Writing While Socialist
Vijay Prashad, Mark Nowak
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Editor's Note: Over the past year, the
scholar and activist Vijay Prashad taught a series of nonfiction writing
workshops to students, activists, workers, and journalists across
India. The workshops sought to develop an ethics and practice of
socialist writing to foreground what Prashad calls “the small voices of
history.” Here he talks to the poet Mark Nowak, founder of the Worker Writers School in
New York City, about the political valence of socialist writing in a
time of rampant populism, racism, and xenophobia. This is the
second in a series of dialogues between Prashad and Nowak. Their first
conversation, The Essentials in Socialist Writing, was published in Jacobin
.
Mark Nowak: You have facilitated a new series of
workshops around India since we last spoke. How has this project evolved
over time? What new ideas, techniques, or insights did you bring to the
second round?
Vijay Prashad: With each workshop the broad outlines
of socialist writing become clear to me. I am now able to better
distinguish between capitalist writing—which typically emerges from the
liberal, mainstream media and is intended to produce commodities—and
socialist writing—which is intended to produce a confident community of
struggle. The time in our workshop is spent digging deep to understand
how to create these communities.
As socialist writers, we take our lead from the people struggling to improve their worlds.
This leads us to the question of style. It is a myth that style is a
bourgeois concern. There is an assumption that socialists are interested
in content, not style—in getting the point across in as transparent a
manner as possible and not worrying about
how a story is framed
or what kind of mood it evokes. But the socialist writer is not merely a
conduit from the picket line to the reader. The writer must shape the
story. It is to encourage discussions of socialist style that I do these
workshops in the first place.
Let us consider the Indian state of West Bengal, where the right is
currently engaged in a concerted attack on the left. Every day there are
new incidents of violence visited upon the working class and peasantry,
particularly those amongst them who are communists. Recently the police
attacked a demonstration by tea plantation workers, and some of the
workers were injured. A writer reporting on the protest has a choice:
should one write in the mode of grief, representing the workers as
victims, or should one write in the mode of anticipation, conveying the
intensity of struggle?
Tea plantation workers on strike in northern West Bengal, 2017. Image courtesy the Communist Part of India (Marxist).
The women protesting in the photograph above should not be taken for
victims of a ruthless state. They are not mere spectators to history,
they are the ones pushing history forward. The mainstream media does not
take them seriously. It avoids telling their stories. It does not
question the conditions of their lives and work. It does not ask how
they have built up the courage to take to the streets against the more
organized and powerful state. As socialist writers, we take our lead
from the people struggling to improve their worlds. If we can narrate
their struggles with honesty, then we can perhaps bolster their
confidence. It is this confidence, and not commodities, that we seek to
produce.
It is a myth that style is a bourgeois concern.
MN: I like what you say about the tea plantation
workers in West Bengal. This is a discussion we have often had at the
Worker Writers School in New York, led by long-time collaborators from
Domestic Workers United.
The students, who work as nannies, street venders, cab drivers, and
retail workers, have seen journalists come in, listen to their stories,
learn about their struggle for a domestic workers’ bill of rights, and
then disappear. They ask, “Where did my story go?” How do you think
workers can maintain some control over their own stories?
VP: Stories travel. That is always a risk. I like
Eduardo Galeano’s great line that people are not made of atoms, they are
made of stories.
Imagine a journalist at a protest, watching people march and chant
but unable to comprehend them as anything but quaint or anachronistic.
This is a journalist who sees the
event—the meeting or the protest—but cannot see the
process,
cannot see the history of struggle. What use is this journalist’s story
to the workers? Will there be anything but condescension in the prose?
The workers won’t recognize themselves in the story. There are the
liberal writers who approach workers with sympathy. They see them as
victims, as people to be pitied for the terrible conditions of their
life and work. Such writers want their readers to recognize the
existence of injustice, but again only as an event—something to look at
and bemoan. The intention behind such writing is to provoke the
readers
to act on behalf of the workers. In this setup, the workers are to be
pitied, they are not seen as drivers of human history. Others have to
act for them. No wonder there is little in their texts that workers can
recognize. These victims are alien to them.
One of the ways in which workers are written out of the news and out
of history books is that their lives are not seen as producing history.
The mundane nature of working-class and peasant life is seen as
reproductive, not generative—merely reproducing the world but not making
new worlds. But history is produced by the sentiments of the workers
and by their struggles. Attention to their everyday lives allows us to
better understand extraordinary developments, which build off millions
of small gestures made by ordinary people.
Socialist writing is intended to produce a confident community of struggle.
I recommend that people visit the
People’s Archive of Rural India,
a website that documents the lives of rural Indians, driven by the
ferociously energetic and brilliant journalist P. Sainath. Nilanjana
Nandy’s
story about women who fought to sit on chairs in Rajasthan and Parth M.N.’s
story
about borewells in Maharashtra are good examples of socialist writing.
Sitting on a chair is not only about sitting on a chair. It is about the
increased confidence of women in rural India. Where this confidence
goes is the next chapter in the story.
Left: Babli Devi, Kharveda village; Right: Sangeeta Bunkar, Kharveda
village. Image courtesy the People's Archive of Rural India.
These small voices of history are the pebbles thrown into a pond that
set in motion the cascading waves of history. Such stories are not
taken seriously by mainstream writers, but a socialist writer must make
them central. They are, after all, signs of confidence that lead from
everyday life to extraordinary events. They are what workers, as
readers, can recognize as real stories of their lives and struggles.
MN: So the liberal writer hopes to engage the reader
to act on behalf of the struggling, downtrodden subject while the
socialist writer hopes to document their subjects engaged in acts,
minute and major, of resistance? How would you relate this in one of
your workshops? Could you walk readers through one of your recent
workshops to help us understand how you practice this in your pedagogy?
VP: There is a major political distinction between
the liberal writer and the socialist writer. The socialist writer, to my
mind, must believe that change is possible. This does not mean that
such change is inevitable, merely that it is possible. Cynicism and
pessimism are not the mood of the socialist. This means that when
injustice is uncovered, the writer assumes that justice is possible.
Perhaps the antidote to cynicism is to retain faith in the capacity of
human beings to overcome the present. For this it is important to treat
the people that one interviews not merely as repositories of
information, but also as reservoirs of hope and anticipation.
Workers are not mere spectators to history, they are the ones pushing it forward.
What kind of hopefulness do people exude not only in their words, but also in their practice? PARI published a
story
about a man, Karimul Haque, who works in the hills of West Bengal. His
mother died because there was no ambulance available to her when she
needed one. Subsequently this man has turned his motorcycle into a kind
of ambulance.
He now ferries people across the hills to local hospitals.
In another
story,
Srilal Sahani, who lives just down these same hills and is in terrible
debt, spends his mornings selling fish in the local market. In the
afternoons, he rides his bicycle up and down the main street, beating on
a small drum and singing songs. Both men are gesturing to life beyond
the misery of the present. They have taken history into their own hands
by attempting to improve the lives of the people around them. These may
seem like small gestures, but they are significant to those whose lives
have been impacted. Karimul Haque is saying to his neighbors that they
need not to wait for an NGO to come to their aid, that they can make
their own history.
Srilal Sahani won't allow debt to define him. In both
these stories hope is not a theoretical concept, it is real and
palpable. A writer who abandons hope is abandoning the stories of these
people. These may be stories of survival and not of political
transformation. But stories of survival are the first drafts of
revolutionary action. In our time, we must write stories that are both
about incubated revolutionary sentiment—such as those of Karimul Haque
and Srilal Sahani—and stories of protest.
In a recent
piece,
Viet Thanh Nguyen points out that writing workshops are often hostile
to politics. Aside from the art of writing, he notes, these workshops
“did not have anything to say about the matters that concerned me:
politics, history, theory, philosophy, ideology.” This was not a problem
in our workshops across India, where we took art and politics as
equally important and indeed intertwined.
One example is our emphasis on “smashing language.” We drew up lists
of hollow or dead words: development, freedom, growth, and
sustainability. Having made this list, we then “smashed” the words,
broke them up in order to awaken the meaning within them. The example I
give my students is from the first few months after the Russian
Revolution. The Bolshevik leader Krupskaya recounts the “altered
language” she heard from women workers and peasants in a meeting. The
speakers, she recounted, “spoke boldly and frankly about
everything.” Their language had changed. Communist futurist writers,
such as Mayakovsky, drew from what they saw in these meetings. They had
to “smash” their language to bring it back to life. The assumption was
that the old Russian language was saturated with feudal implications. It
could not be inherited without first being “smashed.” So in the
workshop we do what Mayakovsky did to language, we plunder and pulverize
it, playing games with the words.
You can well imagine what people do with words like development and
freedom—how they play around with them until the words become
meaningless and perhaps even imbued with new meaning. The emergence of
new words shows how hope is embedded in our own fierce desire for a
better world. It reaffirms the belief that we are not trapped as long as
we are able to conjure, if only in language, an alternative world. In
Homage to Catalonia,
George Orwell reflects on the changes he witnesses in Barcelona. He
writes: “There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I
did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of
affairs worth fighting for.” It is this attitude that our workshops
hope to cultivate.
Change is possible. We are not trapped as long as we can conjure, if only in language, an alternative world.
MN: You mention Eduardo Galeano above. He is perhaps
my favorite writer. In the past you have also talked about James
Baldwin. Galeano and Baldwin are two writers who try to construct a
bridge between socialist writing and literature, who borrow from both
traditions to sketch extraordinary exposés of struggle and resistance.
Are there other writers that clarify your conception of socialist
writing?
VP: Baldwin is so important. Make language “clean as
a bone,” he advised. I take that advice fully. There are many writers I
admire for what they do with the stories around us. I have already
mentioned the journalist P. Sainath, with whom I co-taught a workshop.
He is really one of the finest socialist writers today. I would also
like to encourage people to read the work of Brinda Karat, one of the
leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). She spends a great
deal of time traveling around India, interacting with workers and
peasants who suffer and struggle. What I find most interesting in her
writing is that she conveys the hardships that people face as well as
the determination to overcome their conditions in equal part. In a
recent
column,
she documented the assault and murder of a young Muslim boy, Junaid
Khan, on a train in northern India. The story begins with a portrait of
Junaid’s mother, Sayara, mourning her son, then documents the murder and
the underlying Hindutva politics that caused it, and concludes with a
call to arms against the suffocation of public space. Karat's writing
evokes pathos and rage, but also complicity. It reminds us that nobody
helped Junaid, and that our collective silence is what killed the boy.
Ryszard Kapuściński's ability to write about politics is almost
magical. There are stories that he fabricated some of his experiences in
Africa, and that is unforgivable. But there is an object lesson in the
way he was able to bring his readers from Poland into worlds that they
knew little about, to teach them about power and culture and to
encourage them to puncture their parochial visions and take in the
world. We forget that he was writing in Polish and was telling the
stories of Iran and Ethiopia to people in Warsaw and Szczecin.
There are
many heirs to Kapuściński: such as the Colombian writer Santiago Gamboa
and the Lebanese writer Sahar Mandour. They are novelists and
journalists of the left, writing in Spanish and Arabic respectively, and
telling stories of intimate worlds that have the capacity to explode
into something dynamic and deliberate. You cannot have socialist writing
today that does not engage with private, domestic worlds alongside the
world of the streets. The latter is not enough.
MN: Speaking of hope, in recent years we have seen
the rise of so many new social movements and so many energized, young
activists participating in Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the
Bernie Sanders campaign, #NoDAPL, protests against the “Muslim Ban,” and
other anti-Trump protests. What writing advice would you give to people
becoming politically active, some of the first time, in this moment?
There seems to be an imbalance between the speed needed by today's
technologies, such as Twitter, Facebook, and live-streaming, and the
necessity of pausing and thinking about how to tell the story. How do
we, as emerging writers in social movements, achieve any balance between
the two completely different paces of our writing practice?
Stories of survival are the first drafts of revolutionary action.
VP: The difference between Twitter and long-form
writing is in the length of the text, not in the thinking that goes to
produce it. One could produce a thoughtless long-form essay as easily as
a thoughtless tweet. To me the length or the speed of production is not
the issue.
What is at stake is the understanding behind what one is
writing. If one does not have a good way to explain these protests, one
will struggle to report them either in a tweet or in a book. A socialist
writer who wants to track these movements needs to take a step back and
look at the historical dynamic of these struggles, where they come from
and where they could potentially go, what stands in opposition to
them, the closeness or distance of these movements from the people, and
the question of whether the demands being articulated can speak to the
lived anxieties of people. These elements—if answered with care and
close study—will help the writer understand how to write about
something, whether in 140 characters or in 500 pages.
Both those on the inside and those on the outside of movements would
be well-served not only by accounts of what is happening, but also by
accounts that provide the broader context. Our movements are born out of
older movements, older uprisings that produce our confidence, and our
movements in turn birth new and, we hope, broader revolts against the
present order. That is the kind of historical sweep that socialist
writers need to create. Their job is not simply to define the terms of
an event, thereby rendering it mythical and impossible to replicate. The
reader must not think, “I wish I was there.” The reader should
think, “I was not there, but I’ll be there tomorrow.” The story has not
ended, it is ongoing. Engels wrote that history moves “often in leaps
and bounds and in a zigzag line.” It does not necessarily move in a
progressive direction, and can just as often fall backwards. A story
needs to represent that: the journey from and the journey towards.
Arthur Rimbaud called a good poet a “thief of fire.” That is a lovely
phrase. There is despair for humanity right now, but there is also
optimism. That’s what our socialist writers must strive for—to be
thieves of fire.
