8 Books Toward Autonomy and Freedom https://ift.tt/0aT7NVy
It’s true: we are living in chaotic and fearful times. It’s also true that we have been living in chaotic and fearful times. As each day heralds more cruelties, it is important to hold both truths — to meet this moment with unique outrage and understand how people and communities across the world have responded when faced with systemic catastrophes. I’m reminded of when abortion access became threatened nationwide after Roe v. Wade was struck down, the Carolina Abortion Fund reminded us that the South had been struggling with punitive abortion deadlines, costs, and restrictions for decades — and that meant they had tools of resistance to share.
From the past year of reading, I’ve collected a list of books that grapple and grasp at autonomy and freedom for those who have often been denied it: queer, trans, and nonbinary people; people of color; migrants; disabled and chronically ill people; people living under threat of violence and war; and people who live within a multiplicity of marginalizations. Autonomy: the right to govern the self, unbeholden to external forces — the freedom from — and every freedom to. To do what? To do anything. To live.
These books and authors engage with freedom even when denied autonomy by systems — governments, nations, religions, heteropatriarchy, healthcare — and question at how to bolster a safe, meaningful, loving life. Some of these books’ plots and themes engage with activism and resistance. Some do not. Some imagine alternate futures or magical realities. Characters and speakers are acted upon and take action, and within those stakes exists space for play, mess, solitude, disagreement, and care. In these books, joy and struggle necessarily coexist — only both can bring about a world where we all live freely.
What would America look like if Al Gore had declared a War on Climate Change rather than Bush’s War on Terror? In Sim Kern’s novel, The Free People’s Village, a greenwashed version of late capitalism, gentrification, racism, homophobia, and police brutality still loom. The book follows the inhabitants of a warehouse/punk venue/free living space destined for demolition along with the homes in a historically Black neighborhood and the months-long self-sufficient Village that emerges as a hub for mutual aid, protest, and artmaking. Immersive and fast-paced, Kern’s book reads like a personal history of an imagined revolution, with all the messiness of conflict, privilege, multiracial coalition, and police and government retaliation that follow.
Everybody is somehow focused and wide-ranging, beginning with Laing’s training in herbalist medicine and coalescing around the question of bodily freedom through the work of Wilhelm Reich, the iconoclast psychotherapist who studied with and ultimately broke ties with Freud, and who, late in life, had his works burned by the FBI. (“Cloudbusting” by Kate Bush is about Reich, too!) Throughout the book, Laing explores aspects of the work of Susan Sontag, Malcolm X, Andrea Dworkin, and Nina Simone, all concerned with the limits, illnesses, fascism, policing, prisons, sexual politics, desires, rights, and experience of being within a body in our painful and pleasurable world. I’ve read and enjoyed other books on art and writing by Olivia Laing, but — unusual for me with nonfiction — I could not put this book down.
This book of poems began as a mutual aid zine that sold out too quickly for the author to make more copies. Ashna Ali, a queer Bangladeshi poet who became disabled after a COVID-19 infection, writes about the quarantine in New York, crip community, grief, and the impossible logics of life under capitalism, documenting and processing the social moment in recent real time. One of my favorite poems delights in the particular bodily bonds of friendship between disabled people supporting each other through ongoing crisis.
That exclamation mark! The title sets the reader up for sly humor, joy, surprise, and formal experimentation in this novel of queer life in Lagos. “Vagabonds,” in Nigeria, are those whose bodies, loves, and livelihoods exist on the outskirts, outlawed by a prescriptive government, but who move through Èkó (the roiling, playful, vengeful city-spirit of Lagos) all the same. Vagabonds! follows a varied and vast set of characters who encounter spirits, magic, and miracles, forming a collaged portrait of many interlocking stories.
T. De Los Reyes writes lush, searching poems about love, tenderness, and bodily want from “life on the margins.” Gabrielle Calvocoressi (another incredible Southern poet!) described the experience of reading this chapbook: “I find myself grinning with pleasure at the same time that my heart is pierced with longing, grief, the inexplicable weight of mourning.” And as a bonus, check out the rest of the titles at Bull City Press — based in Durham, NC, they publish some of the most exciting contemporary authors and poets in short form (the Inch series) as well as chapbooks and full-length collections.
Minor Detail
By Adania Shibli (trans. Elisabeth Jacquette)
So much has been said about this novel after its author’s award ceremony at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair was canceled. The novel itself is slim, straightforward, and devastating, split into two parts: the story of the murder and rape of a young Palestinian woman hidden by four Israeli soldiers and all but erased from historical records (the “minor detail” of the title) and the contemporary Palestinian scholar whose research leads her toward the truth. She encounters the colonial strictures of Israeli borders and guards; we see through her eyes the brutal past superimposed on the present, which it never truly left.
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a sprawling queer Midwest-to-East Coast-to-San Francisco novel. Can I call this a picaresque? Like the protagonist of Candide, Paul floats from place to place and person to person — but in search of pleasure and mutual desire, not answers. This is a highly realistic novel except for the fact of Paul’s shapeshifting — he changes his body at will, becoming who he’d like to be and who others want him to be. This novel refuses the idea of freedom and desire as concrete or ambitious — that motion, pleasure, and temporariness are aims of their own.
Safia Elhillo’s poems position themselves as shields, veils, and painted-over canvasses, taking familiar narratives of Muslim girlhood, harsh patriarchs, and dual cruelties toward girls’ and women’s bodies, and turning them into stories of transformation, deus ex machina, and triumph. She “writes a new world,” reshaping lived violence and threat into possibilities of future life.
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