Writing as Activism

A reader’s view

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

I sometimes hear writers say, “My writing is my activism.”

What does this mean, exactly?

While an author may set out to pen a piece of activist writing, that writing only becomes part of a wider struggle when it’s read or heard, passed around, debated and discussed. Activist writing is not a blueprint or set of guidelines to live and act by. It is writing that engages readers in in any number of ways – through the energy of its prose or verse, its creative use of language, its utopian (or dystopian) vision of the future, the vitality of its description of the present, its ability to help the reader understand the world (including our shared histories) in new ways, to imagine themselves not just as part of that world, but as actors in the process of making it better.

It’s impossible to predict which works might have these effects. A political tract written deliberately as a polemic to spark action may fall flat if it alienates its readers, while a carefully crafted poem or a speculative novel might prove the catalyst for a new movement. This summer, I’m mostly reading science fiction, because in the midst of growing economic inequality and climate chaos I yearn for visions of how the world might be otherwise.

Writing as activism is not a question of genre. Nor is it about the intention of the writer. While an author may imagine themselves as engaging in activism while writing, and this engagement might come through strongly on the page, it is only when writing gets out there that it has the potential to act as a catalyst for change.

That’s why when I think about writing as activism I’m less interested in asking authors how they write as activists, or in analysing activist writing for its content, style and messages – thought these are potentially potentially useful exercises – than hearing from activists about what they have read and when, what struck them, what discussions they had about that reading with others.

When I conducted oral history interviews with former activists in Spain and Cuba, I often asked such questions. The answers could be surprising: the things activists remember reading (or the television shows or films they watched, the music they listened to) were often different from the texts cited in histories of the movements they were part of as foundational works or key cultural references. While historians of Basque nationalism write a lot about the competing influences of Marxism and ethnic nationalism in the 1960s and 70s, women I spoke to were reading Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet. While cultural critics typically cite the 1993 film Strawberry and Chocolate as a watershed moment in changing attitudes to queer sexualities in Cuba, members of the LGBTQ+ community recall watching pirated Brazilian soap operas that circulated secretly in their social and sexual circles. Of course, there is often overlap between classic political or cultural texts and activist reading/watching. But even the most radical canon conceals as much as it reveals.

All this writing about activist writing has inevitably got me thinking about the works that have influenced my activism and my thinking about activism. Between editing paragraphs I’ve found myself scanning my memory and my bookshelves. Tomorrow will throw up a whole new lot; today I’ve settled on three:

Elly Bulkin, Minnie Brue Pratt and Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (1984). On the inside cover page of this ragged paperback, I’ve written in red ink “Montréal, June 1993”; on the previous page someone else has marked “4.95” in the top right corner, and below that a third hand has scribbled an unrecognised signature. I’ve forgotten where exactly I bought this second-hand copy, but I recall clearly the animated discussions I had about its contents.

In the early 90s I was living in a collective dyke/trans house in the east end of Montreal. Not a day passed without an intense argument about the relationship between racism, class, sexuality and feminism. For my housemates and me this book was a treasure. A collective text that grew out of the friendship between three US lesbians – one white of Christian heritage, one Black, one Jewish – it felt like a roadmap for negotiating the fraught politics of privilege and oppression (our own, those of others).

As I flip through the pages three decades later, my eyes are drawn to faded pencil lines highlighting phrases that still resonate: “How much easier it is for someone to say simply that she is oppressed (…) and not to examine the various forms of privilege which so often co-exist with an individual’s oppression” (Bulkin); “You can’t run the tape backwards and start from scratch, so the question is, what are you going to do with what you’ve got?” (Smith); “Where does the need come from, the inner push to walk into change, if by skin color, ethnicity, birth culture, we are women in a position of material advantage, where we gain at the expense of others, of other women?” (Pratt). I’m amazed at how much this book still has to teach me – about politics, history, love, change.  

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” (1992). I don’t remember when I first came across this chapter, though it was probably a good 10 or 15 years after it was published. In a way it’s a strange piece for me to choose: I did not study Cultural Studies at university and was never a theory geek. But I’ve returned time and again to Hall’s writing when grappling with the relationship between theory and activism, and the problem of the institutionalisation of radical political thought.

The phrase most often quoted from this essay is: “The only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency.” The metaphor Hall uses for this struggle is “wrestling with the angels.” This striking image has been interpreted in different ways, but what attracts me is the implicit warning against complacency and orthodoxy. The piece also has an important reflection on the first person in political writing: in order to avoid the impossible burden of having to represent an entire group (in Hall’s case, “the black person’s burden” of being asked to speak on behalf of “the entire black race”), one must, paradoxically in his words, speak autobiographically.

Val Plumood, Being Prey (2000). I first read this astonishing story of Plumwood’s survival of a crocodile attack when writing about veganism and feminism a few years ago. The drama of the attack is compelling in itself, but what really attracted me was Plumwood’s reflection of having her anthropocentric worldview shattered at the moment that she thought she would die in the jaws of the crocodile. The brutal experience of being turned into potential prey led her to believe that no creature – including those most typically eaten by humans – should ever be treated as just meat.

Plumwood’s story led me to her philosophical work, dense in its reference to European continental philosophy and lessons from the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, which differs in substantial ways from the mainstream Western animal rights and ecofeminist traditions, especially around the issue of sentience as the basis for the moral consideration of other-than-human beings. Borrowing form Hall, I would say that my experience of reading Plumwood has been one of struggling with angels. I’ve had intense arguments with other vegans about the implications of her work for our everyday ethics and political work. Her ideas and stories keep me on my toes, preventing me from feeling smug or settled in my activism.  

Tell me and other readers about some writing that has shaped your activism!