I wrote this piece in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020. Not an isolated wake, but one drawing in and finding force in the unjust killing and brutalisation of more and evermore Black Americans. An ever-growing trail of names — of people gone, of lives stolen violently and unjustly by law enforcement agents and the emboldened ‘Blue Line’ fraternity,1 and of families broken-hearted — flowing unchecked backwards and forwards through time.2 #SayTheirNames #SayHerName

In sharing this piece now, I wish

⸸ To honour the memory of George Floyd, a man ‘loved by everybody’ and a man ‘whose death would not be in vain’, and a man who must not be forgotten.  

⸸ To honour the spontaneous global uprising against racism and police brutality and the demand for change that rang out following George Floyd’s murder — public lynching — by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin with three other former Minneapolis police officers charged as accomplices: Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao.

⸸ And to honour the stirring appeals that Philonise Floyd, George Floyd’s younger brother, repeatedly makes on behalf of the Floyd family. To honour

the calls of our family and the calls ringing out in the streets across the world. People of all backgrounds, genders and races have come together to demand change. Honor them, honor George, and make the necessary changes that make law enforcement the solution – and not the problem. Hold them accountable when they do something wrong. Teach them what it means to treat people with empathy and respect. Teach them what necessary force is. Teach them that deadly force should be used rarely and only when life is at risk. (Full transcript available here.)

Although aspects of this essay speak directly to the moment in which it was written, I have left it unaltered. It captures an exuberantly mutinous period. A wakeful season marked with multiracial and intergenerational uprisings and occupations, transnational coalitions and solidarism, spontaneous speeches, artivism, and statue toppling, and all during the early stages of a murderous pandemic — proving another site of socio-economic inequality and injustice. It speaks directly to the realities and possibilities of what Cornel West described at the time as ‘America’s moment of reckoning’.

Given what we now know, having moved forward through time, this essay attests to the difficulties of changemaking and the challenge of building and sustaining momentum for change, here relating directly to police killings and brutality and policing reform. Not only physical attacks and extrajudicial killings but also procedural casualness, overpolicing, misconduct, and desecrating human remains to name but a few modes of state and police violence and injustice.

We have made progress during these 36 months, but there is still much work to do if we are to ever dismantle and abolish our racist, toxic, and violent policing and prison systems.

And make no mistake, this is, as many activists and activist-scholars advise, a ‘long distance’, intersectional, and international struggle. Speaking about US police militarization and the ‘Ferguson Uprising’, for instance, Angela Davis observes how the reaction of the civilian police

was an armed response that revealed the extent to which local police departments have been equipped with military arms, military technology, military training. The militarization of the police leads us to think about Israel and the militarization of the police there — if only the images of the police and not of the demonstrators had been shown, one might have assumed that Ferguson was Gaza (Davis 2016, 143).

And today, as yesterday and tomorrow, we must continue to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation. As global citizens, we must unite to protest the systemic evictions, land theft, apartheid, and settler colonialism that everyday threatens and marks the lives (and dreams) of the Palestinian people.

Professor Davis, of course, also reminds us that freedom is a constant struggle, one best actioned through transnational solidarities. A struggle causing many of us, despite the stacked odds, to still rise and rise and rise…

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

From ‘Still I Rise’ by Maya Angelou

Subscribe now

Share

GEORGE FLOYD AND THE URGENT MATTER OF CHANGING THE WORLD:

The Radical Power of Bystander Footage, Monument Activism, and Effective Movement Building

In an age of converging crises, hope can feel in short supply. Yet despite witnessing the increasingly tight realities of everyday life around the globe, I find myself twinging with an unexpected expectancy. And it’s because I’ve been observing a repeating pattern throughout the anti-racism uprisings and global solidarity protests.

It’s not just that people in numbers are still taking to their streets and screens — more than three months after the heinous and public lynching of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers. It’s not just that the global anti-racism uprisings and protests are being led by activists and movements of colour and that the actions are multiracial and intergenerational. Nor that these actions are working, in many cases, to help bring about meaningful societal change — radical civic transformation occupying only our fiercest dreams mere weeks past. Or at least firing-up dialogues about how to start securing that lasting, meaningful change.

This is all reason enough to think that the current wave of uprisings and protests will not, as so often happens, fall into the realm of cultural debate. But the thing that’s got me feeling really encouraged about this moment is the rejection of traditional notions of leadership and hierarchal organizing. To be more specific, it’s the breadth of that rejection. From unprecedented calls to defund — increasingly militarized — ‘chain of command’ police departments and reinvest in bottom-up community services, to monument activism targeting past ‘heroes’ and leaders, to the flood of ‘leaderless’ organizing, we are in the midst of a radical expression of anti-hierarchicalism spanning state and anti-state domains. For unlike many earlier emancipatory movements, today’s activists and movement builders are just as likely to reject notions of leaders and hierarchical organizing within their own movements as they are to resist them within institutional contexts. And that is one heck of a reason to be hopeful.

Let me explain, by way of some background and a few examples.

The anti-racism uprisings and global protests erupted because of a collective observance of the atrocious public lynching of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. A murderous 8 minutes 46 seconds that once seen cannot, nor should not, be put out of mind.

Set in the wider context of the relentless extrajudicial murder and assault of Black Americans, the snuff-like horror of bearing witness to George Floyd’s murder provided — literally in this case — a breath-taking insight into systemic racism. It also shocked global publics into a raw understanding of the destructive and debilitating effect of institutional power — power organized hierarchically. Plainly put, white cops trump Black people.

And contextualized further within the coronavirus pandemic — a public crisis also unduly impacting minority communities — the shock effect of the bystander footage is, not surprisingly, proving a creative rather than depressive force. Resolutely recorded by Darnella Frazier, its transformative power is twofold. It changes forever our ways of seeing and being in the world. For it not only explicitly displays the prejudiced nature of the status quo, it demands our radical refusal of it. (Or for some, defence of it.) And, for many, that increasingly means a fundamental rejection of hierarchal modes of thinking and organizing, wherever we might find them. (Modes of thinking and being rooted, we must always remember, in ableist, white supremacist, capitalist, heteropatriarchy.)

And that brings me to my next point.

Frazier’s footage changes how we see ourselves remaking that world. Or at least it should. For in chronicling, yet again, the urgent need for effective activism, it illuminates how far we’ve come in terms of changing the world in lasting and meaningful ways. And, as we see, it really isn’t that far. But the grievous fecundity of this zero-hour moment makes possible a shift, an uplift, in the revolutionary consciousness: to secure radical ends we must radically reshape the means. It forces us to reimagine how we, as activists, organize ourselves; how to transform a fleeting moment into a lasting movement, pockets of national rebellion into an international revolution. For just as there’s no going back to pre-Covid-19 days, there’s no returning to the time before George Floyd’s murder by police.  

Taking a closer look at the radical power of witness testimonies and bystander — as well as police body cam — footage, we see how they disrupt and decenter state narratives. Yet despite taking a brave stance, often at great personal cost, bystander documentarians are frequently vilified. But where would we be without them? We would not, it is fair to say, still be out on the streets in such numbers. Bystander footage interrupts normal service giving us a glimpse behind the curtain to a world — our prejudiced world — where police officers are not heroes but villains, where state officials do not seek truth and justice but self-preservation, and where media outlets serve corporate masters over their communities. Not always, of course, but more often than is good for our society. Observing bystander footage involves us, makes participants of us. We must actively decide to look away or to stay and fight for change in whatever way we can — be that documenting, writing, marching, occupying, toppling or any other myriad form of protest. No longer can we plead ignorance. And by ‘we’, of course, I mean white people (and their surrogates). For just as — under current systems — there’s no such thing as a ‘good’ cop; there’s now no such thing as an uninvolved citizen.

The annihilation of George Floyd, once witnessed, disrupts forever the possibility of comfortably imagining that those in authority — any kind of authority — are there to protect and serve. One look and with our own eyes we see how the notion of ‘trusted officials’ is not to be trusted. This is not news to Black Americans nor to members of other minority communities who have been confronting this calamity for centuries. Nor even, perhaps, to white allies. Neither is it news to brutalized, disempowered people around the globe; publics dominated via similarly intersecting systems of difference (underpinned by neoliberal ideology and policy): religion, caste, ethnicity, gender, sexuality as examples. But it is news to many — too many — white Americans. (And indeed, more generally, to non-American white people.) As Amy Cooper’s overlapping racist action towards Christian Cooper illustrates, global systems of white power and privilege enable white publics (and their surrogates) to benefit from and bolster hierarchal systems of domination and oppression.

In this way, the bystander footage of George Floyd’s lynching (and Amy Cooper’s wolf cry) is simultaneously a tipping point and an entry point into the workings of structural violence — specifically, here, state brutality, racial injustice, police reform, and the carceral system. That is to say, for those living intimately with historic systemic domination and oppression, it is a breaking point: #NoJusticeNoPeace #SayHerName #SayTheirNames. Allies too may deduce it as a watershed moment. For everyone else it is either a departure point — into understanding and taking positive action regarding racism and police brutality and the broader contexts of overlapping systemic domination and oppression within which they sit — or it is a sticking point.

Without the illuminating, fomenting, and connective power — unifying resonance — of Frazier’s footage, it is unclear if today’s anti-racism uprisings and global solidarity protests would be as diverse and inclusive, and consequently as effective, as they are. Or if indeed they would even be taking place at all. Nor would we have global publics reaching en masse for anti-racism media — from books and podcasts to documentaries — on race and privilege in efforts to better understand the workings of systemic racism and structural violence. For in arousing Audre Lorde’s powerful ordinance that, ‘You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same.’ (Lorde 1982, 142), our collective observance of bystander footage (and other modes of witness testimony) creates the chance for us to transform the matter of our diversity — usually a divisive tool — into a unifying force.

After George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and the ever-increasing roll of murdered and assaulted Black people and minoritarian people, you are either with the revolution or against it. Today, it really is that simple.

Less simple, however, is the matter of enacting lasting transformative worldmaking — the holy grail of any movement. Witnessing those stultifying 8 minutes and 46 seconds throws this age-old activist quandary, or some might say, failing, into sharp relief. (A dilemma itself forming part of the status quo: activism is tolerable within neoliberal capitalist systems only as long has it has no real structural impact.) For just as Frazier’s footage documents the deadly realities of structural violence, it illuminates the continuing urgent need for structural change. And in so doing, it creates another kind of turning point. It forces us, as activists, to confront ourselves and our past actions and revisit a fundamental question: How can we make sure that this time round our activism secures meaningful and enduring change? That it ends, once and for all, the extrajudicial killing of Black people. Ends forever the extrajudicial killing of all oppressed people. And puts to an end the systemic domination — death by one thousand cuts — of all disenfranchised publics. 

And one way to do that is by learning the lessons of earlier movements — defeats and victories — and adjusting our approaches to movement building accordingly. There are many reasons for the gains and losses of past rebellions — a mix of missteps and effective countering on both sides (viz. oppressor and oppressed). But a sustained critique of hierarchic leadership traditions and, what Lorde describes as, horizontal hostilities has revealed how such predilections work internally to disempower movements. (Establishment forces, of course, also successfully harness their disruptive power.)

As movement history illustrates, putting people on pedestals does nobody any good. Except, perhaps, the individuals themselves (and, of course, their acolytes) and those who would work against us or dominate us. In hierarchic systems, decision-making and strategizing power is conceived as top-down instead of ground-up. Useful in autocracies, less so in revolutions. We have all seen charismatic activists become front line decision-makers become leaders become messianic figures of hope and change become heroes (and today, celebrities). Heroization brings tremendous expectations and responsibility, intense scrutiny, increased risk to personal safety, and supernatural levels of authority. Just ask Superman. All troubling enough you might think. But superhuman authority figures also disrupt and destabilize the idea of collective power: people power. Indeed. Noam Chomsky (2003) warned, back in the late 80s-early 90s, that making people believe in the idea of ‘Great Men’ is a sure-fire way to teach people how to feel powerless.

It is an ill-judged, dangerous strategy to reduce (the idea of) mass movements to an anointed few, when even the best-intentioned leaders can disappoint, divide, distract, and derail a movement. (Some movements still, however, hanker after leaders and hierarchal structuring, showing how difficult it is to combat ideas and traditions that are, as Blain Cooper might say, ‘dug in deeper than an Alabama tick.’4) At the time of writing, long-standing environmental luminary of the climate movement, Bill McKibben is, for instance, facing down a series of damning accusations — each capable of irreparably damaging the environmental movement.

All this is to say, such traditions and tendencies encourage us to forget our common goals and to imagine ourselves as singularly powerless and in want of extraordinary men — and biases do trend towards men — to gather us together and lead us towards Elysium. When, as we see in today’s inclusive, autonomous anti-racism uprisings and global solidarity protests, it is the ordinary masses collectivized, who are the necessary, the real, change agents.

Today’s anti-racism organizers and protestors are clearly materializing and embodying the anarchistic idea that to be effective movements must be riotously polyphonic and resolutely anti-hierarchy. Revolutionary responsibility should not, nor cannot, be borne individually. Transformative worldmaking is a collective responsibility: ‘Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us’ (Lorde 1982, 141). An ‘us’ made up of ourselves and each other — a transnational collective of ordinary people coming together to radically transform our world. But not a homogenous ‘us’, rather an ‘us’ rooted in intersectional understandings of prejudice, privilege, and oppression. For whilst we might share struggles rooted in domination — around poverty, for example — we do not share them in the same way.

Today’s anti-racism organizing strategies (are so far) resisting the lure, the abdicating habit, of heroizing individuals as leaders, as is common within establishment contexts. Such thinking has, after all, landed us with the authority-based (command chain) control systems we are trying to transform, if not eradicate: from representative democracy and religious and legal institutions (including police departments) to patriarchal social relations and educational facilities. Indeed, it is no coincidence that monument activism is a deeply embedded part of today’s uprisings and global protests. Statue toppling represents an inspired synthesis of the rejection of hierarchicalism in both the means (anti-racism activism) and the ends (deposing racist statutes and statues). There is more than just a little poetic justice in the notion that an autonomous peoples’ movement is tearing down monuments to past autocratic leaders and state heroes.

As we are witnessing, in the aftermath of converging crises, disaffected publics are finding — strength in — each other, coalescing around the issues at hand, here, police brutality and racial injustice, as one, two, three becomes a ‘we’, a community. An on- and off-line nexus of racial justice activists and allies, forming an inclusive front-line, one underpinned by a broadening inquiry line, as one subject or question begets another and then another:

How can this happen? What gives them the right? Who gave them the authority? Who controls — authors — the narrative? Who occupies the pedestals dotting our streets, our histories, and our minds?

And following this line of questioning the matter of our resistance becomes not just a case of who occupies our pedestals, but where do the pedestals come from in the first place? Why do we need them, and what purpose do they serve?

The worldwide spate of statue toppling and daubing — still tearing through the U.S., the U.K., Europe, and South America, for instance — signifies a forceful rejection of white supremacist ideology and resistance to deep traditions of heroizing early capitalist, racist and colonialist leaders. Mostly men of the establishment, taking the form of kings, clergymen, roving invaders, captains of industries, and of armies.

But statue toppling is not just nihilistic impulse — tearing something down for its own sake (although that strategy has its own merit). It’s also about opening up the public realm, imagination, and conversation and uplifting the overlooked voices and lived experiences — the stories — of marginalized people. It is a wildly generative act. As demonstrated during the toppling and dunking of Bristol’s Edward Colston monument and, more recently, Baltimore’s Christopher Columbus statue, actions often become a noisy, rough blend of interactive street art and street performance — a riotous expression of agentic solidarity. And joyousness in delivering some kind, even a small kind, of comeuppance to — the memory of — these most inhuman people.

Neither is statue toppling an isolated mode of activism. It is but a small — albeit often spectacular — part of a wider campaign of monument activism targeting all forms of reactionary public memorialization (past and present): portraits, brand logos, street or school names, national holidays and so forth. Its expansiveness expresses a desire to comprehensively take back control of national narratives; an irresistible urge to perform a collective, corrective ‘face-heel turn’ kind of rescripting.

Face-heel turns are a popular mode of revelatory storytelling, common in superhero comics and wrestling rings, revealing that those once positioned as heroes were really villains all the time. Gender oppression traditions means that these ‘turns’ mostly impact men — Christopher Columbus, Leopold II, Robert E. Lee, Edward Colston, or Cecil Rhodes, as examples — but there have been villainous women masked as heroes over the years too. Of whom, perhaps, Queen Victoria still reigns supreme.

Take the action of countering Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, for example. This increasingly monumental change (official calls emerged in 1977) not only radically recenters Indigenous Peoples’ experiences, histories, and cultures but expresses a refusal to uphold white traditions of venerating the individual over the collective — after all, organizers could have named the day after an important First Nations leader but chose instead to uplift all their people.

Today’s monument activism satisfyingly expresses on every level — symbolic to concrete — a profound refusal of all kinds of hierarchical thinking and organizing. It seeks to retell, or at least disrupt, the story of society, or indeed movements, as necessarily organized hierarchically. But it is not just the egalitarian, emancipatory matter — racial justice and beyond — of this retelling that has me feeling encouraged; it is the manner. Despite pushback from mainstream spheres and some traditional activist strongholds, today’s anti-racism uprisings and global solidarity protests boldly animate the idea that radical ends require radical means: to productively change the system, we must change how we do things. They also amplify it. Their successes (and ‘failures’) inspire other activists and movements to utilize (and adapt) radical and creative approaches. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, across all kinds of media, I witnessed — with some surprise — activists, and general publics too, become increasingly comfortable with the idea that we need to not only radically reimagine our world, but how we go about our worldmaking.  

Indeed, to have any chance of changing the world, the broader story of contemporary activism must become one of decentralized, intersectional, transnational, polyphonic, autonomous, and anti-hierarchical organizing and actions. A quality and approach perhaps unimaginable to many earlier generations of activists. But not — as we see in the work of Ella Baker, Dave Forman, or Gloria Anzaldúa, as examples — all. From Black Lives Matter to the CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) or Occupy City Hall, 21st century anti-racism activism and movement building is placing traditional activist strategies — rooted in notions of leaders, hierarchical organizing, and ‘single issues’ — under pressure. And, as an avid reader, there’s nothing quite like the anticipation of turning a page to a new chapter.

And so, despite living every day haunted by a profound sense of the impossibility of our ever changing the world in meaningful and lasting ways, I find myself encouraged by today’s uprisings and protests. Countless digital witnesses to George Floyd’s murder — ordinary people like me and perhaps you — still march, topple, write, rage, and stand in solidarity materializing the enduring, meaningful transformative worldmaking we need so urgently. As the inclusive and expansive groundswell of racial justice activism demonstrates, we are standing now on a horizontal axis directing our collective attention towards the vertical. And that makes it possible to think that, as Sam Cooke first sang back in 1964, change is gonna come. And that this time, it might just last.

If you enjoyed this essay, please consider sharing and subscribing. Thank you!

Share

Subscribe now

References

Chomsky, Noam. 2003. In Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, by Peter R Mitchell and John Schoeffel. London: Vintage.

Lorde, Audre. 1982. "Learning from the 60s." In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, edited by Cheryl Clarke, 134-144. New York: Ten Speed Press.

We live in the stories we tell ourselves. — Grant Morrison

As powerful self and worldmaking tools, stories matter. That is why the matter of storytelling extends beyond the stories themselves. It matters how we tell them, who tells them, and who decides which ones to tell. Just as it matters who gets powerful, becomes empowered, through their telling. Or at least it should do.

Storytelling in the Global North is centered around the experiences, imaginations, and desires of white men, primarily straight white men. It represents our world as they see it, live it, and dream it. And ultimately as they have wrought it. When thinking about some of our most beloved stories and protagonists, some meanings and interpretations are privileged and prized too. Batman’s typecasting as a “Dark Knight” is a prime example. Even though Batman’s meaning is always in flux, we have, to date at least, settled on — and to my mind, settled for — a reduced version of the character. Not for the first time have we been seduced by the idea of a Byronic hero with a death wish: misglad, bad, and dangerous to know. (“We,” of course, encompasses creators and audiences and their intersections.) It didn’t have to be this way.

I have talked previously about how prevalent the concept of vengeance and (street) justice is in modern film. But we can easily find its expression in other storytelling forms. Listening to Jimi Hendrix’s cover of Hey Joe — a song about a vengeful man shooting and killing a female partner suspected of being unfaithful — I was again reminded of how often the doings of empowered, agentic women serve as foils for retributive male action. Or as some would say, dishonorable, disobedient, willful women. And how commonplace it is for (overwhelmingly sexualized) violence against women and/or a heterosexual family unit to supply a ready excuse for retributive male violence, often — although perhaps not in Joe’s case — falling into the realm of heroism.

Interlude — The Refrigerator Monologues: A Case Story

Despite increasing awareness and resistance to this misogynistic trope, gender-based violence, frequently sexualized, still routinely serves to provide an emotional backstory, often transformative, for male characters. There’s even a term for it, “fridging.”1 Drawn from the superhero comics world, fridging speaks directly to storytelling traditions utilizing female characters only as a (grizzly) means to an (heroic) end.

But that’s not all. You see, the issue with fridging isn’t just the brutalizing erasure of the female character in question; it’s that her story, her whole existence, is seen to have value only in so far as it serves another — male — character’s story. Women are reduced to objectified plot devices.

In Frank Miller’s Sin City comics series, Goldie’s murder sets Marv on his vengeful killing spree. The savage murder of Frank Castle’s wife and children unleashes the retributive Punisher upon the world — a name that says it all. And the rape and murder of Becky Butcher by a superhero known as The Homelander underpins Billy Butcher’s vendetta against superheroes (The Boys comics series, also picked up by Amazon Studios). Another character whose name screams out his approach to vengeance. A (damaged) man laboring under a traumatizing character trait, one that — in his world, as in ours — is not disciplined but valorized and empowering, earning him a leading role within a governmental agency (CIA Black Ops team). Characters are fridged in Batman stories too, most notably his parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne. But also, the murder of his one-true love, Rachel Dawes in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (2005-2012) or Silver St. Cloud in Kevin Smith, Walter Flanagan, Art Thibert, Art Lyon, and Jared Fletcher's Batman: The Widening Gyre. “Super” men driven and inspired to extraordinary levels of action and valor by dint of sexual and gender (and sometimes family) based violence and dishonor. A most curious stimulus, you’d have to agree.

Marv, Frank, Billy, and Bruce, all unexceptional exemplars of this clichéd, chauvinistic motif in action. Catherynne Valente’s superhero novella, The Refrigerator Monologues proves, however, an exceptional example.

With art provided by Annie Wu, Valente confronts the fridging trope head-on. The story innovatively reimagines the role of women in superhero comics by centering and exploring the lives and deaths of six “fridged” women, each a parody of a popular DC Comics and Marvel Comics character.2 Gwen Stacey from the Spider-Man mythos, for instance, provides the template for Paige Embry. Though murdered, maltreated, and gravely dishonored, the female characters do not, in Valente’s hands, seek the usual cold comfort of violent payback but the cathartic warmth of mutual support and camaraderie.

Fridging is a dehumanizing process, depriving one persona of their individuality by subordinating them, and their story, to another’s. Female characters, here, become non-subjects, non-agents — mere things. The Refrigerator Monologues upends this dire tradition. By centralizing storytelling as a shared survival strategy — the women disclose their life stories to each other at nightly meetings of the “Hell Hath Club” — Valente gives these ordinarily sidelined characters center stage, an attentive audience, and, obviously, their voice. The novel’s structuring mirrors this “showcase” setup: each chapter is dedicated to the story of one character and is written from a first-person narrative point of view, the most immediate, intimate mode of narration. We, the readers, form part of the witness-bearing audience, affiliate members of the “Hell Hath Club.”

By equal measure, language is a tool of domination and of liberation. Words can help change perceptions of the self, the world, and one’s place, or role, within it. The world, according to ethnobotanist and psychedelic guru Terence McKenna, is “made of words” and once you know the language of the world “you can make it whatever you wish.” The generative power of language is well understood and exploited by superhero storytellers too, not least in the matter of transformation — just think of Billy Batson and the transformative power of his magic word “SHAZAM!” Or Zatanna Zatara: As a Homo Magi — a sub-race of humans born with magical abilities — Zatanna is a particularly powerful sorcerer-come-superhero. Her power is linguistic, specifically speaking words and spells backwards. (In effect, reversing and undoing the generative power of man-made language, of disrupting the established order.)

But much like the deadened women inspiring the characters of The Refrigerator Monologues, the most efficient way to disempower her is to silence her. For to take away a voice is to stifle, to repress, to deprive of vitality. Zatanna’s voice is not her only source of power, but it is her aegis. By returning their voices to them, Valente returns life, returns agency to these ghosted characters. Storytelling, after all, is a set of power relations; those who tell the story, control the story. Understanding this — that the way it has been told is the way it will be known and remembered — Valente alters memory and rewrites manmade histories. (Hi)stories all too often pushing hetero-patriarchal notions of love, family, happiness, and honor. In prioritizing same-sex platonic friendship over hetero- romantic/sexual relationships, Valente appears all too aware of the wider gender politics at play here.

Through their raw, retrospective expositions, the female characters disentangle, rescue, their stories from the more prized — official — histories of their abusers, murderers, and “heroic” avengers. We, and they, (re)discover the “who” of them: Who they were — as complex individuals — as opposed to who they were connected to, for they were only ever known to us before as some super-man’s lover, mother, or other kind of significant other. Like Arachne, spinning their words into new yarns, they challenge and resist superhero storytelling traditions, stories about godlike men steeped in heroic portrayals of violence in which women are pawns or prizes.3 A process giving rise to personal agency, a power ordinarily denied female characters, of all kinds. It is empowering, liberatory work. And like all good superhero storytelling, it is transformational. Their storytelling moves them from the margins to the center, melting away the frigid roles and worlds male imaginations have made for them. It is not simply a refusal of the malestream narratives told about them, it is a rebuttal. In Hell’s radiating heat, they are where they should be, at the center, the warm heart of the world.

Just like Valente’s novel, their stories are outside official superhero discourse. (Superhero texts are usually visual — comics, games, films — not prose narratives.) Removed from the constraints and oppressions of a male-dominated genre, they — Valente and her characters — disrupt and repel objectifying and effacing storytelling conventions, creating a much-needed space for women’s voices. As stories from the margins, they reframe female characterization within the superhero genre, certainly, but they also undermine the ever-popular “revenge as motivation” trope.

In dealing with the brutalizing consequences of revenge, their stories remain tragedies of blood, but in reimagining their reactions, these women orators break the closed cycle of retribution. It is not by chance, however, that women created this reformative “revenge” story. Valente could have exacted her own petite vengeance upon a misogynistic genre and a creative industry by telling a furious tale about unforgiving women rising from the dead to inflict violent retribution upon the men who abused and defamed them. And undoubtedly a tale about six hellraising vengeful women would have been hugely popular — as Monster (2003), Kill Bill (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005) attest — especially perhaps today given the current interest in “woman-of-action” revenge stories, such as Peppermint (2018) and Marvel Studios’ Black Widow (2021). But she didn’t. Valente instead chose to productively engage the onerous trope — to provoke a dialogue — rather than replicate it.

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. — Audre Lorde

In illuminating the connective, transformative power of sharing experiences and stories, Valente presents another way of responding to wrongdoing. A mature, productive, love-centric approach cultivating engaged empathy, connection, healing, personal growth, and hope, and thus solidarity, resistance, activism, and change. There is anger too, certainly, though it is of the more generative than (self)destructive kind. As we see in real-world global movements against sexual abuse, assault, and harassment, such as #MeToo, sharing stories can be empowering; it can reveal the prevalence of gender-based violence, often systemic, and nurture solidarity and change. Silence, as Audre Lorde observed, will not protect us. Moreover, Valente, here, bypasses the binary frameworks dominating androcentric stories and storytelling showing that our approach to justice doesn’t have to be one thing or another, in this case, anger or forgiveness, revenge or amnesty, hate or amity — it can be a dynamic mix of both. Despite its prevalence in male-centered worlds, retributive justice is not our only response to abuse and violence (physical, sexual, psychological). Other kinds of justice, such as restorative, offer the possibilities of disrupting, escaping, and erasing cycles of abuse and violence. Valente saw the possibilities of moving beyond old ways of doing things, rather than simply repeating them. Reeves didn’t or couldn’t.

A dream of dark and troubling things. — David Lynch

As observed in Part One of this essay, Reeves will not be the one to wake Batman, and us, from his long, dark nightmare. A grim fate made even more so because there were other paths Reeves could have taken. Not only other Batman tales to be told but another way of telling the Batman story. Batman is amongst our most problematic yet beloved heroes and doubtlessly beloved because of the very traits that make him problematic. And wishing him to be made decent, to be made good — like another little fiery-eyed avenger, Heathcliff — it is just another dream, like wishing him away. But his storytellers could be radically retexturizing his story to allow it to speak directly and meaningfully to the condition of our times.

The Batman mythos, after all, possesses — in its portrayal of (social and personal) transformation, vengeance, (street) justice, white privilege, (“philanthropic”) dynastic wealth, and predatory capitalism to name just a few themes — deep relevance to the on-going intertwining quest for social, racial, and economic justice. In this most recent retelling, we could have had a film finally taking seriously the responsibility of representing white male vigilante justice, one underscoring its dangers rather than its agentic delights. An interpretation accounting for America’s long and baneful history of white male vigilantism and street justice, as well as its heroization. And its official face: policing institutions. Imagine: A Batman story radically confronting matters of street justice and “warrior mentality” policing;4 perennial issues, but ones rising to the fore again in the aftermath of the brutalization and murder of Black people by police and white citizens emboldened by the “Blue Line” fraternity.5

The teaser trailer, and subsequent trailers and paratexts, inform us this is not to be.

And in passing, to those who would say that the filmmakers couldn’t have made a more radical Batman film because they couldn’t have known the condition the US would be in when the project started (Reeves took charge in 2017), I would simply say that life in the US — a colonizing nation founded on genocide and chattel enslavement — has always been like this, created through a “domination/ subordination” system, albeit not always so exposed. There have always been grim-faced, imperious, vengeful white men — heroes of the community — patrolling neighborhoods to keep them “safe.” It has then always been entirely possible to conceive of different kinds of Batman stories but not so eminently desirable to produce them.

Yet, in many ways, Reeves is telling the story of our times: a privileged yet fearful white man fights to steer, to shape, to control the world around him through fear and violence. To protect “us” from “them.” As Ian Bremmer writes: “Depending on who’s talking, ‘them’ can mean the corrupt elite or the grasping poor; foreigners or members of racial, ethnic, or religious minorities. Or disloyal politicians, bureaucrats, bankers or judges. Or lying reporters.” In short, to protect “good” people from “bad” people, as is Batman’s want. One man with power enough to un/make the world as he wishes, a not unfamiliar protagonist or tale. For historically these kinds of men and narratives have formed our world; how we inhabit it and imagine it, in all spheres, from our homes to our homelands. (Just look at Vladimir Putin’s, President of Russia, decision to invade Ukraine.) Ask descendants of colonized peoples and lands. Ask women and children suffering domestic violence and abuse. Ask people demanding economic, racial, social, end environmental justice, all entwining threads of resistance and revolution. They — we — feel the fecund power of dominant narratives, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, as bell hooks memorably described it, with, I would add, a dash of religion for extra mastery.

Aspects of heroism too have been weaponized in our grand narratives, the idea that people need someone, some “great man,” to protect them, to save them, and that violence is somehow key to this “saving.” Our histories — cultural, intellectual, political — abound with stories sanitizing binary notions of leaders and followers, the powerful and powerless, and agents of change and “blind fools of fate”; that where we are weak, fearful, and ordinary, “he” is strong, courageous, extraordinary. Despite their disempowering possibilities, (super)hero stories are much beloved and going nowhere fast. (Look at the speed with which much of the world heroized Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of currently embattled Ukraine, perhaps forgetting that when we raise individuals up, we centralize our power and make easy targets of those uplifted.) Not only can heroes inspire and motivate folks to action, but some people find themselves relating to heroic protagonists and in some cases emulating their “heroic” actions. (Remember Alan Moore’s, “I am Rorschach” guy!) And herein lies the rub, particularly with the Batman story and the macho vigilante genre more broadly.

It is Batman’s deep-rooted connection to patriarchal honor codes plus his vigilantism and conservatism  — state authority is incompetent/untrustworthy and thus as a rich individual it is his duty to step in and, under the guise of making the world a better, safer place, protect the status quo — that means his representation, his story, must always, but especially today, be handled with great care, lest he becomes even more of a poster-boy, a hero, for real-world vigilantes (including men and boys manifesting what Charles M. Blow described as, “reactionary white male victimization syndrome”), populists, and the alt-right, as has happened with the Punisher and the villainous Bane. But Batman is a major cultural icon with global reach. Resonating far beyond superhero and comics fan domains, his story offers a particularly powerful opportunity to meaningfully engage and critique concepts such as heroism, vengeance, vigilantism, retributive justice in the popular imagination. An opportunity lost now, at least in terms of the next decade or so of mainstream filmmaking.

It was 2005 when Ra’s Al Ghul told a questing Bruce Wayne that whatever his original intentions, he had become truly lost (Batman Begins). And in that storyline, it was Ra’s Al Ghul who manipulated Bruce’s childhood trauma, his desire for justice and peace, and his wish to make the world a safer, better place, and ultimately though inadvertently, it was Ra’s Al Ghul who set him on the path to becoming the “Dark Knight.” Of course, that’s just a superhero story. But it mirrors the creative treatment, or exploitation, of the character too.

Over the decades, many creators, like Ra’s Al Ghul, have had the opportunity to set Bruce on a path to becoming something more than a vigilante, to becoming a different kind of legend or hero. And, again like Ra’s Al Ghul, many creators have exploited the character’s trauma, vengefulness, and sense of civic responsibility to make him into a “Dark Knight” rather than setting him on a path towards finding another way to name, face, and survive his childhood trauma and thus leave a different kind of mark on the world. But like Reeves and Christopher Nolan before him, they — and those invested in the superhero industry, including fans — simply couldn’t imagine it.

And so, some seventeen years after Ra’s Al Ghul invited Bruce to the top of a frigid mountain, we see another emotionally frozen Bruce, once again at the precipice of becoming, but a becoming predestined, a becoming already become: To the question, “Who the hell are you supposed to be?” the new Bruce doesn’t answer, as is usual in these circumstance, “I’m Batman” but rather responds, “I’m vengeance,” a hard-hitting response punctuated with, well, some hard-hitting punches.

This small statement tells us all we need to know about the new Batman characterization; there is no process of becoming for this new Bruce, nor pretense of process, no first becoming Batman then morphing somewhere along the way into the “Dark Knight.” It is the illusion of becoming, of choice, of creativity, of progress, of “any color as long as its black,” of a new Batman story as long as it features the legendary “Dark Knight.”

As is well documented, stories matter. We need and deserve, and indeed can have, better superhero stories. The superhero genre is part of a rich speculative, futurist tradition, and our superhero creators should be tapping into that potential to tell stories that help us to critique and to radically reimagine our world. (And not simply upcycling stories, characters, and costumes.) As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m not so sure of the value of heroes and of stories about heroes, but if we are to have them, then let them be free from the furious shadow of malestream imaginings.

If you enjoyed this essay, please share:

Share

Or subscribe:

Subscribe now

Thank You!

 
I had other plans for The Break’s inaugural post, an essay on media representation perhaps or one exploring vandalised solidarity murals (both coming soon!). But we really need to talk about Palestine and about what’s been happening there, for some 73 years now. As members of a global community, we need to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people as they work to end Israel's occupation of Palestine; one way to do that is by pressuring Israel to comply with international law. Another is by shining a light upon the 'state-settler collusion' underpinning the deadly, brutal, and inglorious attacks on Palestinians by Israeli forces and settlers. We need, that is, to come together as global citizens and actively support the re-emergence of a Palestine devoid of military occupation, land theft, apartheid, and settler colonialism. 
 
There are many ways we can help. Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions. 
 
(Counter)storytelling is a very real part of the global strategy to end the Israeli occupation and colonisation of Palestine. Just as it is part of all reformative and revolutionary movements. Through stories, we can raise awareness about Palestine and the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom, justice, and equality. We can, that is, come together to help un/make the story of Israeli oppression of Palestine and its people, today and for tomorrow. 
 
And that’s why I’ve chosen to make The Break’s first post my review of Colum McCann’s Apeirogon: A Novel (Penguin Random House, Feb 2020). I’ve also included links to recommended texts at the end of this post (including a link to a free ebook from Pluto Press). And you can always check out Democracy Now! for information on past and recent events. 

Subscribe now

Apeirogon: A Novel by Colum McCann

Set against the background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Colum McCann’s Apeirogon tells the compelling story of an unlikely friendship between two grieving fathers and their search for peace, within themselves and for their respective nations. A story made all the more remarkable because it is not pure invention. The fathers — Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, the former a Palestinian Muslim and the latter an Israeli Jew — are real people, and they really are the best of friends. Friends who, like McCann, embrace the peacebuilding possibilities of dialogue and storytelling. Introduced in 2005 at a ‘Combatants for Peace’ meeting, theirs is a friendship forged in tragedy and activism. Yet whilst telling the life-stories of its two protagonists, Apeirogon is far from biography. Braided through these narrative histories is a profound exploration of the worldmaking power of storytelling and love, in all their myriad forms and expressions. 

Retelling their histories through a mix of interviews, testimonies, transcripts and imaginings, McCann’s kaleidoscopic novel mirrors the object after which it is named, an apeirogon — a shape with a countably infinite number of sides. There are, McCann is saying, more than two sides to any story. A multiplicity captured in the novel’s mosaic structure.

Divided into 1001 numbered episodes of varying length — a structure suggesting One Thousand and One Nights — the novel unfolds in fragments and snap shots, literally in some cases as the text, atypically, features photographs. The numbering method — 1-500, a central bridging section numbered 1001, and then counting back from 500-1 — suggests a circularity, disrupting the idea of beginnings and endings. And whilst the vignettes might appear esoteric — from bird migration, the Holocaust, and armament histories to John Cage’s musicianship, Philippe Petit’s tightrope walks, and Saint Simeon’s asceticism — each resonates with the novel’s central theme: the transformative power of storytelling, in whatever form. But also, the radical promise of love and of believing in something bigger than oneself. Each entry has its own value, poetry, and power too; the histories of Theresienstadt and the ‘Minbar of Saladin’ proving particularly poignant.

Within McCann’s tessellated storytelling sits the sombre directness of Bassam’s and Rami’s stories. Simple. Factual. Oral. Heart-breaking. Their opening statements repeated at consciousness-raising events around the globe like talismanic mantras:

My name is Bassam Aramin, I am Abir’s father. I am Palestinian, Muslim, Arabic.

My name is Rami Elhanan. I am Smadar’s father. I am an Israeli, a Jew.

McCann here strikes a perfect counterbalance: whilst his storytelling refracts the portrait of these men’s lives into 1001 pieces, the men’s stories snap the image back into focus, to the origin stories: the grievous loss of two beloved daughters, the very real human cost of national conflict.

It is powerful storytelling on both fronts. Or rather counterstorytelling — a powerful tool through which to secure social change. The men contest and counter state narratives by voicing their opposition to occupation, segregation, dispossession, and patriarchal male honour codes that demand retributive justice not dialogue. And, of course, by simply just being friends. McCann too, in authoring the story of their stories, is part of the counternarrative. But by telling it in such a distinct way he also counters the dominant idea of what a novel is and can be.

On the surface, Apeirogon tells a familiar story of ordinary people caught up in national conflicts. But that’s where the familiarity ends. Interspersing personal narratives with other kinds of micro-narratives should be disorientating, but it is not. It illuminates instead the fragility, randomness, and interconnectedness of life, love, and death. People, here, are transdimensional authors and their stories, like circles, have no ends nor beginnings.

Share

Apeirogon: A Novel by Colum McCann was published by Penguin Random House, February 2020. Further details available here.

Please source books responsibly. You can check them out of public libraries for free (yes, free!) or purchase them from independent and/or second-hand bookshops (online or on the main street).

Subscribe now

Recommended Texts and Links:

Palestine, by Joe Sacco

A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali, introduction by Joe Sacco

Palestine In Black & White, by Mohammad Sabaaneh

Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, by Norman Finkelstein

Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide, by Ben White (Not sure how long this free ebook offer will last, but here’s a link to the amazing Pluto Books.)

On Palestine , by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé

The Wanted 18 (Dirs. Amer Shomali and Paul Cowan). An animated documentary ‘moovie’ recreating ‘an astonishing true story: the Israeli army's pursuit of 18 cows, whose independent milk production on a Palestinian collective farm was declared "a threat to the national security of the state of Israel."’

Combatants for Peace

Skate Pal, an organisation supporting young people in Palestine through skateboarding!

Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Subscribe now