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| The Six of Wands card from The Fountain Tarot. A person wearing a white shirt is lying horizontally on their back, held aloft by the hands of multiple people whose forms are not visible. The bottom of the image is flooded with bright red. Five white wands surround the raised figure and the people lifting them. The raised figure holds a sixth white wand in their raised hand. The expression on their face is intense, activated. |
What is publishing for?
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On August 1, 2024, the Sun entered the second decan of Leo, that ruled by Jupiter. My keywords for the Six of Wands and Jupiter in Leo are: philosophies of visibility, vectors of privilege, and the tiny benevolent dictator who lives within.
Today, I would like to read Jupiter specifically as a planet of politics. Like Jupiter, political reality connects us to each other, generates vast ideas, and champions the creation of dynamic conceptual frameworks and spiritual practices. Jupiter helps us commit to what is greater than the individual self. Jupiter excites the soul to make more space for all people. Jupiter tests the margins; Jupiter creates the conditions for the nourishment of those who have been forced to survive at the margins. Jupiter is political.
And Leo is loud, proud, unapologetic of personal triumph. The sign that is ruled by the Sun, and in which Saturn experiences deprivation, says No to shame, says Yes to the individual’s motion to take up space, to show what they’ve got, to ask an audience to listen to what they have to say. Leo knows that the gift of a performance cannot be delivered without asking the group to sit down and grant the person on the stage the time and space to do their work in the spotlight.
In particular, I am thinking about publishing. This is the topic because I think about publishing all (too much of) the time, but publishing is also Jupiterian, involving the expansive deliverance of knowledge and worldview. Publishing, much like the ruler of thunder and lightning, can deliver a really shitty experience, but also has the potential to be politically and personally transformative if its radical potential for connectivity, as opposed to its profitability, is centered by those who participate in its cycle, its system, its impactful events.
The text I am spotlighting for this decan is Vajra Chandrasekera’s blog post, “Every Throne Will Fall”. This post, published on November 8, 2023, delivered two distinct and inseparable revelations for me as a reader: one, this post shared the official announcement that Chandrasekera’s second novel, Rakesfall, would be published in June 2024 (it is in the world, it is in the world!!!); and two, this post was the first example I had ever seen of a successful author choosing to use their book announcement to amplify a statement of resistance of the genocide of the Palestinian people.
This wasn’t the first time Chandrasekera had done this (and since November 2023, he has often paired announcements of his award nominations or wins with renewed calls to support and amplify Palestinian liberation). It was just the first time I had witnessed such an act of publication, and the one that forever changed my understanding of authorship–what authorship is for, what publishing is for, what any of this is for.
As a result of reflecting on this text, as well as others that have been published by other authors in the last year, for this decan I consider the idea that in a world worth living in, personal success is responsible to political relations.
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There was a long time when I thought that publishing was about saving myself. If I could become a successful published author, I believed, I would be absolved of my past and admitted into a future of ease and relief from the realities of living in a white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist world. I had many variations on my dream about publishing, and other people had no place within them.
The dream has changed. Its old meaning means very little to me, anymore. Publishing has indeed saved me, but not in the way I assumed it should. I remember where I was standing, the feel of the carpet beneath my feet, in the moment I read the first paragraphs of Toni Morrison’s “Peril” and felt the breath reenter my body, as I read Morrison’s words about the threat that writers present to oppressive societies and allowed her conviction to guide me back from my fear of my personal powerlessness. I remember the relief, the grounding, the recognition, the revelation, the education, the comfort, the challenge, the ecosystemic responsibility I experienced since October 2023 when I read the statements published online by Chandrasekera and Abdulhadi and Tbakhi and Older and El-Mohtar and Sakr and and and.
Publishing, for me, is no longer about anything but other people.
Writing will always be something that is for me. But distribution, engagement with the wider ecosystems of language and books and art, connection with readers--being part of that world is about the expansive potential of being in relationship with other people.
Publishing is, among other things, one of the actions we participate in to make sure we know why and how we need each other. That we are responsible to each other. Publishing is one of the ways we make sure other people may know they are not alone. This means refusing to abandon those who are most marginalized, it means embracing sacrifice as a thing that should be risked with what personal success we have accrued, it means refusing to turn away from the power we have and what might be done with it to continually create a world worth living in. Publishing is not the only way we demonstrate responsibility to ourselves as a wider humanity but it is a very powerful way, and I believe that the more we lean into the collective potential of publishing, as opposed to the individualistic fantasies of publishing, the more magic that power will reveal and amplify and create in the world.
I have been thinking a lot about the reasons/justifications we have for "separating art from politics". I don't believe it is possible to separate art from politics, but materially, the concept impacts people who participate in both art and politics (whether they believe they are acting politically or not). Since last October, a lot of people have lost jobs and opportunities, or sacrificed their chance to benefit from life-changing awards, out of solidarity for Palestine. As someone who is not involved in publishing at a level where my immediate material circumstances would be impacted if I lost opportunities such as a book contract, teaching position, or award, I have been considering what that must be like.
The most spiritually frightening question is not what I might lose if I made every possible effort to move in solidarity with our most oppressed peoples. The question that matters more is what I would lose if I did not.
That question is of exponentially less importance than what will happen to our most oppressed people if we do not sacrifice our comfort for their survival.
During the last 10 months, I have returned to the below words from “Every Throne Will Fall” to recenter myself in this framework of personal power and responsibility.
“To minimize yourself is a disservice because there is no path to liberation that begins with making yourself small and helpless. That’s what people do when they say, oh well, this doesn’t concern me, well, this is far away, well, this is not my problem, well, I don’t know enough, well, I have no power to change anything, well—even out of this poisoned well we can draw truth, which is that we all have power and meaning as human beings whose beliefs about the world are of consequence, and whose actions, whose speech, whose choices matter. What that power is for you, precisely, where to find it, how to use it and when and what for, that is entirely your work. But if you don’t grasp and use it with consciousness and conscience, it will be used by those who speak for you, without consultation, without excuse, without apology, in your name…
A far more difficult realization is the idea that we nevertheless have power. An iota of it, but power nevertheless. We see ourselves as small because the world is so big and it demands smallness from us as a measure of obedience. But at least at the scale of our own lives, we are not so small. We go through life under our own power, after all, hurting and helping, crashing and burning sometimes bright, sometimes out.
There are always things you can do with your iota. Sometimes that means using your voice and your political subjectivity to push the powers that claim to represent you. Sometimes that means using your body in concert with others. Sometimes that means withdrawing your power where it has been co-opted by others to bad ends. Sometimes that means using your skills to good purpose.
“...For a long time, part of what drove me as a writer from the third world trying to publish and be seen in the first was the idea that I had to be proof. To be quod erat demonstrandum. I wanted to say to others like me, writers and other artists from the third world without the resources and opportunities that our first-world counterparts have, that this can be done, we can also do this, it is possible. But this work of demonstrating possibility goes so much further than merely overcoming barriers to publishing. We cannot simply want seats at the table. Bring Kafka’s axe with you and plant it in the centre of the table when you get there. There is no more time for compartmentalizing your life, your work, and your politics. Allow yourself to be unpartitioned and whole.”
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Closing questions:
Rasha Abdulhadi and Fargo Tbakhi have invited writers to “hijack the space of the bio.” (Here is a thread by Sara S. Messenger that documents several of these efforts.)
Inspired by their invitation, and this post from Chandrasekera, I ask: What are other spaces of personal comfort and individual benefit that can be transformed/politically expanded beyond the uplifting of the self, towards solidarity with those most marginalized in the world?
Links and other reading:
"Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide" by Fargo Tbakhi
"On Speaking Out" by Daniel José Older
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