By Susana Medina.
Do you love the world? Love is depth. Love is humanity at its best. Love is action, and the opposite of denial. Love is the key word, the abracadabra that will save us from ourselves. It is the word that some rebel writers keep on repeating, and it has never sounded less corny, fluffy or vague. We now have the challenge of challenges, a global emergency: climate breakdown and extinction are already here, and without action, the future of the planet, and its dwellers, will be burning at the stake. We are Code Red. We urgently need global change at all levels: individual, communities, business, institutions and governments. We need the sustainable infrastructure to support cutting emissions. In an unspeakable betrayal, our governments and the billionaire media have been flooding us with lies, and continue to fail us. In the UK, high-carbon and nature-annihilating projects, such as HS2, airport expansion, road development schemes, the bailing out of airlines and the monstrous subsidising of fossil fuels are going ahead in staggering cognitive dissonance greenwashed with empty promises. There are multiple causes which call for global civil disobedience, most of which are interconnected. In Why Rebel, writer and environmental activist Jay Griffiths, speaks about our moral imagination faltering, and the fact that ‘Every shred of mental energy’ has to be ’requisitioned for love, essentially the love of life.’ She also mentions ‘The powerlessness we might feel as writers before the magnitude of such a crisis,’ while giving us the much-quoted antidote: ‘Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars, and they are now lining up to write rebellion across the skies.’
With each rebellion, there is a luscious explosion of colour and creativity, the carnival arts, performance and light projections of slogans on guilty facades taking pride of place. Rebellions joyously embrace a wide range of arts, encouraging us to rewild our culture. In times of emergency, rebel writers write short pieces, poems, tweets, Facebook posts, press releases, court defence statements, and sometimes, banners. Some rebels are able to undertake larger projects. This Is Not A Drill, an Extinction Rebellion Handbook, which was published in August 2019, contained a declaration of rebellion and twenty-nine essays by highly committed rebels on the need to act now, illustrated with the XR trademark design by the Arts Factory. Some key figures of XR swiftly brought out books: Roger Hallam published Common Sense for the 21st Century: Only Nonviolent Rebellion Can Now Stop Climate Breakdown and Social Collapse, on its cover the mural attributed to Banksy, which appeared on Marble Arch at the end of the April Rebellion, depicting a girl holding the XR symbol by a freshly planted sapling, with the caption: ‘From this moment despair ends and tactics begin;’ Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander published Extinction Rebellion: Insights from the Inside in 2020, while seventeen-year-old Blue Sandford published Challenge Everything: An Extinction Rebellion Youth Guide to Saving the Planet. Writers Rebel held its first event on 11 October 2019 with their renowned ‘40 Top Writers Marathon,’ continued to create high-profile events such as ’55 Tufton Street,’ and has a frenzied online presence. Many creative rebels who took to the streets during the Extinction Rebellion protests, translated the experience into writing, and art, though very few were able to put aside other projects and commitments to only write the rebellion, shaping the experience in a literary book, or to embark on large-scale art projects such as those of artist-activists Ackroyd & Harvey at Tate Modern and the Thames.
Writing and publishing are slow endeavours. Jay Griffiths and Sue Hampton responded pronto to writing rebellion. Climate change novelist and relentless direct action activist Sue Hampton quickly adapted her experience with Extinction Rebellion 2018-19 into a novel called FOR LIFE, released as an e-book, which I was too busy rebelling to read at the time. This year, she published Rebelling for Life, a compilation of short stories, poems, and blogs arranged in a non-chronological way, where she focuses on rebellion, climate grief, and activism against the arms trade. Largely written in a have-been-there direct style, the emotional tone is fiercely honest and the emphasis is on the love that matters: ‘agape, the kind God would feel for humanity, if God existed’ as a uni student rebel spending a transformative night in a cell reflects in ‘The Prisoner.’
Beginning with an interview where Hampton talks about the climate emergency ‘as a knowledge that can’t be unfelt or unknown’ which shook her to the core, morphing her self-styled keyboard warrior identity into one which embraced non-violent civil disobedience, most of the pieces deal with the emotional reality of being a rebel, the grandma activist being a recurrent theme, which reminds us there is an intergenerational commitment to rebellion. A rebel grandmother herself, Hampton pens ‘For Nathaniel,’ a poem for an action by XR Grandparents and Elders: ‘I am here for you/because I’m Grandma/and you, firefly boy, are a spirit to power me,’ and references XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook in ‘Climate Vigil’: ‘All the children are our children.’ In ‘Views of an Extremist Grandma,’ written after rebels were classed as extremists by the police anti-terrorist group Prevent, she sets out her ethics in ten impeccable points which go from accepting the scientific consensus about the climate and ecological emergency, to rejecting war, violence, and divisive ideas about humanity, to the conviction that only non-violent mass disobedience will solve the existential nightmare we find ourselves in. In ‘The Activist,’ #ReggaeGran #NoFrackingNoCrime, who has gained Twitter glory, protests outside ExCel to stop the Arms Fair, and ends up going on hunger strike outside the Yemen Embassy for twenty-six days: she is ‘hungry for peace.’
The first short story, ‘The Trial,’ begins with a district judge in denial, who complains to his unsympathetic wife: ‘You’ve no idea how wearisome these trials are.’ … ‘I don’t care as long as I’m spared the speeches …,’ whilst the prosecution lawyer, also at odds with his partner when it comes to XR court cases, is portrayed as someone who ‘Didn’t normally pay attention to the defendants’ last-ditch attempts to cram in as much death and doom as possible.’ Seen from multiple points of view with contrasting characters, the story narrates the court case of a nineteen-year-old rebel on trial who has decided to defend herself by endlessly repeating: ‘This is a climate emergency.’ Her mother disagrees with XR methods, while the father finds it unbelievable rebels like her daughter should be criminalised, seeing the substantial fine as designed to punish liberal parents. Like many who have postponed studying to protest climate inaction, the young rebel announces she’ll be leaving uni for as long as it takes.
If in ‘Rebelling in Red,’ Hampton joins The Red Rebels and finds it a ‘creative, mysterious way of rebelling: a graceful, emotive and spiritual alternative to blocking roads,’ in ‘Stop the Press,’ a statement written in a police cell, she does not mince her words when defending the blockade of the printing press with bamboo lock-ons which prevented the distribution of Murdoch’s News Corp’s newspapers including The Sun and The Times, as well as The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard. The media barons who profit from business as usual are seen as a ‘malignant oligarchy that sets the BBC News agenda and that of most other UK channels,’ and the action, the news of which sparked a day of collective joy in many a quarter, as ‘an attempt to highlight the role of five billionaires in a conspiracy to lie and to mislead the British people, thus preventing the change that’s so urgent and essential if we are to survive.’ In a poem of the same title, she writes: ‘For just one day/the lies are stalled.’
Hampton ‘tells the truth,’ for ‘the new beginning is a fine root through rubble.’ All the pieces in this collection have genre, date, and sometimes location or a brief explanation written at the top, performing as exhibits before a hypothetical trial on her actions when faced with the global emergency. Her depression, like that of many people across the globe, is called ‘climate grief’: ‘The pills can’t screen it off and the CBT’s N/A.’ Love, which is the leitmotif running through the collection, is offered as prerequisite and solution to our climate and ecological woes: ‘If protecting life on earth is not what love requires of us, I don’t know what is … If we’re to change the future we can’t delude ourselves. And in a theoretical way I know how to do that without the limiting self-absorption of depression. The secret, as always, is love.’
Rebelling for Life gives us a compelling emotional palate of the world of rebels and peace activists, the seers and deniers, and those affected by their actions, or inaction. The grief, the emotional investment, the depression, the hope beyond belief, the doubts about the efficacy of protest, or being rational and well-behaved when ‘weeping and wailing would be more proportionate,’ the shock at being perceived as a threat to society or ignored, when ‘There’s the scientific consensus, and the consensus that our leaders are the criminals.’ Reading its pages, the mind shifts from the moving serenity and elegiac tone of some of the poems, to the sheer clarity, bareness and sometimes, softness of her prose, to the contrasting, chilling effect of her statements, which pre-empt complacency, to counterpoints where playfulness and hope come to the foreground. Thus in ‘Kit List,’ she makes an inventory of what a rebel needs to pack. Amongst the numerous items and qualities, we find: superglue, thermals or sunblock, waterproofs, bust card, a message scribed bold on frayed flat card, a book, high heart and thick skin, facts, tear deep, and all the love you can find.
We are in the age of great dying. The climate and ecological emergency are intimately interwoven, and should be tackled together. If Sue Hampton’s pieces deal primarily with the human side of being a rebel, an activist or a nature-loving person, Jay Griffiths’ tour de force pieces in Why Rebel? make us highly attuned to the bewildering beauty of the natural world and the soul-destroying biodiversity emergency. ‘I wish that everyone who said they believed in angels would actually believe in insects,’ starts the poignant introduction, a first line that made me smile, gasp and want to continue reading straight away.
Not being acquainted with Griffiths’ feral writing, I soon became disoriented though, as in the first essay she detours to the poet Marinetti to speak about the ugliness of current politics. A gathering of erudite literary essays from different times, which blend poetry, cultural history, politics, anthropology, mysticism and environmentalism, with the personal, Griffiths makes the case for rebellion, through a series of loosely connected and fragmentary arguments that range from fascism and 1930s futurism to decry Libertarianism, the Alt -Right, Trump, Bolsanaro and Johnson; shamanism and poetry as healing forces, which have been expelled by the totalitarian state of mind of utilitarianism, efficiency and profit-motives; the nourishing beauty of the soil and the surreally expensive fascination with colonising space when we have a global emergency; Brexit, and a love of land where ‘the territory of English indigeneity was stolen by the far right,’ the real ‘indigenous people’ being the protestors who protect the land. These are some of the ideas Griffiths explores. Her fury is commendable, as she condemns the story of the British empire, which is one of murdering, enslaving, and uprooting indigenous people, continuing these days under the guise of corporate colonialism, and reels about our self-wounding relationship to nature, our necrophiliac economy and ‘the devastating stupidity of it all.’
Although different essays deal passionately with the multi-fanged predicament we find ourselves in, it was when I began reading the pieces on animals, insects and soil that the sheer power, joy, rage and sorrow of this book began to unfold. If ‘The Forests of the Mind,’ is a paean to poetry and metaphor, and a diatribe against the disease of literalism, where she feels ‘the fire of pure fury,’ when it comes to ‘the trenchant stupidity of deforestation,’ in ‘Happiness, Animals and the Honeyguide Rule’ she invokes the bird called the honeyguide, which ‘needs human hands to break open the hive, while humans need the bird to guide them to the right tree,’ as a lesson about the best relationship between human and ‘the more-than-human-world,’ to then, wax lyrical about the joy and tenderness of communicating with animals, inter-mindedness and the unbuyable delight we draw from interspecies community. Having enchanted the reader, she proceeds to condemn species narcissism, and our disregard for irreplaceable habitats: ‘The philosophy of human exceptionalism, that arrogant and ultimately self-injurious idea that humans are a species both separate and superior, reaches its apogee in mass extinctions.’ Wildlife populations have fallen 68% since 1970; 90% of the Monarch butterfly population has disappeared across the USA; bleaching will kill most of the world’s coral within thirty years, and with it, the wider life dependent on it; swallows, martins, nightingales, the number of species undergoing extinction or endangered is gut-wrenching, ‘the deadened oceans are an analogy for a wasteland of human imagination.’ ‘We collectively commit a bureaucratic slaughter that beggars genocide.’
As we face a tsunami of extinctions, Griffiths reminds us that animals and insects are our guides and healers, and a gigantic collective of goodness, in pages that are the most moving you are likely to read on the subject. ‘The Narcissist and the Firefly,’ begins with an unforgettable ode to these tiny creatures, where she reminds us they are our unassuming and bashful minders, as they bring three quarters of our food into being, remove dead matter, so renewal can take place, and give us flowers and silk. Insects are crucial to the cycle of life. ‘No insects, no Mozart. Without beetles, we wouldn’t have The Beatles.’ Understanding and cherishing the interconnectedness of everything is vital to our well-being. But there is no love in Narcissus. Regretfully, we live in the age of narcissism, and species narcissism. ‘And this is the age of the endlings, the very last individuals of their species.’ In a few instances, Griffiths conjures the untold sorrow of the sixth mass extinction, with heart-breaking stories of endlings: ‘Modernity’s life on earth, brief as a firefly, leaves a toxic dark for ever. In the last of nights, the last star put out on Earth, in the horror of annihilation’s finality, a last firefly, lonely to its core in a vast wasteland, glows one last time and is gone for good. Perhaps it will be only in that kind of darkness that we could have seen the magnitude of what we have done and all that we have lost: a world, each other, and ourselves.’
Before the weight of world sorrow, a tatty leaflet found itself in Griffiths’ hands: ‘Never has one little leaflet made such an impression on me. Two words: Extinction and Rebellion.’ Extinction Rebellion, with its emphasis on non-violent direct action (NVDA) has given us the power to create media awareness. Interestingly, Griffiths writes about how bureaucratic, unbeloved scientific words and deadly language about our planetary crisis are responsible for failing to communicate the emergency, and how we need heartfelt words and messages — something Extinction Rebellion excels at. Listing a few of the things we may love, and despairing the biodiversity crisis, she asks us a question: ‘Please tell me you understand the immensity of this … let me ask you what you love, what makes you happy. Is it a child? Is it your partner? … And this love, then, this happiness, tell me how it will even exist without the tiniest of beings, the insects, against which we have been so utterly pitiless?’
Though not writing explicitly about rebellion in most of the pieces, the rebel spirit is there throughout, and the medley of essays, most of which are lyrical, flow fully into it, with the last three contrasting pieces of reportage about Extinction Rebellion which close the book. ‘A Time of Rebellion’ tells us about the electrifying atmosphere of the April Rebellion, the wonders of superglue, and the terrifying numbers of the reality of climate chaos. Giving us a brief history of the protest movements XR honours, and a summary of some of its strategies, Griffiths quotes some of its key figures: arrest is ‘the classic sacrificial move,’ ‘’I’ve prototyped prison as a campaign strategy,’ says Roger Hallam. She speaks about XR’s ‘indubitable messianic quality,’ and joins The Red Rebels who ‘perform in silence, and through silence they speak.’ She cites Daiara Tukano, who spoke on the Pink Boat ‘of the earliest Earth protectors: Indigenous peoples. It is they who protect 82 per cent of the world’s biodiversity, they who led the resistance to climate chaos, they who are disproportionately affected by it … More than 1700 environmental activists have been murdered this century, a disproportionate number being Indigenous people.’ Arm inside a lock-on-pipe, she speaks of her fear of being injured when released from it by the police, a fear shared by most rebels who lock-on, and of how lucky she is to find a sympathetic officer when discharged from a night in a cell. And if in ‘55 Tufton Street,’ home of the climate-denialist Global Warming Policy Foundation, she exposes the ludicrous lack of expertise of its founders and fellow-denialists, in ‘Regina vs Me,’ she presents us with her impeccable, lengthy defence statement where she speaks of the failure of the government and the media to inform the public of the severity of our predicament, and the unmet binding obligation of our government to educate the public about our crisis, disruption and arrest being the only viable strategy to get the media to report and raise public awareness, thanks to which XR gained massive coverage, thus contributing to the emergency declaration. Witness statements include that of Professor Lewis: ‘To criminalise Extinction Rebellion would be, in effect, to penalise an example of good and thoughtful citizenship. It would, in effect, send a message that the minor inconveniences caused by their actions are more important than the most serious threat to life on earth humankind has ever faced.’ Citing all the things she’s not going to talk about, she summarises her purpose: ‘I am here to talk about justice.’ Her defence statement touches the judge: notwithstanding a guilty verdict, he speaks his truth in a tribute to rebels.
Seeded with numerous insights, and lessons from indigenous cultures and peoples, especially from Indigenous Australian Civilizations, Why Rebel communicates a sense of wonder and awe before the natural world, of being wonderstruck, of organic love – After reading it, the soil became truly alive, my irrational apprehension of worms replaced with tenderness: ‘worms are … gardeners of delirious fecundity … the artists of the turning world.’ If Griffiths gives us love, she also gives us rage, her power lying in interweaving literary solace with fury at the state of the world.
Piecemeal writing pervades the rebellion, and it isn’t necessary a bad thing. Both Why Rebel and Rebelling for Life have a restless, patchwork feel, which I fully understand, for what is happening cannot be made into something whole, and there is also a sense of urgency to publish so as to create awareness. As I was tweaking this piece, I went to Tate Modern to see ‘On the Shore’ by Ackroyd & Harvey, not knowing their giant grass banner would be travelling from the solemn atmosphere of the Turbine Hall to the Thames, where, becoming public art, it floated majestically, before being composted in the evening. From installation, to ceremonial performance, to festive procession which incorporated the audience, to site-specific work, writing was central to this land art piece. Co-founders of Culture Declares Emergency, Ackroyd & Harvey use photosynthesis to grow living grass artworks, and recently created grass photographs depicting portraits of rebels which were accompanied by writers’ performed words. For Tate Modern, the artists created a lush, 16 metres long, grass portrait of that essential element in rebellion, the banner, the material, and the crucial natural process it referred to, photosynthesis, fittingly conveying the message, while the words of Booker prize winning novelist Ben Okri in astonishing fluorescent yellow, which is the colour of grass when prevented from photosynthesising, reminded us of our sacred duty to protect life:
CAN´T YOU HEAR THE FUTURE WEEPING? OUR LOVE MUST SAVE THE WORLD.
A mighty emotional ecosystem, ‘On the Shore’ was a powerfully choreographed multi-disciplinary ritual, which included a cellist, and a squad of strong performers dressed in mourning black who, headed by a dancer, paraded the grass banner to the river, rolled up like an immense sacred scroll. It also included a large crew of rebels, some of them part of Writers Rebel, who struggled to lay the immense grassy banner on the shore, and onto the water, a tense action filled with physical exertion, not least, that of the artist Dan Harvey, who, as we were leaving, welcomed some inquisitive newcomers to the floating piece: a couple of ducks.
The rebellion was also written in the speeches that followed. Recalling ‘Paint the Streets,’ Writers Rebel launched ‘Paint the Land,’ which called for writers and artists to create work with the landscape about the emergency. And Ben Okri, whose little daughter sang at the end, made an unforgettable speech that touched us all to the core: ‘Love is the only economy, the highest economy of life, the most efficient force of civilisation … Love is the last power that stands between us and extinction. Only love is endless. This is the time we need to show that we are greater than our history. We can be the agents of change.’
We could all hear the past, the present and the future weeping, which is now becoming inconsolable sobbing. Undoubtedly, there will be more literary books and art about rebellion. Love for life will feature largely. Love, fear, suffering, indignation, justice, hope and courage will be the main plotlines, transformation their mission. New voices will emerge that move beyond dystopia. As it happens, I’ve just come across a tweet that calls for these kind of stories: a new rebel group called XR Wordsmiths is on the horizon, which referencing Cyberpunk and Steampunk, are kicking off an art movement that envisions a future that has solved the global emergency using current technologies: Solarpunk. And as it happens, I have also come across a promising anthology which I’m now reading, Poetry Rebellion, edited by nature writer Paul Evans, 2021, which spans 4,000 years of poems and prose to rewild the spirit, ranging from Lao Tzu and Chaucer, to Silvia Path, Gary Snider and Helen Mort. The collection is not supposed to be ‘just a sanctuary in which to find solace from environmental grief but a manual for psychic resistance in the war against Nature.’ Evans, who sees fear of the destructive forces of nature resulting in ecophobia as a chief factor that has lead us to where we are, foresees love as the sequel to the grave existential threat we are facing: ‘What will emerge from the emergency … will be created by a rewilding of people radicalized not just by climate strikes and extinction protest, but by a fearless urgent love of a Nature which is good, even when it’s bad for us.’
Love is a sophisticated concept: it encompasses wonder, kindness, protection, care, respect, empathy, gratitude, generosity, courage, sacrifice, work, devotion, connection and understanding. Its manifestations can be manifold. In policy-making terms it would entail drastic action, substantial investment, and legislating against ecocide. The multi-faceted tragedy humanity has created, has to be solved by humanity. The antidote prescribed by rebel writers is to be rewilded by love, whatever shape it takes.
© Lorenzo Hernández
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susana Medina has just finished Spinning Days of Night, and Rebel Rebel, An Emergency Dialogue, co-written with Roc Sandford. She is the author of Philosophical Toys, offspring of which are the short films Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys and Leather-Bound Stories (co-directed with Derek Ogbourne); Red Tales (bilingual ed. co-translated with Rosie Marteau) and Souvenirs del Accidente. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best European Fiction (Dalkey archive Press). She has been awarded the Max Aub Short Story International Prize.
