Nora Caplan-Bricker on Rebecca Solnit: The Work Love Has to Do
Rebecca Solnit’s radiant descriptions of today’s feminism could sound laughably oblivious. Instead, they feel like a ray of hope in the dark.
What does it mean to
be hopeful right now, when we have a president who is openly hostile to many
Americans and hope can feel like a privilege reserved for those who aren’t
targets? The day after Trump won the election, the writer and activist Rebecca
Solnit, always an exacting observer of language and its uses, defined hope on
Facebook as “not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine,” but
rather the acknowledgement that “when you recognize uncertainty, you recognize
that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with
a few dozen or several million others.” She also posted a link where her
treatise on the topic, Hope
in the Dark, could be downloaded for free.
That book was a call
to action published during the difficult Bush years, in 2004, while the essays
collected in Solnit’s new book, The
Mother of All Questions, were composed between 2014 and 2016—years
that Solnit credits with a revitalization of the American women’s movement. Of
course, the 2016 election has since made a mockery of that narrative in the
minds of many. It would be easy for Solnit’s radiant descriptions of this
decade’s “gorgeously transformative” feminism to land, in today’s atmosphere,
with the thud of an inadvertent joke. Instead, these essays make the case for
placing one’s faith, and pouring one’s energy, into channels that can irrigate
our culture under any regime: art, activism, and the telling of stories that
animate both. The resulting collection provides, to borrow the author’s phrase,
a bit of much-needed hope in the dark.
The book’s title, from
an essay in Harper’s—where Solnit is a columnist—helps to frame
Solnit’s exploration of the shapes women’s lives take, with or without the
traditional linchpin of motherhood: She is interested in writing books and
raising movements more than she is interested in changing diapers. In that
titular essay, she lambastes interviewers who can’t seem to stop asking why
doesn’t she have children. It’s a line of inquiry rife with
assumptions about women’s role in the world, “a closed question,” Solnit says,
intended to “push you into the herd or nip at you for diverging from it.” To
Solnit, the open question—the motherlode—isn’t why a life
fails to look a certain way, but how it can succeed in being meaningful,
whether through parenthood or through “so much other work love has to do in the
world.”
Solnit’s sentences
thrum with conviction, but she is not, one feels in this book, writing to
persuade anyone. For Solnit, some of
that other work entails playing the matriarch to a generation of younger
feminists with refreshing generosity. While she was working on these essays,
Bitch Media co-founder Andi Zeisler was accusing feminism of selling
out completely, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz was
complaining about young women’s “complacency.” Solnit, though,
celebrates what others have dismissed as “hashtag feminism.” Social media, she
writes, is “like a barn raising for ideas: innumerable people bring their
experiences, insights, analysis, new terms, and frameworks. These then become
part of the fabric of everyday life, and when that happens, the world has
changed.” Not changed completely, perhaps, but changed enough to make room near
the center for the voices that once clung for dear life to the edges.
Solnit also grapples
eloquently with a challenge that dogs all feminist writing: How does one write
about the oppression women suffer at the hands of men without reinforcing the
atavistic idea that woman and man are
inelastic designations, with little in common and nothing in between?
read more:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2017/03/rebecca_solnit_s_the_mother_of_all_questions_reviewed.html