Top Quotes: “Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism” — Nadya Tolokonnikova
Introduction
“If nationalist aggression, closed borders, exceptionalism of any kind really worked for society, North Korea would be the most prosperous country on earth. They have never really worked, but we keep buying it.”
“I was born in Norilsk, a very industrial and very Siberian city. Siberia is the shape of a giant cock. My hometown is located at the head. Every summer I’d go to my grandma’s place, which is right between the balls and a four hour flight away.
The air in my hometown consists of heavy metals with a little oxygen. Life expectancy is ten years less than in other regions of Russia, the risk of cancer two times higher.”
“In Holland there is a law that allows employees to reduce their working hours simply by asking their employer. The employer is required to accept this request unless there is a sufficiently good business reason to deny it (which happens in less than 5 percent of cases). By protecting part-time employment, Holland has produced the highest ratio of part-time workers in the world.”
Pussy Riot
“We created Pussy Riot out of confusion. My friend Kat and I had been invited to give a lecture. We told the organizers the topic would be “Punk Feminism in Russia.” We started preparing for the lecture the night before and suddenly discovered that Russian punk feminism did not exist. There was feminism, and there was punk, but there was no punk feminism. The lecture was less than a day away. There was only one solution: invent punk feminism so we would have something to talk about.
Our first song was “Kill the Sexist” (October 2011).”
“Pussy Riot began rehearsing in a basement belonging to a Moscow church. It was the autumn of 2011. Construction work was going on. We would be recording songs, and workers with jackhammers were walking around us.
We rehearsed a number thoroughly and for a long time. Unlike punk groups who perform in clubs, we had to get the musical part down, but we also had to unpack and pack the equipment as quickly as possible. We not only sang during rehearsals but also tried to learn how to continue playing and singing when guards or police were grabbing our legs and trying to drag us away.
Time passed, and the renovation of the church basement was finished. The church decided to rent it to a store, and we wound up on the street. We went to rehearse in a pedestrian underpass from which we were constantly kicked out.
But after a couple of months, the harsh winter was setting in, and it was impossible to rehearse outside. We set up shop in an abandoned tire plant. We went there every day during the New Year’s holidays. We started work on January 1, 2012, as the country was sleeping in after the big party and MPs were sunbathing in Miami. The guards at the entrance to the plant always asked us the same thing; “Can’t sit still at home, girls?”
“Why should we stay at home?” Kat would ask, surprised.
“To make pies and cook soup.”
After hearing a full lecture on the history of the feminist movement a couple of times in response to their questions, the guards elected not to talk to us anymore and would just let us in without saying a word. That is just what we wanted.”
“Some people are inspired by exactly the same things in Pussy Rlot that irritate others: directness, frankness, and shameless dilettantism. You say we’re making shitty music? That’s right. We consciously stick to the concept of bad music, bad texts, and bad rhymes. Not all of us have studied music, and the quality of performance has never been a priority. The essence of punk is an explosion. It is the maximal discharge of creative energy, which does not require any particular technique.
But why the bright colors? It was a really dumb reason: we just didn’t want to be taken for terrorists in black balaclavas. We didn’t want to scare people; we wanted to bring some fun, so we decided to look like clowns.”
“Smile as an act of resistance. Smile and say fuck you at the same time. Laugh in the face of your wardens. Seduce your hangman into your beliefs. Make prison wardens your friends. Win the hearts of those who support the villain. Convince the police that they should be on your side. When the army refuses to shoot into the crowd of protestors, the revolution wins.”
Prison
“I was facing seven years in a prison camp. I lived every day as if it was the last one. I felt every minute of my life.”
“I learned what it means to care and be attentive. I was able to see green leaves for about thirty minutes the whole summer. I was able to catch sunlight through the prison bars for ten minutes several times a week. I did it religiously every time I had a chance to see the sun. I caught rare raindrops and cried happy tears because of the shining beauty of the rain.
The white-blue penitentiary light is always on in the cell. At night they have the light turned on: guards have to see the prisoners, and prisoners should always remember that they are being watched.”
Activism
“Any given system of power is built on an assumption (which of course is trying to portray itself as an axiom) that to receive joy you need to pay or obey. The ultimate act of subversion is thus finding joy in a refusal to pay and obey, in an act of living by radically different values. It’s not an act of deprivation or austerity, it’s not a vow, it’s an act that reveals joy that transcends given boundaries. And that’s the way to go, the way to attract people to what we’re doing. Who can possibly be excited about the politics of austerity anyway?
Bring joy back into the act of resistance. For some weird reason political action and fun have been basically separated for decades. It comes from the professionalization of politics. I believe we’ve lost the connection between our existence, something that personally touches us, and politics. Look back at what was going on in the 1960s: we used to know how to combine the very core of our human existence and politics. Perhaps that’s why radical politics changed so many things in the political structure back then: those amazing, brave, and beautiful. beings knew how to live passionately, how to treat political action as the most exciting and pleasurable love affair in their lives.”
“It began as a series of protests and occupations by students. The agenda was a polyhedral constellation of anticonsumerism, anarchism, pro-imagination. . . Students occupied the Sorbonne and said it was now the “people’s university.”
Students were joined by striking workers who staged wildcat strikes throughout the French economy. Up to 11 million workers took part — a huge number that represented about a quarter of the population of France at the time. The strike was the largest in French history and lasted for two weeks.
In a wildcat strike, workers walk off the job with no warning and often without authorization or support from the union. In this sense they are “unofficial.” (By the way, “wildcat strike action” is the best name ever, isn’t it?) Wildcat strikes have been considered illegal in the United States since 1935 (of course). In 1968, they were the main tactic of the protesting workers.
The workers’ demands were serious and structural. They wanted to see a change in how things worked, how things were governed. It was a radical agenda — not better wages and conditions but a plan to kick out the government and President de Gaulle and to have the ability to run their own factories. When the trade union leadership negotiated a one-third increase in minimum wages, the workers occupying their factories refused to return to work. It wasn’t enough. It was a sellout. After union leaders made the deal, workers started to treat their own leaders as traitors and collaborationists.
“The largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country, and the first wildcat general strike in history; revolutionary occupations and the beginnings of direct democracy; the increasingly complete collapse of state power for nearly two weeks”…this is what the French May 1968 movement was essentially.”
“CLOSING OF THE FASCIST RESTAURANT OPRICHNIK, DECEMBER 2008
LOCATION: THE MOSCOW RESTAURANT OPRICHNIK, OWNED BY PRO-PUTIN, ULTRACONSERVA-TIVE JOURNALIST MIKHAIL LEONTYEV
The restaurant Oprichnik opened in Moscow. We immediately set ourselves the goal of closing it by welding a metal plate to the front door. Why?
In the sixteenth century, Ivan the Terrible used the oprichnina to advance his policies in Russia. To wit, he stabbed, hacked, hanged, and poured boiling water on his enemies. Ivan and his oprichniks used red-hot frying pans, ovens, tongs, and ropes. This reign of terror was called the oprichnina. In Russia, calling a restaurant Oprichnik is like naming a nightclub Auschwitz in Germany.
We practiced welding doors in the tank-strewn back alleys of Victory Park in Moscow. Day by day, a handful of people learned how to weld in the freezing December weather amid garages and snowdrifts.
Our activist collective had split into two parts.
The first was the industrial workers. We were in charge of the physical work — finding a huge pile of metal and welding it to the door of our restaurant. We had a wide range of engaged citizens: anarchists, social democrats, feminists, advocates for transgender rights, and those who simply shared our general irritation with Vladimir Putin. Weirdly enough, years afterward I found out that one of those anti-Putin activists was secretly super-conservative, and the nature of his disapproval of Putin was that Putin was not tough enough. Well, shit happens.
The second half of our group was a distraction group. Their role was to enter the restaurant and play a drunken crowd to attract the attention of security workers. The action was to happen at the end of December, close to New Year’s eve, so the distracters were dressed as bunnies, kitties, and Santa Clauses. We rehearsed a song that our crew would start to sing when welding started. They had to sing super loud, otherwise security would hear the welding and prevent the action.
Finally, one more activist, a prominent organizer of LGBT prides in Moscow, had to stand on the street cor-mner, close to the restaurant, to hand passersby stickers on LGBT issues. His mission was to distract potential secret or not-so-secret police officers.
And you know, we did it, we did it successfully — we closed that shameful restaurant. We came back there after the action, at night, after a few hours had passed, to take a look at them trying to tear our welded sheet of metal from their door and open it.
Now the restaurant is completely gone. Sometimes I walk down that street and wonder whether that’s connected with our action or not.”
“A million protest actions are possible:
kiss-in: A form of protest in which people in same-sex or queer relationships kiss in a public place to demonstrate their sexual preferences.
die-in: A form of protest in which participants pretend that they’re dead. This method was used by animal rights ac-tivists, antiwar activists, human rights activists, gun control activists, environmental activists, and many more. bed-in: A protest in bed. The most famous one was done by Yoko Ono and John Lennon in 1969 in Amsterdam, where they campaigned against the Vietnam War from their bed.
car/motorcycle caravans: A group of cars/bikes move through the city with lots of symbols, posters, and noise. Used, for example, by the Blue Buckets movement in Russia to protest the unnecessarily frequent use of flashing lights and roadblocks by motorcades and vehicles carrying top officials.
repainting: In 1991, Czech sculptor David Cerny painted a Soviet IS-2 tank pink.
replacing: Swapping “normal” mannequins in shop windows with “abnormal” mannequins.
shopdropping: Covertly placing your own items in stores. refusing to accept management’s absurd orders and laughing in response to them
laughing in response to abuse by police or guards, laughing to protest a trial
(Ridiculing power is one of the best means of democratization; we call it methods of laughter.)”
“People dont call it the Cathedral of Christ the Savior anymore, but rather the Pussy Riot church or, alternatively, the trade center of Christ the Savior. You can rent a holy conference hall and a press center and a concert hall with a VIP green room. Restaurants, a laundry, and a VIP car-washing service are located under the altar in the basement. It also houses a company that sells seafood. Tourists are sold Fabergé eggs at 150,000 rubles a pop, and the cathedral does a brisk trade in souvenirs.
And since no one supervises or taxes them, the Russian Orthodox Church has decided to dabble in cheap Arabian gold. ‘If you want to be sure that your venture will go well, do it with us.’ That’s what I read on the website of the “holy place.”
The Orthodox Church’s patriarch, Kirill, renowned for his tobacco business and his alleged fortune of $4 billion, spoke out often before the elections against political activism on the part of the rank and file. “Orthodox people are unable to go to demonstrations. These people do not go to demonstrations. Their voices are not heard. They pray in the quiet of their monasteries, their monastic cells, and their homes,” said His Holiness.
The patriarch had been unashamedly campaigning for Putin, referring to him as president of Russia before the presidential elections took place and saying that Putin had allegedly “fixed history’s crookedness. If Putin has fixed anything, it would be the pockets of his minions — for example, the pockets of His Holiness Kirill.
So Pussy Riot’s only crime was that we did not rent a room at Christ the Savior Cathedral. The church’s website features a price list for room rentals. Any wealthy official or businessman could afford to hold a banquet at the church, because he is a man, has money, and is not opposed to Putin. These are the three secrets to success in Russia.”
“They produced their own fake edition of the New York Times, dated July 4, 2009 — 80,000 copies of which were given to people on the streets of New York and Los Angeles. The paper imagined an alternative future that had already arrived, with headlines like “Iraq War Ends” and “Nation Sets Its Sights on Building Sane Economy.” “All the News We Hope to Print,” said the tagline on the front page. There were stories about establishing universal health care, a maximum wage for CEOs, as well as an article in which George W. Bush accuses himself of treason for his actions during his years as president.
In 2004 Servin, in character as a Dow Chemical spokesman, went on the BBC and said Dow was going to give $12 billion to the untold thousands of victims of the Bhopal chemical plant disaster in India in 1984. Which is what Dow Chemical should have done. The financial market’s reaction was to tank Dow stock to the tune of billions. Oh no! Money for deserving victims?”
“Putin remains an ordinary KGB agent, and — paradoxically — that’s the secret of his success. Putin came into his enormous power by pure accident. He was appointed by the oligarchs in 2000, with the oligarchs believing that Putin would be their puppet. They believed it because Putin is a truly unexceptional human being.”
“In 1967 Philip Berrigan and his comrades (the “Baltimore Four”), two Catholics and two Protestants, one of whom was an artist and two ex-military, including Berrigan, a former infantry lieutenant, occupied the Selective Service Board, a military building in Baltimore where the draft was organized. The men poured human and chicken blood over records in a sacrificial act meant to protest “the pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese blood in Indochina.” Philip Berrigan and others were arrested for this action. Their trial took place at the same time as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the subsequent riots in Baltimore and other American cities. Berrigan was sentenced to six years in federal prison. Their nonviolent action laid the foundation for more radical antiwar demonstrations.
“I think that [the] word [of the church], on the modern scene, is one of liberation from death. We are learning something of the price of that word, in repeated trials and jailings,” writes Daniel Berrigan.
In 1968, Philip Berrigan was released on bail. Of course, the brothers did not stop. Philip and Daniel, joined by seven other activists (the group became known as the “Catonsville Nine”) walked into the offices of a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, removed six hundred draft records, doused them in homemade napalm, and burned them in front of the building.
“We confront the Roman Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country’s crimes. We are convinced that the religious bureaucracy in this country is racist, is an accomplice in this war, and is hostile to the poor,” they said.
The brothers were convicted of conspiracy and destruction of government property. They were sentenced to three years in prison. They went into hiding but were caught and forced to serve the sentence.”
Prison
“I was locked in a cell with a former police investigator. She was one of those people who had followed her heart and joined the police after watching a TV series about good cops in her childhood. During the 1990s she investigated crimes, saving citizens from malevolent cops, and she was happy. In 2003 she resigned, because she lost interest. Nobody needed crimes solved. Instead, total submission and unconditional loyalty were all that were required, even the willingness to break the law. Her ex-husband, also a cop, put her in jail for a crime she did not commit. She was accused of being a fraud. But in fact her ex-husband openly told her that her criminal case was bullshit, and if she’d give him a flat she owned, he’d make this case disappear and she’d be free. She refused to give him the flat. So she was in jail.”
“I encountered fourth- and fifth-generation guards. From the time they are knee high, the locals believe that a person’s only purpose in life is to suppress another person’s will.
The toughest discipline, the longest workdays, the most flagrant injustice. When people are sent off to Mordovia it’s as if they’re being sent off to be executed.
We worked sixteen to seventeen hours a day, from 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. We slept four hours a day. We had a day off once every month and a half.”
“Your unit, or even the entire prison, has to endure your punishment along with you. The most vile thing is that this includes people you’ve come to care about. One of my friends was reprimanded for drinking tea with me and was denied parole, which she had been working toward for seven years by diligently overfulfilling quotas in the manufacturing zone.
Disciplinary reports were filed on everyone who talked to me. It hurt me that people I cared about were forced to suffer.”
“It was my third hunger strike. The first one lasted for nine days, the second and third ones for five days. I finished my third hunger strike after the prison warden came to my bed with his mobile phone and asked me if I wanted to talk with the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights in Russia. A really high person in their hierarchy.”
“It was all uncomfortable to them: my hunger strike and, of course, massive support from the outside — activists, with my comrade Peter Verzilov among them, were camping outside the prison, constantly rallying, chanting, and setting off fireworks. They were filing endless complaints and following the wardens everywhere, asking unpleasant questions about what’s up with prison conditions and why on earth they treat human beings as slaves.
The Presidential Council guaranteed me that there would be an investigation of the human rights violations I’d mentioned in an open letter I wrote describing the reasons for my hunger strike. He told me that I’d even be invited to be on the public supervisory board when I got out. You learn one thing in prison: all officials recklessly lie all the time. You cannot trust anyone. But it still sounded like a good point to start negotiations.
As a result of my hunger strike, a major review of my penal colony happened. It was indeed initiated by that council. Most inmates were too intimidated to talk with the supervisory commission about violations, but the workday was reduced in my penitentiary to eight hours for some time. Food was better. The head of the penal colony lost his job.”
“Hilarious situations arose after my hunger strike. I was still in prison, but guards totally changed their attitude to me. They treated me as an equal. I was shocked in the beginning, but then I just chilled and began to enjoy it. Christmas had come in the middle of summer. Sometimes it felt like officials were even slightly intimidated by my presence in their facility. I turned effectively from a prisoner into a member of a public supervisory commission in their eyes. I gained lots of symbolic power and weight. They were well aware of the trouble that prison wardens in my Mordovian camp had to face because of my open letter and protest. They did not want to lose their jobs too.”
“When I arrived at my next facility, I could see the highest prison officials lining up, meeting me and checking how it’s going. All of a sudden they started to care about following every single law.
I got back all the letters that censors in Mordovia had hidden from me for a year. I felt like I had just won the biggest lottery that has ever existed. Four giant, human-size sacks of letters in Russian, English, Chinese, French, Spanish, and more. Packages and packages of postcards that wonderful and truly alive people were sending from all over the world. Little knitted balaclavas. Rainbow balaclavas. I cried over these gifts and cards.”
“Because officials were slightly intimidated and confused by my presence now, I ended up in a carnival of prison surrealism. Like, they didn’t give me real shitty prison food but bought food especially for me. That’s how I got lamb ribs with mashed potato in the prison of Chelyabinsk. It happened only because I had mentioned Mordovian prison food in my open letter and it became known internationally for its misery.
In a prison of Abakan I was put in a cell with a young girl who was celebrating her birthday. She was so shocked by the new food that wardens started to give us after I was moved to her cell! It was real meat, real vegetables. She was asking me about the difference between the North and South Poles, about Stalin and Madonna, when guards showed up in our cell, greeted my cellmate, and wished her a happy birthday. She could not believe what had just happened. Before they had been rude and the food was disgusting.”
“At the end of my one-month journey I was transported to Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and sent to the biggest and oldest Siberian prison. In fact I was happy to be sent to Siberia, ‘cause it’s my home. Siberians are simply great. Another exciting thing is that I had wanted to wind up in that prison since I was five. My grandmother’s apartment, where I spent a lot of time in my childhood, is located right across the road. I remember being five or six years old and walking alongside those giant fences thinking, “How curious I am to take a look at what’s there! I wonder if it’s possible to escape? Can I use a ladder and take a look?” No doubt there is something witchy about me, because everything I passionately want inevitably happens.
My final destination was a prison hospital. It’s probably one of the most prosperous prison facilities in the whole of Russia. The prison system didn’t want to hear my complaints anymore. They let me write, read, and paint what I wanted. Instead of wearing the tight and extremely uncomfortable prison uniform, we wore pajamas. And finally, I got to participate in a prison rock band. It was called Free Breathe. Our band was mixed-four men and two women, including me. Every evening at 6:30, we were escorted to a prison theater, where our rehearsals took place. All of that was inconceivable before my hunger strike.”
Conclusion
“General Electric, which makes your fridges and washing machines, and Boeing, whose planes you’re flying in, are two of the biggest — and very legal — arms manufacturers and profiteers from war.”
“CHRIS: I started an underground newspaper in high school, and the administration banned it.
NADYA: Of course.
CHRIS: It was a serious paper. I wrote stuff I cared about that would normally never have been in a school paper. For instance, the people who worked in the kitchen, who were poor people of color, lived above the kitchen in terrible conditions. No students were allowed to go up there. I went up there and took pictures, and waited until the commencement issue so all the parents would be there and handed it out to embarrass the school, and the trustees were there.
Over the summer, the school renovated the kitchen, and when I came back, the kitchen staff had put up a little plaque in my honor.”
“CHRIS: There was no gay and lesbian organization at my college, Colgate University. My father by then had a church in Syracuse, which was an hour away, and he brought gay speakers to my campus, and my father said, you have to go public, you have to come out. They were too frightened to go out of the closet. So one day my father said to me: you’re going to have to start the gay and lesbian organization, which I did. I’m not gay, but I founded the gay and lesbian organization.”
“Pope John Paul II did tremendous damage to the church. Because he had this phobia against communism. That gave the church a kind of right-wing tilt, and the church in essence embraced neoliberalism. It forgot about justice. It certainly forgot about the poor. And that’s why it’s largely irrelevant.”
“CHRIS: Their court trials are a joke. There’s no habeas corpus, there’s no due process, 94 percent are forced to plead out to things they didn’t even do.
NADYA: Because they’re scared.
CHRIS: The students I teach in the prisons with the longest sentences are the ones that went to trial because they didn’t do it. And they have to make an example of them because if everyone went to trial the system would crash. They’l stack you with twelve, fifteen charges, half of which they know you didn’t do. And then they get to say: if you go to trial, look at that poor guy who went to trial. I taught a guy once who had life plus a hundred and fifty-four years, and he’s never committed a violent crime. It’s insane.
NADYA: What did he do?
CHRIS: It was drugs and weapons possession.”
“CHRIS: Politics is a game of fear. Appealing to its better nature is a waste of time, it doesnt happen. So who was America’s last liberal president? It was Richard Nixon. Not because he had a soul or a heart or a conscience. But because he was scared of movements. Mine Safety Act, Clean Water Act — all of that came from Nixon.
There’s a scene in Kissinger’s memoirs where tens of thousands of people have surrounded the White House in an antiwar demonstration and Nixon has put empty city buses all around the White House as barricades, and he looks out the window, and he goes, Henry, they’re going to break through the barricades and get us. Well, that’s where people in power have to be, all the time. I lived in France when Sarkozy was president. Sarkozy pissed in his pants every time the students came into Paris or the farmers brought their tractors into Paris.
NADYA: What should we ask for? What will be those words that can really bring us together?
CHRIS: I’m a socialist. I believe that most of the people at Goldman Sachs should go to prison, and Goldman Sachs should be shut down. Banks should be nationalized. Utilities should be nationalized; the fossil fuel industry should be nationalized.”
“The acquittal rate in modern Russia is less than 1 percent. What does that mean practically? It means that once you find yourself in a police station, it’s almost impossible to get out of there. Even those who work within the system are not happy about that. I know policemen for whom dignity and self-respect are important. We have ex-interrogators and ex-prosecutors working with us on protecting prisoners’ rights.
People die in police custody every day. There are thousands of deaths in prison annually, half of them from tuberculosis, which given the current state of medicine should be impossible to die from, and from HIV, which is no longer necessarily a death sentence on the outside.”
“Later, in the 1960s and ‘70s, came Kollontai’s heirs, like the activist and visionary Shulamith Firestone (1945–2012). Firestone’s ideas were a radical cocktail of feminism and critiques of Marxism and psychoanalysis. In The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970), a bestseller written when she was twenty-five, Firestone advocated the complete elimination of gender as the only way to achieve equality. She wrote that to eliminate “sexual classes,” children would be born through “artificial reproduction” and they would no longer be dependent on a single mother. “Genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally,” she wrote, and labor wouldn’t be divided by the sexes because labor itself would be eliminated too (“through cybernetics”). A promoter of celibacy, Firestone said that in an equal society, sex and reproduction would no longer be important.
In a piece in the Atlantic published after Firestone’s death, Emily Chertoff wrote that “Firestone wanted to eliminate the following things: sex roles, procreative sex, gender, childhood, monogamy, mothering, the family unit, capitalism, the government, and especially the physiological phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth.””
“Feminism is a liberating tool that can be used by male, female, transgender, transsexual, queer, agender, anybody. Feminism allows me to say: I behave how I like and how I feel, I deconstruct gender roles and play with them, I mix them up voluntarily. Gender roles are my palette, not my chains.
There is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
PAUL THE APOSTLE, GALATIANS 3:28
No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.
BETTY FRIEDAN, THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.
FRANTZ FANON”
“Instead of protecting women from domestic violence, my government has recently passed a law that legalizes domestic violence.”
“I became a feminist because Russian men refuse to give me a hand. Russian men don’t shake hands with women. It bothered me.”
“I learned that in prison you are obliged to compete in beauty contests. If you don’t compete, you won’t be paroled.”
“The colony also decided that my friend who preferred to look androgynous was not ready to be paroled because she kept performing at prison concerts in low-heeled shoes. The way the colony saw it, performing onstage in low-heeled shoes was too masculine. A woman should wear high heels. My friend was granted parole only after she performed in high heels and thus proved her loyalty to the feminine regimen.”
“Your safety and happiness can be provided only by self-respect. It’s dangerous to lose your self-respect, and if you lose it once, you may never be able to pick it up off the floor. You have to take care of your self-respect 24/7. Consistency in your beliefs, behavior, and character is greatly appreciated. You cannot afford to panic, to be indecisive. Your deeds should follow your words; otherwise it’ll become known that you’re a cheap little liar, you’re weak and can be easily attacked and hustled.
We had to go through normalization and sanitization when we came out. We were expected to say one thing and not say another. Sometimes I would feel like my newborn freedom was dissolving into the air.”
“When Pussy Riot was speaking at Harvard, police arrested one man from the audience for speaking his mind. His position was that Harvard should not host public figures who openly supported Vladimir Putin, which Harvard had done before.
We were supposed to go along with it. Instead, we canceled our upcoming events, and rather than going to a fancy dinner, we went to the police station and stayed there until the man was freed. The looks on their faces! But how could they expect us to do anything different? The dissonance seemed lost on them.”
“hooks was born Gloria Watkins, and her pseudonym is a tribute to her great-grandmother. She decided not to capitalize her name because she wanted to focus on her work rather than her name, on her ideas rather than her personality. hooks’s name is a perfect representation of her writings: nonhierarchical, poetic, and explosive. Inclusiveness wins over elitism; all letters are equal.”
“When you knock on doors and ask people to participate, some of them will tell you to go fuck yourself. That’s fine. So go fuck yourself — it helps to relax and to get your thoughts together and keep going.”
“Know this: if everyone who tweeted against Trump showed up on the street and refused to leave until he left, Trump would be out of office in a week. The powerless do have power.”
