan for concrete mass action might emerge. My comrade and lover Teresa Gutierrez is there. If by any chance she posts any photos I'll pop them up here.

I may not be too terribly lit-oriented in my postings this week as there's other stuff worth attending to. I will get back to books, and my on-again-off-again mosey around questions of their political worth, soon.

Warsaw, Gaza, BDS & Gil Scott-Heron

Today is the 67th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. For people like me, Jews of the post-war generation who grew up in the shadow of the Nazi holocaust and never heard that there had been any armed Jewish resistance to the European fascists' genocide campaign except for this one instance, the April 1943 battle by the last survivors inside the ghetto holds special resonance. Of course I now know what I didn't know as a kid, that there was widespread, hard-fought resistance, and that most of it was led by communist partisans. Still, the heroism of the Warsaw fighters stands as a proud moment in my people's history.

What a contrast to the present-day shame, the stain on my people's name: the Zionist apartheid state of Israel. Today, those who support the right of national self-determination, those who stand with the oppressed, those who oppose racism and occupation, stand with the Palestinian people. Especially the people of Gaza, today's Warsaw Ghetto. I'm glad that more and more of those who stand with Palestine are Jews, as more and more break away from the grip of Zionism, which is a racist, reactionary ideology that has nothing in common with the Jewish people's history of righteous struggle for justice and against oppression.

I've noticed this development again lately in connection with BDS, the growing worldwide movement for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions against Israel. More and more of those signing on are Jews. I saw an example of this in the last few days, after it was announced that beloved, politically radical musician Gil Scott-Heron has scheduled a concert for next month in Tel Aviv. Veterans of the anti-apartheid movement that built up around the struggle in South Africa in the 1970s and 80s, in which Gil Scott-Heron was very active himself, have expressed dismay. Supporters of the BDS movement have issued public appeals to the musician to cancel the concert. And on Facebook, a slew of postings, from Palestinians, from people of African descent, and also from many people with Jewish names, express decades-long love and respect for him and ask him to please support the BDS movement against Israeli apartheid and not play in Israel. The musician has a series of concerts set for this week in England, and activists with tickets plan to hold up Palestinian flags and placards asking him to cancel the Tel Aviv gig.

Anyone can leave a comment on Gil Scott-Heron's website. If you do, I'd urge that your message be conveyed with the utmost respect for this wonderful artist who has contributed so much over the years. The hope is that he can be won over to see what an error a Tel Aviv concert would be.

Update: A welcome development: although it's not definitively confirmed yet, it appears that Gil Scott-Heron has canceled his Tel Aviv concert.

Ngugi in New York

So yes, I was there last night when Ngugi wa Thiong'o read here in NYC. I'm awfully glad I was. Partly just to see him and hear his voice, mostly to hear what he had to say.

Ngugi read several short excerpts from his new memoir Dreams in a Time of War. Before, during and after these readings he made related comments. When I say "related" I mean it in the sense of a world view that takes in everything and sees all the connections. His remarks were dazzlingly wide ranging and erudite. They made me want to go look up a million things to delve deeper into his references. They also made me want to sit quietly and think about the profound issues he addressed.

Most of all, he addressed colonialism. Its roots, its extent, its varied manifestations in Africa and elsewhere. Especially its effects on the consciousness of the colonizer and the colonized. Its effects on the mind. Its effects on language. Its role in education. He discussed how British colonialism tried to wipe out his native language Gikuyu, and linked it to how they outlawed the Welsh language, which reminded him of how the 16th-century English poet Edmund Spenser who wrote The Faerie Queene was a colonizer in Ireland and worked to suppress the Irish language.

Ngugi also shared some thoughts on the struggle, on perseverance and optimism, that I found inspiring. He said that when you are beaten down you have to stand back up. No matter how many times you are struck down, you must arise again. This was clearly meant in the broad sense about the fight, any fight for justice and liberation. But it came from someone who has experienced this literally, this kicking and beating and this getting back up. That gave it great impact, spoken as it was in his quiet voice. As was this point that he also made: Anger is necessary. Anger is good. Anger is righteous. Anger must be coupled with hope. Anger must be paired with a belief that victory is possible.

There was much more but these random highlights will have to do. I didn't take notes because if I had I wouldn't have been able to pay close attention, and he was for the most part so soft-spoken that I would have missed too much if I wasn't paying close attention. As a result, I can't offer direct quotes, which is a shame because there were several really sharp formulations. Nor did I get his autograph in my copy of Wizard of the Crow, or a picture with him. I could have -- he was going to do all that after the program ended -- but it would have meant standing in a long line and staying much later before even starting the long slog home to Queens, so I sadly decided to forgo it. As it is I got home very late and as a result my mind is even more befogged than usual. But I'm clear on this: I want to read more of his work. It is a gift to the international class struggle.

Which reminds me to thank again Tony Christini of Mainstay Press for introducing me to this important author.

And yesterday here in NYC

Apparently some Tea Party grouping had the nerve to make a Tax Day appearance in Manhattan last night outside the main post office at 33rd Street, and somehow, even though they only heard about it minutes before, a fair number of people got over there to provide a left counter-force. They did a good job from what I hear, and were boosted by non-stop support from passersby and motorists. I didn't know any of this was happening, which to be honest I'm kind of relieved at, because last night I was at Judson Memorial Church to see and hear Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and if I'd known there was a call to mobilize against the racist rightists I'd have felt compelled to go do that instead.

I'll blog about the Ngugi event soon. For now, a couple of shots from last night.

This second one shows my comrade Fred Goldstein, author of the essential book Low-Wage Capitalism, calling Lou Dobbs a "racist demagogue."

(Photos by John Catalinotto)

Yesterday in Boston

"As Palin opened her vitriol, the people on the move chanted, "Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Palin, Tea Party Go away" while fending off punches, kicks, body blocks and other violence. ... Palin appeared dumbfounded, standing there for the longest time speechless and wide-eyed in front of the corporate media, perhaps gazing over the horizon to see Russia."

Read more here.

But first, an astonishment & a caution

An astonishment is what I was calling it 300 pages from the end, and now that I've finished reading Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen I'm sticking to my guns. Guns? Guns and guts and killing must be in the front of my brain at the moment, because this novel is steeped in them, in dirt and death, which is not usually a good thing by my lights. Except in this case it is. Because it is displayed in the service of truth. Matthiessen serves up great gobs of truth in Shadow Country, most of it exceedingly ugly. As it has to be. For this country is an awful place, with an awful history, built on the most awful deeds. The worst extremes of racism, the traffic in human beings, chattel slavery, lynchings and all manner of despicable violence, Klan terrorism, Jim Crow, the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants, the utter subjugation of women, rape, misogyny. The most vile, unrestrained despoilation of the land, water, flora and fauna; the killing off in swift fashion of entire populations of species of birds and fish and trees; the draining, cutting, paving, stripping. Every awfulness, every crime, every deed that sickens and disgusts you as you read, all of it was integral to the advancement of U.S. capitalism. And none of it was ever considered a crime if it was committed by or on behalf of a capitalist and resulted in the further enrichment of the capitalist class.

All this happened in a terrible land called Florida. Of course it happened throughout this country with only slight local variation, but this story takes place primarily in southwest Florida, in the late 19th and early 20th century. Astonishment: an astonishing achievement, this laying bare of the rot on which this country rests.

There are lots of other impressive aspects to Shadow Country. Literarily, stylistically, it is a wild ride, wildly realized. The narrative grabs you and won't let go. I've described it above in broad terms because I believe that this is a book of grand ambition that is really "about" large, important issues and ideas, about history, about racism, about greed, about the destruction of the natural environment in the service of capitalism--but at the same time, there is a real story here, grippingly told, the story of one E.J. Watson, an actual figure in Everglades history known variously as a scoundrel, outlaw, killer, developer, farmer, sugar cane trader and so on. In Matthiessen's telling, Watson is at once less mythic than the figure of local legend and more complex. He is anything but a hero. He does despicable deeds, speaks despicable words. But he doesn't do exactly what everyone else says he does, and this is one of the novel's accomplishments, to place the twisty, twisted path of Watson's life in context. Watson's real story, as Matthiessen fictionalizes it, is not better, braver, truer, more virtuous than the tales that come to be told and believed about him. But the real story has many more dimensions, which come clear as the context is ever more fully explored in the course of the book's nearly 900 pages.

There are a myriad of literary wonders. There are three sections, with Watson's story each time retold from a different angle. First, a sort of Greek chorus of alternating voices, each telling his or her own version Rashomon-like; this first section,which literally begins with a bang as a mob of shooters kills Watson, is about 200 pages, and it's disorienting and confusing but worth wading through. Next, in a rich, moving, and constantly surprising central section, one of Watson's sons tries to piece together a clearer vision of his father. Finally, the story is told in the main character's own voice, right up to the seconds after he's shot as his life ends. There are nearly endless surprises, on nearly every page.

However, let me say this to anyone considering reading Shadow Country: this is a book full of terrible words. The most terrible word, the n word, is repeated many many times, so I must make this clear and warn anyone reading this. The novel is laced with violent racist acts and racist language, so please take this into account in deciding whether to read it. It's very hard to take. Anyone who doesn't want to subject herself/himself to this should not.

I think this may be the first novel I've ever read through to the end that is this replete with such racist language. The reason I kept going was that it seemed to me that it is used in the service of truth. This is what it was like, Matthiessen seems to be saying, look at this, think about it, face it. There are actually many passages where the characters, white and Black and Native, talk about the words, which words to use, why, why not--the national question, relations between and among them, is not something they ignore or can ignore, not when it is a matter of life and death, a matter of profit and loss, property and poverty. It is everywhere in this novel, the matter of nationality, color, race, it is interwoven in everyone's lives, in every question of relations and love, work and wages. As it was, as it is.

This is one rough trip. For me, I think it was right to take it.

But can't books ...

What can books do? How can books advance the working-class struggle? Or can they? Do they ever? Have they ever? Back to my ongoing albeit reprehensibly inconsistent grapple with these questions.

Last week I talked about what books can't do. I said, basically, that no book can substitute for lived experience, a union strike being the clearest example. You can read Victor Hugo's great 19th century novel Germinal, about a coal miners' strike in France, or you can read Denise Giardina's Storming Heaven about a struggle by coal miners in 1920s West Virginia -- and you should, these are great books, you can and should read these and any other novels about strikes, not that there are very many -- and it might affect you deeply. But reading a novel about a strike can never revolutionize your consciousness the way actually being on strike can.

The same goes for any issue, any struggle. As the dearly missed Marvin and Tammi sang so long ago in Motown, there's nothing like the real thing.

OK then. I've made the record. I don't live in the clouds, I don't ascribe some crazy-ass magical power to books, I don't substitute reading for the real world. Having said that, though, the rest of what I want to say is on the flip side: the case for what books can do. Fiction in particular.

Because I do believe that novels and stories can help change the world. There, I've said it. A book can help raise consciousness, help move people to action, help spread the word about this inequity or that battle. Fiction can contribute, then. Contribute to the cause. I really think this is true.

How? Which books? By whom? About what? These will be the next spots on my meander.

Between the links

Before I recommence my current round of ruminating about books and revolution, here are some worthwhile links.

The brilliant Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong'o will be in NYC for a rare appearance next Thursday. The event is apparently a benefit for Revolution Books, the retail outlet of the Revolutionary Communist Party. I am, to say the least, not a fan of the RCP. But neither am I a bitter, rigid sectarian, which is what I'd have to be to pass up this chance to see and hear the great Ngugi. You can bet I'll be there. With my copy of Wizard of the Crow in hopes of getting Comrade Ngugi to sign it. Can't wait!

If you're in Austin on Monday, you might want to swing by the Ransom Center where they'll be screening the documentary Peter Matthiessen: No Boundaries. This caught my eye because Matthiessen is of course the author of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, a great work in solidarity with the struggles of the Indigenous nations of North America and in particular with political prisoner Leonard Peltier, and also because I'm currently reading his novel Shadow Country. Most likely I'll blog about the novel once I've finished. At this point, with about 300 pages to go, all I can think to call this book is an astonishment.

From astonishment to disappointment: Margaret Atwood has accepted a literary prize from the apartheid state of Israel and seems set on going there to receive it. She thus spurns international appeals that she honor the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement. Here is a letter to her from Palestine.

The murderers of Massey Energy must pay for their crimes, which are only the latest in a centuries-long rampage of profit-taking at the cost of workers' lives. I used to write a weekly column called "On the Picket Line" about strikes, workers and the labor movement for Workers World newspaper. Through most of the 1980s and 90s, I reported on and took part in solidarity for as many worker actions as I could. In the course of this work I learned a lot about the hard life and awful suffering that the working class of coal country endures. And about what tough, fighting people they are. This latest atrocity at the Upper Big Branch mine has set me to thinking about the 1989 Pittston coal strike and the wonderful sisters and brothers of that struggle who I got to meet. Especially the sisters, Catherine Tompa and the others who formed themselves into a group called the Daughters of Mother Jones and were key leaders in the fight. I just googled Catherine and found that she died a few years back. If she were alive, I know she'd be on the front lines once again demanding justice this time around.

Finally, this from Cuba. The latest tactic in imperialism's never-ending war against the Cuban revolution came with the recent propaganda attack from the European Union. Now, in a letter from Kenia Serrano Puig, president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, fondly known as ICAP to all who've traveled there, comes an appeal to speak out in defense of the island nation and its right to self-determination. "We are asking our friends, the same ones who have demonstrated to us their irreducible solidarity for so many years in the most difficult of circumstances," to sign a statement of solidarity by artists and intellectuals. Initial signers include Danny Glover, Rafael Cancel Miranda and many others. For more information, to read the statement and, I hope, to sign it yourself as I just did, go here.

Welcome to #49

As those of you who've found your way here via this link know, this blog has been listed as one of the presumably top "50 Places to Find Literary Criticism Online" at Online University Lowdown. I don't know anything about the site, and I haven't had a chance to review the list they've posted so I can't vouch for it, but it's good to be included. Even if I barely squeaked in, at 49th.

For new visitors to Read Red, welcome. Spend some time here. Read old posts. Review the list of books I've written about, favorably if I've read them, hopefully if I want to. See if anything I say makes sense to you. If it does, come back. I usually post several times a week. About books, about the literary world, about publishing news, about the arts in general, and about how all this connects to a revolutionary Marxist approach to reading, writing, and fighting for a better world. Sometimes my life makes an appearance here too.

If I'm doing things right, you'll find quite a different take on literary matters here than at other sites you might check out. To my knowledge, this blog is unique. I don't know of any other English-language site where an active participant in the working-class struggle--a communist activist who is also a reader who is also a writer--addresses questions of literary culture. What I write here is informed by my world view as a Marxist-Leninist, a partisan for the international movement to overturn the capitalist system and replace it with a society based on liberation and equality: socialism.

What you'll find here, then, is, frequently, dissent from the standard version. Rants. Outrage. Also cheers. Celebration. New information. About books and writers ignored or discounted by the bourgeois literary establishment. About events, political-activist and/or literary-cultural. And, yes, literary criticism and analysis--but written from a class-conscious rather than an academic angle.

If any of this interests you, stick around. At the moment I'm in the midst of an ongoing muse about the uses of literature in service of the class struggle. That's what I'll get back to shortly.

What books can't do

Revolution runs on the engine of action. Revolution is not, as Mao reminded us, a tea party. It is not a talk shop. It is also not a reading room.

But it does require revolutionary consciousness. How is consciousness changed?

Consciousness changes in various ways and at varied tempos, now in slow increments and now at high velocity. However, the main and most important location for changing consciousness is the living struggle. Being determines consciousness, and there's nothing like finding your hungry, tired, sweaty self thrust toward the flashpoint of the class struggle for finding your sluggish, confused, intimidated mind refreshed and revived, your eyes whose vision had been blinkered suddenly opened wide. If you've ever been on strike, as I have three times, you have no doubt experienced this phenomenon firsthand. As Lenin wrote, a strike is a microcosm of revolution, a school or training ground. On the picket line it's a beautiful thing to watch workers who had days or weeks before been stolid, sullen, fatalistic, settled, seem to wake up, look around, understand. There's a nearly audible click as a new perception of reality comes into play.

Thirty years ago this coming summer, I was one of the leaders of a six-week strike of public transportation workers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of the great moments of that very difficult struggle came on a morning early in the walkout when the top management tried to drive in to the HQ through our picket lines. They had all come together in one car hoping to shoot through and get in to their offices. The strikers blocked their car. Surrounded it. Grabbed it, shook and rocked it, waving picket signs, chanting our demands, while inside the bosses froze in terror. Remember, no cell phones back then. They couldn't call for help. It was just us and them, and at least in my memory little to no police presence, and the bosses were convinced, you could see it in their faces, that we were about to smash the windshield, reach in and grab them, beat them bloody or worse. For some reason we did not. We contented ourselves with a nonviolent display of our power. Our superior numbers. Our rage. It sure was fun scaring the bosses, but in my opinion the most important effect of that excellent confrontation was to be seen not on their faces but on those of the strikers. They shone with determination, strength and class pride.

Our potential as workers, as the people who make everything run and can bring everything to a halt as we literally had by refusing to drive or service the buses, had suddenly that summer day come clear for us all. Not as theory. In action.

There's not a book in the world that can match a week on strike for the power to shift a worker's mind, enlarge a worker's understanding. What use, then, are books? Especially those of a fictional persuasion?

To be continued.