LIBERTY, EQUALITY, SORORITY!
The author Olivia Laing issues a rallying cry to move forward into the future enlivened and unafraid
What does it mean to feel free? In the early days of the first lockdown, I was finishing a book about freedom when I came across a video on YouTube of the singer and civil-rights activist Nina Simone. It was 1969, so she was 36 years old, and she was talking about what freedom meant to her. She’d tasted it on stage sometimes, she said: a feeling of being absolutely without fear.
She was laughing as she spoke, but she also looked as if she’d glimpsed something magnificent, astonishing, rare. In a softer voice, she added: ‘Lots of children have no fear. That’s the closest way, that’s the only way I can describe it. That’s not all of it, but it is something to really, really feel.’
No fear: imagine that. This has been a frightening year to inhabit a human body. We’ve lived through a plague, and I’ve no doubt that the pandemic will continue to affect us for years into the future. At the same time, freedom is returning to our lives. The freedom to lie in the grass with our friends. The freedom to meet strangers, to see a band, to lose ourselves on a sweaty dancefloor once again. To be unafraid of other people’s bodies feels like the greatest luxury imaginable. I even long for the Tube.
But the past year has brought other revelations, too. We don’t all have the same experience of inhabiting our bodies, and we aren’t all managing the same level of risk. Racism, misogyny and homophobia remain toxic and powerful forces. As Simone knew, real freedom isn’t just a matter of doing whatever you feel like. It’s also about finding ways to live without being constantly limited, damaged or even destroyed by the violent reinforcement of ideas about what is possible for the kind of body you happen to live inside.
I first learnt all this growing up as a gender-nonconforming kid in a gay family during the Aids crisis, under the homophobic rule of Section 28. But that wasn’t the only lesson of my childhood. My introduction to activism came at the age of 11, when my mother took us to Gay Pride. We marched over Westminster Bridge, a sea of bodies abruptly formidable in our togetherness. For the first time I understood that our vulnerable bodies can also be a source of power, that our physical presence can change the world.
I’ve been on hundreds of marches and demonstrations since then.
I spent my twenties immersed in the environmental direct action, living in treehouses to protect woodlands threatened by new roads. I know from experience how powerful bodily disobedience can be, and yet it still felt miraculous to see the Black Lives Matter protests flowering around the globe this year, conducted under the inimical conditions of the pandemic.
I’m pretty sure Simone would have been there if she were still alive. I ended my book with her because she embodied the long struggle for freedom. As a child she’d hoped to become a concert pianist, but she wasn’t accepted by the Curtis Institute of Music, a decision many people told her was based on the colour of her skin. Devastated, she drifted into playing piano in a nightclub, where on her first shift the owner insisted that she sing. She soon became a star, but the feeling of drifting persisted until a friend introduced her to the civil-rights movement.
At last she understood that the things she’d struggled with in her own life were actually political, and as such could be communally resisted. Music was a weapon. When she wrote ‘Mississippi Goddam’ in response to the bombing of a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which six children were killed, she felt as if she’d ‘flung 10 bullets’ back at the killers. When she sang she made crowds of people weep because they tasted for a minute the true possibility of freedom.
In later life, Simone came to feel despair about the possibility of change, but right to the end she was still singing the old songs. I listened to them a lot last year. ‘Too slow!’ she shouts in ‘Mississippi Goddam’, and she’s right. The pace of change has been glacial, and many of the advances won have already been reversed. And yet the taste of freedom remains, like wild honey on the tongue. People do not want to live in fear, as the Reclaim These Streets protests in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder so plainly showed.
We’re going back into the world again, leaving our winter cells behind. It’s frightening but also exhilarating, the idea of being around other people, other bodies. I think we have an opportunity right now to make a different kind of world, one in which no one needs to feel fear because of the kind of body they inhabit. Imagine what that summer would be like. Imagine the enormous possibilities. ‘Everybody: A Book About Freedom’ by Olivia Laing (£20, Picador) is out now.