Peter Valente
“Sooner than later the end will arrive”: A Review of Andrew Zawacki’s Unsun: f/11
1.
Andrew Zawacki a kind of poet-archeologist of the Anthropocene. In his recent book of poems, Unsun: f/11, he is filming a world on the edge of collapse; he is a reporter tracking the effects of corporate logic which extends only to its concern with profit; as a result, these corporations ignore the environment, release toxins into the world, and disturb the natural landscape, transforming the organic into horrific unnatural shapes; we are living in a world where even the “weather’s a rapture / of Capitol” and the “sunlight detonates.” In the world of the poems, the human is dwarfed, and nature is in a revolt against its violation; rage controls the inner logic of the book. He writes, “You cannot step into the infidel / water, ghostlit // and hexed.” Words that suggest treachery are associated with words that evoke nature: “Water” is “infidel.” He writes, “Anthracite air, arthritic // branch.” Nature is very old or prematurely old as a result of its abuse. The collapse of the natural world is on the horizon, if we don’t do something about it. Thus, Zawacki’s poems feel like urgent messages to the present.
2.
And of course, they’re “scaling up the latest war, / to tell us who we are.” The human is being defined not by his concern for the environment or his empathy, or his kindness but by the military machine, that the USA government injects billions of dollars into, by dismantling our social programs; so by the extent that the people are warlike, confrontational, violent, and argumentative, they’re all fighting a “just” war. At least that’s what the right would have you think. Just watch Fox News, and follow, if you can stand it, a few of Trump’s tweets. No wonder this country is so polarized with imaginary lines that divide white from black, gay from straight, man from woman, old from young, Muslim from Catholic. Trump’s angry rhetoric is starting a war among the people in the USA, and the recent riots in the streets are only one symptom of a larger problem. As I write this, protesters are swarming the streets in New York and Los Angeles and throughout the USA, after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. The streets of some cities look like a scene from Paris in 1968. Black Lives Do Matter. The police are grossly overpaid and protected by police unions, so it’s hard to get them fired, which is why that murderer cop, after 17 complaints, didn’t get let go. It sure does seem that the sky is “falling, failing.”
3.
Zawacki writes, “Shellacked by atmospheric dust, the stars are leaking alkalis the colour of trap-cut diamond flutter – 11 carat – and piss.” Greed. Money and shit. Billions and billions of dollars for yachts, expensive cars, for the people who live in gated communities. And the poor continue to suffer with no sign of relief. Make America great? For whom? Seems like it’s a crime to be poor, nowadays. Immigrants at the border are held in cages, in their own feces, and hungry, with children crying as a result of being separated from their parents. The Greeks had a word for the outsider, “Barbaroi.” Everyone who was not Greek was “Barbaroi.” Just like everyone in this country who is not white, heterosexual, Christian, Nationalist, rich, is a considered a criminal, a rapist, an inhabitant of one of those “shit” countries.
4.
“There’re cold fronts at the equator, // desert where an oasis was. A shrapnel of snowfall – collateral white – is hacked from a highlighless sky.” The language of the pastoral is infected with military language: “A shrapnel of snowfall.” The climate is changing. It’s an astonishingly visual image. Cinematic. Zawaki’s book is a visual one; it’s a kind of apocalyptic film. Is it even possible anymore to speak of the natural world on its own terms, when “Poppies mimic a bullet wound.”? You can hear “brittle sutras wheezing through the dark.” At times, there is a hint of something else in these poems, perhaps a flicker of light, hope, in the growing darkness, but largely, as Sobin had written, “the invisible – you knew – had all but vanished.” The ground of the visible has shifted. We are bombarded on a daily basis with images from our iphone, so much so that we believe the simulation rather than reality. Reality has also vanished. We live in a world that has become increasing more abstract, and where physical experiences are replaced by videos on youtube. In an interview with Barbara Claire Freeman, Zawacki says,
I realize that Baudrillard is behind some of this: the Gulf War never happened; war is a phenomenon on your television screen, in your living room, i.e. you can turn it off; America is nothing more than a feedback loop of the images it flaunts to itself, on a Vegas hotel treadmill monitor. (As my friend Aleš Debeljak would retort: tell that to widows and mothers in Sarajevo and Srebrenica.) The history of combat itself is one of somatic retreat: from bayonet to musket ball, War Games to drone strikes.
That a virus should come and quarantine us in our homes, and have us practicing social distancing, has a cruel logic to it. We’ve come to so rely on our iphones so much that what is around us starts to recede. And we are practicing a kind of social distancing every time we fail to talk to someone face to face on the street but rather through skype or text message. “Anthropo - / scenic, lustre / -fucked, a body no // where to be found -.”
5.
In the 90s, I wrote in my journal: “The vestiges of an original language equal to life and to the mysteries, recedes farther into oblivion. That which cannot be seen, the invisible, replaced now by number, category, all that which would cause the mysteries to instill doubt and uncertainty and produce the sense instead of an inaccessible Other, a nothingness.” We are now “ecstatic with code.” Even the dusk is increasingly color corrected; it’s like using photoshop on your computer, except the destruction of nature is irreversible. “Root canal: ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel, to fracas a mountain in half.” These poems comment on the ecosystemic violence that has been done to the earth through the neglect of corporate businesses and government, who are only concerned with profit anyway and not the fate of the planet. And man is complicit in the damage that is all around him, it is “never not / touching us.” Zawacki writes, “The blast radius / centre everywhere…./ like a negative / yanked from the dark - // not / an avatar in an environment / but the figure // as ground for ground.” As I read these lines, I thought of Sobin’s “Late Bronze, Early Iron: A Journey Book,” which I read years ago. In an old journal, I found the following:
In “Late Bronze, Early Iron: A Journey Book”, Sobin maps the collapse of a culture which used a picture language, one where the images had an harmonious relation to each other and whose mark was delicate and strong, elaborate but clear; the language spoke of a unity that accepted variety and mirrored in its culture something beyond itself, an elsewhere that was here, present, though mysterious and invisible. A conquering culture (the emergence of Iron) destroyed all this in favor of a written language, that bore the imprint of the human (think of Heidegger’s sense of a reification of the “I” instead of being), “the thumb-slash,” and a concern with the visible manifestation of a beyond. All that delicate balance gave way to chaos, where instead of the unified image which resonated beyond itself, there remained only an image that referred to itself, the invisible drained of all its mystery.
“not / an avatar in an environment / but the figure // as ground for the ground.”
6.
Zawacki:
shadows over the ruins
of a city of
lead and cement: an early-
warning satellite chitters, the end
times barely begun, no witness
protection program for any of us.
In my notes I find: “All this destruction of the environment has more to do with the very real threat of economic forces, than anything that could not be quantifiable or even seen with the eyes. The invisible was replaced by a Nothingness that became equated with death, an isn’t that is, a void we cannot hope to fill. This nothingness is, ironically, as clear, now, as the portrait of a face, but this clarity creates doubt in the observer, who remains infinitely apart from this Other, as if, indeed, something is lacking; a void has now entered the world.” Zawacki writes: “(The gaps you observe in the film were / Put there, to force you to see not seeing, / If one can speak of ‘placing’ an absence / Or say what’s not there is ‘there’).” An isn’t that is, a void that cannot be filled; something is lacking, irrevocably lost, like the time you spent looking at your cellphone, as the world passes you by. It’s the “thermal noise of nothing making racket.” And “Nothing // hurts.” We are witnessing, as Sobin predicted, “an entire world – worlds – gone under: there, just there, as you stood at the fixed center of so much latter-day postulate.” Zawacki’s poems are like images of a world gone under, “annulling / ever icon come before.” And the natural world suffers, unable to just fall in oblivion. Indeed, if these rich CEO’s would have it their way, and life was possible somewhere else, they’d blow up the planet and escape. The “assailed ground saturated // with anything other / than us although we // stand there, a hold in the field /already a halt // to the forest, and are thereby / held by // woods and meadow at once, / beholden to both, // cursive along our labored / collapse toward history’s // alluvial havoc.” Once, we were beholden to woods and meadow; a pastoral was possible.
7.
Reading Zawacki’s poems, I kept thinking of this Celan poem from Threadsuns, and the way in which these works are a commentary:
THREADSUNS
above the greyblack wastes.
a tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
Zawacki writes, “I thought I could leave my body / out of it, but it / is the it.” Furthermore, he conceives “the body as a continuation of / music by other means.” Celan is right: “there are / still songs to sing beyond / mankind.” Pierre Joris, Celan’s translator, writes, “Celan’s topos is a visionary-realistic land – and language-scape mapping the second half of this century form the devastating aporia constituted by World War II, its extermination camps and nuclear wastelands, and reaching beyond Celan’s own dates into this very fin-de-siecle.” Today we are facing the deniers of climate change, the rise of racism and homophobia, the demonization of Muslims, police violence, the rise of Nationalism, greedy profiteers, like Donald Trump and his corporate bullies, who would rather give billions of dollars to corporate businesses and the military, and cut environmental plans. His mishandling of the coronavirus, after dismantling Obama’s safety plan against potential pandemics, has plunged the USA into chaos. Zawacki shows us the result of our neglect of the environment, which extends to our entire social-political world, the “greyblack wastes” in our own time. In this sense, the book is prescience.
8.
The destruction of the planet cannot be undone. But what is man nowadays? There’s “no such thing as a self, itself.” Zawacki is “A cursive / crack in the windshield / of nobody’s car.” Perhaps the human is approaching the end, as technology envisions a world where man is no longer necessary. It sounds like science fiction, when researchers say that AI programs, when taught a language, can immediately learn another language on their own, with no human intervention. Man is being transformed in an irreversible way in this age of digital technology, when there are more cell phones on the earth than people. The very fact of their existence alters nature in a fundamental way: our dependence on the machine. We are slaves of the death cult of capitalism. Zawacki writes, “at which moment does wholeness stop / does injured matter.” As I read this I looked again at my notes on Sobin and found this:
Unity has split into an infinity of pieces. Babel entered the language. Signs proliferated without any sense of meaning, as if the language, itself, separated us from the world, from life, and blinded us to the nature of the real, instead of being a conduit to the invisible.
In Zawacki’s poems, language is not focused on a sublime elsewhere, but on the nothing that is; his camera is pointed at the industrial wastes, the scraps of technology, the oil spills, disasters, and war; here, Zawacki’s nomadic syllables cross borders, sounding the devastation.
9.
The only position to take is anger:
Spahr’s 2015 book That Winter the Wolf Came calls for a new poetics in response to the forms of communal intimacy that emerge, voluntarily or not, in the context of oil spills or state-sponsored violence. And “#Misanthropocene: 24 Theses,” a 2014 collaboration with Joshua Clover, is an exercise in self-critique. “#Misanthropocene” rebukes the “west melancholy” that anchors “Gentle Now.” It exposes the limited political reach of feeling bad about environmental destruction.
10.
Thinking of his daughter, Zawacki write, in “Dixie Pixie Sonnet”:
Pell-mell all hell and ill will will unfurl
If you don’t wear your cheap synthetic, frilly fuchsia princess dress
Fake glass high heel sequin slippers clacking on the tile
This section of the poem finds Zawacki at his most playful in the language. But then there is the statement: “In your lifetime, the Arctic will have been.”
How to create a language to express what it means to a young girl who has to encounter this world of iphones, data surveillance, text messages, twitter, facebook, etc.? In essence, these poems are addressed to a child. And furthermore, what can young people do to help change the direction this world is going in.
It took a young girl, Greta Thunberg, to confront politicians at the U.N. climate Summit and say:
For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.
There must be another reason: follow the money.
11.
Zawacki concludes his book with these lines:
an alarm going off, and darkness
dropping.
And cannot be undune.
The sun has gone out. How can we save ourselves? Through feeling grief about the situation? No. Audre Lorde writes, in Poetry is Not a Luxury, Sister Outsider; Essays& Speeches:
My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing....Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives.
Anger is an energy. Zawacki’s Unsun reads like a report from the Front. It’s a book to arm yourself with for the long fight ahead.
1.
Andrew Zawacki a kind of poet-archeologist of the Anthropocene. In his recent book of poems, Unsun: f/11, he is filming a world on the edge of collapse; he is a reporter tracking the effects of corporate logic which extends only to its concern with profit; as a result, these corporations ignore the environment, release toxins into the world, and disturb the natural landscape, transforming the organic into horrific unnatural shapes; we are living in a world where even the “weather’s a rapture / of Capitol” and the “sunlight detonates.” In the world of the poems, the human is dwarfed, and nature is in a revolt against its violation; rage controls the inner logic of the book. He writes, “You cannot step into the infidel / water, ghostlit // and hexed.” Words that suggest treachery are associated with words that evoke nature: “Water” is “infidel.” He writes, “Anthracite air, arthritic // branch.” Nature is very old or prematurely old as a result of its abuse. The collapse of the natural world is on the horizon, if we don’t do something about it. Thus, Zawacki’s poems feel like urgent messages to the present.
2.
And of course, they’re “scaling up the latest war, / to tell us who we are.” The human is being defined not by his concern for the environment or his empathy, or his kindness but by the military machine, that the USA government injects billions of dollars into, by dismantling our social programs; so by the extent that the people are warlike, confrontational, violent, and argumentative, they’re all fighting a “just” war. At least that’s what the right would have you think. Just watch Fox News, and follow, if you can stand it, a few of Trump’s tweets. No wonder this country is so polarized with imaginary lines that divide white from black, gay from straight, man from woman, old from young, Muslim from Catholic. Trump’s angry rhetoric is starting a war among the people in the USA, and the recent riots in the streets are only one symptom of a larger problem. As I write this, protesters are swarming the streets in New York and Los Angeles and throughout the USA, after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. The streets of some cities look like a scene from Paris in 1968. Black Lives Do Matter. The police are grossly overpaid and protected by police unions, so it’s hard to get them fired, which is why that murderer cop, after 17 complaints, didn’t get let go. It sure does seem that the sky is “falling, failing.”
3.
Zawacki writes, “Shellacked by atmospheric dust, the stars are leaking alkalis the colour of trap-cut diamond flutter – 11 carat – and piss.” Greed. Money and shit. Billions and billions of dollars for yachts, expensive cars, for the people who live in gated communities. And the poor continue to suffer with no sign of relief. Make America great? For whom? Seems like it’s a crime to be poor, nowadays. Immigrants at the border are held in cages, in their own feces, and hungry, with children crying as a result of being separated from their parents. The Greeks had a word for the outsider, “Barbaroi.” Everyone who was not Greek was “Barbaroi.” Just like everyone in this country who is not white, heterosexual, Christian, Nationalist, rich, is a considered a criminal, a rapist, an inhabitant of one of those “shit” countries.
4.
“There’re cold fronts at the equator, // desert where an oasis was. A shrapnel of snowfall – collateral white – is hacked from a highlighless sky.” The language of the pastoral is infected with military language: “A shrapnel of snowfall.” The climate is changing. It’s an astonishingly visual image. Cinematic. Zawaki’s book is a visual one; it’s a kind of apocalyptic film. Is it even possible anymore to speak of the natural world on its own terms, when “Poppies mimic a bullet wound.”? You can hear “brittle sutras wheezing through the dark.” At times, there is a hint of something else in these poems, perhaps a flicker of light, hope, in the growing darkness, but largely, as Sobin had written, “the invisible – you knew – had all but vanished.” The ground of the visible has shifted. We are bombarded on a daily basis with images from our iphone, so much so that we believe the simulation rather than reality. Reality has also vanished. We live in a world that has become increasing more abstract, and where physical experiences are replaced by videos on youtube. In an interview with Barbara Claire Freeman, Zawacki says,
I realize that Baudrillard is behind some of this: the Gulf War never happened; war is a phenomenon on your television screen, in your living room, i.e. you can turn it off; America is nothing more than a feedback loop of the images it flaunts to itself, on a Vegas hotel treadmill monitor. (As my friend Aleš Debeljak would retort: tell that to widows and mothers in Sarajevo and Srebrenica.) The history of combat itself is one of somatic retreat: from bayonet to musket ball, War Games to drone strikes.
That a virus should come and quarantine us in our homes, and have us practicing social distancing, has a cruel logic to it. We’ve come to so rely on our iphones so much that what is around us starts to recede. And we are practicing a kind of social distancing every time we fail to talk to someone face to face on the street but rather through skype or text message. “Anthropo - / scenic, lustre / -fucked, a body no // where to be found -.”
5.
In the 90s, I wrote in my journal: “The vestiges of an original language equal to life and to the mysteries, recedes farther into oblivion. That which cannot be seen, the invisible, replaced now by number, category, all that which would cause the mysteries to instill doubt and uncertainty and produce the sense instead of an inaccessible Other, a nothingness.” We are now “ecstatic with code.” Even the dusk is increasingly color corrected; it’s like using photoshop on your computer, except the destruction of nature is irreversible. “Root canal: ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel, to fracas a mountain in half.” These poems comment on the ecosystemic violence that has been done to the earth through the neglect of corporate businesses and government, who are only concerned with profit anyway and not the fate of the planet. And man is complicit in the damage that is all around him, it is “never not / touching us.” Zawacki writes, “The blast radius / centre everywhere…./ like a negative / yanked from the dark - // not / an avatar in an environment / but the figure // as ground for ground.” As I read these lines, I thought of Sobin’s “Late Bronze, Early Iron: A Journey Book,” which I read years ago. In an old journal, I found the following:
In “Late Bronze, Early Iron: A Journey Book”, Sobin maps the collapse of a culture which used a picture language, one where the images had an harmonious relation to each other and whose mark was delicate and strong, elaborate but clear; the language spoke of a unity that accepted variety and mirrored in its culture something beyond itself, an elsewhere that was here, present, though mysterious and invisible. A conquering culture (the emergence of Iron) destroyed all this in favor of a written language, that bore the imprint of the human (think of Heidegger’s sense of a reification of the “I” instead of being), “the thumb-slash,” and a concern with the visible manifestation of a beyond. All that delicate balance gave way to chaos, where instead of the unified image which resonated beyond itself, there remained only an image that referred to itself, the invisible drained of all its mystery.
“not / an avatar in an environment / but the figure // as ground for the ground.”
6.
Zawacki:
shadows over the ruins
of a city of
lead and cement: an early-
warning satellite chitters, the end
times barely begun, no witness
protection program for any of us.
In my notes I find: “All this destruction of the environment has more to do with the very real threat of economic forces, than anything that could not be quantifiable or even seen with the eyes. The invisible was replaced by a Nothingness that became equated with death, an isn’t that is, a void we cannot hope to fill. This nothingness is, ironically, as clear, now, as the portrait of a face, but this clarity creates doubt in the observer, who remains infinitely apart from this Other, as if, indeed, something is lacking; a void has now entered the world.” Zawacki writes: “(The gaps you observe in the film were / Put there, to force you to see not seeing, / If one can speak of ‘placing’ an absence / Or say what’s not there is ‘there’).” An isn’t that is, a void that cannot be filled; something is lacking, irrevocably lost, like the time you spent looking at your cellphone, as the world passes you by. It’s the “thermal noise of nothing making racket.” And “Nothing // hurts.” We are witnessing, as Sobin predicted, “an entire world – worlds – gone under: there, just there, as you stood at the fixed center of so much latter-day postulate.” Zawacki’s poems are like images of a world gone under, “annulling / ever icon come before.” And the natural world suffers, unable to just fall in oblivion. Indeed, if these rich CEO’s would have it their way, and life was possible somewhere else, they’d blow up the planet and escape. The “assailed ground saturated // with anything other / than us although we // stand there, a hold in the field /already a halt // to the forest, and are thereby / held by // woods and meadow at once, / beholden to both, // cursive along our labored / collapse toward history’s // alluvial havoc.” Once, we were beholden to woods and meadow; a pastoral was possible.
7.
Reading Zawacki’s poems, I kept thinking of this Celan poem from Threadsuns, and the way in which these works are a commentary:
THREADSUNS
above the greyblack wastes.
a tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.
Zawacki writes, “I thought I could leave my body / out of it, but it / is the it.” Furthermore, he conceives “the body as a continuation of / music by other means.” Celan is right: “there are / still songs to sing beyond / mankind.” Pierre Joris, Celan’s translator, writes, “Celan’s topos is a visionary-realistic land – and language-scape mapping the second half of this century form the devastating aporia constituted by World War II, its extermination camps and nuclear wastelands, and reaching beyond Celan’s own dates into this very fin-de-siecle.” Today we are facing the deniers of climate change, the rise of racism and homophobia, the demonization of Muslims, police violence, the rise of Nationalism, greedy profiteers, like Donald Trump and his corporate bullies, who would rather give billions of dollars to corporate businesses and the military, and cut environmental plans. His mishandling of the coronavirus, after dismantling Obama’s safety plan against potential pandemics, has plunged the USA into chaos. Zawacki shows us the result of our neglect of the environment, which extends to our entire social-political world, the “greyblack wastes” in our own time. In this sense, the book is prescience.
8.
The destruction of the planet cannot be undone. But what is man nowadays? There’s “no such thing as a self, itself.” Zawacki is “A cursive / crack in the windshield / of nobody’s car.” Perhaps the human is approaching the end, as technology envisions a world where man is no longer necessary. It sounds like science fiction, when researchers say that AI programs, when taught a language, can immediately learn another language on their own, with no human intervention. Man is being transformed in an irreversible way in this age of digital technology, when there are more cell phones on the earth than people. The very fact of their existence alters nature in a fundamental way: our dependence on the machine. We are slaves of the death cult of capitalism. Zawacki writes, “at which moment does wholeness stop / does injured matter.” As I read this I looked again at my notes on Sobin and found this:
Unity has split into an infinity of pieces. Babel entered the language. Signs proliferated without any sense of meaning, as if the language, itself, separated us from the world, from life, and blinded us to the nature of the real, instead of being a conduit to the invisible.
In Zawacki’s poems, language is not focused on a sublime elsewhere, but on the nothing that is; his camera is pointed at the industrial wastes, the scraps of technology, the oil spills, disasters, and war; here, Zawacki’s nomadic syllables cross borders, sounding the devastation.
9.
The only position to take is anger:
Spahr’s 2015 book That Winter the Wolf Came calls for a new poetics in response to the forms of communal intimacy that emerge, voluntarily or not, in the context of oil spills or state-sponsored violence. And “#Misanthropocene: 24 Theses,” a 2014 collaboration with Joshua Clover, is an exercise in self-critique. “#Misanthropocene” rebukes the “west melancholy” that anchors “Gentle Now.” It exposes the limited political reach of feeling bad about environmental destruction.
10.
Thinking of his daughter, Zawacki write, in “Dixie Pixie Sonnet”:
Pell-mell all hell and ill will will unfurl
If you don’t wear your cheap synthetic, frilly fuchsia princess dress
Fake glass high heel sequin slippers clacking on the tile
This section of the poem finds Zawacki at his most playful in the language. But then there is the statement: “In your lifetime, the Arctic will have been.”
How to create a language to express what it means to a young girl who has to encounter this world of iphones, data surveillance, text messages, twitter, facebook, etc.? In essence, these poems are addressed to a child. And furthermore, what can young people do to help change the direction this world is going in.
It took a young girl, Greta Thunberg, to confront politicians at the U.N. climate Summit and say:
For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.
There must be another reason: follow the money.
11.
Zawacki concludes his book with these lines:
an alarm going off, and darkness
dropping.
And cannot be undune.
The sun has gone out. How can we save ourselves? Through feeling grief about the situation? No. Audre Lorde writes, in Poetry is Not a Luxury, Sister Outsider; Essays& Speeches:
My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing....Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in those assumptions underlining our lives.
Anger is an energy. Zawacki’s Unsun reads like a report from the Front. It’s a book to arm yourself with for the long fight ahead.