Comradely Love and Joyous Passion
Andrew Brooks on Elena Gomez’s Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt (2020)
Early in Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt, Elena Gomez writes:
whenever I make a scene it is: always of people gathered.
of food quibbles. of body organs playing up but the next
stage we are on the move. or have a plan or start to take
care of each other
we turned up in a proceeding
section feeding each other
berries
Am I too far inwards? Is this a way to conduct a mob?
For Elena the mob is always on the move, coalescing around snacks, feeding each other, turning up for one another, enacting care with gestures large and small. To be always on the move is to insist on the possibility of escape from the world we currently inhabit, to suggest that the only way we might find each other is through a shared commitment to a movement beyond the regulative and the regulatory. Perhaps this is only the way to conduct a mob. Or, it might be more apt to say we are always conducted by the mob, that spontaneous collective formation known by its dispossessive force. To be on the move together or to hatch a plan or to care for each other or to feed each other berries can be understood, following Édouard Glissant, as moments ‘when one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time.’ At the heart of the mob, and also at the heart of Elena’s poetics, is love: militant and comradely love. What role does love play in the making of revolutions and the articulation of revolutionary desire? Can love teach us to remain determined to leap from the world we inhabit to a future we desire?
The title of Elena’s most recent poetry collection, Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt, is both an instruction and an imperative: do not forget the role that joy and desire play in revolutions, she reminds; the joyous passion of revolt can not be contained, she warns. The title is both an invocation of a revolutionary horizon and a direction for how we might orient ourselves toward a revolutionary process. But how are we to understand what constitutes joy or passion or desire or care or love? And how might we disentangle these concepts from the logic of capital which fails to recognise that the gendered nature of care work – the production and reproduction of the worker – is central to accumulation, or from neoliberalism which transforms the collectivity of care into the empty and individualising concept of self-care and renders desire a site of singularity? Elena, who is a sharp reader of Marxist-feminisms, shows us that such concepts have a different history, one that continues to haunt our present. The ghost she is most directly in conversation with throughout Admit the Joyous Passion of Revolt is the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai:
dear Alexandra no. I mean, dearest. Or instead to my
comrade or to my speaker no even to the mother the not–
mother are you tired yet, is there a way for us to
communicate that won’t rely on false memories or feigned
scholarship or mere connection or my own mother
memory asking: where is Inessa?
Kollontai was a Bolshevik revolutionary who, among other things, critiqued the bourgeois structure of the family and its reproduction of private property, and articulated a conception of love that went beyond sexual or familial relations. Kollantai understood love and sex in materialist terms, as relations that contribute to the way societies are structured. In order to abolish the violence of private property (which, we should remember, is also the violence of individuation and the racial and gendered logics that come with the appeal to self-possession) she argued that we must conceptualise love beyond the limits of the property relation. What Kollontai called ‘comradely love’ was the basis for collective solidarity, a dispossessive relation that understood the liberation of specific groups (women for instance) to be inextricably linked to revolutionary struggle. ‘dear Alexandra’, writes Elena in a gesture that is part intimate address, part invocation. Kollantai slips from a historical figure to a contemporary comrade to the speaker of the poem to a mother who is also not-mother. The direct address pulls Kollontai into the present, a reading that must negotiate the expanse between a post-October Revolution Soviet world and a world ravaged by decades of austerity as the long crisis of contemporary capitalism rolls on. Kollontai remains a touchpoint through this long poem, a figure that guides the speaker of the poem toward this conception of comradely love in spite of a world still restructured by the private property and the capital relation. Toward the end of the poem, she writes:
How everyone was a child once and yet forgets it &
how children aren’t welcome in the public
world. That they are designated.
How the brief hours I spent caring for my nephews made
me love them more, and at the same time strengthened my
resolve to not become a mother in my lifetime.
Have I read too much Kollontai now.
The final line is sealed with a full stop rather than a question mark suggesting a sense of resolution. She has read too much now to turn back, knows another type of love to be possible. This love allows her to name those who terrorise our lives – bosses and cops – and to name the things we require to survive – comrades, snacks, spells, poems, dresses:
After a boss leaked the surplus
labour all over your standing desk
we divided the chips from my
snack pockets. I was too girly
and it showed.
A love both militant and vulnerable. Love as that which opens one to a state of affectability, to being touched by the irreducible difference of the mob. Such love must be freely given but should not be confused with free love (which too often replicates the logic of the free market). Love, freely given, must collectively determine its terms, not based on proprietary relations or competition or law, but rather on collaboration and the sharing of our needs. Here love is that which offers a glimpse of what it might be like on the other side.
Against the tendency to render revolution in masculinist terms, Elena offers us something else. ‘dear Alexandra you are not Lenin (thank u)’. Reproductive work and domestic labour were viewed as reactionary, capitalist activities in the time of the Russian Revolution, which held industrial work as the signal site of proletarian action and revolutionary promise. In her time, Kollontai pushed the tendency to dismiss feminised forms of labour and against what Bini Adamczak calls ‘the gender of revolution’ in which ‘the revolution is seen as masculine and counter-revolution as feminine’. Elena’s work follows the thread from Kollontai to the Marxist-feminists of the 1960s and 70s such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Selma James, and Leopoldina Fortunati who argue that the gender relation is a tool of capitalist exploitation and that domestic sphere and care work underpin the capitalist mode of reproduction and so are crucial sites of workers’ struggle. She writes:
Your buttons in fact can drop
into this chute & my mother is
Waiting behind us to assist the revolution in
this way.
needlepoint.
&c.
Like Kollontai, Elena knows that reproductive labour is central both to a world structured by the capital relation and to the promise of a communist horizon. There can be no revolution without the mother (a figure that we might understand as operating in excess of the gender binary). And there can be no gender revolution that does not also alter the material relations of the world we live in. Describing Kollontai’s politics, Adamczak writes: ‘you cannot have a sexual revolution in the sphere of sexuality. You cannot have a gender revolution in the sphere of gender relations. These things can only be changed if the relation between gender and the economy, between sexuality and material relations, are changed too.’ This is also one of the lessons that Elena’s poetry imparts and it does so by way of a distinctive historical materialist poetics that attends to both timeliness and movement. The power of poetry, writes Joshua Clover, is that it is particularly good at ‘attuning the time axis and the space axis, the aspects of change and of arrangement — and of transforming one into the other. Consequently it’s good at getting us to experience that transformation. Since all economic life is based in the exchange of time for space and vice versa, I think that’s interesting and powerful.’ Poetics allows us to attune to historical shape of the moment we find ourselves in and crucially to where it might move next. This poem, with its attention to way bodies – both human, animal, and otherwise – must be produced and reproduced with care and love reminds us that the world may not be as it is now and that joyous passion is part of how we get to what comes next.
Perhaps poetry is also well suited to modelling the form of comradely love that Elena writes of. I’m conscious not to turn poetry into some privileged site of artistic and communal production but perhaps its marginal relation to the larger literary sphere opens it up to forms sharing that are less bound by possessive relations. The poetry scenes we are a part of tend to involve making plans over a pot of beans, reading poems to each other in a park, making books late into the night. I am reminded of another comrade, Kay Gabriel, who once said that listening to poems read aloud was one way that we might leap from our miserable present toward a world we desire. Perhaps I should have said at the outset that Elena is my comrade. We share snacks, pass poems between one another, publish one another, gossip, feed each other berries. When I read Elena’s poems I read them as an extension of our friendship and an expression of comradely love. But Elena is not just my comrade, she is our comrade and this poem teaches us to love differently and to admit the joyous passion of revolt into our lives.
We are spilling out love. It is taxable.
Care & the collective heart. My poetry is insignificant.
Remember you have your own advice: there are animals
and they need us.
✷ ✷ ✷
Works Cited
✷ Joshua Clover and Kristina Marie Darling, ‘An Archive of Confessions’: A Conversation with Joshua Clover’, Tupelo Quarterly, 2017.
✷ Curatorlab and Bini Adamczak, ‘Infrastructures of Care: Curatorlab in Conversation with Bini Adamzcak’, edited by Dimitrina Sevova, in Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020).
✷ Édouard Glissant and Manthia Diawara, ‘One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara, translated by Christopher Winks, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 28(1), 2011: 4–19.