I want to honor those who, at Bash Back 2023, made the tender decision months ahead of time to honor our dead at the convergence with a do-it-ourselves memorial.
Chicago is already a place where we anarchists have long come to honor our dead, thanks to the blessed memory of the Haymarket martyrs, whose monument at Waldheim (now Forest Home) cemetery—put up in 1893 after a fundraising campaign—bears the words, attributed to August Spies just before his state execution in 1887, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.” Surrounding this monument are buried so many of our anarchist and other rebellious ancestors, both little-known and well-known ones, like Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Clerye, and Emma Goldman.
Whenever I’ve visited to pay homage, their tombstones are bedecked in remembrances such as flowers, political buttons, stones, and other tokens left by the living, those of us still fighting for a better world because of such dedicated generations of revolutionaries before us. I can feel the ghosts, their strength, their wins and losses and yet resolve. They are a thread, tying us to otherworldly possibilities, past, present, and future.
But they are also all in a cemetery run not by radicals, nor are their monuments and gravestones likely—for the most part—designed and carved by loving anarchist hands, nor installed in DIY ways that queer-up how mourning and memorials are, too, something we anarchists could and should self-organize—stealing back ways of honoring our losses from this death-denying culture that simultaneously and systematically kills and erases too many of our friends and comrades.
We anarchists don’t conform to this social order; it is fitting that those who didn’t conform in life find comfort and visibility and honor and remembrance from us in their deaths, with imagery and words and their names on granite-hard-soft memorials that mirror back their queerness, transness, anarchism, and how much they were/are loved.
As the memorial pictured here was commemorated this past weekend, with people sharing stories and tears and hugs, Bash Back “bashed back” against those who would disappear us.
