Introducing Rainwood House Sings

Some background for my upcoming serial Movement Mystery

Greetings, Friends!

In this issue you’ll find:

• an introduction to the serialized version of my novel Rainwood House Sings, with some of the backstory and philosophy behind it, plus brief notes on:

• Venezuela elections, imperialism and sovereignty

• Disclaimer manifesto

Helicopter + sleepless night = story idea 

There was a time when police helicopters frequently circled over my small town of Mount Rainier, Maryland, just east of Washington, DC. Often I lay awake, staring blearily out my bedroom window, watching a chopper prowl low, nearly brushing the treetops. Its searchlight stabbed the shadows and swept around our houses, seeking criminals, I supposed. 

As my female protagonist would later do in Rainwood House Sings, I assured myself that helicopters posed no threat to me, safe in my home. Yet I couldn’t help flashing back to the dread I’d felt at the sight and sound of low-flying helicopters, during the time of US-funded counterinsurgency in the eighties in Mexico and Central America. As a US-born illegal immigrant in Mexico, I had some level of personal fear, but mostly it was my Mexican, and especially my Central American, activist comrades, for whom a circling helicopter could mean death.

On one such helicopter-invaded night, my sleepy brain began spinning a scenario. It’s the early 2000s. A Mexican immigrant living here in Maryland hears the helicopter outside her window and has to talk herself out of the terror it provokes. This woman taking shape in my mind shares some traits with me: she was an anthropology student activist in Mexico in the eighties and now lives in a small town near DC like mine. But Marlie Mendíval is emphatically her own self, born in Mexico City and immigrating to the US at age 8, while I was born into a white Jewish Christian family in Boston.

My mind then jumped from this troubled woman to the person the chopper was chasing. What if, late on a November night, a wrongly accused activist is forced to flee police pursuit? What if the fugitive ducks into a shadowy backyard to dodge the searchlight and scrambles toward a house hoping to stay out of sight? What if he trips, pitches down the basement steps, and in panic grabs for the doorknob? And what if the door has been carelessly left unlocked and flies open, launching him inside?

That’s how the story started in my mind years ago, and that’s how it starts now–except in the book we first encounter the man in the basement and then the woman, who is drinking coffee past noon because of the sleep the helicopter stole from her, and to warm her hands against the chill of drafty, ramshackle Rainwood House.

A bit of backstory

I’ve always been an avid fiction reader. Reading an absorbing story gives me a break from issues I’m embroiled in, but also new perspectives, providing both escape from reality and new or sharpened views of it. I love that and so much more about fiction.

In recent years, however, I have become increasingly bothered that activists and organizers so rarely appear as protagonists or point-of-view characters in movies, novels and other forms of fiction. In this article I suggest some reasons why that might be, but an overarching problem is that fiction is by nature focused on the journeys of individual characters, and while social problems pervade fiction, they tend to appear as immutable forces characters contend with through individual and interpersonal struggles. Rarely are characters shown joining or leading social and political movements to confront these issues collectively and fight for systemic change, organizing together to fight the inequities plaguing them or to create a more fair society.

To be clear, stories abound where people suffer and struggle to overcome oppression. In fact, I believe fiction is compelling to us because it invites us to identify with and root for the characters as they grapple with injustice. Many of these works raise essential points about race, gender, class, and the effects of social ills like drugs and domestic violence.

Yet while literature, at least modern Western literature, offers many great stories portraying characters resisting injustice, only rarely—Les Miserables comes to mind—do they highlight the collective, activist side of this resistance, or show main characters in the midst of movements actively fighting for systemic change and forging alternative, liberated spaces.

Searching for Activists in Fiction

Such stories are potentially full of drama, adventure, conflict, and inspiration, yet they are rare. When I mention the paucity of stories with full and fair portrayals of activists and movements to activist friends and colleagues, they often frown as they think about it, recognizing that folks like them rarely appear in the works of fiction they read or watch.

They do cite with enthusiasm certain works of works of fiction where activism does appear. John Steinbeck’s novels and the movie Norma Rae come up often.

I have been collecting these suggestions for some time. Two recent ones I loved are Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman and The Cold Millions by Jess Walter. The first portrays day-to-day organizing of members of the Turtle Mountain Reservation against efforts to legislate “termination” of Native peoples and entirely assimilate them. The second is about the International Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) in an early 20th century labor rights battle, from the viewpoint of a young worker who befriends the indomitable labor and women’s liberation activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

I have been compiling these works of fiction of different genres, formats, and types, all centering on activist characters, plots and settings. I look forward to sharing this list soon, and to inviting folks to share their favorites. My goal is to make fiction featuring activists a thing.

Sleuthing for Activist Stereotypes

I also began to take note of, and write about, the stereotyping that lurks in a fair portion of the fiction where activists do appear. Even where activists are important characters, stereotypes regularly creep into such portrayals—generally, I believe, unbeknownst to the creators.

What constitutes a “full and fair” portrayal of social justice activists and movements? How does it contrast with a stereotyped rendering? In this issue of my newsletter I review two examples of fiction where the same labor struggle–the 1985 Miners’ Strike in Great Britain–plays a key role: the movies Pride and Billy Elliot. There I consider what makes Billy Elliot a stereotyped depiction while Pride is more “full and fair.”

Stereotyped activist characters tend to be props rather than people (as also happens with race- and gender-based stereotyping). A full and fair portrayal may be any genre or type of fiction; it may be serious or lighter in tone; the important thing is that each activist character is complex and multidimensional, respecting their viewpoint and uniqueness, including their flaws. A woodenly positive portrayal of an activist can be just as stereotyped as a demonized character. Additionally, the activist movement or setting in the story needs to be as accurate as any of the other settings, showing activists doing real things—churning out flyers while discussing strategy, trudging on a picket line in the rain, meeting to plan a campaign, etc.—which the writer has taken the trouble to research.

When I say “real,” I don’t mean limited to realism in style. We can have fairy tales, scifi, fantasy, any genre. It is the truthful rendering of the dynamics and interactions, dilemmas and debates, as well as knowledge, respect, and attention to details, that make depiction of activists real, just as for any other group of people and the milieux they move in. 

Erasure, dismissal, and stereotyping of activists tend to be interwoven into fiction in ways we may not notice, as with stereotyping of female, global majority, and other groups. Fiction draws us in and engages our emotions; we may not be aware of it playing on our unconscious prejudices.

The neglectful activist mother, the hypocritical and/or activist male, are among many stereotypes ascribed to folks devoted to social justice and liberation movements, i.e., activists, that may creep into stories even of writers who identify with the causes of their characters. I mention an example of this at the end of my review of Cantoras, a fascinating novel about the struggles of five Uruguayan lesbian women.

Rainwood House, a Movement Mystery in Three Books

I feel it is crucial to look more closely at how we activists are represented in the mainstream narrative flowing all around us. How does this narrative, so readily internalized, affect our experience and capacity to do the indispensable work of organizing to oppose the multifarious destructive forces bent on destroying our planet—which sounds like a fiction plot, right? Would that it were!

And how does it depict, or not, the equally crucial activist work of carving out spaces to create a just and compassionate society?

As tends to be the case, when you want to see more of something, it’s a good idea to go ahead and start making it. Which is why I am not only seeking out existing fiction featuring activists and encouraging others to write it, but also writing it myself.

Like any art form, the first job of fiction is to engage people, which requires competence in the craft, imagination, and hard work. Any other jobs the author wants their fiction to do must rest on that base. 

Rainwood House, by Juliana Barnet

The main characters in Rainwood House Sings:

• Rainwood House, a ramshackle post-Civil War house in Maryland full of old books, whispers of past racial justice struggles, and musical plumbing.

• Marlie Mendíval, the aforementioned owner of Rainwood House, ex student activist in Mexico, ex union organizer, and ex-spouse of Rainwood House’s co-owner, who wants to take the house from her just as she’s starting to risk her livelihood as a university groundskeeper by leading a campus workers movement.

• Demetrius Ben M’Hidi, the community organizer chased by the helicopter who ends up in the basement, having fled his DC neighborhood when police accused him of shooting a cop and opened fire on him.

• Samantha, Marlie’s nine-year-old granddaughter, who loves books, bats, and singing (off-key.) Also her friends, though she’s currently embroiled in cultural clashes with them.

  

  Demetrius, Samantha, and Marlie, by Sophie Barnet-Higgins, age 13 when she made this drawing

Serializing Starts Next Week!

The first book in my Rainwood House movement mystery series, Rainwood House Sings 2nd Edition, will be published later this year. But Activist Explorer readers will receive it by email starting next week…

Chapters will appear in this newsletter, with illustrations by me and my daughter/co-author Sophie Barnet-Higgins. I’ll provide a way to navigate the parts, following the lead of writer Eleanor Anstruther in her serialized novel Fallout, about the Greenham anti-nuclear activist encampment in the eighties in England.

I will also read be reading the story aloud.

If you read the first edition eight years ago, I think you’ll still enjoy the 2nd edition. It is about 20,000 words shorter. They say less is more, especially in prose, and I think it is true in this case, though the first edition was pretty good, if I do say so.

Another reason for the second edition is to have Book 1 come out closer to book 2, so this time you won’t have to wait eight years for the next book in the series.

Yet another reason for a second edition: the first time I “hand-sold” the book. No book tour, almost no promotion, generally all sales were direct, in person. A good number, according to a small publisher I spoke with recently, but my personal reach is limited.

This time around, I took a class to become a “book promotion ninja.” And I now have writer colleagues, some of them also activists, including our Activist Fiction Writers Circle, a group of women collaborating to support one another in publishing our works of fiction featuring activists.

Finally, this Second Edition will include a foreword by a very well known creator and activist!

Look for Chapter 1.1 in your inbox! 

Venezuela elections, imperialism and sovereignty

Last year about this time I visited Venezuela and saw how people around the country, especially in communes, are rebuilding their economy after the onslaught of sanctions and prolonged economic crisis. In 2019 I helped defend the embassy of Venezuela in Washington DC against an unelected individual, Juan Guaidó, installed by the Trump administration as part of a US-backed coup that hoped to topple Venezuela’s socialist government but failed. The first US-backed coup against that government, when Hugo Chavez was president, was in 2002—watch The Revolution will Not Be Televised to learn more.)

I am not neutral on this topic, nor do I think anyone is. I am in favor of countries and their people’s being permitted to decide their futures themselves. As a US person, I feel that we have no right to keep intervening in another country that is trying a different pathm for which the US has been severely punishing it for nearly two decades. Do we really want our energy and resources to go toward enforcing subservience to international corporations?

If you are used to relying on the New York Times and similar media outlets, just remember how these same media that are now trashing the Venezuela electoral process promoted the Iraq War and validated the lie about weapons of mass destruction. Remember everything we were told about the coup against Allende in Chile, Aristide in Haiti, and so many other coups and regime-change interventions by the US government. Let us not again be gulled into believing, once again, that what is said now to justify intervention is true this time. Instead, remember the past. The motives and modus operandi have not changed.

Be skeptical! Take the time to investigate a broad range of sources. I’m not saying become Maduro supporters. I’m saying be humble and leave other countries alone, even if they are brimming with oil—which we should be leaving in the ground.

We are no better than anyone else and have no more right to intervene in their elections than they do in ours.

A brief disclaimer manifesto:

Many things are important and I consider all I write about to be worth it. That said, some things are omnipresent. Whatever my topic at a given moment, these things arch over my consciousness and pervade my thoughts, even though I may not mention them:

- the existential threats of nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe, and systemic violence.

- our socio-political-economic system based on supremacy of the few over the many, where those in the supremacist position exploit, manipulate, divide, and coerce other groups to acquire and maintain wealth and power. This system holds us all hostage and confounds our capacity to act rationally, together, to overcome the above human-caused threats.

- the fundamental connection we all have to one another and to the world regardless of our feelings and will. We urgently need to become better attuned to this connectedness to overcome our isolation and allow ourselves to become aware of and act in harmony with the strong, delicate threads linking us to everything else.

Til Next Time…