This Is How We Survive - SFBA Book Club

No cover — Mai'a Williams, Ariel Gore: This Is How We Survive (2019, PM Press)

208 pages

English language

Published May 19, 2019 by PM Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-62963-594-1

(1 review)

In This Is How We Survive: Revolutionary Mothering, War, and Exile in the 21st Century, Mai’a Williams shares her experiences working in conflict zones and with liberatory resistance communities as a journalist, human rights worker, and midwife in Palestine, Egypt, Chiapas, Berlin, and the U.S., while mothering her young daughter Aza.

She first went to Palestine in 2003 during the Second Intifada to support Palestinians resisting the Israeli occupation. In 2006, she became pregnant in Bethlehem, West Bank. By the time her daughter was three years old, they had already celebrated with Zapatista women in southern Mexico and survived Israeli detention, and during the 2011 Arab Spring they were in the streets of Cairo protesting the Mubarak dictatorship. She watched the Egyptian revolution fall apart and escaped the violence, like many of her Arab comrades, by moving to Europe. Three years later, she and Aza were camping at Standing Rock …

In This Is How We Survive: Revolutionary Mothering, War, and Exile in the 21st Century, Mai’a Williams shares her experiences working in conflict zones and with liberatory resistance communities as a journalist, human rights worker, and midwife in Palestine, Egypt, Chiapas, Berlin, and the U.S., while mothering her young daughter Aza.

She first went to Palestine in 2003 during the Second Intifada to support Palestinians resisting the Israeli occupation. In 2006, she became pregnant in Bethlehem, West Bank. By the time her daughter was three years old, they had already celebrated with Zapatista women in southern Mexico and survived Israeli detention, and during the 2011 Arab Spring they were in the streets of Cairo protesting the Mubarak dictatorship. She watched the Egyptian revolution fall apart and escaped the violence, like many of her Arab comrades, by moving to Europe. Three years later, she and Aza were camping at Standing Rock in protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline and co-creating revolutionary mothering communities once again.

This is a story about mothers who are doing the work of deep social transformation by creating the networks of care that sustain movements and revolutions. By centering mothers in our organizing work, we center those who have the skills and the experience of creating and sustaining life on this planet. This Is How We Survive illuminates how mothering is a practice essential to the work of revolution. It explores the heartbreak of revolutionary movements falling apart and revolutionaries scattering across the globe into exile. And most importantly, how mamas create, no matter the conditions, the resilience to continue doing revolutionary work.

4 editions

subcutaneous reviewed This Is How We Survive by Mai'a Williams

Glad I read it

4 stars

I'm reviewing this book mainly because barely any reviews came up when I searched for them (promotional blurbs don't count), which is disappointing. There's a lot to talk about, & it deserves serious engagement.

For me, the central portion of the book covers Mai'a's years in Egypt, where she first ended up after getting jailed (with her kid) & kicked out of Palestine by israel, & eventually leaves after basically being harassed out of the loose activist “community” she tried to foster through the revolution. The themes built upon from the chapters about her earlier transnational experiences, of simultaneous solidarity & conflict with others in struggle, state violence & “intracommunal” policing, really come to a head. The constant misogynoir she mentions almost in passing seems to practically reach a fever pitch in Cairo, which she is careful to remind readers is an African city. At some point, my gut reaction …

I'm reviewing this book mainly because barely any reviews came up when I searched for them (promotional blurbs don't count), which is disappointing. There's a lot to talk about, & it deserves serious engagement.

For me, the central portion of the book covers Mai'a's years in Egypt, where she first ended up after getting jailed (with her kid) & kicked out of Palestine by israel, & eventually leaves after basically being harassed out of the loose activist “community” she tried to foster through the revolution. The themes built upon from the chapters about her earlier transnational experiences, of simultaneous solidarity & conflict with others in struggle, state violence & “intracommunal” policing, really come to a head. The constant misogynoir she mentions almost in passing seems to practically reach a fever pitch in Cairo, which she is careful to remind readers is an African city. At some point, my gut reaction to her the drawn-out collapse of Cairo's revolutionary milieu just became “Ugh, what a parade of terrible fucking people!! Why is she putting up with any of this shit??”

For me, the book's strength is that she doesn't necessarily try to answer it directly. Instead, she explains what happened, what she felt, how she [re]acted at the time—including the explanations she gave when she was asked over the course of events, rather than “looking back”. I liked this & think it worked out well, especially because the intro/foreword, which does try to do a little bit of the “here are the lessons” thing, wasn't to my liking. I preferred to read her story & draw my own conclusions, whether or not they were the same as hers.

The “Revolutionary Mothering” subtitle plays out in this fashion too. Rather than try to give some list of do's & don'ts for raising a children in social movements, her child Aza is simply the most important character in the story after herself. (Much more important than the father, who isn't absent, but is just…another person.) Rather than describe children & mothers as burdens or boons to social movements in an abstract way, Mai'a & Aza encounter people with these attitudes (or situations that might raise these questions) & respond however they do.

I originally read the title of the book, This is How We Survive, as didactic, but I don't think the book itself is so. I think it's better understood as “these are the things we do to survive as [aspiring] revolutionaries”, with the freedom/responsibility of deciding what to do with that knowledge & those experiences being given to the reader. I hope more people, especially those who have the kind of transnational mobility Mai'a has, check this book out, if only to know that others have taken similar paths before them & should be listened to.