(…) the faultline between artificiality and sincerity: a thrilling but terrifying place to be. It’s her reaction to “the complexity of the situation we’re in, as people living now,” she explains, halting as she extracts a thread from her spiralling thoughts. “You can have contradictory feelings about everything and things don’t make sense. The range of knowledge available to us is so confusing.”

“But also it’s surreal and it’s ridiculous,” she concludes. “I’m trying to get to a point where I can just embrace that feeling fully, as a human.”

“I take a stance against a temporality that describes liberation only in terms of unilateral ‘victory’ against the reactionary. Such a perspective shows an “enormous condescension of posterity” towards those who are defeated. Writing history this way suggests turns the story of oppressed peoples’ struggles into one of successive defeats, imposing a linearity in which any setback is taken as proof that the fight was badly conducted… rather than one that exposes the determination of reactionary and imperialist forces to crush any dissent. This is what songs of struggle — Black spirituals, revolutionary songs, gospel songs, songs of [enslaved people] and colonized people — recount: the long road to freedom, a never-ending struggle, revolution as daily work.”

Francoise Vergés