On Refusal
First published on Jan 22, 2025
This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On New Year's R/evolutions
I refuse. Do you see the fuse that is the molotov cocktail in the belly of sedition?
Refuse: to express oneself as unwilling to accept. Do you remember the first time you threw that molotov cocktail? What colour was the air?
Refuse: to show or express unwillingness to do or comply with. When was the last time you were ungovernable? What was the taste of defiance?
Cerulean and watermelon.
Your answer will not be the same but make it delicious.
What do you hear when you refuse? Make it the soundtrack of your joy.
I refuse to surrender to misery. What we fight for must be better
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”: a quote frequently attributed to anarchist Emma Goldman, never actually appears in any of her work, but is a paraphrase of a longer paragraph from Goldman’s autobiography Living My Life:
“At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement,” Emma Goldman writes.
What is refusal if not reckless abandon!
“My frivolity would only hurt the Cause. I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it,” she added.
Anarchism is often misunderstood as inciting violence. I understand anarchism as inciting liberation. Do you see cerulean? Because I taste watermelon.
Dance to the beat of your own revolution. Sprinkle with rhinestones and glitter your noncompliance.
Remember to hear a rainbow when you refuse injustice, cruelty, and power of the fascist’s pulpit. “Reckless abandon” is not an accusation. It is powerful to keep time with Emma Goldman’s release and freedom.
Your heart needs cerulean (or whatever colour races your heart to the oasis of freedom). Your courage longs to taste watermelon (or whatever flavour is the gift of that beautiful ideal of anarchism).
Keep a journal of the ways refusal innervates your senses. Remember that misery enervates your refusal.
Do not confuse innervate for enervate. It is a mistake as common as thinking refusal is miserable or that agitators shouldn’t dance.
Refuse. Dance. Rejoice.
My goal: that you are found by wonder.
My wish: that you intensely live.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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