In her new book—her 17th solo work—Rebecca Solnit recalls a conversation with an unnamed older man she was “seeing” who said to her, “Baby, you’re driven.” She adds that at that time, when she “threw out sharp replies without thinking,” she replied, “And you’re parked.” Solnit goes on to say that she “was driven to redeem my existence, by achievement.” Seventeen books in about thirty years, plus five co-authored books, is a lot of books in a fairly short amount of time.
Solnit is quick, sharp and intensely motivated to write, right perceived wrongs, and try to change the world so that young women today don’t have to experience the kinds of hurtful experiences, including the sexual harassment she experienced as a young woman. Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir (Viking; $26) is a long complaint about patriarchy, femicide, misogyny, sexual terrorism, male privilege and male chauvinism.
An intellectual and an emotional autobiography, it is also a kind of “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman” who emerged from self-doubt and insecurity and who created a powerful self and shaped a powerful voice that she has used to honor the poor, the wretched, the abused, the exiled as well as people on the margins, where as she points out, “authority wanes and orthodoxies weaken.” Except in the colonial world where authority and orthodox can become even stronger than in the imperial center and where there is little if any pretense of democracy and where bodies pile up.
As the author Jamaica Kincaid and others have said, almost anything and everything one can say and believe to be true contains at its core, its opposite and contradiction: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” as Dickens famously wrote.
Not surprisingly, much of this new book is about Solnit’s previous books and essays, including “Hope in the Dark,” in which she elevated hope into a kind of gospel. Soon after the U.S. bombing 
of Baghdad, she explains, “some of the friends I’d protested with and others around me extrapolated from the fact that they had not stopped the war the idea that they had not achieved anything and, sometimes they traveled onward from there to the idea they’d never achieved anything, had no power and that we were all doomed.”
She adds that, “Despair became a machine that would grind up anything you fed it” and that “That prompted me to work harder on the case for hope I was building.”
For years, Solnit rode the hope train. Her mantra was summed up by the title of her 2010 book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster that acknowledges human resilience and that downplays the machinations of disaster capitalism.
Not all lefty writers, activists, liberals and concerned citizens have embraced hope as thoroughly as Solnit. Senator Elizabeth Warren recently noted that hope was fine, but that it didn’t mean all that it was supposed to mean, unless there was also “fight.” As Sheelah Kolhatkar wrote in The New Yorker in June 2019, “Warren’s rhetoric is more about fighting than about hoping.”
Earlier this year, the young Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg—who reads both climate change and cultural climate—wrote, “People sometimes ask me if I’m an optimist or a pessimist. I am a realist. Hope is something you deserve [after] you have actually done something.” Thunberg added that she didn’t want the gift of hope that adults were offering her and her generation. “I don’t want your hope,” she explained. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act.”
From Africa, the Nigerian novelist Wole Soyinka told Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “I no longer use the word ‘hope.’ I just look at the records of the past, the advances made since then, and the evidence of sincerity in the policies that are set. Hope, despair, and so on—I’ve now moved completely beyond that.” Will Solnit hear any of these voices? Maybe she will. Throughout her life, she has been open to new and different voices, though her most recent book also suggests that she has had a tendency to dig in her heels, become defensive and strike back. Still, there are signs of a new consciousness and a new awakening.
Near the end of Recollection of My Nonexistence, she writes, “though damage is not necessarily permanent neither is repair. What is won or changed or fixed has to be maintained and protected or it can be lost. What goes forward can go backward.” How and why she reached that conclusion she does not explain. Maybe it’s too soon for her to do so. Maybe she doesn’t see the change, or regard it as something different.
Solnit has a tendency to want to be right, and to place herself on, or very near, the “cutting edge,” or what some radicals have called “the vanguard,” whether it has to do with ideology, race, class, culture, politics, gender or ethnicity. So, she explains, she lived in an African-American neighborhood, experienced poverty, watched gay liberation unfold, was present when punk was pure and saw environmentalism from the frontlines.
In a chapter called “Otherwise,” Solnit tells a story about Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights who published one of her books, and so she was often in the editorial offices. “In these decades Lawrence Ferlinghetti…had never spoken a word to me,” she writes. On one occasion in particular Ferlinghetti said “hi” to a male writer, but not to Solnit who was in the same room.
Ferlinghetti and the Beat boys, including Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg, who recognized and owned his own misogyny, often ignored women and excluded them from their club, though as many women Beats, including Diane di Prima, have pointed out their Beat older brothers helped to liberate them from the constraints of American culture in the 1940s and 1950s.
The fact that Ferlinghetti didn’t say “hi” to Solnit, may not have been because she is a woman. Maybe it’s just that he can be an elitist asshole. Among men, including Beat and bohemian men there is a pecking order. Guys who think they’re at the top often don’t see or speak to guys they consign to what they regard as the bottom.
In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Solnit says that she once had an “urge” to “shout” and complain about an exhibit of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs, almost all of them depicting his male buddies. Her new book is the “shout” that she didn’t express at that exhibit, or to Ferlinghetti when he was rude at the least and misogynist at the worst, or when she first decided that Kerouac’s On the Road was “contaminated.”
It’s too late for Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac to hear Solnit’s shout. At 100, Ferlinghetti might not be able to hear her or read her words, but one hopes (there, I’ve used the word), that writers, readers and publishers these days will acknowledge Solnit and her contributions to intellectual life, the history of ideas, feminism and the protest movements of the late twentieth- and the early twenty-first century. It might help if she removed the chip on her shoulder. But that’s her choice.
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