In Conversation with Sarah Schulman
Sarah Schulman’s newest nonfiction book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, opens with a conversation with Vivian Gornick. Schulman mentions she’s writing a book on solidarity to show how people who are different from one another find common cause; Gornick argues that true solidarity emerges among people occupying the same position—workers fighting against their boss, for instance. Schulman has always had a unique focus on the messy end of solidarity. Her fascination with the gift and the struggle of living with one another can be seen throughout her 21 books, her plays, her journalism, and the epic oral history project and subsequent political history of ACT UP, Let the Record Show.
I talked to Sarah Schulman about her new book on May 20th on her turf, the East Village. —Natalie Adler
NATALIE ADLER What’s your thinking about bringing your political work into your writing work?
SARAH SCHULMAN I don’t think about it. The weird thing is I don’t have any writing practice at all. I have almost no theories about my own writing.
NA Because it emerges from action?
SS I’m a novelist. I did the same thing with Conflict Is Not Abuse. There’s two things: I like to use juxtaposition in a way that accrues meaning, and that produces some kind of revelation. So these non-fiction books have a heavy narrative drive, like a novel, and you can’t just read one chapter and know what it’s about. You have to read the whole thing. The whole book is an argument. The other part is I have so much trouble getting my lesbian novels published that these non-fiction books appear with more spotlight than they deserve because there are these other books that are missing in their place. These books are about lots of different kinds of people. The ACT UP book was mostly about men. So I got, “Wow you’re so smart, you’re such a good writer, because men are so important.” But those books are not any better written than these plays and novels that no one is allowed to see. So in a way I resent these non-fiction books!
NA There’s so much clarity and simplicity in your writing at the sentence level. “Other people are real”—which you insist is a key thing to accept in order to generate solidarity—is the way you might talk to a small child or a red-faced adult having a meltdown.
SS The title is two very normal words that everyone uses all the time and I don’t think many people have put those two words together before. There is a lot of complexity that can be found in shared vocabulary and still be uncovered.
NA Will you talk a little about fantasy and dreams? Dreams I would say are the right everyone has…
SS To wish.
NA Yes, to wish that things could be different than they are. That someone being bombed can dream that it will end.
SS I think the best example is post-Franco Spain. Franco dies and abortion is still illegal and it’s illegal to leave Spain for an abortion. France is having a big feminist moment and these feminist women in the south of France want to help Spanish women come to France and get abortions. But they give them a task to do when they’re home: talk to this woman and tell her it’s okay, or bring back diaphragms, and none of them will ever do it. Finally the French people realize that these Spanish women have been raised under fascism, they’ve been acculturated to it, and of course they’re not going to do it. So the question is, is it a failure? The necessity, the need for abortion, is fulfilled. The problem was the fantasy that they’d become [practicing feminists].
NA And not just return to their families as if none of it ever happened. That part of your book got me thinking of the phrase “I will aid and abet abortion.” You were not able to raise consciousness in every single case of that worthy cause, but you got the job done.
SS But the utopian feminist dream of the ’70s was that women were being exposed to these ideas and they would transform.
NA But it seems that is not actually how transformation takes place, more often than not. So that’s a good segue to thinking about strategic radicalism. I realized that I’d never sat down and actually read the BDS demands as a document. They argue for gradualness and incremental processes as the way to make sustainability happen. And I thought “Oh, that would make so many people angry.” Which I am sympathetic to—I think of Nina Simone singing “they keep on saying ‘Go slow’”; I think of Obama’s condescendingly invoking incrementalism. How do you talk to comrades about the importance of incrementalism?
SS Well some changes you can make immediately. This [BDS] is not one of them. The fascist cataclysm we are in right now in the United States, there’s no easy fix. No way out that’s fast. And the BDS movement is a Palestinian movement. And they’re saying three things: Pick your strategy based on your context; don’t factionalize; try to build victories in a sustained way. BDS has been doing this for 20 years. Suddenly the “D” of BDS is the number-one student demand on campuses in this country: divestment. It went from being this obscure, crazy, ultra-left, marginalized thing to a centerpiece of student politics because divestment is actually winnable, it is material. So it is a great demand and a great strategy.
NA Divestment is something that is hard, it takes time, but once it is won it is really won. Boycotts people slip on eventually.
SS Well one problem is people call boycott too easily. Running a boycott is a really difficult thing, and it has to be done systematically. You can’t just say “boycott xyz” unless you are going to be there every day and you have concrete demands that are winnable and all kinds of stuff.
NA Every day a millennial—my generation—realizes that their favorite album, Graceland by Paul Simon, was written in spite of a boycott. Well what do you do with it? I don’t really like listening to it that much anymore—that knowledge changes something for me.
SS Well it is like the whole PEN thing. I am not submitting my book to PEN. I have friends who become finalists at PEN and I don’t understand how they can do that. I really don’t.
NA My wife always says can you stomach it? That is her bottom line for everything. Some people can stomach it and others can’t. It is the point you make in the ACT UP book, a lot of things are about character.
SS And also this is a real spotlight moment. The light is shining on all of us and you are finding out who is actually a coward, who is actually privileged. My girlfriend is a slavery historian, and she’s like, “If you’ve ever asked yourself what you would have done during the radical abolitionist movement in slavery, it is what you’re doing now.”
NA You write in the book, “my precise opinions will not always be absolutely reflected by the people I generally stand with.” Factionalization is a huge problem on the left, and in queer organizing. BDS is saying we have to avoid it, that if anything is to happen, it has to be big tent, coalitional. Why is this so hard to internalize?
SS Well there’s a couple of approaches to understanding that. One is that people are not in a state of urgency. I have been in the Palestine solidarity movement for 16 years. I have worked with a lot of people who don’t like me or think I am stupid. But they put up with me because they need support. If you are in a state of urgency you’re more flexible. So that is one element. The other is that other people are different and that is so hard to accept. I have been in therapy for thirty years trying to accept it and it is the hardest thing in the world to accept. It is about maturity, on some level.
NA A point you make in this book, which you’ve made elsewhere (and consistently in your fiction), is that actually people can change and we are changed by one another all of the time.
SS They say you can’t change other people, but actually you can. You [just] can’t change them the way you want to. When I teach fiction writing, the person has a want. So they take an action that they think will give them what they want. Then they have the unforeseen circumstance. That is a narrative arc. So you can change people but you can’t predict how that’s going to end up. As a teacher you know that.
NA I wanted to talk to you about your reflections on teaching, which are part of this book, too. You moved from CUNY to Northwestern, which as a newer MA-MFA program in creative writing, and you told me you’ve been working to get different kinds of applicants.
SA Fortunately for me, my immediate colleague is Daisy Hernández. She did a book, Decolonize This. Even though aesthetically we are very different, we are on the same page about what students we want. Every student in the MFA gets a full-ride plus $45,000 a year plus health insurance for three years. We figured out right away that if we just did nothing and waited for applications to come in, it would all be people who graduated from Brown two weeks ago. We started doing community events in different neighborhoods, going to local public undergrads, and trying to recruit older people who have already published.
[Before I started at City College] I didn’t know what an MFA was. I was a waitress at LeRoy’s Coffee Shop in Tribeca and I already had two books out and I had never heard of an MFA. My customers were telling me I had to get one. Getting people to understand what that is, and that it is okay to apply for it, and they don’t have to pay the fee, is a whole thing. There are 55 fully-funded MFA programs in this country. That is the biggest hunk of money in all of America for developing writers. It also pays writers salaries; it is like the WPA. But there’s no coherence. All these programs have no communication about what we are doing with this money, and how we keep from creating homogenized aesthetics in these workshops.
NA I have been thinking about didacticism in political writing and how our homogenous culture wants to turn toward what they think of as complexity, but which is really just cowardice and an inability to stand up for something. Like the way Israel is “complex.” But when you read a lot of our greatest writers on the left, there is incredible complexity along with a healthy dose of didacticism. People love to heap praise on “moral clarity,” but why do you think there is a stylistic allergy to didacticism?
SS I’m not sure I would call it didacticism. I wrote a novel called The Cosmopolitans about realism. It is set in the ’50s, and it is written like a kitchen-sink realism. But actually realism is not real. In the end I have this whole essay about what is realism. I try to avoid being didactic. I don’t think I am. I don’t like to use certain phrases. The word “settler-colonialism” doesn’t appear in anything I have written. I don’t think it helps to understand what it is. I think it is reassuring to hear things laid out in a way that makes sense. When I was starting to write AIDS novels, the first one, People in Trouble, was totally social-realism. It was based on Zola’s Germinal. By the time I got to write Bohemia, I was more sophisticated in writing about AIDS, and I could write something that had a lot of abstraction and change styles and all kinds of things like that because it was more advanced. But in the beginning, People in Trouble was one of the first novels about AIDS activism. It was inside the heart of the nightmare. It was very hard to explain what it was like. I had to be very clear. By the time I got to write Bohemia people knew what it was like.
NA When is the [Jean] Genet renaissance happening? Is it ever going to happen? Genet-aissance?
SS Well someone is going to have to make a movie. There was Querelle with Brad Davis, who died of AIDS. Somebody would have to make something accurate about [Genet] because he is so fascinating. He did so much for Palestine. His book on the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon was incredible. He also had this imperial impulse as a French person, and [was at] the bottom of French society by being a French soldier in the Levant. He was elevated in a way he would never be in France.
NA He was also a deserter.
SS He also had a lot of Arab partners. The idea of the pure motive goes out the window because it is the impact of your actions that are the most important.
NA As a Genet lover, I was really interested in close-reading White’s biography. Genet was an anti-Semite because he didn’t want to align himself with the victim in this way; he saw himself as victimized and he saw Jews as victimized.
SS That’s one theory, and there’s also because he was French.
NA I do think there was a strong undercurrent in this book—the French, good or bad? Discuss.
SS I have a lot of exposure to French people. It is the other culture I know the most about. As my French friend said, “Well, you know, the Jews and the French…” and I was like “well the Jews are French.” And of course they’re so Islamophobic. Israel’s biggest immigration is from France, because the North African Jews are caught between the anti-Arab stuff and anti-Semitism.
NA I think Genet is a really wonderful example of your model of necessarily imperfect solidarity.
SS He’s the beginning of queer solidarity with Palestine. He was openly gay in all the things he did. That’s amazing. What will it take? Probably a movie starring a famous person.
NA A famous straight man. Is there anything else about your book you want to leave readers of the Lux newsletter with?
SS I want to talk about the Jeremy O. Harris thing. Harris is a Black, gay playwright. He wrote a play called Slave Play, which many people, including me, loved, and which many people also hated. Of all the art forms that I am in, theatre is the most conservative. It has been the most exclusionary based on gender. When I first emerged into the theatre, most of the theatres had all-male, all-white seasons, and that was considered normal. CTG in LA wanted to do Harris’s play and it was an all-male season, and he said no. Never before has any man in the theatre risked a production because women were being discriminated against. He made them promise to have an all-female season. All of us women playwrights who have existed all our lives on the margins were so happy. People were envisioning this beautiful season of all these under-published women with these brand new plays and the whole country would be changed. Instead they did a Lily Tomlin revival, this play called Clyde’s by Lynn Nottage which was the most-produced play in the United States that year. They did nothing we wanted. And he had risked himself. On one hand they’re listening to him because he is a man, even though he is a Black man, in a way they would never listen to any of us, but then in the end they didn’t do anything that would’ve helped anybody. But he tried. And we felt good. It is like one of these things, one of these failed solidarities with great intention that was uplifting and then a fail.
NA But your book still says that act was still incredibly important. What does it do, if you were to summarize it? If it didn’t change the next season, what did it do?
SS It showed that a very privileged and rewarded person can actually be self-critical about their own gains and see that it is at the expense of other people. Have the ego to be able to see the truth and then risk their own advancement to change things for the people who are being unjustly excluded. [Even if] the machine will not let that change occur.