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Title: Tales from the Underground Author: Fergal Finnegan Date: 10 March 2007 Language: en Topics: clandestinity, Ireland, book review, Red & Black Revolution Source: Retrieved on 15th November 2021 from http://www.wsm.ie/c/ramor-ryans-clandestines-pirate-journals Notes: Published in Red & Black Revolution No. 12.
At this point in time it is a rare and welcome event when a book by an
Irish activist is published and rarer still when a book by an Irish
anti-capitalist writer receives widespread praise and acclaim.
“Clandestines: the Pirate journals of an Irish Exile”, which has
received a slew of positive reviews following it’s publication in the US
by AK Press, is just such a rarity, and as it is being launched in
Ireland this week means readers here will soon be able to make their own
appraisal of the book.Although this is Ramor Ryan’s first full length
book many readers may have already come across Ryan’s articles and
essays before as the author is relatively well known and his work is
included in probably two of the most notable collections of
anti-capitalist writing of recent years- the Verso Press publication :
“We are Everywhere” and Softskull Press’s “Confronting Capitalism”.
“......the only thing that works is memory. Collective memory, but also
even the tiniest, most insignificant memory of a personal kind. I
suspect, in fact, that one can barely survive without the other, that
legend cannot be constructed without anecdote” — Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Clandestines consists of a series of stories and reflections culled from
Ryan’s experience of over twenty years of activism. The result is an
entertaining and readable mixture of memoir, political essay, travelogue
and literature. Clandestines then is not your standard political tract
but rather a form of political picaresque documenting Ryan’s adventures
as a wayward radical with an uncanny ability to find himself in
interesting and often tricky situations everywhere from the mountains of
Kurdistan to jungles of Chiapas. Ryan has certainly been around the
block and the book includes a number of eyewitness accounts of events of
major political and historical importance such as the massacre of
mourners at a Republican funeral in Belfast by Michael Stone in 1988 and
the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990.
However, Ryan is at his best when he is observing the everyday and the
marginal rather than the epic and grandiose and much of the book is
taken up with Ryan’s descriptions of various encounters with people at
the edges of history. These memorable character sketches, by turns
affectionate and exasperated, often ironic and occasionally derisive,
fill and enliven the pages of Clandestines. Ryan wanders amongst this
motley crew-the generous and riotously joyful Berlin squatters, the
Zapatista peasants, the disaffected Cubans, a drunk Croatian war
veteran, the Central American gang members, a charismatic Venezuelan
punk singer, the self indulgent hippies at a Rainbow Gathering and a
host of others- observing, conspiring, joking and drinking and
ultimately turning these encounters into a series of amusing and
interesting tales without ever stretching the reader’s credulity too
far.
But Clandestines is more than a series of anecdotes about the “wretched
of the earth” and eccentrics from the activist milieu. In the most
impressive sections of the book, like the chapter on life in a dismal
Guatemalan backwater, Ryan manages to interweave these colourful and
finely observed character portraits with a political analysis that
outlines the sort of historical and social pressures that can shape,
embolden or even crush the lives he describes.
Obviously enough this sort of writing is made possible by a libertarian
sensibility that combines Utopian hope with a keen awareness of human
frailty. In all of these essays we find an unresolved and creative
tension between Ryan’s attraction towards political romanticism that is
tempered, undercut and sometimes completely usurped by an intelligent
scepticism. This tension is one of main sources of the book’s constant
ironies, pathos and humour but it does also mean that the reader is
occasionally left with the impression that the author is sometimes
uneasy with some of his own political rhetoric. On the other hand there
are some sections in the book in which Ryan’s storytelling is disturbed
and subsumed by political analysis and in one particular chapter, on the
Milltown massacre, this certainly undermines the quality and impact of
the piece. However, for the most part Ryan gets the balance between
right and this dynamic tension means the writing never degenerates into
political liturgy or a disconnected series of anecdotes.
Despite the fact that Clandestines is a profoundly political book Ryan
swerves away from answering in a systematic way the political questions
that his varied experiences have thrown up. And these are pertinent and
difficult questions for the anti-capitalist movement: for instance how
should libertarians relate to national liberation struggles, how do we
forge meaningful grassroots democracy, what is to be taken and what is
to be dispensed with from the Marxist tradition, and most consistently
Ryan’s poses questions about how solidarity is built between activists
from the global north and those struggling in the global south. These
issues are explored but left unresolved however it would be a mistake to
believe this is because Ryan is either naive or unreflective. He clearly
marks these issues over the course of his essays and understands their
significance. Neither can this be attributed to a lack of interest in
political theory as Clandestines is clearly influenced by the work of,
amongst others, the radical historians Galeano, Linebaugh and Federici,
the situationist theorist Vaneigem and of course the whimsical and
passionate writings Sub-Commandante Marcos of the EZLN. It is also
obvious from his analysis of Latin American politics and his critique of
Kurdish Marxist guerillas that he has absorbed the best of libertarian
thought right into his bones. Nonetheless, Ryan chooses to avoid neat
and easy answers as he crisscrosses the Atlantic marking historical
transitions, observing and organising, and chasing hope in the face of a
whirlwind of neoliberal and imperialist destruction.
All the same, or perhaps because of this refusal, Ryan’s singular
account of an unusual activist life paradoxically serves as a metaphor
for the anti-capitalist movement as a whole in all its contradictions.
Ryan’s tales trace the patterns of globalisation from below and his
search for new political communities, his desire to sustain hope, his
discovery of a new world in the making in a forgotten corner of Mexico,
his questioning of how we can fruitfully anchor our own life stories
within grand historical narratives, his suspicion of easy answers, even
his celebration of glorious and seedy marginality makes him, despite his
steadfast refusal of such roles, something close to an anti-capitalist
Everyman.
If, for the most part, even Clandestines little imperfections are
interesting the book does deserve unequivocal criticism in one small
regard. Although Clandestines is quite nicely produced with evocative
black and white photos and hand drawn maps it does suffer somewhat from
poor quality editing-there are quite a few typos, the occasional
repetition and most seriously of all a certain unevenness in parts of
the book that could of been simply remedied by some simple revisions or
minor excisions.
That said Clandestines is a lively, humorous and, at times, a touching
book. At his best Ryan captures both the poetry of everyday moments and
the roar of history and, to use a phrase from the book describing one of
his acquaintances, Ryan as a writer often “embodies what is seductive
about the rebel milieu-smart, vigorous and passionately committed to
some great mysterious ideal”