These posts are difficult to write and I’m sure they are difficult to read. By measuring the time taken to write–or to read–it is possible enter the symbolic world created by the hunger strike, a world in which existence matters. It is the force of the statement made by the strike that enables this fragmentary sliver of participation. It is their gift to those in solidarity, the hospitality of those utterly without resource. Like all gifts, it invokes a response, the taking of the time to feel for an instant the stakes of their action.
For a hunger strike both compresses and expands time. Every moment without sustenance is freighted with meaning and, after the first days, haunted with danger. And yet it also makes things visible. It opens the understanding of the long hunger strike from Atlantic slavery, to British imperialism, women’s suffrage and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
The long hunger strike is interwoven with British coloniality, from slavery to Ireland, the women’s suffrage struggle, India and the former British mandate of Palestine. This pattern stems from the British practice of using regulated hunger as a weapon, which was then turned against them by the enslaved and colonized.
the long hunger strike
The long hunger strike turns the state weapon of hunger against itself. It changes the terms of the encounter between the state regime and the body of those Fanon called les damnés, the damned–those who have no voice that the state can hear. By risking life, the damned reclaim dignity and in so doing make themselves heard. This is not a statement in the manner of a politician proposing a settlement, or a philosopher formulating a maxim. It is one that is felt within the body, at a molecular level. It is nonetheless articulate. It enacts the right to exist through the self-willed challenge to life.
The power to keep people in hunger of all kinds is a tool of coloniality, the transhistorical expansion of colonial domination and its continued effects. Whereas, according to Nelson Maldonando Torres,
decoloniality refers to efforts at rehumanizing the world
Humans have the right to exist, so they share food and offer hospitality to each other. They know that living together is the only way that humans may live and the only way to avoid ge(n)ocide. Dignity is the right to exist. If it is refused, people strike.
Slavery and the hunger strike
For Marcus Rediker, the historian of slavery,
The Atlantic slave trade was, in many senses, a four-hundred-year hunger strike.
In Central and West Africa, a politics of “eating” was central to social ordering. As Africanist Wyatt McGaffey has summarized it
An ordered society is one in which ‘eating,’ both literal and metaphorical is properly distributed
Eating is both supplying food and creating conditions in which people, animals and spirits alike can thrive. A slave ship was very obviously not such a place. Many captive Africans refused to eat. In 1727 a man refused to eat on board the Loyal George, causing its captain to torture and kill him, whereupon all the Africans rose in revolt. Similar violence on the ship City of London caused all the 377 Africans on board to go on hunger strike in 1730. A Fante man (name unknown) undertook a fatal hunger strike on board the Brooks, the ship famously drawn by abolitionists. The little Black stick figures were people, who had a politics and acted on it.
HMS Brooks, slave ship
As a result, the slavers resorted to force feeding, using a metal device called the speculum oris to force open African hunger strikers’ mouths. As the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson reported in 1808:
the slaves were frequently so sulky, as to shut their mouths against all sustenance, and this with a determination to die; and that it was necessary their mouths should be forced open to throw in nutriment, that they who had purchased them might incur no loss by their death.
Speculum oris to open the mouth of a hunger striker, c.1850
It rarely worked (if by that we mean “kept the captive alive”) but it perhaps deterred others. Many more “returned to Africa” by means of their hunger strikes.
the suffragettes
The same tool was used against the Suffragettes, when they undertook hunger strikes in British prisons. In July 1909, the artist Marion Wallace-Dunlop was imprisoned for stamping a slogan on the walls of Parliament. She refused to eat, declaring
I claim the right recognized by all civilized nations that a person imprisoned for a political offence should have first-division treatment; and as a matter of principle, not only for my own sake but for the sake of others who may come after me, I am now refusing all food until this matter is settled
She was, in short, on dignity strike. “First division” treatment was a provision of the 1898 Prison Act, whereby the prisoner would not be subjected to a month of solitary confinement, or have to wear prison dress. They were allowed visits and reading materials. “Second” and “Third” division prisoners were allowed none of these things and had to maintain silence at all times, or else be placed on bread-and-water diet.
As the writer Oscar Wilde, sentenced to two years hard labour, put it in a letter to the Daily Chronicle in 1898, there were “three permanent punishments authorised by law in English prisons”: hunger, insomnia, and disease. The hunger striker in British prisons, like those in the slave ships before them, turned the state’s weapons against itself.
For this presumption, they paid a terrible price. Using the speculum oris, prison administrators force fed the Suffragettes, especially those from the working class. Sylvia Pankhurst, arrested in 1913 for breaking a window as part of the Suffragette escalation of the period, described how she was force fed after a hunger strike of only three days:
I felt a steel instrument pressing against my gums, cutting into the flesh, forcing its way in. Then it gradually prised my jaws apart as they turned a screw. It felt like having my teeth drawn; but I resisted—I resisted. I held my poor bleeding gums down on the steel with all my strength. Soon they were trying to force the india-rubber tube down my throat. I was struggling wildly, trying to tighten the muscles and to keep my throat closed up. They got the tube down, I suppose, though I was unconscious of anything but a mad revolt of struggling, for at last I heard them say, “That’s all”; and I vomited as the tube came up. ….But infinitely worse than any pain was the sense of degradation, the sense that the very fight that one made against the repeated outrage was shattering one’s nerves and breaking down one’s self-control.
Force feeding was also rape. Sometimes the prison authorities tried to make this anatomically specific, by inserting food into women’s vaginas and rectums. The women called it “violation.”
the palestinian dignity strike day 35
The logic of colonial domination continues in the former British mandate of Palestine today. 33% of the Palestinian population are what the UN call “food insecure,” meaning threatened by hunger. This hunger is unevenly experienced: 57% of those living in Gaza suffer it, as do 19% of those living in the West Bank. An outside visitor to Palestine, like myself, would be hard put to document this suffering because Palestinians are so committed to hospitality. We visited a village demolished over 100 times by Israeli police, reduced to only two tents, where our hosts produced a delicious and generous lunch, quite unasked and utterly not to be refused.
Within the Israeli prison system, food supply is a consistent problem. Families are not allowed to bring in food and, according to a 2016 report by Addameer, “the quality of the food and the quantity has decreased dramatically” since 2011. Not least, the fall in quality is due to the fact that Israeli convicts prepare the food for Palestinian prisoners. As a result, prisoners rely on a privatized and expensive canteen, forcing them to participate in the prison labor system. Prisoners spend an average $111 on food per month, which is “shopped” and cooked collectively at a mark up of over 20% from outside shops. The Israeli Prison Service makes over $30 million a year from this system.
Like the enslaved and the disenfranchised women before them, the Palestinians are turning the system’s withholding of food into a means to reclaim dignity. So it is denied to them in other ways. Far-right activists held a barbecue outside a prison, taunting the prisoners with the smell of food, just as British prison authorities left eggs, bread, milk and chops in the cells of Suffragettes. The prison service released a video purporting to show Marwan Barghouti eating a candy bar after more than two weeks of hunger strike. If he had done, he would have vomited it immediately. No media bothered to mention that.
Ever wonder where all the scary, white clowns went? They’re in power, of course. Because racial capitalism and petrocracy, the rule of fossil fuel, have been in a deep embrace since neoliberalism began. And children of the multiplex that we are, we know what happens when you are smothered in toxic materials like crude oil. You mutate.
Andrea Bowers, “Dignity Safety Justice: Woman With Raised Fist (Trans Latina Coalition, Blockade at the Beverly Center, L.A., CA, March 20th, 2015)” from “Whose Feminism Is It Anyway?” (2016
Mutant capital thinks like the Joker. Let’s use nuclear weapons! It’s fine if people starve themselves to death! And, of course, drill, baby, drill. Never mind that the consequences will be mutually assured destruction, the mother of all Intifadas and ge(n)ocide. It produces scenes like the Australian finance minister waving coal in Parliament as his solution to a climate-change induced heatwave.
Morrison Holding Coal.
That’s the situation. It is the current mess we’re in. It’s a mutant replay of the onset of the neoliberal phase of racial capitalism in 1979-80 under Mrs. Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. And it’s mutated wherever racialized capital has produced its divisive effects, from France to India, South Africa and beyond.
Of course these places are not simply the same. The situation, also known in Marxist-speak as the “conjuncture,” was defined by Stuart Hall as “related but distinct contradictions, moving according to very different tempos.” Grace Lee Boggs’ famous question “What time is it on the clock of the world?” is, then, a question about the status of the situation.
In the past, I’ve worked on time-specific projects like Occupy 2012 or After Occupy in 2014. The question now is the uneven temporality of the present, colliding pasts that were thought to be past, with futures that may never be, and differentiated experiences of the present. It’s ongoing, unfolding, mutating.
It’s also a reference to the way that people in Palestine tend to refer to the institutional crisis of settler colonialism as “the situation.” As I write on the tenth day of a hunger strike by 1500 Palestinian prisoners, it’s a situation that should be on all of our minds, every day. I visited Palestine in 2016 for the first time. It was a difficult experience, not just because of the intensity of the oppression but because it made me realize how inadequate my version of “activism” is to the challenges of the situation.
One of the keynotes of the situation is the global implosion of center/center-left neoliberalism. Those outside the dominant super-rich suffered the 2007 recession, waited, saw the elites continuing to gain and have looked for someone to blame. Many have identified those political formations that claimed to be progressive but enabled the intensification of neoliberalism, from the Democrats to the UK Labour Party and France’s Socialist Party.
The contradiction that dominates this political shift is, however, not simply economic. It is the mutation of racism and xenophobia into newly pathological forms. The hostility to Poles in London, to Algerians in Paris, and the continued killings of African Americans by US police are clearly not the same but equally they are related. Further, the connection of racialized hierarchy with revived nationalism opens the way to mutant forms of what was once called national socialism.
Each of these contradictions is made non-linear, or mutant, by the Earth system crisis, itself brought on by racial capital’s post-1980 embrace of petrocracy. The Anthropocene can be measured from 11,700 BC, or 1610, or 1950. But the climate mutated when neoliberalism went global in 1980. Look at the graph.
Carbon emissions. Produced by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, closed by the Trump administration
While the acceleration begins in the 1950s, it goes into overdrive after 1980. Half of all carbon emissions were produced since 1980. It’s gone mutant.
Past time now, then, for what Grace Lee Boggs called {r}evolution—the horizontal construction of autonomous power from below by multiple subjects. {R}evolution is deep. Are you ready for it? Let me tell you this much. It’s a revolution against mutant racial capitalism. But there won’t be a hero to save us, whether from Vermont, or wearing a cape. And it won’t be about getting an electric car or solar panels.
{R}evolution contains evolution: a transformative change in human relationships to each other, to non-human life and to habitat. A change away from fossil-fueled capitalism to constructing sustainable social relations.
{R}evolution is decolonial because it will only be in displacing whiteness’ claim to the “ownership of the Earth, forever and ever, amen,” as WEB Du Bois put it, that the feedback loop of crisis can be ended.
{R}evolution for James and Grace Lee Boggs in 1974
begins with a series of illuminations….A revolutionary period is one in which the only exit is a revolution…. It initiates a new plateau, a new threshold on which human beings can continue to develop.
That’s what you see in Palestine. It’s what you see from other Indigenous communities. The hardest lesson, perhaps, is that it is not measurable in terms of individual lives
{R}evolution is in the spirit of the Black radical tradition, defined by Cedric J. Robinson as:
the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.
How do you do that without (vertical) power and without reinstating the past form with different leadership? To create both a genealogy of {r}evolution and its present-day possibility is to interact decolonial resistance to racial capitalism with that to fossil-fueled capital.
Easier said than done? No doubt. But not always so easy to say either. That’s what this project will be, an exploration of pathways to thinking and making {r}evolution.
