body politics pt. 1

being with change instead of managing it

I began writing this while weightlifting at the gym. A year of resistance training has shown me a new way to pray. Week after week, body against the barbell, to the best of my ability, I pray for small changes. A horizon emerges from this physical resistance.

In 1968, the writer and art critic John Berger distinguished between riots, revolutionary uprisings, and mass demonstrations. He described the latter as a kind of communal training, requiring both spontaneity and practice, invoking time as the lead prophet. “The truth is that mass demonstrations are rehearsals for revolution: not strategic or even tactical ones, but rehearsals of revolutionary awareness. The delay between the rehearsals and the real performance may be very long…Its value is the result of its artificiality, for therein lies its prophetic, rehearsing possibilities.”

Berger was writing at a time of heightened and protracted people’s movements around the world, and in the midst of a 20-year-long proxy war between the U.S. and Soviet Union set in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. A committed Marxist, his writing assigned divinity to human creativity, art and protest, through agnostic language — faith then becomes ‘promise’ or ‘desire.’ “Freedom is the experience of a desire being acknowledged, chosen, and pursued,” he wrote, in a five-year wake of essays started after 9/11. “Desire never concerns the mere possession of something, but the changing of something.”

I’ve been thinking about what this moment of accelerated awareness of Palestinian rebellion is asking of us, here in the heart of empire. The arc of solidarity doesn’t end at a ceasefire, or the dismantling of Israeli occupation. Organizers conjure the faith resistance requires, affirming that “Palestine will be free in our lifetime.” This invokes a field and duration of vision in deep conflict with the neoliberal architectures of immediacy that hold our attention and labour captive. And it resists romanticism when you consider that, not too long from now, the Earth will liberate itself from human rapacity.

The arc extends beyond Palestine, beyond the global south, and loops back around to us. To chant “End the occupation now!” affirms the task at hand. This moment asks us to relinquish believing in ways of life that, at one time, may have made sense, offered convenience, or semblances of freedom. There’s a book sitting on my coffee table by the imprisoned Egyptian activist and technologist Alaa Abd El-Fattah. The title, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, is a call to reject naivete. He writes directly to those living in so-called ‘liberal democracies,’ to see how our faith in state and corporate-led visions of freedom has been constructed.

But once recovered, where does belief turn its attention? It’s a question worth asking because faith unmoored is vulnerable to the charisma of charlatans.

This is why I disclosed that this essay took root in aggressive normalcy. Squat rack, fluorescent lights, body odours, commercial radio tinnily blaring “Californication” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The quieter contents of our modern lives are linked by time spent in garish mundanity; at the grocery store, on the bus, waiting in line, for emails. I am writing for the same reason I use my body in this way, not to convey a moral position, but to rehearse the possibility of being transformed.

*****

I know that there are answers I’ll never get, but some internal force compels me to ask questions regardless. My dislodged faith often finds respite in collectivity, which is not the same as consensus. This tension is satisfying, because it mirrors reality. My reiki healer said that my throat chakra is struggling with expression: I need to trust that I’m a good person instead of constantly anticipating that I am wrong, and therefore bad. But what I’ve instead come to desire is being wrong over and over again — to embody a political horizon that’s always expanding, resisting hubris.

Like the Christian mystic Richard Rohr says, “I pray for one humiliation a day. It doesn’t have to be major.”  

*****

A shared political ethos accommodates different senses of time, perspective, and priorities. Faith as a cultural practice submits that all rehearsal is the performance. I contemplate this while reading Steve Biko, the African socialist, nationalist, and anti-Apartheid activist, who was murdered by South African police at 31-years-old. “The major thing to note about our songs is that they were never songs for individuals,” he wrote in 1971. “All African songs are group songs. Though many have words, this is not the most important thing about them. Tunes were adapted to suit the occasion and had the wonderful effect of making everybody read the same things from the common experience.”

What happens when we read and write together; when we breathe together; when we sing together? This is the diligent work of removing the distance between yourself and the ugliness and contradiction of humanity. Learning this song requires conceiving of a horizon.

Like Berger, Biko considers how impressionism can be a tool for political synthesis. A chorus of old and young voices, iterating ancestral songs, collapses the present. “We regard our living together not as an unfortunate mishap warranting endless competition among us but a deliberate act of God to make us a community of brothers and sisters jointly involved in the quest for a composite answer to the varied problems of life.” There is no alienation in an ensemble. Subjectivities collide!

Group song goes beyond the ornamental or representational. Instead it is relational, rational, and resurrecting. It admits to a cosmos that accounts for life beyond sight. Group song is an assertion against domination. “We as a community are prepared to accept that nature will have its enigmas which are beyond our powers to solve,” Biko writes. Resistance, as in the spirit can’t be colonized. What is revolution but the rehearsal of a group song?