Writing Like Other People Exist
Sarah Schulman and the story of an idea
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Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair has been on my bookshelf for years. But the ideas in it have been living in my head for as long as I can remember.
To read this book in early 2024 is to experience an eery sense of déjà-vu. Schulman began writing in the summer of 2014, when Israeli forces bombed Gaza with a brutality that has since been overshadowed by the current violence. Conflict is bookended by accounts of and reactions to the 2014 war on Palestine, which Schulman cites as an extreme example of abuse, in which much of the global community is complicit. The remaining sections of the book cover the conflict-abuse spectrum on a smaller scale – domestic violence, police racism, classroom debate, homophobic policy, sexual harassment. What these situations have in common is overreaction, caused by “distorted thinking in which justifiable behavior [is] understood as aggression”. The resulting escalation, if not checked, can lead to violence, cruelty and full-scale abuse. You don’t have to accept Conflict’s links between all these situations to recognise its core truths: In order to build strong movements and a just society, we need to distinguish between everyday normative conflict and abuse, and deal with those situations appropriately.
This is a book that speaks directly to activists, calling on us to join a conversation about how we approach conflict in our movements and communities. It brings together psychological theories and approaches to interpersonal conflict and resolution with reflections on grassroots activism, high politics and war. While confronting abuse requires direct intervention, addressing conflict necessitates strong listening and communication skills. When communities respond to conflict through aggressive tactics such as shunning, they make situations worse. And while progressive communities too often overreact to conflict, they also often fail to recognise and challenge abuse.
This is a book to be shared, its lessons discussed and put into practice. As Olivia Laing writes, Conflict is best read as a manifesto, offering radical solutions for change, whether at the level of family, friendship, political movements, nations or global solidarity networks. Yet precisely because it deals with painful issues and challenges some of the basic tenets of contemporary social movements (Schulman has no truck with trigger warnings, has an avowed disdain for buzz words, and states emphatically that not everyone who believes themselves to be a victim of abuse actually is), Conflict has been denounced by some activists as dangerous, Schulman accused of being apologist for abusers (a scroll through Goodreads reviews gives a flavour of such reactions). It’s understandable that people who have experienced abuse might resist Schulman’s arguments. However, if we reject the book out of hand we miss an opportunity to confront challenging problems that weaken political movements. Equally importantly, we miss the chance to examine what it tells us about how writing itself can contribute to the construction of the deep communities and non-abusive society Schulman – and surely all progressive activists – advocate.
It’s tempting to say that Conflict is an “accessible” book. But it would be more accurate to call it a conscious book. Schulman locates herself in a tradition of queer feminist writing that crosses genres, grounded in “a specifically lesbian historical analysis of power” which understands “sexual, racial, material, emotional, colonial, and gender dynamics […] as continuous and interrelated”. Schulman writes in the company of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, lesbian poets and activists who were profoundly aware of the power of language both to dominate and liberate, who wrote passionately about the need for women, especially Black women and lesbians, to write their ways into the world and challenge violence and exploitation. Schulman takes special inspiration from Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, a “biomythography” that fuses fiction, history, myth, autobiography and poetry. In Zami Lorde responded to the lack of genres available for expressing and exploring her multiple identities and experiences as a Black lesbian by, as Schulman puts it, “simply inventing her own”.
Conflict is less an invention of a new genre than an example of experimental nonfiction that moves from genre to genre, guided by the argument and affect shaping each of the book’s sections. As Schulman writes in the introduction
As a creative writer I have long understood that form should be an organic expression of the feelings at the core of the piece. Each chapter here serves a different function and that is represented in its tone, genre, style, and form.
Schulman began her professional life as a journalist, before embarking on a prolific writing career encompassing fiction, nonfiction and, more recently, the use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook to build political arguments through posts that represent underreported voices and invite dialogue (the final section of Conflict reproduces examples of such online exchanges during the war on Gaza in 2014). This commitment to literary form-shifting has alienated some readers, but the mixture of genres and voice, the use of “eclectic sources and other people’s stories”, reflect the expansive terrain covered in the book and as well as the challenges of incorporating and listening to a range of voices: the very tasks at the heart of resolving conflict and avoiding abuse.
Schulman locates Conflict within the “literature of ideas”, informed by, but separate from, academia. Her discussion in the book is “undisciplined” (her term and scare quotes), “not rooted in traditional academic research or controlled studies with live subjects”. Her observation that it is “civilians who will have to find solutions to escalation” reminds us that activist research needs to be accountable to the communities it writes about. If the undisciplined literature of ideas has a place in the university, Schulman suggests, it is in the classroom, where it can “serv[e] as a subject of academic analysis and inquiry while not being a product of it”.
Indeed, the experience of reading Conflict is closer to that of the intense intellectual debate and heated emotional exchange encountered in the intimate seminar class than the more formal format of the lecture. Schulman takes the reader through her own process of learning and thinking about a topic, how she came to the conclusions she draws. She’s a storyteller, not a preacher. She wanders around an issue, looks at it from different angles, encouraging the reader to consider and reconsider both accepted wisdoms and novel ideas. Like Lorde and Rich, Schulman brings her own “observations, feelings, contexts, histories, visions, memories, and dreams” to her writing. If, as she stated in an interview with Molly Fischer in 2020, “a nonfiction book is the story of an idea,” in Conflict, Fischer reflects, “the idea’s story is perhaps also her own.” Still, Schulman is not the central character in this tale. When she does play a key role in a particular story, she is not there to paint herself as a hero, or to reveal some intimate detail about her life, but to examine a situation close-up, from different perspectives, flesh it out, give all the players a voice.
An exquisite example of this technique is found in her sketch of “A Dangerous Flirt” during the course of a work meeting – where there is potential for it all to go wrong, for one person or another to be accused of harassment, to risk their career. The author sits at a table surrounded by “relative strangers” and takes particular notice of the woman across from her – “attractive and smart…a bit naughty”. She begins to imagine that the woman’s provocative language and inviting gestures are directed at her; a sex scene with the woman takes shape in her head. By taking us through this scenario in detail, Schulman shows how such a moment can go from risqué to risky to full-blown crisis in the flash of a smile, the flip of a fringe. Or it might go the other way entirely. Or nowhere at all. It’s about context, about the ability/willingness of the parties involved to see the complexity of the situation, to resist jumping to conclusions. It’s a moment that reminds the reader that although people with different sexual histories would inevitably react differently to the electricity in the room, self-help-type advice to establish healthy boundaries and stick to them at all costs isn’t always up to the job.
We can picture the novelist writing and rewriting drafts of this scene, scripting inner monologues of the main characters and the others at the table who witness the interaction between the two women, voyeuristically guessing at its hidden meanings. It doesn’t matter whether this encounter is something that Schulman experienced, whether she is deliberately or unconsciously embellishing. The point is how she uses the tale to invite the reader to see for herself the stakes in such an interaction. She asks us to reflect on the relationship between fantasy and truth in scenes of seduction (there are strong echoes of psychoanalysis here, and later Schulman tells us that the psychoanalyst William Reich is one of her heroes). Schulman allows us to recognise the conflicting meanings of the scene – anticipation and risk – before stepping back, recalling the history of “homosexual panic”, reminding us how easily desire can be misinterpreted, and of the particular dangers such misreadings pose for queer people. Yet we are left too with a sense that even as these threats hover, there is potential to avert catastrophe – as long as we accept that frustrated desire or a wounded ego don’t count. After all, Schulman reminds us, “[u]neven desire is not a crime”.
Like the best creative writing teacher, Schulman stresses the importance of metaphor, as well as its potential misuse:
[R]hetorical devices that hide details keep truth from being known and faced. Using the word “violence” without metaphor will help with the current discourse of overreaction and help us discern, with more awareness, the differences between Abuse and Conflict.
She gives the example of people who claim that a particular experience “feels like rape”. If it’s not rape, she says, it almost certainly does not feel like rape. I read this as a warning to writers: use our words too loosely, and we risk complicity in the cover-up of abuse.
If Conflict is written with the conviction that writing matters politically, that how we write shapes our actions, Schulman also recognises the limitations of the written word. More than one tale in the book features a communication breakdown through email or and text messaging, underlining how pithy sentences, sent and read in isolation, can lead quickly to misunderstanding, or put an end to a potentially meaningful relationship before it has had the chance to get off the ground. “We have developed these reductive modes […] to accompany reductive ideas that are supposed to serve large social functions but are not based in human complexity,” Schulman writes. She wishes that “all the people of the industrial world would sign a pledge that any negative exchange that is created on email or text must be followed by a live, in-person conversation.”
There are many such dreams in Conflict, and there is a utopian thread running through the book, in the best tradition of feminist speculative fiction that invites us to imagine different worlds. As with so much such writing, the book’s answers – communication, complexity, commitment – also provoke questions. In a 2020 feature on Schulman for The Cut, Mollie Fischer cites someone close to Schulman:
“The social world she’s describing is so time consuming.” (…) It demands constant self-scrutiny, ongoing dialogue, diligent fact-finding, and availability for intervention in the personal lives of one’s friends. “That world she’s asking for is nearly impossible under capitalism.”
I would state this somewhat differently. Capitalism teaches us to dedicate our time to profit and competition, to prioritise individual hard work and success over collective effort and gain. It true that the kind of world Conflict envisions is not fully realisable under capitalism; but this does not mean we have no agency to make change in the present. If the solutions Schulman proposes are time- and labour-intensive, something else becomes increasingly apparent through the course of Conflict: just how much time is wasted when we focus our energy on damaging, counterproductive and potentially abusive forms of communication and behaviour. What if we used at least some of our time differently? What if we diverted the energy expended on writing emails into the void, or provoking invisible interlocuters on social media, into seeking out and speaking to people in person? Or writing about activism in ways that invited careful listening and considered response?
In her review of Conflict, Laing writes:
As an activist, Schulman believes that problems have solutions. It is possible, she argues, to do things differently, not least by acknowledging the existence of other people.
Circling back to the question of style, we might say that Conflict Is Not Abuse is a written version of deep listening and serious dialogue. That’s where some of Schulman’s critics get it wrong. If the book meanders a bit, crosses genres, makes bold claims and sometimes sweeping connections, it’s because the best political arguments are presented not as perfect preformed ideas, but as part of an ongoing conversation.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. If you like what you read, you can:
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