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<div>Clandestine Occupations was just published by PM Press
(order at <a href="http://www.pmpress.org">http://www.pmpress.org/content/article.php/DianaBlock</a>).
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<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33222-reverberations-of-underground-activism">http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33222-reverberations-of-underground-activism</a></small></small></small></b>
<h1 id="reader-title">Reverberations of Underground Activism</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Dan Berger - <span
class="itemDateCreated">Wednesday, 14 October 2015</span></div>
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<p><strong><em>Clandestine Occupations: An Imaginary
History</em>, Diana Block, PM Press, 2015</strong></p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>The underground is an elaborate metaphor for the many
subterranean ways of living, thinking and feeling that
percolate our movements.</h3>
<p>Of all such strategies, perhaps no decision is as
fraught - as controversial and yet, as I have explored <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32429-criminalizing-the-history-of-us-radical-underground-movements">elsewhere</a>,
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.</p>
<p>Certainly that is how writer and activist Diana Block
conceptualizes the underground in her new novel. <em>Clandestine
Occupations</em> 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.</p>
<p><em>Clandestine Occupations</em> is in some ways a
sequel to Block's beautiful 2009 memoir, <em><a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.akpress.org/armthespiritakpress.html">Arm
the Spirit</a></em>. 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, <a
target="_blank" href="http://womenprisoners.org/">California
Coalition for Women Prisoners</a> in real life).</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.marilynbuck.com/">Marilyn Buck</a>, a
white ally to the Black Liberation Army who spent more
than 25 years in prison - including being held <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www.marilynbuck.com/incommunicado.html">incommunicado</a>
after 9/11 - and who died three weeks after being
granted compassionate release. (The same fate befalls
Cassandra, too.)</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.freejalil.com/">Jalil Muntaqim</a>,
also a former Black Panther who has served more than 40
years in prison and was <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.freethesf8.org/">one of eight Black
Panthers charged in 2007</a> 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 <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.venceremosbrigade.net/index.htm">Venceremos
Brigade</a> trips to Cuba to today's <a
target="_blank" href="http://blacklivesmatter.com">Black
Lives Matter movement</a>, propel the book's story
arc.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Block casts parenthood and revolutionary commitment in
a global context rare for many American discussions of
child-raising.</h3>
<p>While both books share the same scaffolding, they are
different texts. <em>Arm the Spirit</em> 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 <em>Arm the
Spirit</em>, 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.</p>
<p><em>Clandestine Occupations</em> 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.</p>
<p>The book beautifully, painfully illustrates the dangers
of dogma and ego. It also shows the severity of
clandestine politics. Whereas <em>Arm the Spirit</em>
chronicled Block's journey underground, <em>Clandestine
Occupations</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>Clandestine Occupations</em> 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.</p>
<p>Still, <em>Clandestine Occupations</em> 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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Ultimately, <em>Clandestine Operations</em> 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.</p>
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