Greetings, book and treat people. I was going to share a book review today, but then I started writing about my weekend. I thought I’d just write a few paragraphs above the line, as I often do. It turns out I had a lot to say. So here’s an essay about what’s been on my mind lately.
Before we get to it, the second annual Trans Rights Readathon starts next week! Last year it was my favorite week on the internet, and I’m so happy it’s happening again. If you’re looking for books, I made a list of 100 trans books I love. If you’re looking for organizations to fundraise for, I also compiled a crowdsourced list of 250+ trans justice orgs in the US and around the world.
I’d love to offer some specific recommendations for trans books! Reply to this email with a book request and I’ll share a few of them next week.
Think of Others
Last weekend I spent a few hours packing up books with Great Falls Books Through Bars. They’re a volunteer-run group that sends free books, zines, and other reading material to incarcerated folks. They have monthly volunteer days, and I’ve been meaning to go to one since I moved here four years ago. Sometimes it takes me a long time to do a thing.
It feels strange to say that those few hours filled me up, because the world I dream of, the world I am trying to build in all the tiny ways I can, is a world without prisons. But being there did fill me up. It felt good to do something concrete. It felt good to be out in the world, living my values (always imperfectly) alongside other people doing the same thing.
This is the same feeling I’ve had at every protest for Palestine I’ve attended in the last five months. Standing with a few dozen other people in the center of my little town, marching in the rain through downtown Northampton—all of it is better than sitting alone in my house feeling small and hopeless. It feels strange to admit—there’s something off about it—because what I and so many others have been protesting is so unbearably horrifying. I don’t want to keep going to protests. I want the genocide to stop. I don’t want to send books to incarcerated people. I want those people to be free to browse libraries and bookstores at their leisure.
There’s a certain attitude I’ve encountered from time to time in leftist spaces and movements: that activism should be selfless. It’s an iteration of the expectation of perfection that plagues the same spaces. (I could say a lot more about this. We Will Not Cancel Us is a great place to start.) The idea, as I understand it, is that if you come to any kind of liberation movement for any reason other than to further the goals of that movement, you’re doing it wrong. In other words: if you’re lonely and looking for community, if you’re feeling hopeless and craving inspiration, if you’re seeking ways to feel more rooted to wherever you live, if you want to learn more about an injustice you’ve just been made aware of—well, those are not reasons to show up at a protest, attend a community meeting, or join a movement.
In her book The Wake Up, author and activist Michelle MiJung Kim begins by asking readers to consider our own personal “whys” for joining social justice movements.
When it comes to social justice work, we often default to asking for the what first (e.g., “What can I do?”) because we’ve been trained to crave immediately actionable solutions that bring immediate results. But what many fail to understand is that the what without the why can bring about shallow and misguided outcomes that become stale, or worse, harmful.
She urges us to get honest and uncomfortable with ourselves, to think beyond the obvious and expected and often performative whys, to dig down deep to the bedrock whys we carry in our hearts. She argues that this is where sustainable activism comes from.
[F]rom my personal and professional experience, in order for us to stay tethered to the movement, we need a why that includes ourselves in it, one that recognizes our role and culpability, not a why that is only about others.
Rasheed Newson writes about this beautifully in his novel My Government Means to Kill Me, which is about a Black gay man coming of age at the height of the AIDS epidemic in NYC. Here’s a relevant snippet from my original review:
The impossibility (and futility) of compartmentalization, and the messy reality of how political activism and community liberation intersect with intrapersonal relationships and childhood trauma and mundane desire plays out in a dozen ways throughout the book.
There’s a scene when the protagonist, Trey, is talking with an activist who volunteers for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Trey has just done his first shift at an AIDS hospice, and this older activist, Peter, takes him out for drinks. He asks Trey why he’s drawn to the work, what he’s in it for. He asks, “What’s your selfish goal?” Trey is utterly baffled by the question, and it takes him a long time to come up with an answer. Peter is not satisfied until he does. This moment collapses the space between motivation and aspiration. Trey badly wants to do good in the world. He becomes more and more certain of that as he settles into life in New York—it’s a coming of age story, and he does a lot of growing. But he also wants friends. He wants to belong to something. And he’s carrying around an enormous weight—guilt over his brother’s death. He wants to atone. He’s not pure. He doesn’t get involved in ACT UP purely for the sake of liberation. His motivations are messy, sometimes selfish, often deeply personal. I love how honestly Newson explores why people join movements, and how movements—whatever their aims—are often also catalysts for personal transformation.
Even if I believed that the powerful feelings of connection and inspiration I get when I go to a protest or volunteer with a local abolitionist organization were morally corrupt (I don’t), I’d still feel those feelings. I could insist that the afternoon I spent packing up books didn’t give me anything, didn’t make me feel a little less small, didn’t remind me of how inextricably we’re all linked—but I’d be lying. Of course, I’d also be lying if I insisted that that afternoon didn’t make me more heartbroken, more angry. Doing one small thing often makes the enormity of the systems we’re fighting against starker and scarier. Every protest I’ve ever been to has ignited my rage. Multiple truths are possible.
Once more for the people in the back: binaries never serve us. Here’s Michelle MiJung Kim again:
Part of our obsession with wanting to be seen as a good person is fueled by our binary thinking: if we are not good, then that must mean we are bad. And this good-bad binary leads us to expect moral perfection from those whom we’ve put on a pedestal while brutally punishing those we’ve crossed off as being bad. There is no room for mistake, growth, or transformation, and we do everything in our power to not cross over to the “bad” list because we’ve seen what happens to those people.
I’ve been thinking a lot these past many months about what it means to care for myself, and what it means to care for others. I do think some of the “activism must be selfless” attitude is a misguided reaction to the historical and ongoing co-optation of care. Charity is not care and neither is philanthropy. Nonprofits that uphold oppressive systems while purporting to “help” marginalized communities are not practicing care. “Leaders” who swoop into movements thinking they know better than the people who’ve been there, organizing for themselves for decades, are not practicing solidarity. White saviorism is alive and well. Sometimes the lines between these extremely harmful practices and the liberatory practices of collective care are blurry. I’ve made mistakes and I’m sure I’ll make more. Maybe I’ve made some in this essay.
Here is one thing I know: when I cook a meal and invite my beloveds over to share it with me, I am also cooking for myself. It doesn’t diminish the offering. It expands the offering. Feeding others is one of the ways I feed myself.
You might have come across the Mahmoud Darwish poem ‘Think of Others’ sometime in the last five months; it’s been floating around the internet. It’s a beautiful poem, and it ends with this couplet:
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).
Think of others and think of yourself, because you are others, and others are you. We choose ourselves by choosing each other.
And Beauty
If you’re local, I hope you’ll join me at the next Great Falls Books Through Bars volunteer day! They take place on the second Saturday of every month. You can also donate books or purchase titles from their wishlist.
I found this piece of writing so beautiful and moving.
Ditto this interview, especially since I can’t stop thinking about poetry these days.
This book is out on Friday and I love it with my whole heart. Do yourself a favor and pre-order it already!
As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I’m not ready for winter to be over (I never am), but this winter-meets-spring misty walk I took the other day left me in awe.
See you out there in the world, bookish friends.