What can you learn from your material self about insistence and refusal?
Gratitude to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Sabrina Imbler, Anne Boyer, and Kendra Pierre-Louis for ideas and principles that seeped into this writing.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to carefully marshal their energy and attention.
Submarines and the people who build them
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theory of Water…
…and how to apply some of water’s lessons with your human form
An exercise for practicing your NO
At the Navy base in New London, massive blades and towers and other components shine new and white in the rain, in front of the grayish-white sky and the grayish-white, rained-on snow. A year or so ago on this same train I sat in front of two shipyard engineers on their way back to work. Glancing back, I saw that they were young white men, with hair buzzed high and tight. It’s been a while and I don’t remember exactly what they said, only that it made it clear that we would have to talk for a long, long while, with constant renewal of good intentions, before we could ever achieve a shared understanding of the world.
At New London these young men and their co-workers build, maintain and operate “attack submarines that are ready, willing and able to meet the challenges of undersea combat”. Fuel, components, and finished products come and go by water. There are ducks and geese here too, the mallards and canadas that have gotten good at living marginally with humans, and some winter migrants: one dives, a smooth bubble of motion, as the train passes.
After I heard Leanne Betasamosake Simpson read from her upcoming (inflowing?) book Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, I accepted her invitation to pay attention to the way that water seeps, how it refuses and wears down limitation. The Navy shipyard is in the path of sea level rise by anyone’s standards: although the things it’s building will eventually need to get wet, that doesn’t mean that now is a good time for them to be inundated. But being swept away in a dramatic storm is not the only way to lose to water. The tidal salt drifts in to etch the concrete, drifts back out: a relation of foiling and undermining.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson described the shore as a place that teaches consent and accountability, because it’s where the sky world, the land world and the water world meet, brushing and tugging against each other. She also said that when she learned about the eels that used to swim? still swim? into her home lakes from the Sargasso Sea, she thought, I want to know more about the ocean, and reached out to the Black feminists she knows, who do know more. Hearing that, I remembered telling the Kids as we splashed in mud puddles that water hides your tracks, how water’s constant motion and its power to be the universal solvent (as I learned in ninth grade bio) washes away both your physical tracks and your scent tracks. So if someone is hunting you with dogs—
—and then I thought, I better check with their mom before I finish this story.
To steal away, to resist by being resistless, eating away at the pillars, rusting the guns, emptying out the sites of exploitation, refusing; to seek your level as water, joining with other water, to hide tracks and allow for passage: what are we actually talking about doing with our human forms, which famously hold a lot of water but in a very specific shape, with hands and stuff?
If you’re at an administrative desk somewhere, maybe this involves presenting a soft, shifting, dripping blankness to ICE or DHS or police officers who come around asking about people who work there or use your services. (“I don’t have the authority to speak to you about that,” is one phrase I was offered.)
If you’re organizing your building with other tenants, it might involve quietly slipping through small openings and brief encounters—borrowing tools, asking if their heat is also off—until you are ready to crash forth in a towering wave.
If there are people with whom you have a strong bond, who you think might be shifted toward a more just or even a more expansive position by a slow lapping of information and conversation, it might involve holding those conversations—being the universal solvent. (I have in fact done this with people—it’s doable—but you have to have a lot of mutual trust built up already.)
If your work is funded or your salary paid with federal money, and efforts to get that money are incompatible with doing your work honestly, maybe it involves embracing other elements of fighting, undoing, or building—even if that means earning money a different way and letting the status you’d gained from your earlier work slip from your hands.
“Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” poet John Keats told his survivors to carve on his tombstone. He was wrong, as it turned out, but what wasn’t true for him is true for most of us. And it’s not so bad, maybe, to be inscribed in water, written and rewritten and rewriting what’s around you but cannot fully contain you; to be written into the veins and the breath of the people whose lives you made or touched.
If it’s not clear, I hate the shipyard; I hate the submarines; I hate what they’re for. I’d like to see them washed away, dispersed, unable to reassemble for their purposes of domination. (I’d like to see new jobs made ready for the two young men on the train). I wouldn’t mind being part of the washing or the making ready; I’m not well suited to either, but we move with the times.
It’s not so bad, maybe, to be swelled and lifted by something greater than yourself, to roll on like justice, to be an ever-flowing stream like righteousness. To be available to this, ready for it; to listen for the wave. To be, in the meantime, a current, ceaseless, impure, shifting, finding your way.
QUESTION: Where are your nearby opportunities for quiet action—or quiet obstruction?
PRACTICE: Today, and each day this week, practice saying an implacable no. It can be about anything you truly don’t want to do, of any level of importance—coming into work when you’re not scheduled, rejecting a passive-aggressive familial demand. It can be loud, soft, or even silent, anywhere between rude and polite. It just needs to be firm and immovable. These small refusals open up the channel that allows the big no to flow through when you need it.
SHORT READING: Bianca Wylie, “tech isn’t the future it’s just capitalism faster”
OTHER SHORT READING: Haley E.D. Housman, “Taking Your Time Is the Point”
LONG READING: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (it’s out in April; you can order it or ask a library to)
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I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.