A friend emailed recently and mentioned that they hadn’t seen much of my writing recently; she thought she’d subscribed to something but wasn’t sure. I wrote back and told her I hadn’t been writing much since my sabbatical ended and I went back to teaching and also became chapter chair of my union, which is true as far as it goes, but what has been stopping me more than anything is my absolute horror at the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which makes me want to scream and protest and makes me feel grief and anger and fear and shame, and does not bring many words to my minds besides curses, prayers and slogans - which all have things to recommend them as far as language goes.
As part of my participation in the Jewish Fast for Gaza, I’ve been sharing the things I’ve read that have stayed with me, which most recently was this fascinating article by Abena Ampofoa Asare, about Fred Dube, an anti-apartheid activist who lost his academic career because of daring to connect Zionism to other forms of racism. One of the many things I learned in the article was that among those who recognized Israel as an apartheid state was apartheid South Africa itself, which called Israel to the carpet for its hypocrisy back when Israel used to engage in mild criticism of that regime; eventually like found like and the regimes allied themselves strategically and ideologically. The idea of comparison - across regimes, movements, time periods - is, as Masha Gessen teaches us - how we know the world. As an old comp lit major and newish poet, I think a lot about how without these comparisons - without comparison, analogy, metaphor, we can’t really escape nationalisms and exceptionalisms.
And so, if/when I am writing and reading about things other than Gaza, right now I am never not also thinking and writing and reading about Gaza. As last year drew to a close, and as I looked over my list of books read, things published and so forth, I found myself thinking about two of the best books I read last year - Let the Record Show, Sarah Schulman’s oral history-based story of ACT-UP, and Boss, Mike Royko’s biography of Chicago’s mayor Daley, which I picked up from my brother in-law’s garage - and how they both speak to ideas of comparison, of worlds that are both insular and different than ours and far-reaching and very much like ours.
Comparing these books to each other, on first glance they books and their authors couldn’t seem to be more different. Schulman is a radical queer artist and scholar; her book came out a few years ago and is long, with a range of voices, telling the story of a group of radical queers, bohemians, artists and activists, beautiful young East Village dwellers in Doc Martens, along with other assorted folks who for whatever reason are called to justice, fearlessly facing tragedy, defying the system, and making real change. Royko’s slim book from 1971 is entirely in his own voice - that of the old school working-class journalist in a proudly unglamorous city. He sheds light on a world where the working class, especially Black people but really a whole city, were kept in their place by cigar-chomping louts, and how impervious the system was to those who tried to confront it, from would-be reformers forced to run as Republicans to the civil rights and anti-war movements.
And yet I kept thinking of these two books together because of what they both do - the thing I want most from nonfiction, and the thing so much of it fails to do: they beautifully select details that illuminate the whole and they tell collective stories, that, despite the title of Royko’s book, are not about single people but about how social organisms - neighborhoods, cities, communities, organizations, movements - actually work.
I grew up outside Chicago and both my parents grew up in the city. Some of my earliest political memories are listening to Chicago Public radio when a guy named Aaron Freeman used to do a Star Wars parody called Council Wars, about the city council stonewalling Harold Washington’s attempts to stifle the machine. “The clout” is the dark side of the force the young rebel is told he must turn to. I remember listening to this and trying to picture what this “machine” might look like - what kind of gears did it have, and what did it do? Royko lays it out, from city of small town neighborhoods, each their own world, the patronage jobs to the men who delivered the votes, to the petty vengeance on his enemies.
It’s stunning because in one way, it feels like an entirely vanished world, and yet, every few pages you find an almost-too-on-the-nose “plus ca change” passage. They don’t chomp cigars anymore, but you want a perfect distillation of what “police reform” means?
This is what happened when a scandal threatened to derail his power after some cops were caught running a burglary ring (Fixing tickets was one thing but breaking into houses was a little much.) So Daley fired the police chief and brought in a college man to help the cops talk nice.
In Schulman’s case, the success of this relatively small group offers a rich study for activists and movement scholars. Schulman allows different activists their voices and perspectives on different actions, even when she clearly disagrees. At the root, her question is the same as Royko’s - what is power, where does it come from? How do people get it and use it? Against Royko’s world where each flunky has their fiefdom we see how affinity groups can each be a world in and of themselves and greater than the sum of their parts. How the gears of the machine can be not only a trap but a force multiplier for movement and liberation. Some of the best pieces written about it explore these possibilities.
The question of how to write about people collectively without entering into the realm of pure abstraction fascinates me, which is why I’ve long been drawn to collective biographies and oral histories. These forms make comparison necessary and inevitable if often implicit.
I suppose I started writing poetry because it’s the realm in which everything connects to everything else, or at least we might imagine it to be so. I wrote a lot in 2023 but didn’t publish a lot, but the last thing I published was a poem I wrote on the first day of the year, which seems appropriate.
Speaking of endings and beginnings, another book I read in 2023 which I’ve been thinking a lot about is Sinead O’Connor’s memoir. I had checked it out of the library before she died and hadn’t gotten around to reading it but then she died and so someone recalled it so I read it that night in one sitting. In it she says the first song she wrote was about holding someone’s hand as they died. The second was ‘Jackie,’ the first song off her first album, about the ghost of a woman who never gives up looking for her husband who was lost at sea. Sinead got punished for being ahead of her time but also for thinking like an artist - widely, sometimes wildly, with broad strokes and broad comparisons, without the boundaries most of us cling to for respectability or some sense of “safety”. She never stopped her spiritual questing, and she didn’t think death was the end. I hope she was right.