Opinion: Symonds On Campaign, Love & More
[Opinion column written by Sion Symonds]
Bermuda Is Love launched the #RevolutionaryLove campaign with the purpose of this initiative being to “transform hearts and minds; to prioritise care, redefine love from emotion to actionable care and celebrate diverse forms of love.” Through this initiative, we hope to offer our voice and critically add to and engage discourse within a revolution ongoing, based in a revolutionary conception of love. What is a revolutionary love? In what revolutionary tradition are we acting? Who deserves our love? How do we ourselves change and thus transform our understanding of love, taking love beyond a feeling and turning it into transformative action? My offering is that it begins with conversation but doesn’t end there.
To answer the greater question of Revolutionary Love, let’s first talk about revolution. In his 1963 speech, Message To The Grassroots, Malcolm X questions the common understanding of the conceptual and literal revolution stating, “When you study the historic nature of revolutions, the motive of a revolution, the objective of a revolution, and the result of a revolution, and the methods used in a revolution, you may change words. You may devise another program. You may change your goal and you may change your mind.” Further, Malcolm argues that “You haven’t got a revolution that doesn’t involve bloodshed. And you’re afraid to bleed. I said, you’re afraid to bleed.”
Malcolm challenged the rhetorical use of revolution by his contemporaries, ultimately claiming that the wider movement lacked the conviction of prior revolutions. He saw this as a departure from the term in its truest form. He urged a pivot away from compromise and overaccommodation when engaging in revolutionary activity and instead advocated for definitive revolution. This looks like unapologetic approaches to seeking and creating localised change, beginning with paradigm shifts within ourselves. In the #RevolutionaryLove campaign, this bloodshed is instead personal watershed shifts in our understanding of truly active and intentional love in addition to the real discomfort of a larger paradigm shift. Malcolm argued that revolution is no passive or comfortable thing; “You haven’t got a revolution that doesn’t involve bloodshed.” Understanding that revolutionary love and revolution itself is an active commitment is the departure point of truly impactful change.
As defined by Merriam Webster, Revolution is, 2a. a sudden, radical, or complete change, b. a fundamental change in political organization especially : the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another by the governed, c. activity or movement designed to effect fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation, or d. a fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something : a change of paradigm. The core of each of these definitions is significant and irrevocable change. While some definitions cite radicalism and overthrow in the literal sense as true revolution, B.I.L. is not advocating for a coup d’etat-style revolution [lol]. What we are advocating for is a significant collective paradigm shift in our understanding and actioning of Love.
Respected for revolutionary politics, scholar and love theorist bell hooks writes in chapter 6, Values: Living By A Love Ethic, of her text All About Love, “awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination,” regarding prior models of love as domination models based in power and therefore not love in an ethical or actual sense. hooks encourages us to shift claiming that, “[individuals] that choose to love, can and do alter lives [...] by embracing a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet.” This love ethic, as an iteration of revolutionary love, impresses upon us the global reach of love with an urgency. Defining love as “a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust,” hooks’ revolutionary love is one that regards systems of oppression and the teachings of them as diametrically opposed to a truly ethical, invested and active love. These teachings from hooks and X argue that both love and revolution are not experiences; they are deeply purposeful actions.
Synthesizing Merriam Webster’s definition and that of these revolutionary thinkers, our definition of revolution can be a fundamental, radical change in the way of movement and of thinking – a change of paradigm.
Our definition of revolutionary love therefore being a fundamental, radical change in the way of movement and of thinking about love as an action – of decentring the individual, recentring community, and preserving the rights and dignities therein.
That brings us to the question of ‘who deserves our love?’ Let’s explore that question in the context of language.
Who deserves our love? If we see love as a verb/action, rather than a fixed thing/noun, we understand that Love is not ours to possess, rather it is ours to perform. As we continue to develop this understanding, we recognise that love itself is no finite resource; love can instead facilitate access to supposedly finite resources like housing, food, security, etc. In this context, the only thing that we cannot possess is ‘love’ itself. Further, after committing ourselves to the practice of love, hoping to possess it becomes contradictory. We instead possess means, material resources and ability among a multitude of other contributors in maintaining a revolutionary love.
On November 1st, 1980, James Baldwin asserted, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” In light of recent global crises in Sudan, Palestine, Congo, Tigray and within Bermuda itself [i.e. road fatalities] this belief remains relevant and thus heavily circulated. The only true possession of ours is responsibility; it is our responsibility to protect children globally. Love is not ours to possess but ours to action. With this is a tandem responsibility to do so as informed by an equity that centres the marginalized, the children.
Who deserves our love? The question of deserving is answered by B.I.L. ‘s credence on human needs as human rights and all living persons being deserving of access to these rights by virtue of their humanity. Thus, to be deserving is to be a human being. However, as pertains to the question of who, urgency and equity are essential components in determining who deserves, moreover who needs. As with the Black Lives Matter [BLM] burning house allegory, those in immediate danger, or experiencing significant precarity, are those urgently needing a revolutionary love.
Who deserves our love? – The simple answer is all: everyone is deserving of love by virtue of their humanity. When we use who deserves as interchangeable with who needs, we engage a different conversation around material and/or intellectual need. With both material and intellectual need, those most marginalised by neo and lasting systems of oppression require the most urgent support from organizations like Bermuda Is Love. Those least protected along governmental and socio-economic lines are in the most urgent need. Communities most marginalised are typically those at the intersection of various systems of oppression. This Intersectionality, as coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, recognizes the compounding of race, gender, class etc. to ultimately create significant need. This intersection could look like a Black queer homeless disabled woman, one person among many in need of communal and governmental recognition and protection because of this multi-tiered marginality. Therefore, while everyone is deserving of a revolutionary love, there are those in urgent need of said support.
As we practice love as a revolutionary act, it is important to challenge the conflation of individual ideology and identity. Ideological difference is an indication of a diverse and healthy society, it goes without saying that clashing beliefs will encounter one another. However, this freedom of speech should not amount to freedom of hate. There is no justification for the protection, perpetuation or love of bigotry as demonstrated in Misogyny, Racism, Fascism, Nazism, Homophobia, Zionism etc. Full stop. However, as we challenge vitriolic ideologies it is important that the individual person survives this process. A distinction must be made as ideology is a state rather than a permanent identity. We change. As do our politics, our positions and our locations.
Malcolm X’s story is one of rehabilitation and reform; Detroit Red could not have served his community as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz did. For Malcolm that revolutionary love first appeared as access to education and mentorship from members of the Nation of Islam. Through education, communal support and guidance this Nebraska-born orphaned child was able to survive the depths of street violence, substance abuse, incarceration and the daily reality of systemic racism to then become the giant that was Malcolm X. The life of Malcolm X is a prime example of revolutionary love, not based in a punitive power structure but in action, accountability and compassion. There’s no reason to withhold from our counterparts this revolutionary love and all of its transformative potential.
Finally, we arrive at the question of love: who deserves our love? In discussing intersectionality we began to engage the question of what love is or can be. Thus far in this conversation, love has been established as a multitudinous and fluid concept but paramountly as an action rather than an experience. While we understand revolutionary love as a change in our way of movement and thinking of love, love as an action can perhaps be understood in actionable frameworks.
Love as extending and centring compassion. Love as advocacy or creating space for self-advocacy. Love as being metaphorical shelter or facilitating access to physical shelter. Love as remaining open to accountability. Love as community care, i.e. food access, sustainable gardening, protecting collective and individual health, mask usage. Love as community building i.e., neighbourhood models, community-based aid, class consciousness. Love as challenging marginalisation i.e., inclusivity and visibility for folks in the periphery, centring Queer voices, centring Filipino voices, centring Indigenous/Native American voices, centring Latinx voices, centring voices of those experiencing poverty. Love as embracing others beyond one’s own community. Love as opposing oppression and rugged individualism.
These various demonstrations of the actionable revolutionary love that B.I.L. is looking to implement are not exhaustive and can be challenged, amended and built upon. Love in its various forms is rightfully constructed as a transformative power, whether in familial, platonic or romantic contexts. Further, love, revolutionary or otherwise, is not to enable. The love that we speak to challenges the structures and divisions that interrupt truly effective change, beginning on a grassroot level.
X, Baldwin, and hooks were figures firmly fixed in the politics of love despite their varying understandings of love. These figures were deeply rooted in the communities that they served, thus engaging in revolutionary action specifically informed by their lived realities and those of neighbouring folks. While discussing a bell hooks essay on her love ethic and revolutionary activity, my elder, mentor and friend Ajala Nanang-Omodele asserted that “the presumption for example that Malcolm X is not operating from the politics of love is simply not the case. In fact, the revolutions and uprisings and the killings of oppressors is, like Che Guevara said, rooted in the ethic of deep and profound love for one’s people.” The ethic evidenced by these figures does not suddenly and surprisingly assert itself; it begins at the grassroot. This revolutionary love begins with the internal shifts as instigated by conversations like this one.
“At the risk of seeming ridiculous,” writes Ernesto Che Guevara to then editor of the weekly magazine Marcha, Carlos Quijano, “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” If we are to act in the revolutionary tradition of our predecessors, it begins with the recognition that historic movements like the Anti-Apartheid movement, the First Great Rectification Movement, and the Black Liberation Movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries [Civil Rights Era, BLM], have always been rooted in a profound revolutionary love. If we are to revolutionise that tradition and create our own we must first open ourselves to the change that a revolutionary love brings.
- Sion Symonds
Best wishes.