THE FANTASY AND NECESSITY OF SOLIDARITY
by Sarah Schulman
Thesis / Penguin. 320 pages, $30.
MUCH LIKE her four-decade careers in literature and activism, Sarah Schulman’s The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity is an act of radical compassion. Throughout her career, Schulman has risked her reputation, financial security, publishing contracts, and even her safety for the causes she advocated. Despite putting herself well outside her comfort zone for most of her life, Schulman’s new book is barely about her own life and work; it is primarily devoted to other, lesser-known activists around the world who have struggled to advance solidarity movements with numerous oppressed groups.
Before Schulman gets to the book’s focus—the genocidal campaign Israel has pursued against Palestinians, which she began addressing as an activist in 2009—she reflects on her lifelong crusades on behalf of other causes. Those include abortion, LGBT equality, Black peoples’ rights, labor unions, and HIV activism, which she supported through her work with ACT UP. The reflection on her rigorous solidarity initiatives is never self-aggrandizing or preachy, and much less about bragging than about providing context and comparison.
The author places herself in the center of the action as someone who has faced bigotry and marginalization throughout her career. As a lesbian writer, she shares her long history of men, both gay and straight, Jewish and gentile, in publishing and theater, who have “humiliated, ghosted, and degraded” her. She also writes transparently about her Jewish identity and her experience of learning how America’s antisemitism had facilitated the Holocaust, stating that her Jewish parents and grandparents would be appalled to learn that Jews in Israel are doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to them.
Schulman’s key assertion is that solidarity must not be thought of as saintly but rather functional and achievable in practical steps. In this respect her book serves as a guide or instruction manual in which she enumerates the main components one should consider when undertaking a solidarity movement. Those include getting organized, imposing guidelines, setting goals, establishing strategy, having constant discussions, finding areas of agreement, abiding by protocol, practicing self-criticism, exercising awareness, remaining conscious, listening attentively, and building alliances. Also, patience is non-negotiable. It is egotistical and counterproductive to believe that dramatic change will occur quickly. In the case of Palestine, the process must be incremental given the size of the opposition—the U.S.’s unwavering support for Israel and its hold on the United Nations. Perhaps this speaks to the “fantasy” component of the title. One must take a hardnosed, pragmatic approach to getting things done and be willing to play the long, tedious game. The “necessity” piece should be a no-brainer.
There is a lively humility in Schulman’s tone. She clearly knows her history and has a firm grasp on the machinations of the cultural industries in which she works, including publishing, academia, and theater, but there is never a sense of self-righteousness in her delivery. She remains modest and approachable throughout, even understanding and beseeching. She wants us to wake up and turn a jaundiced eye on not only the government but also ourselves, on the mores that fool us, manipulate us, and lead us to betray what she believes is our naturally conscientious state. “Selective recognition,” writes Schulman, “is how we maintain our own sense of goodness.”
Gay men come in for criticism for their “homonationalism,” for falling in line with the U.S. government and military, and for buying into the institutions of marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing. In an exhilarating section, she reacts to the tired refrain of anti-Palestinian critics who question why a homosexual would defend a people that would just as soon see them dead for their sexuality. Schulman coolly rebuffs the vapidity of this question by providing a list of queer Muslim and specifically Palestinian organizations that have pushed for LGBT rights throughout the Arab world. She also addresses the gross overgeneralization of the claim itself, jokingly asking if we should also attack Florida and other U.S. states for holding similarly murderous homophobic sentiments. She further reminds these critics that Christian and Jewish orthodoxies would also prefer to see homosexuality obliterated, often through violent means. Her most potent pushback comes in the form of a big humanistic “So what?” Just because a group of people doesn’t believe in my right to exist because of my sexual orientation doesn’t mean they should be killed.
Schulman reveals that she was the target of a smear campaign leveled by the Zionist Organization of America in which she was labeled a terrorist, a friend of Hamas, and a proponent of antisemitism at the City University of New York, where she taught. The accusations soon gave way to harassment of not just Schulman but also her friends and colleagues. The experience nearly led to her termination from the college. She offers several case studies that humanize her arguments. Among them is Jean Genet for his solidarity with Palestine and the Black Panther Party. She observes that Genet had been on either side of oppression and domination “and from this complexity, his solidarity impulses sprang.” She also questions his motives, wondering if he championed these causes out of a narcissistic savior complex and queer fetishization or if he found true identification with them. Schulman says it doesn’t matter, as the altruistic actions are what’s useful and what serves the oppressed in the end.
Schulman ends with the transcription of a 2010 panel discussion about the suicide of one of her close trans friends, which occasioned a probing examination of how institutions can crush a person’s soul, prompting them to implode and hurt those closest to them rather than the insidious systems that torment them.
The language itself provides succor. Schulman is a master at communicating on abstract concepts, making them palpable, and applying them to the willfully neglected moral challenges of everyday life. “I learned from the oppressed, not the powerful, about how to define life,” she writes early in the book, and later adds: “When we become used to the lullaby of lies, closer-to-the-truth can feel unbearable.”
Brian Alessandro co-edited Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs (Rebel Satori Press).
