At a book launch May 14 hosted by Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore at the David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley, award-winning author Rebecca Solnit read an excerpt from her new book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain (Haymarket Books, $16.95).
“How we see the world has everything to do with what we can do in the world,” Solnit shared. “Action is shaped by vision—the frameworks through which we understand the world—or so it has long seemed to me. This is why, in my writing of the past few decades, I’ve tried to offer not just my views but what I hope can serve as equipment for anyone considering history, power, change, and possibility.”
The anthology, the writer notes in its introduction, includes essays written “over the past few years, often in response to specific circumstances—the early days of the pandemic, the criminal conviction of a rapist, the aftermath of the 2020 election.” No Straight Road ends with a concise, two-page credo and an unambiguous warning of the damage being done to the environment, feminists and other activists, social justice protections, and civil rights.
Contending that everyone is under threat from power structures aligned in opposition to much of the book’s ideas and content, she acknowledges the urge to surrender. Repeatedly, the essays shift from cataclysmic facts to anecdotes both personal and global to rousing calls to action.
“There is no alternative to persevering, and that does not require you to feel good,” she writes. “Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the ten trillion things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed.”
Solnit, an acclaimed writer, historian, and determined activist, knows firsthand the silencing agenda of the Trump administration. Marin Shakespeare Company was set to produce a new play with music by Lauren Gunderson based on Solnit’s children’s book Cinderella: Liberator. In May, the company received an email, versions of which had been sent to hundreds of artists and arts organizations nationwide. Its $20,000 NEA grant for the production had been terminated.
Although never stated explicitly during Solnit’s discussion at the Brower Center with Daniel Aldana Cohen, founding co-director of the Climate and Community Institute, the administration’s movements to undermine free expression ran like a dark undercurrent. Indeed, the event and her new book could have been all doom—but they aren’t. Instead, Solnit inspires hope, embracing the power of unpredictability, slowness, imperfection, and two terms she suggests we all adopt:
One is “longsighted,” which she writes is “the capacity to see patterns unfold over time.” The other, as alternative to “inevitable,” is the rarely used adjective “evitable.”
Both are indicative of a more measured path that Solnit believes often leads to revolutionary, dramatic breakthroughs, and eventual victory. Temporary uncertainty is a small price to pay for longterm successful movements. Examples and arguments for the tactic can be found in most, if not all, of No Straight Road‘s essays.
To whit, “Feminism Has Just Begun” speaks to longsightedness, with Solnit recalling being in Edinburgh when Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. “I took the short walk to the old St. Pancras churchyard to visit the tombstone of the great feminist ancestor Mary Wollstonecraft, author of that first great feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” she writes. “To be there that day was to remember that feminism did not start recently—Wollstonecraft died in 1797—and it did not stop on June 24, 2022.”
“Changing the Climate Story” cites statistics, including the one that most Americans mistakenly believe only a minority (37 to 43 percent) of the public support government action on climate when in actuality, according to the scientific journal Nature, 66 to 80 percent support such intervention. “That gap between perceived and actual support undermines motivation and confidence. We need better stories—and sometimes better means more up to date,” she writes.
In the Berkeley conversation with Cohen, she said, “There’s a weird habit: a lot of people on the progressive left sphere are very fond of mourning things that aren’t dead. I think people can be that way about nature.”
Overarching themes from the discussion and her book’s essays are holding hope, preserving memory, resisting simple categorization of complex issues, and considering human beings as “always in one way or another in the middle of the story.” On the future as a creative, active space, she simply states, “Each of us must find our work and do it.”
Portraying memories as intergenerational power, she posits they are forceful reminders of victorious rebellions against tyranny in the past and “the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.” Categories, Solnit writes, “to often become where thought goes to die.”
Having authored more than 20 books (Orwell’s Roses; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and more), Solnit also serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and the advisory boards of Dayenu and Third Act. All of which is to say she is unlikely to stop thinking—and acting—upon these thoughts.
Even No Straight Road’s cover serves as an opportunity to advocate for the rights of LGBTQ+ and non-binary communities. It’s the sixth book in a series of Solnit’s book that began with 2014’s Men Explain Things To Me. All feature designer Abby Weintraub’s big white letters, flush left, against a solid background color. This latest missive joins previous books’ red, orange, green, blue, and violet to nearly complete the rainbow from Gilbert Baker Pride flag created in the late 1970s. Solnit said she was “incredibly proud” to add No Straight Road to the slowly forming rainbow, and considers it “the world’s slowest gesture of queer solidarity.”
Buy No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain here.
