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Recollections of My Nonexistence begins as a meditation on place—specifically the small but elegant apartment that Solnit moved into in her early 20s, where she began the academic and artistic research that would come to define her work in the following decades. Solnit was a resident of a mostly black community, which was also in close proximity to San Francisco’s thriving queer community, and it emerges that this landscape is in many ways the origin place of her lifelong work surrounding the injustice facing women and other marginalized communities. Solnit’s central thesis is located in a prolonged consideration of the ways the female existence has been erased and infringed upon by society, and the ways that this erasure provokes violence. In a time in which America is confronting the mass destruction of black and brown bodies, Solnit’s writing about the relationship between cultural violence and voicelessness feels quite necessary.
Central to Solnit’s career-long exploration of misogyny is the idea of a spectrum, that has misogynistic speech on one end and violence against women on another. This idea that violence against women is excused and even abetted by a pervasive culture of silencing women and discrediting their stories is one of Solnit’s great contributions to the modern feminist discourse. This concept has been fundamental to Solnit’s writing for decades, and has only recently entered into the mainstream consciousness. In the memoir, she further expounds upon the dangerous consequences of the cultural rejection of female stories. She further distills how voice—not just sound, but a combination of “audibility, credibility, and consequence”—is a building block of autonomy, and how women’s perspectives must be heard, considered, and valued in order for any sort of progress to be made.
Solnit makes crucial connections between her career as a writer and her lifelong project to end the silence surrounding violence against women. Solnit begins describing the charming and ornate desk from her San Francisco apartment, the one that she has kept through the years and written this very memoir on. The desk is a gift from a friend of hers, a woman who was stabbed repeatedly by an abusive ex-boyfriend, and survived her attack—only to see her attacker walk away uncharged. Solnit writes, “Someone tried to silence her. Then she gave me a platform for my voice. Now I wonder if everything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing.” For Solnit, writing is a means to combat society’s effort to erase women, to relegate their bodies and voices into nonexistence.
In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Solnit has contextualized her staggering body of work within her life experiences. She writes compellingly about the San Francisco neighborhood she lived in for so many years, about the black neighbors that taught her about the importance of place and memory, and the local queer community who taught her how to reject society’s narrative of her own existence. She is always also conscious of her intrusion into these spaces—i.e. how she may have played a role in allowing her neighborhood’s gentrification—turning a critical eye to the ways in which the struggles of the queer community and communities of color have differed from her own. She points out the things that have been denied to her as a woman, while also acknowledging the things that have been available to her because of the color of her skin.
In this memoir, she weaves together the inseparable threads of her climate activism and academic interest in the punk California art scene—demonstrating how art and activism coalesce in her work. She writes of the many struggles of getting her work published and promoted in a culture where her writing was deemed “uncomfortable”, as male publishing professionals continuously refused to respect her work or existence. Recollections of My Nonexistence is a brilliant work of reclamation, a testament to the collective power of humanity to battle systemic violence against marginalized people. She writes, “It is often assumed the anger drives such work, but most activism is driven by love, a life among activists has convinced me.” In this memoir, Solnit writes herself out of the dark, proving the dual efficacy of love and art as liberating forces.
Further Reading: Solnit has written over 20 books on feminism, activism, climate change, sexuality, art, and culture. Men Explain Things to Me is a great place to start. For more writing about female activism and climate change, Terry Tempest Williams’ Erosion is excellent. (Read my review here).