Review of We Are Antifa, edited by Philip Elliot. It's a lively collection of creative non-fiction pieces, fiction and poetry. The editor explains that the collection was put together in response to Trump and his dealings with George Floyd and the aftermath.

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by John Kendall Hawkins

Sun, up down

On the corner, up town

I turn around and hear the sound

A voice is talking about who's gonna die next

Cause the White Man's got a God complex

- The Last Poets, "White Man's Got A God Complex" (1971)

There's been a lot of talk about antifa lately, mostly from the fascist-in-chief, and so, none of it is too enlightening. In simple terms, I know that it stands for anti-fascist. But I wasn't sure if there was an actual mailing list I could get on to receive information. Unlikely, I thought, if Trump is going to refer to it as a "terrorist" organization. But, then, he feels the same way about the Democrats or any opposition to his hold on power.

Luckily, I received an email notification from Into The Void, an online lit mag I subscribe to, announcing the publication of a new collection: We Are Antifa:expressions against fascism, racism and police violence in the United States. I made contact with the editor, Philip Elliot, to get a copy of the book and to arrange for an interview. I threw him some questions to prime the pump, but Elliot responded to them as if I'd likened him and his magazine to the Weather Underground. Whoa! he responded.

"I think you're a bit confused as to what Antifa is," he wrote (I was). "Antifa simply means 'anti-fascist.' It's not a group or organization or anything beyond the simple adjective 'anti-fascist.' The anthology is titled We Are Antifa as a response to Donald Trump's declaration that Antifa is a terrorist organization; the title is a political statement, but it does not in fact mean anything at all other than "We Are Anti-Fascist." Therefore I can't speak for Antifa because Antifa does not, in fact, exist. At least not as any unifying group."

In addition to clarification, Elliot was kind enough to insert a link that provides a brief, but solid history of unified antifas past, "A Brief History of Anti-Fascism," which appeared in the June 24, 2020 Smithsonian magazine. The article is interesting for a few reasons, including a description of the anti-fascist movement's beginnings. "Anti-fascism began where fascism began," we're told, "in Italy. Arditi del Popolo-"The People's Daring Ones"-was founded in 1921 and came together to resist the suppressive forces of Benito Mussolini.

I liked the article's portrait of a later fighter of fascists, Eluard Luchell McDaniels, one of many Americans who journeyed overseas to fight in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. McDaniels, we're told, was a

25-year-old African American from Mississippi commanded white troops and led them into battle against the forces of General Franco, men who saw him as less than human...McDaniels was not alone in seeing anti-fascism and anti-racism as intrinsically connected; the anti-fascists of today are heirs to almost a century of struggle against racism.

But, in America, we've only just started calling the endemic racism what it is -- fascism -- after centuries of calling African American "struggles" a mere byproduct of universal civil rights working themselves out in an otherwise healthy democracy.

All of this information is not only an education in itself, but a solid enough introduction to We Are Antifa. The collection is a product of Into the Void, which is based in Vancouver, BC. Elliot writes that all of the proceeds for the collection go to support Black Lives Matter in Toronto. The collection itself is comprised of Creative Nonfiction, Fiction and Poetry by writers from around the world, which provides a telling tale of the perceived spread and influence of fascist solutions to ecological and economical crises we face everywhere and that democracy seems incapable of addressing with the immediacy required. In a sense, the global rise of fascism can be seen as an hysterical reaction to felt existential threat.

We Are Antifa opens with the creative nonfiction piece, "How the Living Watch the Dead" by Cree N. Pettaway. On one level, it's a story of inherited racial trauma being co-opted by episodic white remorse. On another level, it enquires as to where public memory, such as that on display at a museum, intersects with personal history, such as what a typical African American builds on everyday waking up in the Mighty Whitey's world.

On yet another level, it's a consideration of the narratives we relate to ourselves and those we tell to others -- in stories, in reviews of stories, in weeping at the fossilized remembrances of others' terrors, either live on stage for all to see, or through quiet hermeneutics. Of course, this is a welcome alternative to the fascist vision of Black memory presented in the Netflix series Black Mirror episode "Black Museum," where an executed Black man is on exhibit as a living hologram and can be executed over and over again by dropping a coin in a slot. It proved popular.among white visitors.

In Pettaway's first-person article, three African American women go to visit The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama a few months before The Justice for Victims of Lynching Act is to be presumably passed. The proposed Lynching Act is, according to Wikipedia, "The largely symbolic bill aimed to recognize and apologize for historical governmental failures to prevent lynching in the US." When the women get to the Legacy Museum, their quiet contemplations of exhibits are disrupted by a white man weeping, who the author refers to as Rosary Man. Pettaway's unimpressed:

Weeping rosary man is, to me, a perpetrator. He's not a perpetrator of terror, but of what I deem to be a lack of basic consideration for how much attention he's pulling from a space meant to concentrate on remembering Black people.

Later, they encounter an old white guy who mutters, "Sad," loud enough for them to hear. Doesn't go down much better. Pulling space. More co-optation.

The three sober women blink at Rosary Man's Jesus-like weeping at the history of their despoiled race and are appalled by such teary activism. He's disrupting their well-earned vibe:

In the two hundred times in history Congress considers anti-lynching laws before actually passing one, and the possible two hundred times in my life I am confronted with discussions of lynching, I don't think I cry once.

Two hundred times and Congress just couldn't get themselves over that sadist hump of enough being enough. But mostly the three women wonder of Rosary, "Why, exactly, is he crying?"

Pettaway's essay is rich and arch. There are descriptions of other exhibits, the dirt below a lynch victim's "dangling feet being jarred and shelved for white people to pay money to stare at." The author moves on to describe her classroom teaching of mostly white students. She introduces a well-known but controversial white woman artist's depiction of lynched teen Emmett Till's casket, Dana Schutz's "Open Casket." What do they think? "Who owns Black pain?" (Tough question for the kids: We still haven't figured out who owns a woman's body, an older question.)

"Open Casket" proves controversial, some Black folk thinking the artist is just Pulling Space; there's iration at the mother's flashy clothes. But Pettaway's observation is more interesting:

Till's mother [becomes] a part of the performance of what has happened to him...This is the image I want to see Schutz or someone more capable pull apart: how the living watch the dead, and how the living play the part of spectators and spectated. How mothers observe their deceased children. How white people watch slain bodies of Black people they never met. Bodies that, if things had worked out for the Confederacy, they would "own."

There but for the disgrace of God go I, one might say.

"How the Living Watch the Dead" is a marvelous piece about memories and museums of the mind, each has his/her own, and should be reflective if permitted an intimate glimpse of another's mind exhibits. It is also an excellent story with some inadvertent postscriptual irony pushing it. Pettaway opens the article by referring to The Justice for Victims of Lynching Act and suggesting its imminent passage in Congress. Well, it didn't pass: the Congressional session ended without a vote. Taken up again, this year, momentum building from George Floyd's murder-by-cop "hoax," the Bill pushers, led by Kamala Harris, changed the "largely symbolic" legislation's title to the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act. It hasn't passed yet; Rand Paul, the lone hold-out, strung out over the definition of lynching -- but maybe just stopping Democrats from having a political "victory" before the election. A Go Trump gesture. And they leave poor Emmett hanging. "Largely symbolic" of who we are.This is an excellent start for the collection, and really goes a long way to explaining so many of the outstanding hindrances to changing our virtues and values, and becoming truly Democratic.

The next "non-fiction" piece, "We Were Young, But Not Afraid," is a welcome tonic to Pettaway's teaching moment. Antifa sorts, protesting against a police presence, start chanting, "An! Anti! Antifascista! An! Anti! Antifascista!" when, out of nowhere, a group of "boneheads" answered: "They screamed, 'White power!' holding their middle fingers up to the crowd." A Lefty can of Coke is hurtled and opens up a Right wing gash. A cop chase ensues and fizzles, dissolves into an anarchist basement party featuring "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Cops arrive, bullhorns. "Once again, we scrambled-out the back door," writes Joshua Fernandez, "over the fence and into the night we went running and laughing and cursing, like soldiers' ritual after a great, bloody war." Let's hope the smell lingers a little longer this time.

The "Dry Lightning" by M. J. Ridley explores the dire plight of refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos during the current Coronavirus pandemic. Ridley describes how refugees are introduced to filmmaking skills through ReFOCUS Media Labs, an NGO whose purpose is "to teach refugees photography and filmmaking skills, giving them a competitive edge in the job market and a tool they can use to tell their stories." Lesbos refugees are being brutalized by locals who don't want them there, and Ridley's account includes the arson that took down the School of Peace for Refugee Children, co-founded by Arabs and Israelis. As it began, antifa is international. It may be that fascism is the real virus, using Covid-19 as a cover. Like Orson Welles rhetoricaled, 'a thousand years ago', Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.And Turd Blossom.

As is often the case these days, the non-fiction reads like fiction, and the latter like non-. A War of the Words, to extend the Wellesian metaphor of adverbs and adjectives hiding under our beds like moaning bogeymen crying "Feed me dreams." We Are Antifa moves along apace, the collection bringing the reader the raw energy of youth, idealism jumping fences, even know-better babyboomers out misbehavin' (ain't) over the meaning of words.

In the Fiction section, the reader starts out with "Guide To Straightening" by Emily Capers, the kind of tale I was wont to get in my Inbox as an editor of my excellent undergraduate literary magazine -- funky, naughty, hip. See 'straightening' as whitening, and read this story as a "mixed girl" having a bad hair day, trying to iron herself out an existential crisis to fit in with a classroom of pure whites, only to have a mixed girl next to her snap at her do, "Quit tryna act white" and the white teacher repeating the mantra at the fascist chalkboard. Capers incorporates social media to tell her tale to very effective ends -- split ends, as it were.

The collection includes a taste of Indian magical realism, "untouchable" tree people, soldiers, Mineral Mountain as the soccer toy metaphor the people kick back and forth. "The state is killing us all." (Spoiler Un-alert: Soccer doesn't feature in the story.) "A Policeman Of You" a flash piece by Daniel Nathan Horn, begins,

They make a cop out of you if you aren't careful. They snatch you off the street, disappear you for a while, and then bring you back with a gun, a badge, and telescoping eyes.

Saving Private Stasi. They'll make HomoContractae of us all. COINTELPRO 2020 by Amiga. Invasion of the mind snatched bodies. In my beginning is my end: "We'll get by so long as our lost loved ones don't come back with telescoping eyes and radio chatter dribbling from idiot lips," we're told, but then, lo, what rock thru yon window breaks: "We'll get by until they've made cops out of every one of us."

In "Children of Children" OB Gyn and genetics play a part in a story about "Ashkenazi" Jews and the diaspora and the Eye and Noses that give us away (I can relate here: My family covered for my nose by claiming I was part Cherokee, which didn't go down too well the Natives.) The story begins with a dying grandma, kept alive by a machine, her "heterochromatic eyes...hard blue with yellow smoke clouding the pupil" open, but nobody's home. Laura, grand daughter to the dying woman, goes to an OB Gyn clinic, a nurse has her fill in forms, inherited genes, Ashkenazi is a box checked. There is an exchange:

She hands the nurse filled-out forms, who asks, "Ashkenazi?" Then, "You don't look that Jewish."

If only she had a nickel.

She either looks too Jewish or not Jewish enough. "How does a person look like a religion?"

"You know you've got a Jew nose, right?" her boyfriend's friends ask her. One of them places his thumbnail against his nose and extends his pointer finger.

It's petty, it's foolish, you want to laugh as Woody Allen does about noses in the dystopian world of the future depicted in Sleeper. (Even the Reichian orgasmatron, which you'd think belongs in a utopia, can go wrong.) By the time that the brief story ends, however, order is restored when the dying light in grandma's eyes shows up in a newborn's pupils.

And so the stories go, "Not Racist or Anything, But"," "A Reasonable Fascist," "Good Cop," all following narrative lines you can probably predict (think antifa as a genre, too) but which are edifying nonetheless -- clever, uppity, and hopeful in the spirit that freedom of expression always represents. The youthful energy recalled my fondest memories of university days. And, let's face it, the world belongs to the Young, who make up more than 50% of the world now. Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall, says the Bard from Duluth.

The Poetry section had some sass to splash, too. "The One Where the Roughnecks Burn the World to the Ground While Looking Fab as f*ck" by Kanyinsola Olorunnisola, celebrates the steaming spirit of Kendrick Lamar ("I got dark, I got evil, that rot inside my DNA") and others. Olorunnisola rapping, "we lost our gangster poets in the crossfire / no language left to romanticize trauma to make art of the lab / yrinth of our lives." And Edward Moreta Jr.'s rappin' "Villain Villanelle" has its charms:

all this villainy / ain't no kidding me

coming down the street / (walking epiphany).

blood dj spin / swim in we. / rocking black seas

Ain't gonna drink your vanilla milkshake, Rosemary. Smile directed by Roman Polanski? Whoa. It ain't me, babe. No, no, no.

One or two of the poems in the section are short enough to splodge whole. Here's one. Let it speak for itself (I'll grab a ciggy while it's performing on the page: BRB). "Fill in the Blanks" by James Redfern:

Meanwhile, on [date and time],

another brother was murdered.

Four [or more (adjust number)] members

of a white power hate group,

[insert name law enforcement agency]

murdered another brother.

The news anchor said the DA said:

"[the truth is inadmissible]."

Soundbite: "[insert name of murdered brother]

resisted / posed a threat / was on PCP /

had what looked to be a gun / other

(circle one or more)."

Headline reads: "[blame victim]."

Says it all, really, when you think about it. This form is as much reality as you are permitted under fascists. Choose your details carefully -- they will follow you the rest of your life.

A tribute to Kathleen Chang in the form of "The Peace Sculpture Wore: October, 1996" by Andre's Castro was especially moving. Many of us who grew up in the Nam era can recall, among the horror highlights the MSM proffered up to put on display the fascist thinking behind the war, the Buddhist monks who set themselves on firein protest. They risked reincarnation to send a message about war. In 1996, on an Ivy League campus, student activist Kathleen Chang poured gasoline over herself and lit a match -- attempting to engage her privileged classmates in radical social change. Here's an extract from the poem:

Why October 22nd of '96?

Why Tuesday? Why choose

11:20 a.m. to walk across campus,

stand before sculptured peace

sign between two trees, pour

bucket of gasoline over your slim

build, and set yourself aflame?

Chang, the daughter of a professor (Dad) and writer (Mum) was a complicated person, with an intense understanding of her refugee roots, which she explored and out of which she produced an incredible "children's" book, The Iron Moonhunter that tells the story of Chinese laborers brought to America to lay down the First Transcontinental Railroad in the 19th century that opened up early America for exploration and exploitation, while often demonizing and brutalizing the "Coolies." It's an amazing tale told as part mythology, part reality -- call it proto-creative non-fiction. Kathleen later changed her surname from Chang to Change. Think basketballer World B. Free and go with it.

As mentioned earlier, though the general population of America is just becoming rudely "Woke" to the realization that America is plummeting into a fascist abyss, thanks not only to the President we now have, but also our manipulated electoral processes that let it happen (it's very fascistic to blame the Russians as cover for our own deep state machinations). If you had a conspiracy-theory bent, you might almost see the "election" of Trump as the 9/11 of democracy -- craziness given credence by reporters such as Greg Palast who shows that Trump stole the 2016 election by working with Republican machiavellians, such as Karl Rove, to have millions of Black votes tossed. With Trump's recent refusal to guarantee a "smooth" transition of administrations, should he lose, we may be looking at the mop-up of the Republic's dissolution. So, We Are Antifa is timely, well-focussed, and highly recommended.

(Article changed on October 16, 2020 at 17:20)

Authors Website: https://tantricdispositionmatrix.substack.com/

Authors Bio:

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.