Liberation
When, in his poem “London,” William Blake heard “the mind forg’d manacles,” he summoned up a vision that has haunted and goaded many a reader. The manacles were not the physical manacles of slavery or serfdom. They were mental. Through beliefs, lies, assertions, axioms, manifestos, denunciations, people manacled one another and manacled themselves. People lived and died within their manacles and never thought of them as manacles. The London of prostitutes and soldiers was hell but an everyday hell, a mundane hell, easily dismissed by those who did not partake of the hell. Syphilis and war, ruination and death: what was there to think twice about?
As modern times showed, there was everything to think about. Palestine Liberation Organization, women’s liberation, Symbionese Liberation Army, National Liberation Front, Sandinista Liberation Front, gay liberation, Moro Islamic Liberation Front, liberation theology, Animal Liberation Front, African Liberation Day, Third World Liberation Front, Black Liberation Army: any list was merely a fraction, a series of brief tags behind which lurked an immensity of discontent and pride, of yearning and commitment, of confusion and clarity. Each movement, whether capitalized or not capitalized, sought to remove a set of shackles. Each movement tilted at some oppressive force. The target varied but the impulse—to throw off the shackles—was not only steady. It was relentless.
Though not as overt as an iron around an ankle, the many shackles certainly had a physical dimension—dispossession and the denial of the right to move were two large shackles. The onus of oppression, however, stuck in throats in different ways. One person’s privilege might be another person’s dead end. One person’s accommodation might be another person’s unbearable anguish. To weigh one grievance or hurt against another was impossible, though typically no weighing occurred. The road to liberation was littered with versions of royal condescension. Colonialism—to cite one structure—was a gigantic exercise in condescension; power protesting that its power was proper and right and good for those to whom it was applied; power protesting the integrity of its responsibilities. Or not protesting but merely cynical and brutal and efficient in using the natives to extract whatever materials from the earth the power wished to extract.
Although there has been no telling where the liberation road might lead, the premise was that tomorrow was bound to be better than today. The aegis of progress applied emphatically to such a project. A liberated life was bound to be a better life. The taste of indignity—the woman told she could not do a certain job, the native told he or she could not walk through a certain door, the man told he could not acknowledge his love for another man—could be washed away, if not all at once then gradually. Likely, some residue remained—saddening or sometimes crippling, sometimes passed onto another generation, sometimes immolated in the fire of self-loathing. Still, the pain could be lessened. Acceptance of a seemingly immutable situation was not wisdom but resignation.
The tremor within liberation movements has been the common modern tremor—uncertainty, not about aims but effects. What was being overthrown may have been vicious (apartheid, for instance) but was comprehensible in its degraded, racist, rules-driven way. It was how power dictated how people lived, for better (for the relatively few) and for worse (for everyone else). “After liberation, what?” has been the question that has echoed through the corridors of modern times. While the question has been one of inevitable aftermath, it also has been a question of how complex human relations are, what power structures remain untouched, and how the dismantling of some overweening entity does not mean something constructive will be erected in its place. One wretched situation, such as colonialism, may be replaced by another wretched situation, such as dictatorship, ethnic cleansing, or civil war. Horror may not be one card but a whole deck.
External liberation, the overthrow of a regime or changing the way a group of people is treated, and internal liberation, the reckoning of self-worth, may or may not coincide. The career of Mahatma Gandhi was one long attempt to correlate inner and outer liberation, to make Indian independence an occasion for Indians to find inner strength. In that regard, his quest failed. At the end of his life, he could only look with great sadness at the violence between Hindus and Muslims that consumed India after WWII. The English were leaving but Indians did not seem to have learned anything that the apostle of non-violence was trying to teach. Gandhi was revered as a spiritual figure but to translate such spirit into one’s own being was daunting.
To say that the aims of liberation in modern times have been hollow or merely expedient would be unfair. What is “mind forg’d” is real yet impalpable. As Blake understood, breaking those manacles demanded greater responsibility not lesser. A particular agony of modern times was, and remains, the attempt to support what feels insupportable. A tribe whose mores have been destroyed by colonialism, a nation whose unity lay in repression, a woman whose self-value was eroded by what men demanded of her, any person transfixed by the suffering of other creatures, all of these situations, so large and yet so individual, placed people in roles not formed by time and practice. They had to make their lives up—a task that could be both isolating and brutal.
In place of the kings, nobles, and churches that once owned the world, corporations and states imposed new mind-demands on top of old ones—Christmas as a consumer holiday or national security as an ultimate human need. Liberation in modern times probed the crevices of such ownership and asserted what didn’t want to be suborned. Within the liberation impulse could be something pathetic, noble, grotesque, or downright fanatic, but the desire to expose duplicity and claim some version of humanity was real. If yet another duplicity emerged, that was part of the sad human comedy.