You can tell the genesis of the Arab Spring in other alternative ways ... the comic book about Martin Luther King and civil disobedience that was translated into Arabic and widely distributed in Egypt shortly before the Arab Spring. You can tell of Martin Luther King’s civil disobedience tactics being inspired by Gandhi’s tactics, and Gandhi’s being inspired by Tolstoy and the radical acts of non-cooperation and sabotage of British women suffragists. So the threads of ideas weave around the world and through decades and centuries. There’s another lineage for the Arab Spring in hip hop, ... Tunisian hip-hop artist El General was, along with Bouazizi, an instigator of the uprising, and other musicians played a role in articulating the outrage.
Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, 2015 # 22
Inspirations travel … and so do revolutions
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What if everything is entangled
We tend to tell the history of social movements as linear stories, with a beginning, a peak and an end—and then judge them by whether they “succeeded” or “failed.” Yet ideas don’t get lost. They travel across generations, borders and forms: from comic books and hip-hop songs to word of mouth, connecting Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King; indigenous knowledge of forests with today’s environmental movements. Ideas travel, drift, mutate and return. Movements inspire, transform and reappear in unexpected places and times.
Seen through this lens, nothing is simply lost or failed. What looks like an ending may already be a thread woven into something yet to come.
Everything is entangled.
Meike Gleimof our Imagination
