I'd never heard of Poison Girls until I read this and immediately searched for more information on them. I was intrigued when you mentioned that the lead singer/guitarist was a mother in her 40s when she started the band. I'm a mother in my 40s so it makes sense that would catch my attention. Anyway, I found out that Vi Subversa died about 10 years ago. In this search I stumbled on an obituary that she had written herself for "the writer she was" and it's really beautiful. I think a lot about anarchy and mothering and how the fuck I do this and in her self-written obituary, she ended with this:
"What I do want and pray for is the joy of making music, the magic and freedom of poetry, the beauty of flowers and fertility, and the miracle of growth. For the instant warmth and intimacy of kittens, and the glory of wildlife. So I will write for children. I will read, out loud, wearing a funny hat and glittery clothes. I will tell them about watching wasps suck sweetness from spotty foxgloves, about mischief and mystery and magic. I will call my first collection Daisies are Fried Eggs for Teddy Bears. I will write as a child, from the child in me, to the child in you."
I love this so much. Thank you for leading me to this nugget today.
I just finished a 4parter about Crass for my podcast and to be honest, while I love Crass, I wonder if i shouldn't have focused on Poison Girls instead. I don't know enough about Vi Subversa yet but i wanna know so much more.
"I lost friends to drinking and driving, to suicide, to overdose, to asyphixiation.
"Maybe this is misguided, but I think as the politics ebbed, the substances flowed. When the alterglobalization movement and the antiwar movement waned, people held onto each other as best they could but there wasn’t the same political underpinning."
I think it cuts deeper than that. People die in these situations because the person they wanted to be (sometimes the only version of their life they'd ever liked living or looked forward to) is already dead. There are huge relational and identity losses and loss of structure in everyday life as a movement wanes. Not everyone has the resources to keep their body alive while they rebuild a new self. People can also experience these losses out of sync with the larger group after more-personal events, such as health issues or something that causes them to have to avoid someone on the scene.
Normally, use of potentially dangerous substances stays sub-lethal because people have a reason to moderate their use. Suicidal impulses and other risky behavior stay in check for similar reasons. Needing to get up tomorrow for your community, for the revolution, for a specific meeting or protest or distro or to cook or to demolish rotting wood or to give people rides to the clinic--those are all actual reasons people don't die on any given night. And even though people don't all suddenly give up organizing, suddenly the tide has turned against you and you have less and less of those opportunities, you see less and less of the people your whole body learned to trust and rely on, you have less and less faith that you being around to help out tomorrow will actually end up meaning anything.
This is heightened by the fact that highly traumatized people are likely to interpret the movement's failure as a personal fault and/or a sign that everyone/everything is unsafe. It's easy to feel guilty for not being one of the most hardcore people who respond to the turning tide with increasingly rash action (or by joining cults). And no matter what you do, you can't get back to the high of being part of a community that was strong enough to protect itself and celebrate. You can't get back to who that community let you be.
I think it took me so long to come to anarchist thinkers and ideas mostly because of the punk aesthetic associated with anarchists. Working largely in indigenous sovereignty circles, the punk world (and the white, black-clad, young and disaffected people that I imagined lived there) did not seem to be overlapping at all. I eventually came around to anarchy due to my discontent with the nation-state as the way we were/are seeking deoccupation. It felt blasphemous to speak that in the activist (and academic) circles that I had found myself in at that time because of the reverence for the Ali‘i and kānaka who had done so much to try to keep (and return) independence to Hawai‘i. And, if I’m being honest, it was you Margret, through this substack, that made anarchism seem…approachable, something that maybe wasn’t antithetical to the spiritual, elder-revering, mostly native community in which I live, raise my kids, and do my work in the world. Also, reading Klee Benally has been a revelation, someone I only learned of through a conversation you had with Dean Spade. So, thank you.
I was confused at first when you referred to wally hope and others as hippies because they are mostly referred to as New Age travellers in UK and they played a big role in the road protest movement of the 90’s.
I'd never heard of Poison Girls until I read this and immediately searched for more information on them. I was intrigued when you mentioned that the lead singer/guitarist was a mother in her 40s when she started the band. I'm a mother in my 40s so it makes sense that would catch my attention. Anyway, I found out that Vi Subversa died about 10 years ago. In this search I stumbled on an obituary that she had written herself for "the writer she was" and it's really beautiful. I think a lot about anarchy and mothering and how the fuck I do this and in her self-written obituary, she ended with this:
"What I do want and pray for is the joy of making music, the magic and freedom of poetry, the beauty of flowers and fertility, and the miracle of growth. For the instant warmth and intimacy of kittens, and the glory of wildlife. So I will write for children. I will read, out loud, wearing a funny hat and glittery clothes. I will tell them about watching wasps suck sweetness from spotty foxgloves, about mischief and mystery and magic. I will call my first collection Daisies are Fried Eggs for Teddy Bears. I will write as a child, from the child in me, to the child in you."
I love this so much. Thank you for leading me to this nugget today.
I just finished a 4parter about Crass for my podcast and to be honest, while I love Crass, I wonder if i shouldn't have focused on Poison Girls instead. I don't know enough about Vi Subversa yet but i wanna know so much more.
"I lost friends to drinking and driving, to suicide, to overdose, to asyphixiation.
"Maybe this is misguided, but I think as the politics ebbed, the substances flowed. When the alterglobalization movement and the antiwar movement waned, people held onto each other as best they could but there wasn’t the same political underpinning."
I think it cuts deeper than that. People die in these situations because the person they wanted to be (sometimes the only version of their life they'd ever liked living or looked forward to) is already dead. There are huge relational and identity losses and loss of structure in everyday life as a movement wanes. Not everyone has the resources to keep their body alive while they rebuild a new self. People can also experience these losses out of sync with the larger group after more-personal events, such as health issues or something that causes them to have to avoid someone on the scene.
Normally, use of potentially dangerous substances stays sub-lethal because people have a reason to moderate their use. Suicidal impulses and other risky behavior stay in check for similar reasons. Needing to get up tomorrow for your community, for the revolution, for a specific meeting or protest or distro or to cook or to demolish rotting wood or to give people rides to the clinic--those are all actual reasons people don't die on any given night. And even though people don't all suddenly give up organizing, suddenly the tide has turned against you and you have less and less of those opportunities, you see less and less of the people your whole body learned to trust and rely on, you have less and less faith that you being around to help out tomorrow will actually end up meaning anything.
This is heightened by the fact that highly traumatized people are likely to interpret the movement's failure as a personal fault and/or a sign that everyone/everything is unsafe. It's easy to feel guilty for not being one of the most hardcore people who respond to the turning tide with increasingly rash action (or by joining cults). And no matter what you do, you can't get back to the high of being part of a community that was strong enough to protect itself and celebrate. You can't get back to who that community let you be.
I think it took me so long to come to anarchist thinkers and ideas mostly because of the punk aesthetic associated with anarchists. Working largely in indigenous sovereignty circles, the punk world (and the white, black-clad, young and disaffected people that I imagined lived there) did not seem to be overlapping at all. I eventually came around to anarchy due to my discontent with the nation-state as the way we were/are seeking deoccupation. It felt blasphemous to speak that in the activist (and academic) circles that I had found myself in at that time because of the reverence for the Ali‘i and kānaka who had done so much to try to keep (and return) independence to Hawai‘i. And, if I’m being honest, it was you Margret, through this substack, that made anarchism seem…approachable, something that maybe wasn’t antithetical to the spiritual, elder-revering, mostly native community in which I live, raise my kids, and do my work in the world. Also, reading Klee Benally has been a revelation, someone I only learned of through a conversation you had with Dean Spade. So, thank you.
oh that's amazing, thank you for telling me! And yeah, having a politics associated primarily with a subculture is a serious problem.
Thanks for the shout-out to Anarcho-punk-moms
we'd be nowhere without the anarcho-punk-moms
"all standards, no community"truer than true!!🔥🔥🔥
Red Emmas is THE BEST, I fell in love with that place when I visited Baltimore. I'd love to see something similar spring up in Providence.
I was confused at first when you referred to wally hope and others as hippies because they are mostly referred to as New Age travellers in UK and they played a big role in the road protest movement of the 90’s.
I love your quote about social media. It's a beautiful and heartfelt piece.