Exploring my parents’ radical, revolutionary past

As she woke up on the morning of November 9, 2016 photographer Alice Proujansky reached for her phone. Immediately, her heart sank. On her screen was a notification announcing that Donald Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton to become the 45th President of the United States of America.

“The first person I called was my dad,” she recalls. “We were horrified, but we weren’t surprised, though many people in my social circles were. We weren’t surprised to confront racist America, sexist America, or imperialist America – that was not shocking – these were all things that my parents were fighting against.”

In their youth Proujansky’s parents had been deeply involved in radical, left-wing activism. They originally fell in love organising a 60,000 person counter rally to the United States Bicentennial celebrations, and their friends had joked that they would never work out because her mother was a Marxist and her father was an anarcho-communist. They had also been members of militant organisations, including infamous group Weather Underground (aka Weatherman) that had planned revolution and the overthrow of the US government, using tactics including non-lethal bombings.

“I thought that I need to tell people the story [of my parents], that this is called a struggle, not a win, and it’s called a movement not a finish line,” she continues. “People need to know about this history and what it means to be part of a struggle, and also remember that the great liberal promise is not going to save you.”

The political tipping point, along with the urge to share her parents’ story and the radical history of the United States, led her to begin her project and newly-published debut monograph, Hard Times are Fighting Times. It’s a deeply personal story that lays out her childhood, while uncovering her radical parents and their history. Across the book’s spreads there are warm, relatable family photographs placed alongside journals, call-to-action leaflets and posters, as well as an archive of FBI surveillance files of her parents that Proujansky had found in their attic.

“[The files] were in a dusty box in a hot attic,” she says. “They never really mentioned it, but he got them under the Freedom of Information Act. Part of it was super intimate – it describes my dad’s height and weight and it says: ‘5ft 9in, dishevelled and unemployed,’ and it made me feel so tender towards him.”

The majority of her parents’ most active organising took place before Proujansky was born, though that’s not to say they stepped back from radical politics or action. “A few years back, a company called Kinder Morgan tried to build a big fracking pipeline through the towns [around where my parents live] and thought it would be no problem – these are tiny towns and we’ll just plough this thing through,” she explains. “And this old network [of anti-nuclear movements] that my dad was part of got reactivated, and using their knowledge of organising and anarchism, rose up and were like ‘we are absolutely allowing this to go through here’, and they stopped them.”

Proujansky’s mother spent most of her working years employed by non-profit organisations, and most of their neighbours and family friends had been involved in left wing activism. Rather than her parents being defined just by their activist actions, the book highlights radicality in the mundane, and the experience of growing up in a family that consistently challenges societal norms. “Our family was a nation state and a political ideology, and as such it has its own culture – it’s beautiful, frustrating, hilarious and specific, and we’re all very close,” she explains. “We were not allowed to have a television, we were encouraged to be naked all the time, ate organic food – my parents are complex and part of this book was a way to tease apart and comprehend some of that.

“These movements are utopian movements and therefore doomed to fail – there’s no way there’s going to be complete equity or fairness,” she continues. “But that doesn’t mean that it was naïve or useless. My dad talk about how rigid their tactics were, and not what he would do now, but the politics were fundamentally correct.”

Hard Times are Fighting Times by Alice Proujansky is published by Gnomic Books.

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