“Scratch the surface and underneath is all this savagery”

Marina Carr discusses her ‘dance’ with Euripides’ Hecuba

By Ismail Khalidi

I first met renowned Irish playwright Marina Carr on a mild Dublin afternoon in the Fall of 2022. A longtime admirer of her work, it was no surprise to find her to possess in person the same natural, unforced intelligence that one encounters in her writing. Our conversation was easygoing and wide-ranging, and after several hours we parted ways. On my way to a friend’s Upstairs on the South side of the River Liffey. There, I picked up Carr’s Hecuba, which proved to be one of the most extraordinary things I had read in some time.

The play is, among many other things, a gritty anti-war take on the myth of Hecuba, with Carr putting us in the skin of the much-maligned Trojan queen and re-framing both her and the war on Troy itself.  Carr paints the latter not as a noble, lawful endeavor but rather a genocidal rampage carried out against a more sophisticated civilization by an array of rather barbaric Greek warlords – all under the flimsy pretext of recovering the hostage Helen. Carr’s feats of form and flow, and her subversive twist on (or “dance” with) Euripides’ classic left me speechless.

For months afterwards, I excitedly told everyone about the play, even reading out loud–and often unsolicited–passages to any and all who would listen.  As it happened, my trip to Dublin  was followed by a research trip and residency in France with Pangea World Theater co-artistic directors Meena Natarajan and Dipankar Mukherjee. They were among the first subjected to my ravings about Hecuba. Luckily they were also fond of Carr’s work and knew of the play. We soon found ourselves reading the entire play out loud together between meetings. A couple of months later Hecuba was slated for production as part of Pangea’s 2023-24 season.  

I recently had the pleasure of  connecting with Marina Carr to discuss her play and the world, just as Pangea World Theater’s production (directed by Mukherjee) of the play opened its curtains at the Southern Theatre. Below are some excerpts from my phone conversation earlier this month with the award-winning Carr.  

ISMAIL
What made you turn to Hecuba? What was that spark that made you look at Euripides’ version of Hecuba and decide to kind of turn this on its head? 

MARINA
It was commissioned originally by the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) and they wanted something ‘classical’. I don’t remember the exact conversations but we decided on Hecuba. Obviously I had read Euripides. I have been fascinated by mythology all of my life and I had read a lot of the myths and had been fascinated by books about the excavations of Troy. 

But you know, the way I would describe it is not so much that it is an adaptation, or my ‘version’, but rather it’s more like me dancing with Euripides’ Hecuba. 

So I was examining and writing against it. With Euripides of course, but also with differences, because there were a lot of things I didn’t agree with in how the Hecuba story was told. Because, of course, it was written by a Greek, and the Greeks were the victors over the Trojans. And obviously they put their own spin on it.  And, well, I thought they had trashed her, really, in a way. So I thought I’d re-examine what might have happened, how it may have gone if we don’t completely believe Euripides’ re-telling of the myth. He is writing in the 5th century BC, talking about a Bronze Age queen, and it is built upon myths that have come down, about that war and before the war and I wanted to take into account how the Greek mind sees all that. 

ISMAIL
So there is an agenda? 

MARINA
They are trying to cement the country, in essence to bring all these warring, disparate tribes together. So there’s a lot of propaganda, understandably, around how they portray themselves, as the victors, and of course as the civilized ones. And how they produce the memory and the images of those they have vanquished. For me, coming from an ex-colony here, I’m able to identify with how narratives are constructed and by whom and for what purpose. There is a narrative about my country, as a colonized and vanquished country. We have a lot of problems around that narrative here in Ireland. So I played with applying that to Troy and Hecuba’s story, and what it is like to be invaded and conquered and slaughtered and sold into slavery.

ISMAIL
Obviously you are well versed in the Greeks, but was there a lot of historical digging and prodding you felt compelled to do?

MARINA
Well I’m no expert, as you know, I am a playwright, but I do have some good friends who are Greek scholars, so I decided they would be my go-to experts for details and I had many sessions with them and they helped give me context and put me right on a lot things and helped me to ground some things. To think about the fact that the Trojans were sophisticated. We’re talking about a wealthy, advanced civilization, a port city with people and things passing through from all over. It was called the city of light before Paris was called the city of light millennia before. So you had this place with libraries and knowledge and you then basically have these barbarians coming in, who can’t read or write, just basically tribesmen, many of whom were at war with each other, who came in with these rivalries and competitions and couldn’t agree on much. 

But in the end it is literature, meaning it is a product of imagination, that produced the earlier written versions of Hecuba and my own imagination and the dance between them, for want of a better word. 

Foreground: Cassandra (Ankita Ashrit) looks down at her younger sister Polyxena (Anne Guadagnino)
Background: Bethany Lacktorin (Composer, Live Musician & Sound Designer),
Tyler Stamm (Odysseus) and Nathan Berglund (Polydorous) acting as the chorus
Pangea World Theater’s production of Marina Carr’s Hecuba, April 2024
Photos by Bruce Silcox

ISMAIL
What I really admire, though, is how you question the victor’s narrative, but not in a way that is facile and predictable. It’s a subtle recalibration, a bringing back down to earth, to the mud and sweat and blood of conquest and war and empire. Of course, the style in which you write the play itself, where we hear the characters think out loud and process what they hear and say out loud. With Agamenon, there is this recognition on his part of how ridiculous and barbaric these practices are that he is taking part in and in fact leading; these rites and rituals of conquest, of sacrifice, of pillage and rape, and the use of it all to justify more pillage, more sacrifice, more conquest etc. “How many more kids do I have to slaughter”, Agamenon says to himself, “to keep these perverts off my back?” Wow. 

What fascinates me is when you’re writing about 500 BC but actually human nature, you know, we haven’t changed … we don’t seem to have evolved very much. Scratch the surface and underneath is all this savagery.

Marina Carr

MARINA
What fascinates me is when you’re writing about 500 BC but actually human nature, you know, we haven’t changed. There is this whole idea, this teleological idea that we’re getting better and better. And I have huge problems with that. Because we’d like to think so, but all the evidence points in the opposite direction unfortunately. I don’t know, we don’t seem to have evolved very much. Scratch the surface and underneath is all this savagery. You see it in terms of the base competition for resources or territory, the instincts that rise to the surface.

I happen to believe ideas are ten a penny. Emotions are not … I think we feel and then we scramble to try and put a bit of language and meaning on to it. So I think we’re much more elemental. We like to think otherwise but the body knows first and then the mind. It comes running to catch up and to try to understand what is happening.  

ISMAIL
I want to ask about the moment of Agamemnon and Hecuba’s encounter in Agamemnon’s tent towards the end of the play. Could you tell us about how you tackled that intimate encounter between this conquering king and this vanquished queen as it were? I can see feminists critiquing it, though, for what it is worth I think there is something incredibly feminist in it, or in your understanding of it. More than that, it feels quite real to me somehow, and human. And moving. Many truths overlapping and cohabitating at once. It resonated when you said the mind catches up to the body. I’m curious to know your thoughts about that scene.

MARINA
Yeah, sleeping with the enemy. It just seemed kind of inevitable to me. You know, you have this queen. And you have this king in Agamemnon, or chieftain or whatever you want to call them, the leader of the army. He is a king, he’s the Spartan King. I think he’s just fascinated by her, by Hecuba, by her civilization, by her bravery I suppose. And I think the attraction is there from the very minute they meet, when he comes into the throne room at the beginning. They kind of clock each other, in the way men and women clock each other. There’s everything else going on as well, but there is that going on too. Her husband has been beheaded, Priam is gone. 

And in that scene, later on, she’s a woman alone, on the beach, and her daughter’s been sacrificed. She’s lost everything. Her sons are dead. All she’s left with is Casandra, her difficult prophetess child. And she’s nothing left to lose. I mean, it’s almost as if she’s dying in that scene. And it is a kind of benediction. And again, the body knowing and the body taking over, and then it is she who is the instigator of the lovemaking. It’s not him, he is almost afraid to go near, afraid it will be construed as him moving in on this vulnerable woman, who is, after all, his captive. And so I do think it is interesting that she instigates that moment. And to me, it shows her power as much as her desperation. In a way it is her letting go, or giving up, giving in to one night of joy and comfort amid all of this sorrow. 

ISMAIL
I love how you don’t shy away from that moment or fall into facile tropes. It is both a surrender as you say, and the kind of embrace of her own humanity and her own desires and her own power. And, and of course, his attraction to her is not just as the vanquishing man-King dominating the powerless woman. Of course, that’s part of it. He has power over her, but you do so much more with that scene, especially with the internal dialogue you wield so astutely. Was it something you had to struggle with in writing the scene?

MARINA
Well it is biological in one sense. I heard a statistic that during times of war the birth rate goes up, and of course there is something very primal in all of us, to keep the species going. When there’s so much death, there has to be so much creation and birth and life and love and sex. It seems to me that they go hand in hand. There’s a certain abandon, where the rules that apply in peacetime do not apply during war. And maybe that’s something to do with it as well. The rule book is kind of thrown out and one lives, one savors the day, because there may not be another one. And I admire that kind of living. I’ve never been in a desperate situation like that. But I could imagine if I was, you know, how would you get through a day as a captive in a tent on the beach, your family dead, your children, your husband. What’s left? There’s nothing, there’s nothing left except … a lit bit of solace and comfort, a letting go, I presume. 

ISMAIL
I want to ask about this moment that we’re in now, with a genocide under way, a horrific and vengeful vanquishing of the “other”. In the play, at the top, as Troy is falling, Hecuba says: “This is not war. In war there are rules, laws, codes. This is genocide. They’re wiping us out.” I don’t know if I really need to expound on why this feels so timely, so crushingly and depressingly relevant right now. 

You mentioned the brutal colonial past in your country. Having written those lines, what are you feeling watching this actual genocide unfold in front of our eyes in Palestine. I guess it’s a big question, but maybe how you relate to it as an Irish person, but also just in relation to this play and this dark side of these human historical processes …

MARINA
Well, it’s shocking you know, the disregard that our leaders have for the dignity and sanctity of human life, it’s shocking to me. And the lies that are being told to justify this, you know, it’s kind of terrifying. And yet familiar. To see all these people, above all these women and children slaughtered, it’s so painful. And then you take the long view, you know, and so much of the history of the world is one of rape, pillage, invasion, conquest, [and] the appropriation of territories and resources. And it seems it’s just wave after wave, and everybody’s turn comes, unfortunately, and once the ball gets rolling, all the diplomacy in the world seems not to matter. You know, we always think our age is the most civilized, but people will look back on us, to this century, and just say, what savagery was allowed to take place, just as we look back in time and remark on the savage notions of and customs of the past. But it seems it is in the DNA, this slaughter and greed and conquering of territory, the discarding of whole populations, even children … And it’s so often done the name of ‘educating’ the locals or the natives and ‘civilizing’ then or ‘democratizing’, but as we know, in Ireland and elsewhere, it is all very often just justification for stealing land and resources.

ISMAIL
I’ve found myself drawn to the description in Hecuba of the bloodlust unleashed among the common soldiers, the lies they’ve been told or the archaic beliefs fueling a genocidal rage. How even today, we see politicians and soldiers harkening to these biblical, mythical proclamations to justify mass killing. And these leaders know full well they’ve created a monster and they’re cynically going through the motions of these ceremonies and sacrifices and speeches knowing that whether it is true or not, it will unleash hell all the same. Your Agamemnon is one nuanced example of that. And this play, in my opinion, exposes how real these myths are at their core, and how crazy and epically f*cked up the present is. 

I think we’re being conditioned to not be able to see or tell the truth anymore. But it is backfiring, at great cost, but in some ways it is.

Marina Carr

MARINA
And I think people see what you are describing. Sadly we don’t have the power, you see, that’s the problem. I think most people on the ground are trying to get it right and can see it all clearly for what it is. Unfortunately, we’re not the ones who make big decisions in the darkened rooms when everybody’s gone home. And you can just see as you know, you see it playing out again and again. And these world leaders, should we call them, who should be setting the best example for the rest of us, are in fact once again doing the opposite. And that fills us all with such despair, or it should. Because, I think we’re being conditioned to not be able to see or tell the truth anymore. But it is backfiring, at great cost, but in some ways it is.  And it’s important to call things as they are, for our children, to name things and to point out the lies so they don’t grow up believing these narratives that devalue truth and life. 

ISMAIL
There is a proverb (popularized by Achebe, I think) that goes: “until the lion learns how to write every story will glorify the hunter”. It seems a moment ripe for us to have to intervene and flip things, and say, ‘let’s clock who is writing history and headlines, and what that means and and what bones lie under the foundations of every palace and every myth.’ You said in a separate interview, about Euripides:  “he was writing his version of a myth … Yet somehow all these archetypes of females are in western consciousness; they are types of women to be feared, they are kind of monsters at the outer reach of femininity and they are all terrifying. This terrible fear of women, the societal need to control and marginalize them, still persists.” Can you talk a bit about that?

MARINA
Yes, yes. We have to call that out. And you know, the myths are great to read for that reason, because it’s all there, it’s all in the mix. You see every disposition, you see the egomaniac, you see the despot, the victim, the kind ones who don’t really get anywhere, the powerful orators. I mean, that’s the wonderful thing about women in the Greek plays, they are such powerful orators, and they’ve been given space to actually speak out. It never really gets them anywhere–gets them killed actually–but they are still there calling it. And we do hear what they’re saying, before their inevitable, tragic demise. And that’s one of the things that I find so compelling and commendable about the three big Greek tragedians, that they give that voice to these women, especially at a time when women were looked at more like chattel, sent from your father’s house to your husband’s. You didn’t even have the same rights over your own children. And in the middle of all this, despite the archetypes, these women somehow shine through, and  you have your Hecubas and your Iphigenias, your Pheadras and your Antigones and your Electras, etc. And that’s very heartening, to know despite all the fear of women and the lies that the powerful tell, these brilliant women, they have been and will continue to be at the foundation of so many of our stories.

Marina Carr is an Irish playwright of over 30 plays, including By the Bog of Cats, The Mai, Ariel, Woman and Scarecrow, as well as adaptations of Lorca’s Blood Wedding and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina among others. She is the recipient of The Irish Times Playwright Award, the E.M. Forster Award, and Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Literature Award. She has taught at Trinity College, Villanova, Princeton, and currently at Dublin City University. Hecuba premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2015. Her most recent play, Audrey or Sorrow recently premiered at the Abbey Theatre. 

Ismail Khalidi is a playwright whose plays include Truth Serum Blues, Tennis in Nablus, Sabra Falling, Dead Are My People and Foot, as well as the adaptation (w/ Naomi Wallace) of Ghassan Kanafani’s novella, Returning to Haifa. Khalidi is a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater.

“Settler colonialism always operates through regimes of racial capitalism”: An Interview with Robin D.G. Kelley

By Ismail Khalidi, May 20, 2021

I had the pleasure of being able to chat with the renowned scholar Robin D.G. Kelley this week to get his thoughts on history, hope and revolution for Call & Response. We delved into the question of Palestine, Black Lives Matter and much more.  Among Kelley’s books are Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times,  Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. Kelley is Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA and his writings are regularly featured in Boston Review and included in our bi-weekly Read to Resist section. 

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IK: There is much to be pessimistic about these days, but also many revolutionary sparks of hope globally, from the farmers strike in India to the general strike in Palestine to the movement for Black Lives and the popular uprisings in Columbia and Chile. There seems to be a reawakening of a radical politics of resistance and re-imagining. Would you agree? If so, what do you attribute this to and what gives you most hope about this moment?

I definitely agree and it doesn’t surprise me.  Certainly the scope of these movements surprise me—250 million farmers, workers, students in India represents the largest general strike in human history; Palestine’s general strike is the first of its kind to bring together the entire population since 1936; the insurrection in Columbia, despite violent state repression, shows no signs of slowing down.  And it goes without saying that these rebellions erupted under unprecedented conditions of a global pandemic.   

I could go on, but my main point is that while this moment we’re in might feel exceptional, our movements have never disappeared.  They ebb and flow; they’re cyclical much like the boom and bust cycle of capitalism, but they are not the result of inherent contradictions or some kind of law.   In Palestine itself and within the global solidarity movement, we’ve bore witness to dedicated, consistent organizing to get us to this place.  Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have never rested, not in my life time.  The unremitting state violence against Palestinians is proof of the threat posed by Palestinian organizing, from the Freedom Rides to Land Day demonstrations to the resistance to the war on Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, etc..  The wave of delegations of activists visiting Palestine, the ongoing work of the BDS campaign, the brilliant defense of activists by groups like Palestine Legal, the list goes on.  

Similar to the George Floyd protests last summer, I don’t believe his killing caused the rebellion.  Rather, it catalyzed an ongoing resistance movement rooted in an emergent vision of abolition that can be traced to the long 1990s, to opposition to Bush and Clinton-era neoliberalism, the war on drugs, the war on terror, prisons, police brutality, anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism, Islamophobia, and violence against women of color and the LGBTQ community.   The same could be said about Chile and Colombia.  As you know, revolts have erupted in Chile like clockwork, from years of opposition to Pinochet to the student revolts about nine years ago demanding relief from staggering student debt and a halt to the severe privatization of secondary and college education.  Of course, those uprisings coincided with the global occupy movement, the anti-austerity protests in Spain and Greece, and the Arab Spring.  I remember being asked the same question about what brought on this global eruption and what gives me hope.  

The fact that the question keeps coming up is precisely what gives me hope.  Our struggles are protracted and they have always been.  The same can be said about the state’s response, which is why—if we’re going to be honest with ourselves—there is a massive global defense industry, why so much of the world’s national budgets are spent on weapons and the military and domestic policing, covert operations, border police, surveillance and cyber war, ad infinitum.  True, the U.S. is way off the charts because it continues to play the role of global cop, but my point is that those weapons are meant to be used on us.  They are not mobilized to bring down a fascist dictator or stop genocide.  They are mobilized to protect capital, discipline labor, privatize natural resources like water and land, dispossess indigenous people (still!), and crush any opposition either fighting for justice or even fighting to remove U.S. military bases from their land—from Saudi Arabia to Okinawa.  

IK: For those not familiar with the term “racial capitalism” and the work of Cedric Robinson, can you give us a brief breakdown, and why the term matters today?

RK:  First, “racial capitalism” is an old term that was recently revived as a way to understand the class and material dimensions of racism.  It was used by Cedric Robinson and South African Marxist Neville Alexander in the early 1980s as a way of signaling that capitalism always operated within a system and ideology that assigns differential value to human life and labor.  Land enclosure, slavery, dispossession, displacement, disfranchisement, segregation, exclusion happened to people who are deemed less valued—people turned into racial subjects—and these acts enable the extraction of wealth for the owners of capital by suppressing our wages, taking our land, taxing us and using the proceeds to build a first-class world for white elites and a third-class world for the rest of us.  Settler colonialism always operates through regimes of racial capitalism, though for settlers the objective is the elimination of the “native.”  Israeli apartheid and the ongoing effort to eliminate Palestinians is racial capitalism at work.

But equally important, racial capitalism entails the “capture” of exploited white workers as junior partners in the settler state through the myth of white racial superiority.  Cedric Robinson called it, “the theft [white workers] themselves endured and the voracious expropriation of others they facilitated. The scrap which was their reward was the installation of Black inferiority into their shared national culture. It was a paltry dividend, but it still serves.”   

It matters because it still serves.  Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us that Capitalism is “never not racial,” and it is impossible to dismantle racism without ending capitalism.    

IK: You’ve written about your decades-long connection to the Palestinian struggle. Can you talk a bit about black-Palestinian solidarity, then and now, and about  what connects racial capitalism and settler colonialism in the U.S. to settler colonialism and imperialism abroad, specifically in Palestine?

RK:  The history of Black-Palestinian solidarity begins, in earnest, over half a century ago, but I’m always reminding us that there is a longer, more deeply entrenched history of Black support for Zionism.   I’m cautious about making general claims about Black-Palestinian solidarity because there is no unified Black position or community, so for many of us in this fight, the Black political class has been on the wrong side of the struggle—and continue to be.  Here in the U.S. the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus to come out strongly in defense of Palestine and to call out the Biden-Harris administration for endorsing this genocidal war was Cori Bush, a young activist who came out of the Ferguson, Missouri, struggles against police violence and who topped a Black Democratic political dynasty (the Clay family) that never challenged Israel.  New York’s Jamaal Bowman also took a position though a bit more tepid.  But then we get Representative Ritchie Torres, with a history in progressive movements and Black and Brown working-class struggles, and he writes a dumb op ed titled, “Here’s Why I’m Supporting Israel—Despite the Twitter Mob.”

So if we’re going to be honest, it is—and has always been—the Black Left that supports justice and self-determination for the Palestinian people, that has fought consistently to end the occupation.  Christian Zionism continues to capture a portion of the Black community due to a Biblical interpretation that conflates the modern settler state of Israel with the Israel of Exodus.  But for the most part, Black folks have been indifferent.  That has begun to change after 2011, when more Black and Brown delegations began to visit Palestine, spawning a whole bunch of new organizations, such as Black4Palestine and African Americans for Justice in the Middle East & North Africa” (AAJMENA), linking Israeli apartheid to anti-black racism, supporting BDS, and evoking the global anti-apartheid movement for South Africa.  And as we all know, the Gaza-Ferguson nexus in 2014 deepened the relationship when Palestinians in St. Louis and abroad stood in solidarity with the protests against the killing of Mike Brown.  In August of 2016, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over one hundred organizations, issued a forceful statement labeling Israel an “apartheid state” and characterizing the ongoing war in Gaza and the West Bank as “genocide.”  And then Jewish Voice for Peace launched its “Deadly Exchange” campaign, exposing and resisting the ongoing role of Israeli military and police in training U.S. law enforcement in “counter-terrorism” and other tactics that reinforce racial profiling, hyper-policing, and militarization.

The parallels of state-sanctioned violence is definitely one basis for solidarity but not the main one.  Historically and in the present, solidarity has been rooted in the realization that our struggles were linked, not only to each other but to injustice and oppression around the world, nearly all of which can be traced back to settler colonialism and imperialist expansion.  The rise of capitalism and its violent expansion through a global settler regime is how our modern world came into being.   This is why the struggle against settler colonialism, against regimes of racial capitalism, is fundamental.  And that does not mean simply democratizing the settler regime by dismantling structural racism (as if that’s even possible).   Settler colonialism is a system designed for wealth extraction, dispossession, accumulation, and as I said, the elimination of the native (bodily through killing or segregation, culturally through stripping indigenous people of identity and institutions, etc.)   But because settler colonial regimes were modern, capitalist societies often driven by ideas of sovereignty, freedom, independence, the process of dispossession also required legitimizing settler sovereignty over both land and people.  This is why it is impossible to “unsettle” and dismantle colonialism without ending capitalism.  This point is made crystal clear in the Red Nation Manifesto (the Red Nation is an incredible revolutionary indigenous formation here in the U.S.).  Point 10 reads:

We demand the end to capitalism-colonialism on a global level. Native peoples, youth, poor and homeless, women, LGBTQ2 and nonhuman relatives experience extreme and regular forms of violence because the whole system relies on our death. Capitalism-colonialism means death for Native peoples. For Native peoples to live, capitalism and colonialism must die.

Even colonial relationships not based on settler regimes have yet to decolonize.  Formerly colonized nations, for example, never dismantled the colonial state which was designed to facilitate extraction, suppress rebellion, and discipline labor.  

Return the land to indigenous people?  That might not appear feasible for those of us who believe we could actually “democratize” settler states without some fundamental transformation, but I’d much rather be living under indigenous governance of the Quimbaya, the Chibchas, the Raizal and Palenquero, the Maya, the Mapuche, the Aymara, the Quechua, the Dine, the Oceti Sakowin, Potawatomi, the Ute, Yaqui, Shoshone, Palestinian and Bedouin, etc.   Waaayyy better than our weaponized racist, patriarchal, capitalist  regimes that have brought us to edge of earth’s destruction!

IK:  It seems that the neoliberal order is trying to appropriate and commodify the popular outrage against white supremacy in the U.S. and, in terms of policy, inching towards milquetoast reform as a way of mollifying and channelling the uprising without undergoing any real change. Would you agree with that? And if so, how do we counter that counterrevolutionary trend as artists, scholars and activists?

RK:  Yes I agree and capitalism, even before its neoliberal turn, has always sought to capture, domesticate, and commodify popular outrage, and it has always used what we call “non-reformist reforms” to shut down opposition, to resist revolutionary changes.  Of course, we should expect no less since appropriating/absorbing opposition is, in many ways, the classic definition of reform.  Tweaking the system, not changing it.  We saw what happened in the aftermath of the protests around George Floyd.  Amazon’s Jeff Bezos dropped $10 million on various Black and social justice orgs., including Black Lives Matter.  Commercials popped up everywhere, from Cadillac, Target, Google, ad infinitum, declaring that Black Lives Matter, showing  young crunchy Negroes spouting bad poetry wearing natural hair, all to give the illusion that these companies are with us, even as workers in these very companies are fighting for living wages, dignity, benefits, and dealing with anti-black racism.  None of this is new.  But it is a warning against just how easy it is to appropriate our social justice language if it is not explicitly anti-capitalist.  The most absurd but telling example is the viral video featuring the Latina CIA agent droning on about being intersectional and proud to be part of the agency that can “see” her value.

The other part of your question is too hard to answer briefly but I can say that artists have always stood at the fulcrum of struggle, both against ruling power and in the service of it.    There are many stories of artists whose work intended to be critical of oppressive regimes was incorporated by elite circles and simply served to titillate the ruling classes.  And here are perhaps more stories of artists being jailed, murdered, exiled, or simply having their careers destroyed.  There are artists who have chosen to reject the venues and platforms that might advance their careers and instead make work with and for the people.  Some of those folks we’ve never heard of.

I do think theater is a unique cultural space since it has long served as a means of creating commons and community, and it’s most radical (known) practitioners have been persecuted, exiled, blacklisted, and assassinated—Bertolt Brecht, Federico García Lorca, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Ghassan Kanafani (a novelist but also a playwright), Juliano Mer-Khamis, among others. Their work often reveal the machinations of the rulers and the dignity and power of the ruled, in language and movement that emotionally connects audiences to the characters, histories, memories, and to each other.  Still, in a liberal settler state or in the imperial metropoles, outright violence isn’t always necessary.  Enclosure and arrest are enacted through more subtle forms—through the distribution of largely corporate funding, through boards of directors and trustees overwhelmingly comprised of representatives of corporate power, and through censorship. The liberal language of free speech obscures how censorship functions as an expression of power: it is a euphemism for arrest, silencing, and enclosure.  I go back to your brilliant adaptation with Naomi Wallace of Ghassan Kanafani’s novella, “Returning to Haifa,” that was commissioned by the Public Theater in New York. The fact that the Public Theater pulled the production in response to Zionist political pressure from its board is a prime example of the ongoing warfare on artists who speak truth to power.

We just have to continue to do the work.  Clearly it makes a difference, otherwise the state and corporate interests wouldn’t work so hard to suppress it.   

_{* Ismail Khalidi is a playwright, screenwriter and a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater.} 

“Let’s dust off our imaginations”: In Conversation with Bill Ayers

William Ayers, formerly Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has written extensively about social justice and democracy, education and the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. His books include A Kind and Just Parent; Teaching toward Freedom; Fugitive Days: A Memoir; Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; On the Side of the Child; To Teach: The Journey, in Comics; and Demand the Impossible!

C&R: Kids are at home, classes are on zoom (at least in some cases) and parents and relatives are on full-time. There are of course a host of problems that arise from this, from issues of internet access or lack thereof, to hunger for those who get primary meals at schools, to dire economic hardship and abusive home environments. And from a schoolwork perspective, there is a lot of anxiety and pressure to keep schedules, hit ‘benchmarks’ etc. What is your immediate advice for parents of school aged kids right now, as well as to teachers and students themselves, as shelter in place looks poised to continue through the end of this school year?

BA: Breathe deeply. Stay calm. Pause. Rest. Think. Relax.

Trying to recreate the school experience—with its relentless competition, its standardization, its never-ending testing and grading and ranking, its continual sorting of winners from losers, its assumption that learning is linear and transactional, its separation of life into disciplines and subject matters—at home would be a terrible mistake. Much better to rethink the school (when we finally return) along lines of what makes up a re-invented, functioning family. After all a dramatically extended family, at its evolving best, can be a small-scale model of a mini-society driven by norms of equality and reciprocity, a sense of shared community in which people care about one another and grow and develop together, mutual respect, recognition of differences including distinct capacities and interests and needs, shared wealth, attempts to account for and correct all chance/accidental disadvantages, and so on—from each according to their capacity and ability, and to each according to their need. That’s it: a wild but in some sense universal “family,” imperfect to be sure, a little off-kilter and slightly dysfunctional by definition, and yet at its best a model of everyday anarchy and common-sense socialism.

And we would all do well to remember that in our hurry-up, go-fast, get-ahead and oh-so-frantic world, the growth of a child is slow. Young children need encouragement and support and vast opportunities as they deploy all five senses in their journey through the kitchen, the apartment, the street, the world; older children need sustenance and understanding as they branch out, stretch, ask the big questions, interrogate the universe, and create an identity of their own—their rule is to reach. The universal theme of adolescence, captured perfectly by the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks, is this: I shall create./If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.

So let’s shelter-in-place, yes, and let’s bake bread and make dinners together, invent games and songs, write a daily journal and illustrate every page. Compose music. Sing. Dance together. Exercise for an hour a day. Let’s write a group poem, every person adding a line that must contain a color, a food, and an animal; or write other poems in which each line begins with the same phrase, like “I wish…” or “This is the year that…” Let’s create an Oral History archive for our family, and our friends. What are we? Where do we come from? What’s your story? Where are we going? What might we be inspired to create?

Finally, don’t trust Zoom.

Yes, OK, I’m teaching my classes on Zoom (frown emoji).

It’s weird for me, but I’ve got it (I think) and, against my will and better judgment, I feel a little thrill and a burst of relief each time class ends without the internet exploding. I  push all the right buttons, issue all the appropriate commands. Oh, joy! (smile emoji).

So here we are, suddenly, all of us: distance learning, e-learning, online teaching, virtual classrooms—the whole bewildering turmoil. I soldier on, necessarily but not happily, all the while with an irritating chorus of cheerleaders in the background pushing me forward: “online learning is an excellent way to increase student engagement and differentiate instruction;” “digital tools save time and do the heavy lifting by providing ready-to-use lesson plans, instructional materials, and assessments;” “distance learning can continue delivering instruction without disruption even in events like snow days or the COVID-19 pandemic.” Every line offends what I know to be true about teaching, and my sense of what it can achieve, but, wow! snow days or COVID-19—that pretty much covers the waterfront; wait! better add floods and fires and extreme weather.

I was particularly annoyed when I saw my neighbor Arne Duncan, former Secretary of Education, on TV finding, as always, a silver lining in the catastrophe (after Katrina, you may remember, he famously declared that New Orleans was now liberated to create a whole new school system from  scratch!), this time ushering in the pandemic as dress rehearsal for the “classrooms of the future.”

Come on, Arne— Zoom is not the future of classroom life or teaching. In fact, that response betrays a staggering ignorance about the nature of each. When I saw Arne jogging while on my walk the other day, I suppressed the desire to strangle him, and, fortunately, remembered that  I couldn’t get closer than six-feet.

A colleague with experience in distance learning told me that on-line classes are to actual classrooms what frozen pizza is to home-made pizza: similar ingredients but a vastly different experience. Staying with the metaphor, pizza delivered is straight-forward and concrete, as well as often delicious; real classrooms can be delicious as well, but not because the teacher/pizza person “delivered instruction.” Teachers might write books and record lectures—I’ve done both—and those can be more-or-less delivered into the waiting hands (pizza-style) and upturned heads of hungry consumers. 

Classroom teaching at its best is quite different—it’s a relationship (again, like a family), a transformative journey for everyone involved. That’s why good teachers come to class ready to teach, but also primed to see, to hear, and to know their students as three-dimensional creatures, much like themselves, each the one-of-one, each a member of the group—an intimate encounter that cannot adequately take place at a distance. The teacher comes as a student-of-the-students, prepared to change lives, and simultaneously prepared to be changed by the propulsive, life-altering energy that’s released whenever a human being’s mind expands or rearranges itself. 

C&R: This moment is clearly one in which the inequities and, frankly, the brutalities, of the system we live in (in the U.S. but in much of the world too) have come into sharp relief. In an ideal world this feels like such a good moment to re-think and revolutionize the way we do everything, from healthcare to the environment, to war, peace and education. Starting with the education system, how  could we be using this moment to re-think and re-start our approach to teaching and learning and schooling for the long haul. 

BA: When we feel ourselves shackled, bound, and gagged or when we are badly beaten down, struggling just to survive, or when we’re frightened and unsure, living with dust in our mouths, the horizons of our hope can become lowered, sometimes fatally, and asking foundational questions can seem idle and silly. When no alternatives are apparent or available, action seems pointless. We all live in our time and place, immersed in what is; imagining a scene different from what’s immediately before us requires a combination of somethings: seeds, surely, desire, yes, necessity and desperation at times, and at other times a willingness to dance out on a limb without a safety net—no guarantees.

So let’s dust off our imaginations and dance out on that limb: What kind of world do we want to inhabit? We’ll get through this year in school without the SATs, so why not abolish those tests? And let’s abolish numerical grades. And detention halls and expulsions and suspensions and police in the schools. What else?

Let’s double the number of classrooms in the country within five years. Class size should be capped at 15 students—what privileged private school kids already have—and teacher pay should be pegged to the pay of members of Congress. With smaller classes and adequate pay, teachers will do a better job; students will get more attention; and everyone will move forward in a positive way with more space. 

The coronavirus is a most illuminating bug, and here are some of the shabby policies that had become part of our taken-for-granted world, and, therefore, we didn’t even notice until now:

~~Chicago Public Schools announced in February that they would provide soap in every school bathroom! There was no soap?

~~The New York MTA said that subway cars will be thoroughly cleaned every 3 days!

~~Detroit officials decided to restore water to homes of poor people whose water had been cut off because of unpaid bills!

~~Amazon told sick workers that they will not be docked for staying home and missing a shift!

~~Uber and Lyft will pay sick-leave for workers out with coronavirus!

~~The US Treasury Department said it will lift some sanctions on humanitarian supplies sent to Iran, the country with the third largest outbreak of coronavirus!

~~Big insurance companies announced (with fanfare) that they will waive co-pays for people with coronavirus!

~~The national shame and horror of mass incarceration meets the pandemic, and every minor crime/punishment becomes a potential death sentence!

~~The federal government is considering proposals that amount to Medicare for All With Coronavirus! Socialist medicine, but for only that one illness.

If you’re not pissed off about all of this, you’re not paying attention.

This is a time to get clear, really clear, and rise up.

Jack Halberstam’s brilliant book, The Queer Art of Failure, offers an essential insight for these terrible times: when things are “normal”—predictable, common-place, habitual—he argues, whether in one’s personal relationships, one’s work life, or one’s politics, life putt-putts along at an expected pace with little fanfare, and without much need for thought or reflection. The dogma of common sense is firmly set to “normal.” But if an unanticipated fracture occurs—one’s partner has an affair, one gets laid off or furloughed, Donald Trump becomes president—the rupture is palpable, and it’s suddenly time to question everything, challenge the taken-for-granted, rethink basic assumptions, reimagine and rebuild.

This is just such a time.

Of course I know as much about the novel coronavirus as any other dazed participant-observer—more than Donald Trump and Mike Pence combined, but that’s next to nothing.

I do know that the airlines are on life support, that SXSW was cancelled, that the NBA suspended the basketball season, that unemployment levels are staggering, that hunger worldwide is spiking, and that I can’t meet my classes in person. I know the illness is spreading exponentially, that official inaction wasted precious time at the start, and that a patch-work health care system (“the best in the world!” according to official messaging) and a hollowed out public medical administration has left the US flat-footed.

The ruling class—the powerful, the wealthy, the 1% and their enablers in the political class—has an agenda that’s aggressively promoted in good times and in bad, an agenda pulled quickly from the bottom drawer in any crisis and rushed relentlessly toward center stage. So here we are: the privatization of public goods and services, massive transfers of wealth from the public to the private, the destruction of participatory democracy and the erasure of the public, the suppression of voting, the reduction of education and health care and public safety to products, the intensification of white-supremacy, and more.

The perennial contradiction between “we” and “me”—a basic human tension with vast social, cultural, and political differences and dimensions—lurched violently toward an exclusive “ME” in our country in 1980 with the “Reagan Revolution” and its racist dog-whistles, its opposition to any concept of collectivity or the “public,” its weaponized individualism, and its anemic, libertarian definition of “freedom.” “Public safety” became “own a gun;” “public education” became a product to be bought at the market place; “public health” was reduced to “take care of yourself.” The word itself—“public”—in some contexts was racially coded: public welfare, public housing, public aid, public transportation. Saint Ronald Reagan, godhead of the Right and the icon to whom every Republican leader bends a knee and genuflects piously to this day, famously said this at his inauguration: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” That’s the dogma we’re now suffering together now, and that’s the orthodoxy under examination in seminar.

When at last we emerge from this particular catastrophe, what are we willing to fight for? What do we want?

As the ruling class weighs in on coronavirus it comes fully stoked with a predatory agenda—to take one example out of zillions: they are proposing a “payroll tax reduction,” which sounds nice, except that the plan amounts to stealing from and starving Social Security. In 5 years these same criminal bastards will say, “Social Security is broke! We must privatize the system (and let’s stay on message and call it reform!).”

To take another, the question of cost is constantly raised as people come to terms with the vast scope of the problem. Deborah Burger, president of National Nurses United, had a great response when she was challenged to explain how the US could afford to make a coronavirus vaccine free for everyone once it’s developed: “How insane and cruel is it to suggest that we have to figure out how to pay for it when we can actually go to war and not ask one question, but to prevent this kind of a disease, we have to say, ‘How can we pay for it?’”

We have (in the US) a mixed bag of private, for-profit health care provisions for individuals who can afford it, and rather shaky, wholly inadequate health coverage for people fortunate enough to have full-time jobs. Calling it a “system” is a stretch—a “system” implies at least a minimal structure if not some intelligible coherence. We have as well some limited and insufficient socialized medicine for veterans (the VA system), for the elderly (Medicare), and for the poor (Medicaid)—all under steady attack and relentless chipping away by Right-wing ideologues. Nowhere is there a sense of the common good—just individual needs and personal solutions.

But health equals wholeness. Without collective health, we have humanity shattered. Let’s use this time to mobilize and develop our own agenda. After all coronavirus is potentially instructive and educational, revealing more than concealing, but let’s draw the lessons explicitly. In a country characterized by mass incarceration, vast inequality, militarism, white supremacy, a crisis of homelessness and hunger, a political class refusing to face the imminent environmental collapse, and millions without health insurance, we need to get busy—and fast.

Let’s stop searching mindlessly for the much-discussed sweet spot that lies somewhere between fundamental structural change and the world as it is—a “revolution” versus the status quo ante, that long-ago time before Trump. Let’s see, is it here? No… Here? No… Maybe over there? Not over there either. Oh, wait, there it is: that mythological middle ground turns out to be the status quo itself!

Hyper-individualism and weaponized self-reliance is killing the planet, and it’s killing us. Yes, we are each sacred, each the one of one, but we are also each a tiny member of the larger group, a bit of the community, a part of the collective. We must rethink, and rebalance, the “me” and the “we” dialectic. When, 65 years ago, Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, was asked who owned the patent for his discovery, Salk said, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” Health care, education, housing, food security are human rights—they are all about the “we.”

C&R: What about war? For a country essentially on permanent war footing, and as an imperial power with 800 bases worldwide, there must be direct and indirect lines between the business of war and the business of learning. But we rarely hear about it. Can you talk about those connections?

BA: Actually, the US has been at war for 234 of its 244 year existence. We are steeped in a culture of war, difficult to see, hard to resist.

Like every culture or subculture, the war culture hangs together with a complex set of shared meanings, webs of significance and common assumptions woven in such a way that members of the culture can communicate with and recognize one another. The war culture promotes a pervasive and growing common sense of American violence unleashed. 

The US spends more than a trillion dollars a year on war and preparation for war, more than the rest of the world combined. The war culture accepts that as a desire for peace. The US has military bases stretching across the globe, including a base in the Italian Alps, and yet there are no Italian air bases in the Catskills, for example. The war culture sees that as sensible and necessary. The war culture is everywhere, simply taken for granted, always lurking in the shadows and occasionally bursting forth and on full display. 

I remember a trailer for a film I saw in a theater several years ago—it looked dreadful, so I never saw the film, but it could well have been Mars Attack or The Day the Earth Stood Still—in which the repeating trope was an alien confronting a group of startled earthlings, saying in an eerily mechanical voice, “We come in peace”—just before blasting them into small pieces. It takes a minute for reality to catch up to these hapless earthlings, but eventually they get it. Like the challenge of the wandering spouse caught in the arms of a lover, the aliens hold to the classic defense, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?”

“We come in peace,” but wherever the United States puts down the boot, it brings more war, wider war, and a deeper commitment to war as the way. Marine Corps Major General Butler, two-time winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, said in 1935 that, “War is a racket.” That was the title of a popular pamphlet he wrote, and a theme he elaborated in speeches through- out the country over many years: “It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. . . . It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” Butler consistently urged citizens to demand the impossible and support three radical proposals: strictly limit all military forces to a defensive posture; hold a referendum of those who would be on the front lines before any military action is undertaken; and take the profit out of war by, among other measures, conscripting the captains of industry and finance as the foot soldiers in any impending fight.

A pervasive and frantically promoted proposition that runs loose in the land is that being a military powerhouse makes the United States (and people everywhere) safe, protects freedoms, and is a force for peace and democracy in a threatening, dangerous, and hostile world. It’s not true—not even close—but it has a huge and sticky hold on our imaginations. 

When random US politicians tell antiwar protestors picketing a town hall meeting, “It’s because of the sacrifices our troops are making in [fill in the blank: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, the “Middle East,” Korea, Panama, or wherever turns out to be next] that you have the freedom to stand here and speak out,” they’re tapping into that stuttering cliché. When a retired general speaks confidently at a televised congressional hearing, explaining to the credulous audience that the “enemy can be defeated” if only the Pentagon would be granted more funds to purchase more weapons, and then given greater leeway in their deployment and use, he’s issuing the same unexamined and banal truism. When the talking heads tell us it’s unfortunate that US economic strength rides on oil, a resource that “happens to come from a nasty neighborhood,” but it’s “a blessing” we have the power to police that part of the world, they’re doing the same thing. And when folks across the political spectrum express public gratitude and support for “our fighting men and women overseas,” while refusing to send their own children into those same wars or harboring serious private doubts about the wisdom, purpose, and execution of whatever US adventure is currently in play, they too are situated in that wide open field of received wisdom and diminishing options. 

What if we challenged these instances of hypocrisy and defensive dogma, and insisted that there are more honest and straightforward ways to support US military men and women? What if we demanded their immediate decommission and return home, and insisted that they be provided excellent medical and psychological care, good jobs, affordable housing, and the best available educational opportunities—the things every human being deserves? What if we spoke up in the face of that idiot politician and asked him to draw a straight line between free speech and the specific invasion he’s now supporting and explicitly (or at least implicitly) defending? What if we locked arms as we built a growing wave of peace advocates, anticipating and opposing the next aggression, and the next? What if the Department of Defense became the Department of Peace, and peace education became a core component of school learning?

The history of US military actions is a history of conquest and genocide from the start and chaos and catastrophe ever since: invading and occupying Vietnam and then intentionally expanding that war into neighboring Laos and Cambodia as retribution for the US de- feat, a disaster that cost the lives of six thousand people every week for ten years; unleashing a massive shock-and-awe attack on Iraq in 2003 that led to the breakup of that nation and the rise of several reactionary fundamentalist and terrorist formations including ISIS; orchestrating a fifty-year campaign to destabilize and topple the Cuban government; propping up nasty regimes from medieval Saudi Arabia to apartheid South Africa; overthrowing elected presidents in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973; instigating constant civil unrest in Venezuela for fourteen years including a successful if short-lived coup in 2002; supporting the communist purge and the genocide that followed in Indonesia in the mid-1960s; participating in the murders of the African freedom fighter Patrice Lumumba in Congo in 1961, the Moroccan anti-imperialist Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris in 1965, the internationalist Che Guevara in Bolivia 1967, and the anti-colonial leader Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau in 1973; exporting billions of dollars in arms to Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, and reactionary regimes and right-wing subversives the world around. As busy and ambitious as this looks, it’s only the tip of a menacing mega-iceberg, an emblematic list as opposed to an exhaustive survey. 

Justice and democracy do not belong to war; on the contrary, each is easily injured and quickly exterminated in its furnaces. John Dewey, the great philosopher of education, observed that in war all governments turn authoritarian and totalitarian. We can see the wreckage all around us: omnivorous national security and surveillance; the abrogation of privacy and civil liberties; the wide use of mass incarceration; the banality of torture, domestically and internationally; and the undermining of tolerance everywhere. Historically, law and rights yield in the face of war: Abraham Lincoln’s famous suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War; the Palmer Raids following World War I; the mass arrests and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II; illegal imprisonment as policy today. These moves are all defended by the war-makers as necessary during wartime. 

The US entered new territory after 9/11, for we are in our twentieth year of a government-proclaimed state of permanent war, an absolute war against “terrorism” or “evil.” While there are indeed dreadful and desperate tactics being deployed everywhere—suicide bombings, hijackings, beheadings, random killings—the enemy remains vague and the target elusive: terrorists and “evildoers,” insurgents and radicals, the “worst of the worst” or the “bad actors.” Practically every politician in Washington notes casually that we are at war; it’s completely normalized. George W. Bush proudly called himself a “war president;” Barack Obama, too, chose to claim the mantle of the warrior; now Trump calls himself a “war president” fighting an “invisible enemy.” Whoever sits on the throne of American Empire wears the garments of the warmonger—unless and until we bring the power of a popular movement to bear down and end imperialism altogether. 

Imagine if every “known terrorist” were dead or in prison— now try to imagine the state announcing an end to airport searches and phone taps. It’s inconceivable. 

Ask one of our careless politicians how we will know if any given war is won, or what the benchmarks of success or failure might be, and they become speechless. For these are perpetual wars, wars without borders, without obvious or easily defined enemies, and without concrete objectives; we can only know they are over when our Dear Leaders tell us they’re over. Until then—and don’t hold your breath—your rights to free speech and association are suspended because the rulers want to keep you safe, and these measures, they assure us, are an unfortunate necessity of war. 

To hope for a world at peace and in balance, powered by love, joy, and justice, to insist that the citizens and residents of the US become a people among people (not a superior nor a chosen people) and that the country becomes a nation among nations (not some kind of crypto-fascist übernation) is to resist the logic and the reality of war, and to see, as well, the war culture itself as a site of resistance and transformation. It’s to break with the frame that acts as if war is natural and inevitable. It’s to do the hard work of making a vibrant and robust peace movement— connecting with the environmental activists, the immigrant rights forces, the Black Lives Matter upsurge, feminists, and the queer movement—organizing to close all US military bases abroad and to bring all troops home now, leaving no US military or paid mercenaries behind; compelling our government to sign all pending international treaties on nuclear disarmament; mobilizing to cut military spending by 10 percent a year for the next ten years, dedicating the savings to education and health; rallying to suspend and then abrogate all contracts between the US government and Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.

C&R: What role do the arts play in U.S. schools today? And what role could/should they ideally play in a young person’s education?

BA: The great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of a Pulitzer Prize in the early 1950’s and later Poet Laureate of Illinois, asked in her “Dedication to Picasso,” an homage to the great man and the huge sculpture that he gave the city, “Does man love art?” Her answer: “Man visits art but cringes. Art hurts. Art urges voyages.”

The voyages art demands lie at the very heart of our humanness: journeys in search of new solutions to old problems, explorations of spirit spaces and emotional landscapes, trips into the hidden meanings and elaborate schemes we construct to make our lives understandable and endurable, flights hooked on metaphor and analogy, wobbly rambles away from the cold reality of the world we inhabit—the world as such—into worlds that could be or should be standing just beyond the next horizon. These are the voyages that foreground the capacities and features that mark us as creatures of the imaginary, uniquely human beings. Invention, aspiration, self-consciousness, projection, desire, ingenuity, moral reflection and ethical action, courage and compassion and commitment—all of these and more are harvests of our imaginations. And our imaginations are encouraged, nourished, and fired with art. 

Every human being is endowed with the powerful and unique capacity to imagine—each an artist of their own life—and art unleashes our deep humanity. A robust engagement with the various arts is central and not peripheral to an education for a free people. Albert Einstein famously noted that, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Liberation and enlightenment are each a product of the arts.

But it’s also true that art hurts. The capacity to see the world as if it could be otherwise creates yearning and liberates desire—we are freed (or condemned) to run riot. Art—necessarily subversive, unruly, and disruptive—challenges the status quo simply by opening us up to consider the alternatives; suddenly the taken-for-granted and the given world become choices and no longer warrants or life (death?) sentences.

“Art is not chaste,” Picasso said. “Those ill-prepared should be allowed no contact with art. Art is dangerous. If it is chaste it is not art.” He was distinguishing pretty decorations and castles-in-the-clouds from the grit and grind, rough and tumble of art. He simultaneously reminds us that the aesthetic in education is the opposite of the anesthetic: anesthesia is a drug that puts us to sleep, while aesthetics is a treatment with the potential to awaken us again and again. 

The arts are too often small and marginalized in schools, and this is a gathering catastrophe, not only for students and teachers, but for our common future as well. 

The arts ought to be at the center and in every corner of an education for participation and democracy. We are, in spite of the existential feel of things and our own natural narcissism, finite beings plunging through an infinite space and gazing toward an expanding heaven. We are in the middle of things, and at the end of nothing—the unseen, the hidden, the mysterious, the invisible, the indefinite, the unfamiliar and the unknown, the unheard of and the forgotten are vast, while our various maps of the known world are limited, paltry, and, if history can act as a guide here, mostly castles-in-the-sky. Learning to question, to interrogate, to experiment, to wonder and to wander, to construct and create—this is the sturdiest foundation upon which to build an education of purpose for a free people.

Life begins in wonder, and so does art; and education too.

Watch a newborn—five minutes old and at her mother’s breast for the first time and already there are questions and explorations, a dialogue of discovery and surprise only just underway. Look at a toddler negotiating her apartment or a nearby park or the beach—all five senses are fully engaged, every discovery considered and touched and smelled and—oops!—into the mouth for a taste! And soon they are sorting and building, drawing on paper or walls if the materials are at hand, imagining stories and inventing words, and putting their hand prints on everything. Every kid comes to school a question mark and an exclamation point—her work after all is the construction not only of a life, but of an entire world.

Every school, every classroom, and every teacher must choose whether to support and aid in the construction of a life, whether to help unbolt the vitality of the world or to hide and represses it. Every teacher must decide whether to keep the questions and the passion alive—creating environments for exploration, for doing and making, for experimenting and hypothesizing and failing and succeeding—or to hammer the children into shape so that they leave her classroom, no longer as vital question marks or exclamation points, but as dull periods.

One of Paul Gauguin’s most bizarre and oddly engaging works is a vast canvas filled with quasi-religious symbolism and wild wanderings, its title scrawled across it in a fevered hand: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? 

Art asks those kinds of questions. Education does too.

Kids are born and then come to school with questions: Who am I in the world? How did I get here? What are my chances and my choices?  

The arts allow youth to assemble tentative answers to these and other questions, and over time to develop more sophisticated and dynamic ones. The arts offer an invitation to become the agent of your own story, the author of your own life, or the actor in your own film as opposed to some anonymous walk-on in someone else’s worn out and clichéd script.

Author, actor, agent, composer—these roles allow youth to wield essential tools against propaganda, political agendas, dogma, and all manner of impositions and stereotypes. Art seeks honesty and authenticity, and that means it dives into contradiction, disagreements, silences, negation, denials, inconsistencies, confusion, challenges, turmoil, puzzlement, commotion, ambiguities, paradoxes, disputes, uncertainty, and every kind of muddle. That makes art an ally of critical and engaged and vibrant minds. Art enhances a sense of being fully human, a work-in-progress born into a going world.

Emily Dickinson asserted that “Art lights the slow fuse of possibility.” Yes! Art lights a fuse.

How did we get here, and where do we want to go?

What is our map of the known world, and how might things be otherwise?

What is our responsibility as world citizens to one another and to future generations? 

What kind of society do we want to inhabit? 

Who do we want to be as people?

What can we become? 

What positive and humanizing aspects of work and labor do we embrace?

What gives meaning to our lives?

What time is it on the clock of the world?

Diving into the wreckage and swimming as hard as we’re able toward a distant and indistinct shore, overcoming difficulties and re-imagining life’s possibilities along the way—this is the spirit youth, students, and teachers might bring to these questions.

Reflection, fantasy, theory, nightmares and dreams—all of this has animated human beings throughout the ages, demobilizing and challenging the given world, inviting us to leap into the unknown, to jump off the edge, to change our lives, to escape at times, and to move forward positively at other times. Imagination invites us to reanimate our minds once again, and to get busy in a project of creative repair.

Imagination, then, is more a “stance” than a “thing,” and engaging the imagination involves the dynamic work of mapping the world as such, and leaning toward a world that might be but is not yet. Most of us most of the time accept our lot-in-life as inevitable—for decades, generations, even centuries; when a revolution is in reach, when a lovelier life heaves into view, or when a possible world becomes somehow visible, the status quo becomes, suddenly, unendurable. We then reject the fixed and the stable, and begin to look at the world as if it could be otherwise.

There lies the critical work of reweaving our shared world.

“Art is a vehicle to tell the truth in a way that may not be obvious”: Q & A with poet and author Bao Phi

Bao Phi is an award-winning Twin Cities-based spoken word poet, author, and children's book writer, as well as an arts administrator and single co-parent father. He was born in Vietnam and came to the United States with his family as refugees when he was a baby. He was raised in Minneapolis, where he currently lives with his ten year old daughter.   

C&R: Is there an object or a practice (sacred or mundane) that gives you solace in right now? Is there something or someone who gives you hope?

BP: I come from a poor refugee family that fled war to come here – just recently, when I was helping my mom run errands, she reminded me of this. She still lives in the house she raised me in. As an adult and a single co-parent, I was looking for a place to live for me and my child (time spent 50/50 between me and her mother) at a time when the housing market was ridiculous, and I was competing against dual income households for the same properties. That I found reasonably affordable housing, after two years of looking, is a minor miracle. So as I set in shelter-in-place, my surroundings are a reminder what to be thankful for. And if there’s one person who gives me hope, it’s my ten year old child. She’s sensitive, and humanity often frightens and saddens her. Despite that, she remains bright and hilarious.

C&R: Albert Camus, in his novel The Plague, writes: “At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth–in other words, to silence.” Where is your head, and your heart, in relation to the rhetoric, to our habits, and to the silence that falls when the hard truths of calamity come into focus?

Well, institutional racism, exploitation of resources, and xenophobic nationalism have always existed, the pandemic is just the most recent excuse in history for people to exercise their bigotry in a blatant manner. Whether verbally or physically. And even so, there is a silence around it. A dismissal. Speaking for myself as an Asian American, I feel that our people are so used to being gaslighted in discussions of race that we do it to ourselves. The pattern that I see, pandemic or not, is that we don’t talk about Asians unless Asians are the ones being problematic. Of course, that’s necessary, because no one is above criticism. But I do think it bears parsing when, say, a perhaps not very well thought out op-ed from Andrew Yang gets a lot more attention, from Asians and non-Asians alike, than, say, SEARAC’s in-depth report on APIA boys and men, or any historical analysis of the hate crimes on the rise against us right now. Or that the acting President of the United States is obviously trying to scapegoat China for this pandemic, and since Asians in America will always be conflated with Asians overseas, Asian Americans receive none of the benefits and all of the backlash. And again, this is just the recent example. This is a pattern – Asians are either invisible, or we’re a problem. It’s always pissed me off.

C&R: What does solidarity mean to you? In your work?

BP: To listen critically, to engage critically, to work with a community first mindset, to speak out only when I feel my opinion is missing from the discussion rather than to hear myself talk or to participate in the theater of allyship. Learn, grow, discuss, challenge, change. To move away from the idea of an “exceptional” activist, away from the temptations of being considered an exceptional “Asian”, and more towards a deep community solidarity.

C&R What/who have you read, seen or listened to recently that really blew you away?

BP: Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, both blew me away. Danez Smith’s newest poetry book, Homie, and Ed Bok Lee’s newest poetry book, Mitochondrial Night, are excellent. I loved Minh Le’s Green Lantern, and always excited to see Thi Bui’s new work when it pops up online anywhere, in particular, her recent work on deportation. I’m looking forward to Natalie Diaz’s newest poetry book, as well as Valeria Luiselli’s newest novel, Lost Children Archive. Junauda Petrus’s The Stars and the Blackness Between Them. The Book of Delights by Ross Gay. Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Marcie Rendon’s two mystery novels.

C&R: Does truth still matter in a “post-truth” age? What role does art play in relation to the truth?

BP: Truth always matters. But whose truth, and when? And to what end? What I love about art is that it is a vehicle to tell the truth in a way that may not be obvious. And when you do that, I believe the message sticks with people for much longer.

C&R: There is no shortage of apocalyptic thinking these days. But what if we could fill the future with visions of light instead? There is a Sikh prayer that asks, “what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?” Seeing this dark moment instead as the prelude to a rebirth of sorts,  what would the world look like in 50 years if you could imagine and bring that future into being? 

BP: What would be great is a more sustainable, equitable future. That the bottom falls out for the oil industry which pushes the world towards development of clean, renewable energy. Equitable redistribution of wealth. Reparations for Black and Indigenous folks. An understanding of how racist xenophobia is rooted in structural, colonialist, imperialistic structures that directly effect Asian, Arab, Middle Eastern, and Latinx/Chicanx people. Greater empathy for humanity. Less posturing, more growth. Less rhetoric, more discussion. And flying cars. Or maybe flying bicycles?

Mural on the Plaza Centenario from Pangea’s Lake Street Arts! Program. Mural created by Goodspace Murals. Photo by Meena Natarajan.

“We Know This History Better Than Anyone”: A Conversation with Sharon Day

Sharon M. Day - Playwright - (Ojibwe*) is the Executive Director and one of the founder’s of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force (IPTF), formerly known as the Minnesota American Indian AIDS Task Force.
*She is an artist, musician, and writer.
*An environmental activist, she has led 19 Water Walks from 2011, to draw attention to the devastation of natural water resources and to offer prayers for these rivers. These extended ceremonies have happened along The Mississippi, the Ohio River, the St. Louis River, the James River in Virginia, the Missouri River, Cuyahoga River in Ohio, Seneca Lake in New York and Pokegama Lake in Minnesota.

Sharon's many awards include the Resourceful Woman Award, the Gisela Knopka Award, BIHA’s Women of Color Award, The National Native American AIDS Prevention Resource Center’s Red Ribbon Award, and most recently, the Alston Bannerman Sabbatical Award, and most recently, the Spirit Aligned Leadership Fellowship. The Governor of the State of Minnesota, and the mayors of both St. Paul and Minneapolis named November 10, 1998 after her: Sharon M. Day, Day. She is one of the Spirit Aligned Leadership Fellows. She is an editor of the anthology, Sing! Whisper! Shout! Pray! Feminist Visions for a Just World: Edgework Books, 2000. She is also one of two contributors to Drink of the Winds, Let the Waters Flow Free, Johnson Institute, 1978.

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C&R: What are some of the immediate concerns in Indian country and indigenous communities around the country as this crisis unfolds?

SD: The immediate concerns are lack of testing, lack of PPE and hospital beds and icu beds to care for the sick. In the Navajo Nation which is larger than many states in land area has a rate higher than the rates per 100 thousand in New York City. Native Americans or Indigenous Peoples suffer from health disparities such as food deserts, jobs, and environmental toxins in the land, air and water, resulting in high rates of diabetes, heart disease and asthma. This will not bode well for outcomes when the Corona Virus hits tribal communities both on and off the reservations.

C&R: Many Americans are scared about the future as the virus affects folks across the board in one way or another, often in profound and destabilizing ways. Thinking about five centuries of indigenous resistance and survival in the face of settler colonialism, one of the most destructive threads in this history has of course been the diseases brought by the invaders, which – paired with war, displacement and starvation – saw the near extermination of indigenous peoples across the Americas. Does that long history and the formative role of pestilence influence how you think about the current moment? 

SD: Of course, we know this history better than anyone. This resulted in Native women sewing masks and distributing them to hospitals, community members and providing information to community about our own herbal medicines; most of the time, we can find these medicines within 30 feet of our homes and we harvest these medicines all year throughout the growing season. Grandmothers are preparing herbal packets for distribution. Information is shared via the internet and by phone calls freely.

C&R: There is no shortage of apocalyptic thinking these days. But what if we could fill that thinking about the future with visions of light instead? There is a Sikh prayer that asks, “what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?” Seeing this darkness as the prelude to a rebirth of sorts, what would the world look like in 50 years if you could imagine and bring that future into being?

SD: In our prophesies given over 500 hundred years ago, we were told of this time. A time when all people living on Turtle Island would have to make a decision, to continue on this path of destruction or move to harmony with all things, the plants, the animals, humans and the waterways, indeed with Mother Earth. Which way will we go? indeed this is the question.

C&R: Is there a prayer or poem or a saying that you feel speaks to the current situation and brings comfort or strength or perspective? Could you share it with us?

SD: In these days 
Chi Migwetch for my morning rituals
First gratitude to the water
That flows from the overhead shower head 
like gentle rain to cleanse my physical being
Then Migwetch to the water used to brew my
Mukademashkikiwaboo
Migwetch to the elderberries and honey used to make the syrup
And apple cider vinegar these are my morning concoction.
Migwetch to the cedar trees in my front yard
The small leaves simmer slowly on my stove
For tea to cleanse my lungs the steam to cleanse the air
As the day wears on
I contemplate the songs
Our sacred items
I shut the tv off
No sounds other than my own voice
As I sing
Sing for these medicines
And The helpers
The sacred items 
Obsidian bowl
Sumac tree
Asemaa. 
Sage. 
Cedar.
Together they are everything.
The vibrations we need for healing
Everything.
SDay. 3-26-20

Mural on the Plaza Centenario from Pangea’s Lake Street Arts! Program. Mural created by Goodspace Murals. Photo by Meena Natarajan.