The Thing With Teeth

Musings on the nature of hope

Hope is the thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson wrote: Hope is the thing with feathers/that perches in the soul/and sings the tune without the words/and never stops at all…

Perhaps for Emily hope was a small winged thing.
For me, hope has always been the thing with teeth.

These September days with their shimmering skies and still-balmy breezes seem like a good time to talk about hope. Here in Portugal, school has just swung back into session. All last week, as the final hours of of summer ticked down, Filha labeled her notebooks—blue for Geografia, green for ciência—and organized her backpack. She’s ready to resume her schedule of studying and socializing and I’m ready to resume my schedule of solid blocks of time spent by myself.

Day by day as we watch, the season shifts. Sunlit hours shrinking, the air cooling around my shoulders.

In the USA the changeover of seasons brings a two-for-one deal: Back to School and back to school shootings—218 and counting this year alone. Everywhere you look, the disaster is man-made. Here in Europe, floods are killing people. Across the Atlantic, Brazil is burning—fires the size of Italy. So is Palestine, across the Mediterranean. Burning for different reasons, but the same.

Greed, land theft, racist extractionism, oppression and suppression and manipulation and agitation and all the fingers point back to capitalism. God gave man dominion over the earth says the Good Book, and ever since man has been grasping and plundering and conquering and taking and taking and taking and it’s never enough. There’s always more that can be taken.

So much of the story of this world—a story still being written—is dark. Vile and vicious. The stuff that wakes me up in the small hours and clings like a smothering vine.

It’s a good time talk about hope.

Hope, for me, is a knife edge on which I balance between despair and indifference.

Indifference, to me, is eyes squeezed shut. Is intentional disconnection. Like: I’m not political, like: I have to protect my peace. Indifference is the perfect combination of “That doesn’t affect me” + “What’s in it for me?”

Despair, on the other hand, is something I’m thinking about in a new light. I have been tempted to define despair as giving up. As a loss of hope. As in: It’s too late or There’s nothing we can do or What difference could I possibly make?

But then last week I read this interview with writer Hanif Abdurraqib in which he said: “Despair is inevitable for me. I think that despair hovers. And I don’t find ways to stop its hovering. And I’m actually fine with that because I think that keeps me in tune with the realities of the world that need addressing. It keeps me in tune with what I need to fight back against. It keeps me in tune with a real rage that propels me towards love.”

So now I’m thinking maybe hope and despair go hand-in-hand. How can any thinking person see the realities of our world and not feel the creeping sink of despair? It’s a natural reaction to the state of things, if you’re paying any kind of attention.

One of my oldest tattoos, on the inside of my right wrist, is a latin inscription: Spei captiva sum. I am a prisoner of hope. I got it way back in my 20s, thinking about that knife edge of hope. Thinking about how essential it is to have hope, even in the deepest dark, even in the thick of it. I got inked to remind myself not to let despair pull me into the quicksand of hopelessness, but to use it instead to light a fire. To spark some kind of imagination. To throw myself into the bite of it, to feel the edge of the knife, the teeth of the terror. To feel it, and to do something about it.

“Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written,” Rebecca Solnit said.

In her brilliant book Hope in the Dark, she wrote: “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

I once believed, not so very long ago in fact, that our institutions would save us. Even after COVID, some shreds of that delusion still clung to me. In my soft life, in my breezy naivete, I believed that (some) leaders in high places were smart enough, wise enough, brave enough, empathetic enough, principled enough, to make the world a better place for us. Us, the minions. Us, the voters. Us, the regular folk who sort our recyclables and stay up at night balancing the columns of our budgets and worrying about how to consume less, how to sustain more.

I no longer believe that our institutions will save us. Not those of higher learning, not those of health and wellness. Technocrats won’t save us. Bezos and the billionaires won’t save us—the seats on their spaceships are reserved for those who can pay. Corporate interests are an ouroboros, caring for nothing but their own bottom line. Democrat-nominated Supreme Court justices won’t save us. The Obamas won’t save us. Bernie won’t save us. Jill won’t save us. Kamala with her promise of the “most lethal fighting force in the world” will definitely not save us.

My lack of belief is not indifference or inertia. My despair in the ability of The Powers That Be to ever truly do right by this planet and the people who inhabit it is a kind of hope. A hope with teeth.

Poet Fariha Róisín wrote recently of this kind of hope, saying: “The delusion of empire continues... It lulls you into a sleepy state by convincing you of its inherent goodness, that the only way to exist is for white supremacy and capitalism and heteropatriarchy intertwined to be the main churning gear, but it keeps mutating and changing face… The system cannot betray you when it is you, right?

“This is how capitalism implicates us,” she continues. “Many of us understand that war is not inevitable, that mass consumption is wrong, that there are better ways of existing with each other, with this Earth, but we are so subdued and so embedded in the system that many of us are unwilling to re-route our destinies, our compulsions, our greed—yet the ability to do this is the very ascension many of us also seek; the evolution that we crave. This should feel exciting rather than daunting, yet capitalist conditioning tells you it’s not on you! You are just but one person… how could you do this all alone?”

Fariha also quotes Toni Cade Bambara who said: As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.

“It’s important to remind people that it’s possible to change and that it’s necessary to,” Fariha writes. “At any point in your life you can say: “I was wrong” or “I need to educate myself more on this topic.” …Maybe society would be more compelling if more of us were humble to the fact that we don’t know much, and were invested in knowing more.”

I think what Fariha’s saying is incendiary, in the best sort of way. I have been wrong about a great many things throughout my life. I will continue to get some shit wrong. And I am determined admit that, and to keep asking questions, to keep following the answers, no matter how uncomfortable they might make me feel.

I have been wrong about a lot, but in this perspective of hope, I do not think I am mistaken: Institutions will not save us, so we must save ourselves. Save each other.

We can harness our despair. Flex our claws. Ruffle some feathers. Break down doors. Re-route our destinies. Show some teeth.

Because hope is revolutionary.

[A postscript: I’ve had an influx of subscribers from various other blogs penned by Americans who’ve moved to Portugal. A lot of these new subscribers then turn around and immediately unsubscribe the next time I post. I’m not sure why they’re opting out (and of course nobody’s obligated to keep allowing me into their inbox), but I am wondering if there’s some sort of expectation that I am yet another expat writing fun and frothy stories about a house remodel or a castle visit or what I ate for dinner. Nothing against fun and frothy—there is absolutely a time, place, and audience for such things. I have even been known to get fun now and again. But I’ve been living in Portugal for three years now and even though that’s not really very long in the scheme of things, I find myself less and less interested in writing about tourist-adjacent observations or Under-the-Tuscan-Sun-styled vibes. I’m more invested in thinking and writing and wondering about life itself. The how and why of it. I’m interested in interrogating the ways in which living outside of the USA changes my understanding of what it means to be an American. I’m interested in documenting how this change of country affects my daughter. And I also want to write about dogs and donkeys and doldrums, too. So if you’re new here, and you’ve made it this far, first: congratulations and then: I’m glad you’re here and I hope you keep reading and also: I promise to always keep it real.]

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