This Song Called Resistance

Whew. What a few months it has been since my last post. There's the constant drumbeat of the dismantling of civil society that is percolating an ever-present existential dread into all our lives. This is overflowing into (even more) dysfunction at my dayjob at a climate science organization where we seem to face an existential crisis every few days. And then there's the life-altering exhaustion after a local environmental justice battle was won - followed by the horror at realizing the war has barely begun. I wrote this post back in March, not realizing the kind of resistance that would arise - from the protests in LA to the flotillas and caravan trying to break the humanitarian blockade in Gaza. We're learning to the words to this song called resistance. But in my tiny corner of the world, at 2:50am in a school auditorium on a warm March morning, the song was just beginning.

Spring starts as a song you barely know the words to.

A blur of spicebush in the woods, yolk-bright. Maple buds wary of late frosts, feeling their way along in the returning light, taking their time, ready to burst. Vultures taking wing from their winter perches and playing in the strange winds.
The river whips up a wind icy with winter storms from the southern hills. But the smell of the sun warming wet pebbles lingers, promising.

A refrain here. A half remembered harmony there. Wary and stumbling, but growing louder all the while.

You try to remind the trees of their song of bud and fruit, storm and root. You bang pans and ask the trees to “wake, wake up! Remember your promise made in last year’s rains! Wake!” You tie ribbons to the branches and whisper sweet nothings and prayers to the bark: “wake, you can do it, wake!”

And soon the song returns to the memory of the world, and you. Dogwoods blush with blooms. Herons soar over the banks. Falcons cozy up in the crags. The purple clamshells of bluebells chomp their way to the light amid the flooded banks.

The melodies begin to converge. The rush of the symphony pushes forward, and each wildling find itself singing a little less alone. They suddenly find that they have become a chorus.

Maybe resistance is like that too.

Alone and stumbling, grieving even, at the weight of a song that demands a symphony to be sung. Then someone reaches out and asks, “what can we do?” And you say, “whatever we can.” And you stumble and grow weary and still it seems it will never be enough but with a few others beside you you feel that you are not alone. So others join the song and then more, and suddenly people are asking you, “what can we do?” And you respond, “a hell of a lot. Come along!” So you find you have become a chorus, moving onward of its own accord, finding new notes, new harmonies as people join and others fall silent. You are learning to sing again as a collective, and that takes time but oh how sweet it is when it comes, as sweet as the peepers crying out on a warm spring night and as strong as a dogwood blooming through a frost.

And when the night comes for you to sing out, you are frightened. You have stumbled and you have grieved. You are so so weary. But you also have practiced. You have sacrificed. You are ready. And when the auditorium fills you find it’s standing room only and you’re suddenly 500 strong and that’s better than any amount of money they can throw at this. And the room gets rowdy, so you suggest a song to calm everyone down, a song you barely know the words to, but how sweet it is when more than 500 people sing it out in resistance and community. And you begin to remember the words as you go.

Seven hours later you’re singing another song, of resistance, of camaraderie, of fuck-you-capitalist-pieces-of-shit. But it’s two in the morning and the auditorium has about 100 people left. But how sweet and how strong it is. This symphony called community. This song called resistance.

And at 2:50am they tell the dwindled room that we’ve won. And you don’t believe it at first. Goodness feels out of place in dark times. Blooms feel strange in the chill. Even after hugs and goodbyes and jumping up and down in the street lights right before dawn in a school parking lot, victory feels surreal. And even weeks later victory feels not like victory but readiness for the next blow. And we construct shields and feel wary of asking the community to a celebration. We look for a finality that can’t never be promised.

But the song moves onward, to inspire weary choruses and remind others who have forgotten their refrains. The song of resistance rises and falls across communities on the frontline of a battle against the insipid noise that rises against all of us. So we keep singing, and hope that next time, the words to the song will come to us easier, quicker. That the chorus will be larger, stronger. And that one day, everyone will know the words by heart.

One day.

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” - Arundhati Roy

Prayer for the Creatively Maladjusted

Give me your orchard singers
And river keepers.
Your fight song farmers
And cantankerous caregivers.
Your sci-fi scintillators
And magnanimous hole-menders.

To the environmentalists growing
Immensities in poisoned soil.
To the nurses bringing forward
Life in a crumbling ruin.
To the artists making music
Where noise drowns them out.
To those nurturing blooms in a place
That keeps cutting them down.

To the gatherers,
The healers,
The growers,
And the tenders.
To those who stitch together
Broken worlds every damn day
Without acclaim
But with a whole lotta love.

Another world is already here,
right beyond our hearing.
And on a night full of resistance,
I can hear her singing.

You are reading Entangled Worlds, a newsletter from N.A. Chapman filled with poems and poetic prose that radically imagines the more-than-human worlds beyond the Anthropocene. You can find me on Instagram and Bluesky.