Fantastic Metropolis

Later, in the mid-1980s, when any number of political issues struck me as urgent, I became especially focused on the US’s Central American policy and got actively involved in organized street actions. When in late 1989 the government of El Salvador began a massive campaign of slaughter against the most outspoken opponents of its repressive and murderous policies, I took the decision to engage in civil disobedience. The government of El Salvador had a history of releasing specific dissidents (whom they might otherwise have “disappeared”) under pressure of large and disruptive protests in the names of those dissidents in the US. The experience of performing direct political action, from the moment I began training through arrest, standing trial, and defending myself in court, was one of the most exhilarating of my life. I learned a great deal about power from it. And some of what I learned I’ve put into fiction I’ve written since then (although none of it has yet been published). Perhaps one of my biggest surprises was discovering that there’s nothing passive about nonviolent noncooperation that refuses to bow to police authority. I began writing a short novel called “The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)” while I and the people I was arrested with stood trial. I would sit in the courtroom all day, and then go home and write almost feverishly; for as long as the trials went on, I drew daily inspiration from the eminently sane, joyful rebelliousness of my trial cohort. The story takes place in a corporate for-profit prison in the near-future. The most powerful character in the story is an inmate, a political dissident facing off against the near-absolute power of the prison administration. She has no weapons but her will, her imagination, and her understanding of the dynamics of power.

I had, of course, been incorporating my activist experience into my fiction all along. My five-volume Marq’ssan Cycle, which I began writing in October 1984 and completed in July 1986, originated with the question of how to get to a decent place in which every person’s thriving mattered from where we are now. (Aqueduct Press intends to publish the Marq’ssan Cycle beginning in 2005.) Later, about a year before I turned to civil disobedience, I wrote “The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.” I realized only after writing it that I had an urgent need to address (among other things) my experience of being interviewed by an NPR reporter. In 1987, I and a few other activists who were also artists organized a multimedia, four-day political art event focused on the US’s “Low Intensity Conflict in El Salvador,” which we subtitled “High Intensity Laboratory.” The event was successful beyond our wildest dreams, drawing an audience of people who would never have knowingly agreed to attend any sort of politically oppositional event. The Seattle media featured stories on us, and the local NPR affiliate sent a reporter to interview four of us organizers. The reporter sat with us in the café at the Elliott Bay Book Company for about an hour with her tape-recorder running. She warned us that however long we talked, the segment she produced would probably run to only three or four minutes of air-time. In other words, we knew that she would be selecting only a few fragments of our conversation to edit into her tape. Although the reporter appeared to invite us to speak to the political issue our arts event explicitly addressed, when I began to talk about “Reagan’s policies,” she shook her head at me to indicate that such talk was not acceptable and placed her hand over the microphone. Without even realizing what I was doing, I began to censor my speech—even though, as I realized only later, the reporter could have simply chosen not to use anything I might say about the Reagan Administration in the post-production process. When the segment was aired, I realized that she had managed and edited our discussion such that people without any prior knowledge of US policies in Central America would think our protest was against the barbaric El Salvadoran government, rather than against US foreign policy. What disturbed me most, however, was that during the interview, I and my fellow interviewees censored ourselves without being particularly conscious of doing so. We picked up on the cues fed us by the reporter and played the game as we were tacitly asked to do. Ever since then, this episode has represented a paradigm of how the most banal level of self-censorship works: without threat, and without consciousness. I had actually portrayed that kind of self-censorship fairly extensively in the Marq’ssan Cycle, which I wrote prior to the NPR interview, but apparently hadn’t realized that I myself was so susceptible to such tacit pressure. I have become much more conscious of its workings since the interview and continue to explore it in my fiction (as well as look for its working in my own life).