Since February 2021, I have been working with people who are struggling with scale of crisis and our ability to sustain critical community support.
We grew as the need grew: love and urgency pushing the boundaries of our capacity each time. Each time we were presented with breaking point, the ever-present community pushed us forward. With gritted teeth, I would remind myself, that this is mutual, this is care. In conversation with friends about their collectives, we asked ourselves if this kind of burning—rage, love, grit—can be sustained in the long term. This question, along with the rest of the world, remained in abeyance; we talk in circles, reminding ourselves that crisis is ongoing, support is critical, we cannot keep going, we must keep going. And each time we conclude that with love as our compass, we will keep the fire going.
Returning to bell hooks’ All About Love, I find comfort in the reminder that love is a process (93), love is care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge (94), and even loss and grief (160). At a reading group, we discuss community and kin making in relation to Donna Haraway’s conception of kin making. I was surprised by the resistance to “kin” as a possible, generative site of attachment. It seemed to cause genuine upset that we might use kinship as a modality for organising and further into the discussion, I heard a collective disappointment with the nuclear family and chosen queer family structures. Most of us in the queer community, we are familiar with harm that is concealed by the apparent loving structure of the heteropatriarchal family—cohesion is a false promise.
I wondered about love as a rhetoric/ethic and remained curious about our collective suspicion, which presented as antithetical to Indigenous and POC culture and knowledge. Is it possible to separate care work—sharing, healing, feeding—from a practice of love? Are we conflating feeling with justice?
In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed speaks of a shared feeling as at stake (10) and what is at stake is our relationship to the feeling and each other. As with the reading group, while we were talking about “love” and “kinship” it was apparent that our relationship with these concepts were drastically different. Some people hoped that it could be enough to work together for a common goal while others were sceptical that the work could be sustained without a strong moral compass. It seemed to me that our discussions skirted around the question of relationality but we were, in fact, already connected by love for Community. From our isolated pods, we found purpose in connecting to something bigger than ourselves. Endless infographics, shared on online, stressed individual actions had consequences and that we were to shelter, share, care for our community. We identified as belonging to one another and, in lockdown, there was a sense of expansiveness that came with this identification—you are not alone.
If we take the feeling in the proverbial room to be a love for Community, I completely understand the ambivalence toward love which “reproduces the collective as ideal through reproducing a particular kind of subject whose allegiance to the ideal makes it an ideal in the first place” (Ahmed, 123). Ahmed goes on to explain that identification, as a primal and primary form of attachment, is a form of love that is contingent on making likeness or becoming like (126). If we understand identification as an intrinsic part of love, we must also contend with the idea that making likeness also suggests becoming likeable.
While this kind of idealisation and group formation in mutual aid and organising is intended to strengthen a group against much larger forces, I would argue that we must be willing to step back and observe the ways we may be falling into patterns of control and domination. We may be open to everyone but how are our ways of working perpetuating settler-colonial logic and technologies? A few months ago, I had been contemplating the function of mutual in mutual aid—what makes it mutual when those who give and receive aid arrive from various race, class, gender, and cultural backgrounds. When we extract love from its feeling, we can observe that it is an economy where “the imperative to love becomes an imperative to extend the ‘ideal’ that I seek onto others, who can return the ideal to me.” (Ahmed, 129) While Ahmed speaks of nationhood and white supremacy, I am unsettled by this implication for mutual aid and reciprocity. In mutual aid, we talk of a “long-term commitment” but this commitment almost anticipates some kind of return of labour, care, or even liberation. It’s not hard to see how love like this, based on unachievable ideals of likeness and reciprocity, engenders an economy of care that excludes elderly, queer, Disabled, neurodivergent, and racialised people.
In trying to imagine new ways of relating and organsing with one another, I have been reflecting the writer and anarchist ziq’s insights on the totalising force of Community:
Community is an ever-expanding wave that washes over the land, leaving its salt in the soil and forever amassing momentum until it morphs into its final form: an impregnable global civilization with no chink in the armor, no weakness we can assail in the hopes of containing its immense authority… Until finally the wave collapses under its own weight, adding a thick layer of blood to the salted land.
Friendship can’t scale up to swallow the planet. Friendship remains forever small, personal, intimate, deliberate, voluntary, decentralized. This is a feature, not a bug. Friendship allows you to associate and disassociate with others at will, while always maintaining your individuality, the sanctuary of your headspace and the clarity of knowing who you are and what you need. The dictates of anonymous wider society and the supposed common good needn’t cloud your mind when you form friendships rather than build communities.
This is not to say that friendship is the ideal matrix for our relationships but what is most resonant about this essay is its emphasis on scale. The towering walls within community—what it encloses and what it excludes—reinforce likeness and leaves little room for dissent, conflict, varying levels of (dis)ability and commitment. ziq’s essay echoes Jodi Dean’s conception of affectionate solidarity (also cited in Ahmed’s chapter on Love) ‘the kind that grows out that grows out of intimate relationships of love and friendship.’ This idea of small and intimate connection is ever-present in a 2021 conversation between Prentis Hemphill and Mariame Kaba. Talking about abolition, both speakers frequently turned to the “biological” and the “communal” (Hemphill) that guide our efforts. The conversation leads to Kaba sharing words of comfort she offered to her climate anxious nephew: “it is okay for you to concentrate on the things you have direct purchase over right now, that will alleviate suffering… you can do the best you can around that.” I have been meditating on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s insight into moss and their role in an ecosystem. Small and rootless, in shade, on impermeable substrates, I marvel at the capacity of moss to inhabit the world without support systems to hold them upright. Typically growing close to the ground, in the boundary layer, Kimmerer teaches us that mosses thrive because they are small and resourceful: “their limitation is their strength.” (22) There is so much wisdom in living small and within our limits.
Perhaps love as a political imperative is doomed to fail because relies on an Ideal to sustain itself but love as an everyday, biological, and communal approach is the best we can do. This is how I want to love–small and deep–without falling into saviourism or perfectionism. In a conversation between A’isyiyah and Carol Que, I am reminded that this kind of communal love is the basis of care and kinship in Indigenous and POC cultures, and that “love” as we speak of it in Anglophone is constraining. In these contexts, loving and demanding love is a radical act. Love in our communities is, as A’isyiyah names it, “a life force that permeates time, defies linearity.” In this idea of love, I am emboldened by the potentiality of a different kind of life—one where our energies are drawn from a net of inter/intrabeing through our ancestors, elders, peers or comrades–it is ‘threading the net’, as my friend would say. This net or “chain of command” (Que) feels like a generative and radically different model of solidarity and how it might move through our small ways of doing love. Every action having a ripple effect along the chain. This kind of interdependence that does not, as Mia Mingus writes, “live in obligation and entitlement, but rather a loving willingness and sacred giving.” We don’t need new structures, only new and creative visions of love, care and solidarity that are not hindered by capitalism or settler colonialism.
This No Compass edition is supported by Multicultural Arts Victoria, as a part of the 2022 Ahead of the Curve Commissions.
