*
*
Clandestine Occupations was just published by PM Press (order at
http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php/DianaBlock
<http://www.pmpress.org>).
*http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33222-reverberations-of-underground-activism*
Reverberations of Underground Activism
Dan Berger - Wednesday, 14 October 2015
*/Clandestine Occupations: An Imaginary History/, Diana Block, PM Press,
2015*
Changing the world is hard. Activism contains so many unknowns, and so
many difficult decisions with impacts we might guess but can only know
in retrospect. The combination of urgency and despair, strategy and
principle, has fueled many efforts at radical transformation.
Ultimately, we give it our best shot and hope that it makes a
difference. One of the hardest things, then, is learning to live with
loss. How do we keep fighting after something - an approach, an
organization - we poured our hearts into has fallen apart? How do we act
reflexively and across political generations or perspectives?
These are difficult questions. But in the absence of the dramatic social
change we pursue, grappling with such problems trumps giving in to
apathy or rejecting the need for change. It is, in fact, an opportunity
to live a political life committed enough to grapple with these issues.
Radicals of all stripes ought to confront and reflect upon these issues.
But they continue to circulate around those who have gone underground.
The underground is an elaborate metaphor for the many subterranean
ways of living, thinking and feeling that percolate our movements.
Of all such strategies, perhaps no decision is as fraught - as
controversial and yet, as I have explored elsewhere
<http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32429-criminalizing-the-history-of-us-radical-underground-movements>,
misunderstood - as the one to go underground. It has been taken up in
novels, memoirs, history books, plays, documentaries and Hollywood
cinema. Part of the fascination may lie in the fact that an underground
is hard to imagine in these days of permanent surveillance and social
media overexposure. Yet the best of these cultural texts show that the
underground is an elaborate metaphor for the many subterranean ways of
living, thinking and feeling that percolate our movements.
Certainly that is how writer and activist Diana Block conceptualizes the
underground in her new novel. /Clandestine Occupations/ is a nuanced and
intimate portrayal of radical activism's far-reaching consequences. The
book takes place across four decades and six narrators, each one
relating to a revolutionary named Luba Gold. Each chapter is told
through a different narrator. We meet Luba in 1986 through the eyes of
Belinda, her coworker. We follow her through Joan, a friend who
ultimately betrays her to the FBI; Sage, a former friend distanced by
the intensity of their radical group; Maggie, who meets Luba in 2007
when they both support the parole attempt of someone in prison; and
Anise, the daughter of Sage and a budding young activist. Luba herself
has the last word as she narrates the last chapter, set in 2020 when a
new underground is on the rise.
/Clandestine Occupations/ is in some ways a sequel to Block's beautiful
2009 memoir, /Arm the Spirit
<http://www.akpress.org/armthespiritakpress.html>/. More accurately, it
is a retelling. Both books find the protagonist plotting to free a
Puerto Rican political prisoner, fleeing an FBI sting in Los Angeles
with an infant in tow, living underground for 10 years in Pittsburgh and
returning to public activism in San Francisco. After returning from
living underground Gold, like Block, cofounds an organization focused on
supporting and freeing women in prison (Unshackled Women in the book,
California Coalition for Women Prisoners <http://womenprisoners.org/> in
real life).
Other characters mirror real people as well. Cassandra, a political
prisoner caught up in the sting Luba narrowly escaped and who was
unexpectedly placed in isolation after the 9/11 attacks, bears many
resemblances to Marilyn Buck <http://www.marilynbuck.com/>, a white ally
to the Black Liberation Army who spent more than 25 years in prison -
including being held incommunicado
<http://www.marilynbuck.com/incommunicado.html> after 9/11 - and who
died three weeks after being granted compassionate release. (The same
fate befalls Cassandra, too.)
Another political prisoner central to the book's story arc is Rahim, a
former Black Panther who is reconnected with many of his California
comrades when he is sent across the country to stand trial on a specious
30-year-old case. He resembles Jalil Muntaqim
<http://www.freejalil.com/>, also a former Black Panther who has served
more than 40 years in prison and was one of eight Black Panthers charged
in 2007 <http://www.freethesf8.org/> with the 1971 death of a San
Francisco police officer. One suspects that other characters in the book
are also drawn from people in Block's experience. The book's subtitle
rings true when it proclaims itself "an imaginary history." A series of
real-life events, from the 1970 Venceremos Brigade
<http://www.venceremosbrigade.net/index.htm> trips to Cuba to today's
Black Lives Matter movement <http://blacklivesmatter.com>, propel the
book's story arc.
Block casts parenthood and revolutionary commitment in a global
context rare for many American discussions of child-raising.
While both books share the same scaffolding, they are different texts.
/Arm the Spirit/ traced Block's evolution as an activist into
anti-imperialist feminism, her work against state repression and sexual
violence, her decision to go underground in support of the Puerto Rican
independence movement while parenting a newborn and her rebuilding of a
public activist life upon returning from the underground. It is a tender
and vivid book, simultaneously chronicling a previously unexplored
aspect of recent left-wing history and voicing the complexity of finding
oneself doing two very difficult things at the same time, living
underground and raising a child (ultimately, two children). In /Arm the
Spirit/, Block renders her decision to be a parent alongside her
decision to go underground in a compelling, humane fashion. She noted
that revolutionaries around the world become parents in difficult
circumstances, including more difficult ones than hers. She casts both
parenthood and revolutionary commitment in a global context rare for
many American discussions of child-raising.
/Clandestine Occupations/ incorporates parenthood into clandestinity -
Luba also decides to have a child around the time of going underground.
But the book's greatest success is in its powerful rendering of the
commitments and fragilities of this interconnected group of radicals and
associates. In fact, many of the most sensitive portraits are of people
leaving the radical left, at least in terms of everyday activism: Joan
betrays the underground at the suggestion of her creepy boyfriend, who
later turns out to be an FBI informant. Sage chooses her personal
relationships over her political activism, especially after the rigidity
of the "Uprising" organization (modeled loosely after the Prairie Fire
Organizing Committee, of which Block was a member in the late 1970s)
leaves her few options.
The book beautifully, painfully illustrates the dangers of dogma and
ego. It also shows the severity of clandestine politics. Whereas /Arm
the Spirit/ chronicled Block's journey underground, /Clandestine
Occupations/ takes up subterranean politics from the perspectives of
those left behind. It is a powerful way to tell the story of the
underground, depicting the pain of not being able to account for one's
comrades and loved ones. It puts the emphasis on social relationships
rather than spy-movie tricks. And the resulting picture is complicated.
Belinda is Luba's coworker, a fairly apolitical and lesbian (largely
closeted - her own clandestine operation) nurse, who the FBI tries to
pressure into cooperation once Luba flees. She resists the FBI and finds
a bit of political independence in her courage. Sage, meanwhile, is
isolated from her work after she decides not to go underground and has
told her daughter little about her past. Sage's reluctance to share
information about her past distances her from her daughter, who has to
find her own way in the world. Anise's search for discovery and
political purpose leads her to visit political prisoners, participate in
Occupy Wall Street and take part in an underground adventure of her own.
Telling the story of the underground through other people's experience
of it - including Luba, who meditates on the rise of a new, more
tech-based underground in the year 2020 - is a compelling approach. It
gets at what is compellingly vexing about clandestinity: It is
elliptical, unknown, simultaneously enticing and elusive. That holds
equally true for the clandestine space that some radicals find
themselves in: prison. Block captures the emotional range of visiting or
corresponding with prisoners, the running dialogue between hope and
despair, as well as the pathos of supporting people through decades of
confinement. "This much I remembered - prison visits cooked emotions
until they threatened to boil over in a sizzling, uncontrollable mess,"
Sage confides of her experience visiting Rahim in prison after more than
two decades of silence.
/Clandestine Occupations/ has its own elusions. It is not clear, for
instance, why Luba's group wanted to break that specific (unnamed) woman
out of prison, or what she would do once freed. The purpose of going
underground and its possible connection to aboveground activism is not
well explored here. Block also utilizes some jargon of the far left -
for instance, she refers to politically motivated bank robberies as
"expropriations" - and does not provide much background of the social
movements involved. The uninitiated reader may stumble over some of the
references or miss the nuances at times assumed here.
Still, /Clandestine Occupations/ provides a powerful, deliberately
fragmented glimpse into political commitment and accountability. There
are some lovely passages here about retaining commitment while aging.
There are the small-scale recognitions of the struggle continuing, such
as when Luba and Sage run into each other at a 2003 demonstration
against the Iraq war, "glad ... to be on the streets together again, now
with our children, bracing for the slaughter to come."
The most powerful examples concern deep personal and political
reckoning. Joan, who betrays Luba at the behest of her FBI-informant
boyfriend, is a sympathetic figure troubled by her decision from decades
earlier. She writes a letter to apologize for her betrayals, which seems
to provide a shaky comfort to some of the book's characters. One wishes
that Block, a strong and evocative writer, had included the text of
Joan's letter, not only because of its impact on the characters but to
see Block's imagination of how - especially in the context of growing
state surveillance - fractured political bonds could be rebuilt through
honest, vulnerable dialogue.
Betrayed by Joan, Luba and Cassandra also need to reckon with their own
egotism in the context of intergenerational activism. Each woman
grapples with Anise's youthful intemperance and sense of urgency. Luba
finds herself shocked at Anise's decision to go underground as part of a
hacker-led effort to stifle electronic surveillance in Palestine and the
United States, in an effort that sparks the "Urban Maroon" movement to
shield formerly incarcerated people from state violence. It is a
satisfying end, to show that state violence will continue to generate
clandestine forms of organization, even as they shift from one
generation to the next.
Ultimately, /Clandestine Operations/ is a poignant reminder of the
reverberations of radical activism. In a revealing passage, Luba writes
of the collective responsibility all must bear in social movements. "We
had been so full of our righteous rage, our correct political
convictions, our determination to push ourselves and others to the
limits of militancy that we excluded those who wanted a different role,"
she writes. "We failed to see how our harshness, our superior standards,
our cliquishness could drive people into the arms of our enemies."
Luba's self-reflection comes in 2020, after decades of organizing and
intense political commitment. It is a warning borne of experience, from
the future as much as the past, to build movements that are
uncompromising in their vision but capacious in their empathy.
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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