LETTERS AGAINST “THE DISCOURSE”
by Jeanne D’Anarchie

Anyway, can I call you Sean? I’ve heard so much about you. My mentors bring you up all the time. Talk about your stature. The monkey on your back. I hear about the gentleness of your soul more than anything. Hard not to feel a connection. Under a different sky I’d have liked to meet you. I’ve got admiration in buckets. I’ve found plenty of myself in your work, or who I want to be. A dreamer. A fighter. I can't quite get the voice down though. I'm just fumbling through a rant, your strength keeps leaking out, it’s kept me glued to Letters for two years now. CAConrad turned me onto it in my first week of knowing them, asking me if I’d heard of some Brit named Bonney. I’ll be honest, I don’t really care for the British. My patron is Jeanne D’Arc, you know the beef, but a revolutionary is a revolutionary. I used to say the British taught Americans how to be fascist. Looking at it all, Americans perfected it. I’m being honest when I say that every time I sit down at a coffee shop I think of your poetry. When I cross off a day on the calendar, a little voice whispers ACAB. I say Fuck the Police recreationally. Get my friends to say it. Each class I tell the hungover freshmen I teach I’m not a fucking cop. Some laugh, some cringe, a couple seem to get it. I see it in red as I scroll endlessly through instagram. It’s fucking depressing. These past few days I’ve had hope. Students at Cal Poly Humboldt barricaded two buildings in the name of BDS, in solidarity with Gaza, with other universities sicking cops on students. Intifada Hall they’re calling it. There’s a video I love of some comrade with an empty 5 gallon jug, one of those big blue plastic ones from a water cooler, bonking the riot team right on the face shield. You can see him getting angrier and angrier, like a rabid dog, swiping at it blind as fuck-all. It made me spit out my drink. I’ve been seeing those jugs used to take down sprinkler systems. New uses for steel drums and bolt cutters. Take notes kiddos. Those students were the first to snatch a building in this growing cry of refusal that kicked off at Columbia’s encampment, that kicked off after 200+ days of genocide and Biden’s saving face. The students have held it, for now. It’s fucking metal. Puts a little pep in my step seeing kids at Northeastern learning riot tactics and pushing the cops off campus by sheer numbers. Seeing professors at Emory getting arrested for their kids. Watching the light die behind a pig’s aviators. There’s a demo tomorrow for the new Chancellor. Another opportunist with vacant eyes and blood on his hands. May Day is coming up. Parties, all of them and it’s escalating. They uncovered about 400 bodies in Nasser Hospital in Gaza, a mass grave. People tortured, buried alive, patients with catheters in, fucking doctors. Each day Bibi seems to lecture the whole fucking nation about Nazis. Hamas on campuses. Some shit about brainwashing students in Iran. If there’s a time to get out there it’s now. I’m thinking of you, sitting here feverish with COVID. I’m thinking of revolution and what they took from us, you included. As a tranny, as a leftist, as a southerner, as a dyke-fag or whatever, as a worker with my body on the line, Gaza is to Vietnam is to AIDS is to Cambodia is to Iraq is to Ferguson is to Flint is to Algeria is to every Cop City cropping up is to all of Turtle Island. The gauntlet gets thrown each year and this year I dare say we’re making an attempt. I’ve been reading Judith Butler to kill the time. Somewhere in an essay they say the way slurs work in discourse is for example when some redneck back home yells the word Faggot at me there’s a phantom mob of foaming bigots standing behind the coward as he speeds off in his pickup. A mob of shaved headed ROTC kids and my cop of an uncle and the men who taught me in Sunday School. My blood begins to boil, my heart starts thrumming, if it’s a real mob or an imagined one, either way I feel it in my heels. Butler’s point is a chorus of gay-bashers or bigots sits behind every slur that gets dropped. Every mediocre slogan of hate. That’s the discourse. The real domination and supremacist skullfuckery of empire behind every time me or a comrade has been spat on, called a tranny, the discourse of disgust, of deliberate ignorance, all that vitriol and pisswater. Butler says this is why it hurts. I say it’s why I need a cigarette and a stun gun. It’s how discourse makes its rounds. Discipline and punish. Get in line. All that. It’s also how we take it back. Queer was a slur until queers took it back from gay-bashers and religious nuts. We just kept saying it. We just kept claiming it. We found each other, made our own mob, angry at the people rotting in hospitals from this government’s inaction, Bush and Reagan’s letting AIDS wipe out a generation and we got fucking organized. ACT UP. All that. I’ve walked down Chelsea and seen a gay sports bar full of bears cheering on a pig, so the movement’s changed, but at one point queers took queer back for us. Language changes hands, always. Left to Right to Liberal until it's rags, but rags can be repurposed. Makes good cocktails. Bureaucrats get a hold of it and gut it til it’s empty platitudes and horse shit. It’s why you see the word Intersectionality coming out of the mouths of every robot, lizard person, or HR rep at a university, on tiktok or TV. They’re not using it right, but in a way they’ve shoved it into some new reality. None of these fucks know who Krenshaw is. Her critiquing systemic violence, which is outdated in itself, instead they pretend change can happen if we hire POC bureaucrats and put up some solar panels while still investing in Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Pinkertons, Cops, Black Rock, and the big blue I. It’s why the university I go to’s slogan gets to be Be Revolutionary. Theft, plain and simple. I went to college with a girl whose father was CEO of the Dow Jones. Daddy’s cash made her a pop star and of course she loved to tote that word Revolution around in front of a sea of screeching 14 year olds and they ate it. Didn’t know any better. I pray one day it makes ‘em sick. Reactionaries always steal, but theft is a two way street. Why am I saying all this? It’s been a long day, fever’s still boiling. Sean, I think of your poems every time I grab a coffee. I think of your poems whenever I hear sirens. When I smoke. I think of your poems when Phil Ochs or SOPHIE or a student getting slammed chin first into concrete by a pig comes up on my phone. It’s because they aren’t really your poems. When I think about your work Sean, I think about the cuckoo. I think about tradition. I think about folk. Folk like people. Folk like music. If it ain’t new and it never gets old and all that shit. You’re not afraid to write about the times, because the more things change the more painfully aware we get they haven’t moved an inch. We just have to remember it’s never really been here forever. In modernity, it all feels like pissing in a crowd in the wind, but there are pockets of hope in every kid who learns not to talk to cops. Every factory and coffee shop that gets a union. Every colonized country that calls Palestine a state and sends ambassadors back to think about what they’ve done. Even if these wins are ghostly, they’re present. If the man calling me a tranny, asking what I got in my pants on the subway has a crowd of ghostly, lecherous ghouls standing behind him, I’ve got a crowd of fags and comrades behind me calling him a numb-nut fascist. We’ve all got ancestors. I believe in ghosts not in a witchy, mystical way but literally, practically. When someone dies their residue remains in the people they leave behind. People keep the memory, whether they like it or not. The uncle who disowned me is still in my blood just as much as your words, the words of the doll who taught me how to harangue pigs breaking up homeless camps, the grad TA who explained to 19 year old me me why she had to strike and how we could help. Who I found on the picket-lines 2 years later while IOF jocks rushed the lines, knocked us over, spat. We workers carry kin in songs. I carry it to my students. I carry it to my lovers. The cuckoo flies and flies through time whether we like it or not and yeah, language isn’t reality, often it’s an excuse to stay comfy. Poets give me the willies. Academics even worse. Discourse gets in the way, but I’m not brain-washed enough to think language isn’t tangible when we go to a demo, book club, a drag show. We feel it in our heels when they push us, when we push back and loud. There’s a song, and we all better learn to start singing it together. We gotta hope discourse can be rewired through that fucking chorus. Queers have no problem with the word queer now. Dykes are dykes. Fags are more or less fags. Most dolls I know are trannies tried and true and we claim that shit and move toward abolition. Of what? Of it all. It’s a tug of war for the words that matter and if it’s a tug of war the right’ll be surprised cause we’ve got the fucking numbers. For every king there were a million or so peasants toiling under his heel. For every billionaire tech bro or geriatric there are even more and now we’re getting angry. We’re getting hungry. The stories are getting passed around. The writing’s on the wall. Thanks Tiktok. Thanks Instagram. Behemoths of techno capital turned to bite the hand that made them. Frankenstein’s monsters are a mad bunch of trannies and chimeras. That’s why Joe’s looking scared. The dems always cared more for fascists than workers. The tide is turning, like it or not the songsheets are getting passed out. The tactic books are getting circulated by PDF, tiktok, reel, substack, or zine. Everyone’s got a signal account. My lovers teach me how to barricade doors. When I buy my tall skinny latte I think fuck the police. I think Free Palestine. I think Turtle Island. I think land back. I think eat the rich. I think nobody knows who murdered Marsha P. Johnson. I think scratch a liberal, find a fascist. I think I’m proud to be a goddamn tranny. I think I’m glad I make you want to puke. I think remember what they did to us. I think remember what they did to all of us. We’re not gonna win because the Right or the Dems will see the error of their ways. We’ve got the argument. We know we’re right because we’re fighting for human rights. We gotta remember we’ve got the numbers too. We’re gonna win because people like you’ve been singing for so damn long it hurts, right out of the fucking grave. In a hundred tongues, in a million hovels and apartments and hamlets and tenements, we want to be free, and with every one who's been snuffed or burned or locked up, driven mad, worked to death, genocided, disappeared, maimed, lobotomized, assassinated, forgotten, murdered, or bombed there’s a voice that’s adding to the song. Every verse comes haunting from the Paris Commune, from Haiti, from Standing Rock, from Ferguson, from Kent, from the Zoot Suits, from Baltimore, from Algeria, from Cal Poly Humboldt, from Atlanta. One day we’ll remember ALL the fucking words. One day we’ll sing it again and again, we’re picking up a verse here or there and it’s growing. One day each one of us will raise our voices in song on the way to work or alone in the womb of the world and we’ll all be shocked to remember it’s never just been you or me, Sean. It’s been us. And whenever, wherever, whoever we’re with or not with when we sing for freedom we sing and sing and sing the cuckoo's cry and remember it’s a goddamn chorus. The cuckoo is a fucking phoenix.

Godspeed, Free Palestine

Jeanne D’Anarchie 

April 25-29th, 2024

May Day Postscript,

But my fever broke Sunday. I’ve been in bed since. COVID kicked my ass. Organizing and poetry burnt me out and miss VID is finishing the job, but I’ll be back. What’s more radicalizing than longing to rejoin the wave. I’ve been glued to the feed watching encampments pop up. I haven’t smoked in days, which is a plus. I got winded cooking eggs this morning. What a state. I’m missing May Day. Listened to the radio station at Columbia last night as they broke the barricade of Hind Hall. I called my friend Chris to ask for an update two days ago and they said “Where the fuck does this go from here?” the night before they took the building. I said with my dumb grin “We escalate.” Still don’t know how many were arrested. The student reporters nearly started crying, cops in their faces, telling them they were next if they didn’t get inside and then being locked out. Sure glad we’ve got the first amendment, right? They broke up Cal Poly Humboldt’s Intifada Hall I guess two nights ago, and the messages from the students have been gorgeous. Real Hydra energy. Cut off one, two more sprout up, and sure enough, the pigs got Columbia and CUNY and Fordham rose up this morning. Not sure where else but I know UCLA held out all night from zionists shooting fireworks and bear spray into them, not a cop (in uniform) in sight. I’m sure a couple more will come to meet it, but what about graduation? What about the Summer? I hear people calling this the student intifada or the student’s spring. I’m hoping this isn’t long COVID. I work summers as a laborer and I need my strength. Trying to fight the urge to feel naive. Fighting the urge to feel useless laying here, coughing my guts up and unable to be there, so I’m writing this I guess. I’m writing. Feeling severed, but it’s a chorus my friends, it’s a chorus, and you can’t sing every day the same way you’ve been doing. You’ve gotta change it up before you’re fried and god I am fried. Some gotta drop out so others can come in. I’ll be back singing in a day or two or four, whenever I jog to the end of the block. You better start learning verses, learning to prop us all up. You better start singing by the time I come back. If you don’t know the words, ask your nearest comrade. Share your songsheets. If you don’t have comrades start looking. Start listening. They’re out there. No denying it anymore. We’re out there. We won’t be moved much longer.

Keep Singin’

Jeanne D’Anarchie

May Day 2024

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