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One day I remarked to a Cuban how I admired his skill in cutting cane — it was almost like an art, the way he did it. He thanked me for the compliment, but quickly added that his skill was a skill that needed to become obsolete. Cane-cutting was inhuman toil, he said. Before the revolution thousands had had to depend for their survival on working like animals during the cane season. Many of them would end up having to cut off a finger with the machete for a little insurance money to make ends meet a little while longer.
The job of cutting cane had become qualitatively different since the revolution. No one was a cane-cutter by trade any longer; during the cane season everyone pitched in. Also profits for others were not being squeezed from their sweat and toil. They knew that the returns from sugar sales abroad would be used to raise the living standards of the Cuban people as a whole — new schools would be built, more hospitals constructed; child care centers would multiply, better housing would be available to those who had the greatest need.
Having read about my fight for my job at UCLA, he felt that I could assist him in constructing his defense. He wanted to call me to the stand as an expert on the socioeconomic function of racism. I would testify about such things as the incidence of unemployment in our communities; that most of the time at least 30 percent of the young people in black ghettos across the country are unable to find work. He wanted me to talk about the things that white people generally try to ignore — about the starvation and severe malnutrition which Black people still suffer.
"What is a Black man to do," he asked, "when he has applied for jobs day in and day out, when his unemployment insurance is running out, when he can't pay his exorbitant rent for his rundown apartment, when his wife is desperate, when his children are hungry? What is he to do?" He spoke in a voice haunted by personal tragedies.
George was a symbol of the will of all of us behind bars, and of that strength which oppressed people always seem to be able to pull together. Even when we think the enemy has stripped us of everything, left us bereft even of our souls. The strength that comes out of an almost biological need to feel that we have something to say about the direction of our lives. That need had gnawed at George, behind bars all of his adult life — and, what was most important, he had known how to give the clearest, most universal expression to that need, and his writings had aroused people all over the world.
George was dead, and the deeply personal pain I felt would have strangled me had I not turned it into a proper and properly placed rage. I could not dwell on my own loss. Any individual gnashing of teeth would bring me to my knees. Personal sadness in that still gray cell under the hateful eyes of my jailers might break the cords of will that held me together. George's death would be like a lodestone, a disc of steel deep inside me, magnetically drawing toward it the elements I needed to stay strong and fight all the harder. It would refine my hatred of jailers, position my contempt for the penal system, and cement my bonds with other prisoners. It would give me the courage and energy I needed for a sustained war against the malevolent racism that had killed him. He was gone, but I was here. His dreams were mine now.
This realization brought to mind the many heated arguments we had had around the bail movement — arguments which usually found me alone on one side and Fania, Kendra, Franklin and the other Committee leaders on the other. It had been about a year since the bail campaign was launched. I had profound reservations about devoting so much of the energy of the campaign to the single question of bail. In the first place, I had been certain that there would not be the flimsiest chance of victory. In the second place I thought the political content of the bail issue too weak. It did not permit people to express their resistance to the system of repression, which was not only behind my own imprisonment but was why so many others were languishing in prison.
Only after many months had passed did I begin to understand my own misjudgment. True, the demand for bail was not a revolutionary demand. True, it did not of itself expose the rotten core of the capitalist system. But precisely because a bail demand was something which could appeal to anyone who wanted to side with justice, it allowed the campaign to reach out to many thousands of people who at that time could not have been stimulated to call for my complete freedom. They would not go on record demanding my freedom, but they would go on record demanding that I be released pending the determination of my innocence — or guilt — by a court of law.
So the Nineties turned out to be the lie we always said they were. Those gains in productivity? That was from unpaid overtime at Wal-Mart and the high commissions brokers got from the stocks they hyped. The co-prosperity sphere of NAFTA? Mexican jobs went to China, and unemployed Mexicans to America. The popular inevitability and inevitable popularity of free-market views? Try hawking that idea in Brazil or France about now. Already we’re nostalgic for our days as superfluous men and women; a part of our integrity, a part of our dissent, was to be of no use to anyone. Edmund Wilson: “One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud.” Sure. Still, it was pleasant there for a few years to suspect we might be wrong about everything.
[...] Pop does, though, I think, allow you to retain certain things you’ve already thought, without your necessarily having been able to articulate them, and to preserve certain feelings you have only intermittent access to, in a different form, music with lyrics, in which the cognitive and emotional are less divided. I think songs allow you to steel yourself or loosen yourself into certain kinds of actions, though they don’t start anything. And the particular songs and bands you like dictate the beliefs you can preserve and reactivate, and the actions you can prepare—and which songs and careers will shape your inchoate private experience depends on an alchemy of your experience and the art itself. Pop is neither a mirror nor a Rorschach blot, into which you look and see only yourself; nor is it a lecture, an interpretable poem, or an act of simply determinate speech. It teaches something, but only by stimulating and preserving things that you must have had inaugurated elsewhere. Or it prepares the ground for these discoveries elsewhere—often knowledge you might never otherwise have really “known,” except as it could be rehearsed by you, then repeatedly reactivated for you, in this medium.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REVOLUTION and defiance is the difference between an overthrow of the existing order and one person’s shaken fist. When the former isn’t possible, you still have to hold on to the latter, if only so as to remember you’re human. Defiance is the insistence on individual power confronting overwhelming force that it cannot undo. You know you cannot strike the colossus. But you can defy it with words or signs. In the assertion that you can fight a superior power, the declaration that you will, this absurd overstatement gains dignity by exposing you, however uselessly, to risk. Unable to stop it in its tracks, you dare the crushing power to begin its devastation with you.
In all forms of defiance, a little contingent being, the imperiled man or woman, hangs on to his will—which may be all he has left—by making a deliberate error about his will’s jurisdiction. Because the defiant person has no power to win a struggle, he preserves his will through representations: he shakes his fist, announces his name, shouts a threat, and above all makes the statements, “I am,” “we are.” This becomes even more necessary and risky when the cruel power is not natural, will-less itself, but belongs to other men. Barthes gives the words of the French revolutionist Guadet, arrested and condemned to death: “Yes, I am Guadet. Executioner, do your duty. Go take my head to the tyrants of my country. It has always turned them pale; once severed, it will turn them paler still.” He gives the order, not the tyrant, commanding necessity in his own name—defying the false necessity of human force that has usurped nature’s power—even if he can only command it to destroy him.
I’LL ADMIT IT, the first time I saw two women boxers collapse into each other’s arms after a bout at a recreational boxing show, I thought, isn’t that just like women? But then I saw two men do it ten minutes later, same smiles, same sighs. There are two elemental life functions that we humans think about alternately too little and too much: eating and sex. Men traditionally have had a third, fighting, and it gives them their perspective on the other two. In a woman who has taken on the third, you see a change in attitude that can take many forms. She stops snacking. She stops “dieting.” She forgets to eat. She eats pasta at midnight. She wears sweatpants—a lot. She stops dating. She kisses her biceps. She picks up a man at the gym for a one-night stand; he’s a nice guy, she’ll see him back at the gym Saturday, probably. She comes out of the closet. She gets manhandled by her trainer every day and doesn’t give it a thought. She feels after her first spar the same way she felt after the first time she had sex—inarticulately emotional, disappointed, empty, cynical, with a strange new sense of alignment. Anxious to do it, discover it, again. Now there is a vital third engagement with life, a way to feel one’s body consume and be consumed, to know and be one’s physical self, to excite and exhaust, to touch and be touched, to unleash her power.