Rallying cries
Dear Carolina De Robertis, My mother taught me the power of letters. She liked to write what she called “poison pen” letters when she was upset about something. She wrote to representatives about issues she cared about; she wrote to businesses that had done something to offend her; she spearheaded letter-writing campaigns as head of the safety committee of my elementary school’s PTA that led to action — a traffic light installed in a dangerous intersection near the school, guns and ammunition removed from our local Kmart. She taught me to write letters to the editor, to the White House, at a very young age. Letters are in my blood.
Your impulse to gather letters in your grief after the 2016 election, to gather voices full of anger and hope and possibility, feels like home to me. It feels like home, but the book that resulted from your call also expands my idea of home, of hope. Your book is just what I needed at this alarming moment in our country’s history; I know others will feel the same way. All of us could use a good shot of radical hope right about now.
In your introduction, you write, “It’s my belief that the challenges of this era ... call for a multi-vocal response, as there are truths about this moment that can only be fully expressed through the prismatic proliferation of voices. In other words, no soloist can fully capture the music of our times; we also need symphonies.”
What a glorious symphony you’ve assembled here. Not only are the voices beautifully diverse — voices that include Junot Díaz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Achy Obejas, Parnaz Foroutan, iO Tillet Wright and many others — so are their approaches to their letters. The book contains letters addressed to ancestors and generations yet to come; letters addressed to Millennials, to Baby Boomers, to young children; letters addressed to immigrant mothers, to a stranger in a grocery store, to artists, to activists. Letters that, in their specificity, can reach us all.
In her letter, Cherrie Moraga writes about how specificity can help break through stereotypes; “in that specificity,” she writes, “real art can happen; in that specificity, an audience member might very well find her own freedom road home.” These letters are full of different “freedom roads” your readers can travel. Maybe someone needs to hear Kate Schatz say, “White people: we are a problem. Let us please be a solution”; maybe someone needs to hear Celeste Ng say, “Resist the urge to grow a shell. Don’t let fear convince you that hardness is good”; maybe someone needs to hear Luis Alberto Urrea say, “For a while now, I have been waiting for a leader to come direct me. A warrior to show me the way. But then it came to me: I am the warrior. So are you. We are called to lead each other through the valley.”
In her letter to a teenage girl and fellow Egyptian American, Mona Eltahaway writes, “I have learned to carry the revolution — be it against patriarchy, fascism, or bigotry — within me, so that my resistance travels with me like a beloved totem.”
I can picture people carrying this book with them in such a totemic way. And not just carry it — use it. Díaz reminds us: “Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice”; I know this book will encourage readers to put their own radical hope to practice, to translate it into action, to write their own letters, politicize their own art, create space for other voices to be heard.
If I have any criticism for you, it’s that with our dizzying news cycle, some of the book is already dated — in a couple of letters, for instance, Michael Flynn is still part of the administration — but the inspiration found in these pages is evergreen.
“Our first person is always plural,” writes Jeff Chang.
“So light the small flame of your heart,” writes Parnaz Foroutan, “cup your hands around it to protect it from the savage and the storm, and walk forth into that darkness, because I tell you, that flame, that bit of light you carry, that flickering hope, that has the power to illuminate even the blackest of nights.”
“This is the way forward: through raising our voices,” writes Roxana Robinson.
Thank you, Carolina, for gathering these voices, these fierce, loving, galvanizing voices, and moving all of us forward. With gratitude, Gayle Brandeis