Eliot Sumner

@eliotsumner.bsky.social

1336 Followers 1936 Following

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." -James Baldwin

Fast-Fish in a Free City In 1851, Herman Melville looked at a legal system that authorized the hunting of human beings and offered a dark satire in Moby-Dick. He wrote of the Fast-Fish, the whale that belongs to you simply because your harpoon is stuck in it: “Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law... But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law?” Melville understood that when a government decides certain people are property to be hunted, the law is no longer about justice, and its agents are no longer law enforcement; they are merely armed conquerors holding a harpoon. On January 7 in Minneapolis, we saw the harpoon strike. Renee Good, a mother and poet, was not killed by an officer of the peace; she was hunted by a force that has placed itself above the law. She was a Loose-Fish, fair game in a city that ICE treats as open water. And now that they have taken her life, now that they possess the narrative, they are retroactively writing the law to justify the strike, branding a woman with a whistle as a weapon of war.
“The movements greatest danger is to turn its own children into its executioners.” From the essay: A Matter of Context