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A review by novella42
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit
hopeful
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
fast-paced
5.0
This short essay collection is the best balm I know for activist burnout and despair.
I estimate I've read this book six times in six years. I'm thinking of making a tradition of listening to the audiobook at the start of the new year, for my mental health and to continue to develop my resilience against despair and inaction. I don't know of any other short yet comprehensive resource of the many victories of activism throughout history. None of this caliber, anyway.
In some ways it reminds me of James Burke's classic show Connections, but instead of showing the ripple effects of scientific discoveries and inventions throughout history, Solnit shows the ripple effects of a different kind of 'technology': collective social action throughout history. At one point she quotes Walter Brueggeman: "Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair." Her aim is to help us remember.
In this quick 5-hr audiobook, she offers up an alternative to narratives that focus only on defeats and cruelties and injustices. She honors those, but aims to tell the more complicated and accurate stories that make room for the best and worst, atrocities and liberations, grief and joy. She holds up memories like a guiding light, and while the book isn't perfect, it never fails to show me a glimmer of my own power, and my own hope.
My favorite passage, that has helped me through some extremely dark moments:
I estimate I've read this book six times in six years. I'm thinking of making a tradition of listening to the audiobook at the start of the new year, for my mental health and to continue to develop my resilience against despair and inaction. I don't know of any other short yet comprehensive resource of the many victories of activism throughout history. None of this caliber, anyway.
In some ways it reminds me of James Burke's classic show Connections, but instead of showing the ripple effects of scientific discoveries and inventions throughout history, Solnit shows the ripple effects of a different kind of 'technology': collective social action throughout history. At one point she quotes Walter Brueggeman: "Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair." Her aim is to help us remember.
In this quick 5-hr audiobook, she offers up an alternative to narratives that focus only on defeats and cruelties and injustices. She honors those, but aims to tell the more complicated and accurate stories that make room for the best and worst, atrocities and liberations, grief and joy. She holds up memories like a guiding light, and while the book isn't perfect, it never fails to show me a glimmer of my own power, and my own hope.
My favorite passage, that has helped me through some extremely dark moments:
"Sometimes the earth closes over this moment and it has no obvious consequences; sometimes empires crumble and ideologies fall away like shackles. But you don’t know beforehand.
"People in official institutions devoutly believe they hold the power that matters, though the power we grant them can often be taken back; the violence commanded by governments and militaries often fails, and nonviolent direct-action campaigns often succeed.
"The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision.
"And yet, and of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both.
"These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep. Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that yes, we can change the world because we have many times before.
"You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future."
Content Warnings
Minor: Death, Sexism, Violence, Xenophobia, Islamophobia, War, and Classism