Volume 1 / Athens 1999 "Las luchas continuan" by David Staples Review of Barbara Harlow, After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing, London, Verso, 1996, & Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention, Hanover NH, University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1992. Barbara Harlow's most recent book deals with the subject of the assassinated writer in the singularity of historic revo-lutionary struggles and resistance movements in Palestine, El Salvador, and South Africa. The character of Harlow's work in general has much to do with both the legacy and memory of revolutionary writing as well as the political and historical legacies of revolution. In After Lives, Harlow presents a deeply aporetic analysis of three assassinated writers. Forget for a moment that the Palestinian, Salvadoran and South African revolutionary movements have been linked historically in both fact and fiction; forget too that the writers Harlow interrogates in absentia, Ghassan Kanafani, Roque Dalton, and Ruth First, were subjects of political assassination. Then remember that these strug-gles have been historically linked, and that Kanafani, Dalton and First were asssassinated. Whose memory will serve? In struggle, in historic struggles, Harlow reminds her present and past readers, we feel the absent presence of assassinated revolutionary writers -- Harlow here cites Naji al-Ali, Malcolm X, Amilcar Cabral, Steve Biko, Walter Rodney, Bobby Sands, Oscar Romero, Ignacio Ellacuría, Roque Dalton, Ghassan Kanafani, Ruth First -- and in terms that remind us as well of the starkness of historical struggles and theories of writing: absolute necessity, absolute contingency, and the social-political movement always and already within and between the terms and turns of struggle. The subject of assassination is remembered here as one, every one, divided in profoundly political struggle. Not homogeneously divided, not in the same struggle, but nonetheless together apart. What links Kanafani's, Dalton's and First's writings more than Harlow's essay on their legacies? Her attempt and those of others to continue the singular writing of these and other combined struggles. From "resistance literature" to prison writings to what she calls "new geographies of struggle," Harlow has consistently and coherently moved through the critical writings of the present history of revolutionary and resistance movements, all the while describing how such movements (must and do, can't and don't) go on. In contrast to her previous books, Resistance Literature and Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention, which explicitly target U.S. academia -- for its liberal geo-politics of inclusion of area literatures operating as the exclusion of lit-eratures of resistance, revolution, prison, and politicial movements -- After Lives doesn't openly argue for or against academic poli-tics, for lack of a better politics. The work, the texts, the histories, are written for and to the divergent revolutionary politics of diverse peoples, parties, classes, movements and nations. Mostly for worse, and definitely for better in some cases, the academy doesn't take up such literature and theory. After Lives is quiet in this regard, and it's difficult to speculate what this could mean. On the other hand, in Barred, and in the context of an opening polemic against literary theoretical exclusion of gendered and revolutionary prison and resistance writings, Harlow eloquently links the historically singular and politically contingent aspects of struggles and movements in Northern Ireland, Palestine, South Africa, El Salvador, Argentina, the United States and Puerto Rico with the specific circumstances of the massive incarceration, torture and interrogation of revolutionary and politicized women and men. The historical contingencies and necessities of the struggles are carefully articulated with the physical, intellectual and emotional necessities of ongoing feminist and women's struggles -- and of their continuous struggles going on -- in prison. After Lives, surprisingly, displaces this articulation of gender, resistance and prison writing with the institution and trope of assassination. The results of this theoretical and historiographical move may indeed be the dead ends prefigured by the assassins: profound disarticulation of the movements, self-imposed crisis, and a dismayed revolutionary reactionism typified by the post-Marxist/post-feminist post-Left in the post-'80s United States of Europe and America. Where Harlow gets into trouble in After Lives, which is fine in any case, is in assigning a unidirectional quality to the chronologies of revolutionary politics, i.e. the historical 'movements' from independence to decolonization to postcoloniality, from armed struggle to 'negotiation,' from interrogation to 'dialogue', from the 'old' writing of resistance literature to the 'new' writing of human rights, etc. All of which, according to Harlow in After Lives, is in some other way related to the shift of locus of 'movement' politics from revolutionary parties to NGO's and the apparent end of revolution in our 'new times'. The trouble, which, while a theoretical problem, is also one of historiographical legacies of struggle, is not new. It was, for example, stated and debated in the early 20th century by Lenin and Luxemburg. The problem as a question was, of course, both prior and posterior to the chronological question of revolution, i.e. when the revolution could, would and should come. It was, and remains in different ways, precisely a question of strategy. Dictatorship of the proletariat or mass organization of the party, war of maneuver or war of position? Abso-lute necessity or absolute contingency? As it turned out, particularly during and after the '60s, it was rarely a case of either/or, nor would it be in the coming decades, since within the movements and struggles and writings there was already something of both, or neither. For every negotiation, armed struggle was a precedent; equally, if not symmetrically, negotiation was a prece-dent for every armed struggle. Negotiation became a consequence of armed struggle, armed struggle a consequence of negotiation. You can see the code working itself out in all places at all times, unless you want to see something like closure for a certain moment, such as in the "negotiated solutions," or conditions of cease-fire, or writings of constitutions of the mid-'90s. Harlow writes in After Lives: " 'Democracy' and 'negotiation,' in other words -- and together with such attendant terms as 'elections,' 'policing,' 'transitions' -- have, in the 1990s, in a most important sense displaced (albeit still controversially) 'armed struggle' as the focal point of cultural and political debate." (AL 6) So what, when? In piecing together the lives and afterlives of revolutionary writers such as Kanafani, Dalton and First in After Lives, Harlow has attempted simultaneously to question what the movements informed by these writers will or would have become after them, and with/out them. What, she asks repeatedly, would these writers say now? Part of Harlow's question is of course to insist on the singularity of the assassinated revolutionary writer. But part is also to suggest the possibil-ity of assassination of the revolutions themselves, or revolution itself. "In other words," she writes, "perhaps not only writers but revolutions as well were martyred in the transition from interrogation and assassination to electoral participation." (112) As a question, this opens onto a closed cycle of historical move-ment. The problem, as with Harlow's shift since Barred from the writings of the imprisoned to those of the assassinated, from the history of the present to the past, is that independence, decolonization, postcoloniality (as with the freeing of political prisoners and political amnesty) are incomplete move-ments, much as they get fixed in history and theory; negotiation gives way to armed struggle gives way to negotiation, and so on; electoral struggle necessitates revolution necessitates electoral transitions. Who writes that the revolutions in El Salvador, South Africa and Palestine are finished? More important, who writes that the struggles go on, that revolution, like power, is the name given to a complex situation of strategy in a given society, á la Foucault? Who, following Gramsci (as Stuart Hall, for example), writes that hegemony is never completely made or taken, that it is a historically con-tingent -- and necessary -- process of joining social forces together in the pursuit of revolution, and that that revolution always and already takes many historical forms? Who writes, in other words, that 'the movement' and 'the movements' (the international, anti-national and non-national women's movements, for example) never stop? In Barred, the testimonies of political prisoners, detainees and survivors of prison rape and torture were represented by Harlow as the very specific political responses of significant facts and figures in ongoing historic movements of resistance and revolution. Only five years later, in After Lives, it appears the revolutionary author, and the revolution she authored, are indeed dead. What would Kanafani, Dalton and First say? And what is this question the difference of? What, for example, did these important writers' imprisoned comrades -- in Barred Harlow cites Nidia Diaz, Caesarina Makhoere, Guadalupe Martinez, and Leila Khaled to name only a few -- say? What is hap-pening in the afterlives of assassinated political writers? And what is this difference from the pre-postlives of the assassinated, i.e. from the prison lives and writings of partisan political subjects and comrades? Harlow may be strategically mistaken to conflate assassination with the (of course, still controversial, still open) end of armed struggle in the respective revolu-tions. Dissidence in El Salvador, Palestine, and South Africa is nowhere near (and always near) death and is everywhere in the afterlives of assas-sination, and torture, and disappearance, and imprisonment, and casualty of war. And, yes, After Lives begs the question, what if it were not so? And is it so? Would the writings of the politically assassinated, interrogated, tortured and imprisoned so powerfully presented in Barred signify anything so historically different asthen (ironically, in the periods before, during and after the assassinations analysed in After Lives)? The internal fracturing of the FMLN which was both cause and effect in Dalton's trial and execu-tion (but surely not the end of armed struggle more than fifteen years later) by his own revolutionary group, the Ejercito Revolucionario Popular [ERP], is now at another conjuncture, and possibly a new articu-lation, following the imprisonment of many of its partisans, thousands of deaths and disappearances, various ceasefires and negotiated settlements, and the electoral success of the FMLN in 1997. The armed struggle, side by side with the cultural struggle of which Kanafani was a most articulate spokesman, goes on in the deoccupied and massively enclosed Palestinian territories, as significantly as in Israeli prisons, a fact and figure Harlow clearly links with the revolutionary writings of political detainees and other movement members, including Kanafani, in Barred. On an altogether different scale, the internal fracturing and rearticulation of social, cultural and political movements in South Africa leads many to ask if another, very different revolution is just beginning, as First was one of the first to suggest in her research on the regional geopolitics of Southern Africa, on itinerant mineworkers in Black Gold, and on the new and different articulations of race, gender, nation, and labor to which few in the previous movements were held responsible. Such speculations, far short of Harlow's detailed historical and conjunc-tural analysis of the writing and movements surrounding the assassinations of Dalton, Kanafani and First, are intended to support her concise observations on the singularity of assassination of revolutionary writers in After Lives, as much to bring her work back through the critical historical and literary trajectories of the cultures of political resistance and imprisonment which she outlines in her previous work. "[T]he assassi-nation of the writer is a historical and political event with very tangible cultural, critical and material consequences for theorizing the subsequent participation in and reclamation of the work of intellectual figures who have been instrumental in organizing resistance to systems and discourses of domination, and whose life work had been committed to redefining the very "politics of shed blood."" (26) One might easily and responsibly reinsert "imprisonment" for "assassination" in the preceding citation. What then? What would they say then? What if, as Harlow so wordlessly takes her readers through the historical and political aporia in and of After Lives, they had not been assassinated (or imprisoned)? Not what would they have been had they not been assassinated, but what were they that they were? Behind these questions, much as in Resistance Literature and Barred, is the insis-tence that "...assassination takes place for precisely political reasons, a recognition that corpuses as much as corpses were at issue, and have yet to be laid to rest." (145) Their enemies wanted the writers dead as much as their writings and revolutions to end, to be buried in history, and imprisoned in silence. And yet. In Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention , Harlow turns and returns to the legacy of women's revolutionary prison literature and prison survival as a key to the revolutionary cell of movement history and theory. The revolutionary writing which survives in the cases and places Harlow documents in Barred (e.g., the Northern Ireland hunger strikes, theintifada, sectarians vs. secularists in Egypt, South Africa after the Rivonia Trials, the secret prisons in El Salvador, anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles in the United States and Puerto Rico, and the Sanctuary Movement in the U.S.), in particular the legacies of women's resistance, leadership and organization in the movements and in prison, are testimonios critical in the ongoing and necessary historicization and theorization of the respective movements and struggles. Or are they? This is clearly not a problem addressed to those in the U.S. and European teaching machines (although it is, too), but to those involved in one way or another in the ongoing struggles in these and other places. Or is it? Whose memory will serve? The writings of survivors of massive prison rape, torture, and interrogation, which Harlow articulates with their movements' histories and strategies in Barred, are implicitly at end by the beginning of After Lives. With the exception of her account of Ruth First's imprisonment under the 90 Day Detention Law in 1961, narrated by First in her prison autobiography 117 Days, Harlow in After Lives forsakes much of the analysis which gave a history of the revolutionary present in Barred (long after the assassinations of Kanafani, Dalton and First), and asks her readers to consider the demise of the revolutionary political subject as the closing of the subject of revolutionary politics. How could the same question (or, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, the 'question of the same') be posed to those imprisoned (now and then, and again and again) for revolutionary, seditious, conspiratorial, and a host of other political activities -- or to the legatees of their writings and struggles? More to the point, what is happening in the current historical conjuncture to suggest that the supercession of the previous conjunctures by the end of armed struggle and the rise of 'negotiation,' political amnesty, 'dialogue,' elections and a neo-Gramscian war of position in civil society, in some way obliterates, in the mid-1990s, the very same current historical conjuncture marked by Harlow in her previous works? In other words, what of what was subject to change has changed? And what hasn't? And what must still? And whose questions are these? Harlow's critical focus in After Lives on human rights reporting in the theoretical context of a vacuum-like postmodernism signals a counterrevolutionary turn via her post-mortem on revolutionary writing. What would Kanafani, Dalton, and First (and their imprisoned, detained, tortured and disappeared others) say now and again? What were they (and are they) fighting for in the first (and last) place? And now? Why? Most importantly, why not? * A longer version of this article appears in a special issue on prison writing of Pretext (1998) Return to Top