Solidarity in ruins. A reflection on the Freedom bookshop bombing.

Much has been said on the coward aggression Freedom bookshop was victim of. Founded by Charlotte Wilson and Peter Kropotkin and based in Whitechapel since the 1970s, Freedom was the oldest anarchic bookshop in the English-speaking world, home of the renowned Freedom Press - which sent into print names such as Clifford Harper, Vernon Richards, Colin Ward and his 'Anarchy' magazine, Murray Bookchin, William Blake and Errico Malatesta. It was already attacked by fascists in 1993 and since then metal bars were installed on the windows and the entrance door.
 
All major publishers, bookshops and leftist groups promtly expressed their solidarity, especially because Freedom Bookshop wasn't exactly a steady market competitor, but - like many anarchic organisations - a volunteer-run entity, struggling to survive. A spontaneous 'clean-up' soon followed, and many sincere militants, armed with broom, took part in this Red Aid intervention.
 
Ironically, with all due respect to those affected by the bomb -no one was hurt-, we could look at the bombing as exciting news for anarchism: for once, radical literature wasn’t confined to the spider webs and dust of academia. Not just another talk, another conference of self-boosting egoes and parboiled lectures. Most importantly, not another publisher whining about censorship before billing their authors as 'dangerous' on the back cover of their books (dangerous for whom, and how?). It was, surprisingly, a physical target to be physically attacked.

Let's move for a bit from this episode and let's think about Farheneit 451 and Salman Rushdie. A burning book has always had a symbolic and extraordinary suggestive power: the power of martyrdom. However, walking past the smoking ashes of intolerance, one has to wonder: why would someone firebomb a bookshop, a struggling bookshop, in 2012? Among all the images of inter-ideological confrontation and violence you could picture, nothing seems to be more out of fashion than a pile of burning books in a western megacity. Who's really afraid of books today, apart from decaying celebrities and drunken monarchs?
 
Many years ago it was different. Since the time of my childhood, I used to hear stories of astonishing ideological vehemence. Back in the 1970s Napoli, my hometown, you could find areas that were practically forbidden to walk into if you were red or black, like Piazza Dante, in the Old Town, where buying 'Unità', the official Communist newspaper, or any of the Autonomia's journals, was like going on a mission. There probably wasn't much difference between that kind of territorial defence and hooliganism – being the latter born around that time, too, a time were freedom of speech was heavily challenged, with assaults and arrests. Yet, certain risks of physical nature must have been risks of a certain political significance, compared to the estranged, insular ways 'militancy' is today put together. Facebook groups: perhaps you know this form of conscription...
 
A burning book is then a favour returned to radicalism. When I somehow managed to get on board the Librotraficante Caravan, traveling from Texas to Arizona last year, with other writers and activists, protesting the ban of Chicano literature in Tucson schools, I did it with the passion of an avid reader and political literarature worshipper. Yet, of the many magnificent scholars who supported the Caravan, only one of them, the carpenter turned-writer Dagoberto Gilb, had the courage to admit: 'A banned book is the coolest thing that ever happened to me'. Indeed. Within a society where every idea can potentially be revolutionary and vulgarly marketable at the same time, an aggression is one of the truest sparkles of attention that a militant can expect. And it helps, even if painfully, the book to escape its destiny as a commodified danger.
 
Hot damn, save the books. Books are powerful stuff. But as Hakim Bey would put it, these objects have a strong aura of magic surrounding them. Their power is taken for granted. "As media transmit only words—no sounds, sights, smells or feels, all of which are left up to the reader’s imagination." And there’s nothing really dangerous about books, if the imagination is predated by the contemporary chain of publishing / production / consumption / work / conferences / facebook-activism: the author/publisher produces, defines himself/herself as necessary, you buy, and then Facebook-activists defend the books burned by fascists or seized by the police.
 
To go back to our story, a firebomb was intended to offend, to scare, to hurt a symbol that appeals to 'imaginative' types, perhaps, but all our imaginal activity really amounts to passivity, sitting alone with an iPad, passively clicking 'Like' when we agree and let others dictate the fabula.
 
The awful truth is that we don't need a molotov cocktail to shut down independent bookstores. Our camaraderie is enough undermining. Freedom owns the building where they operate - it was donated a while ago, they weren't paying any rent; Freedom Press magazine is run for free by Aldgate Press. Freedom authors, it comes as no surprise, write for free, also. Despite these favorable condition, Freedom has already been on the verge of bankruptcy. This is nothing but an grim realization: we haven't found a way to make our tribes survive outside of the logic of 'perennial emergency' & 'resistance'; outside the cheap solidarity when fascist aggressions occur, just to return the morning after to the state of oblivion of our everyday existence.
 
We might talk about 'revolutionary literature' and books as a 'gateway drug' to dissent. But what if the practice of dissent remains just a peaceful parade? And a library a mute, fetishized idol? When we have come dangerously close to the commodification of dissent, maybe a sparkling bomb too should be taken as a blessing.