Destroying things

On the meaning of violence, cancellers, and domestic abusers

On the weekend I tabled the Constellation Anarchist Book Fair. This emergent book fair was organized by a collective who stepped in when the usual Montreal Anarchist Book Fair collective announced they wouldn’t be putting on the book fair this year (due to the unsustainability of the increasingly intense micro policing expected of and/or by the collective members, although they didn’t say that in the announcement). This new collective took a hands off approach to organizing, deciding not to control who could be in the space and who could not. The only requirement to table or otherwise take part was to have a commitment to anarchist principles. This principled stance is great news for the left, and great news for me in particular, because I’m often outright banned or quietly iced out of things. (The Halifax Anarchist book fair sent me a panicked email in 2021 stating that they’d received complaints about my presence at the fair and that while they weren’t banning me now, I may be banned next year. I wasn’t able to travel there the following year so I don’t know if I’m banned. The Montreal Anarchist Book Fair which I tabled many times before being cancelled and was never denied, told me there “wasn’t space” last year, despite, you know, me being one of the most well known leftist writers working out of Montreal right now.)

All that to say that the Constellation Collective let me table. I knew for sure that there would be some type of drama and felt anxiety for weeks before the event. I asked two friends and a partner to come table with me throughout the day so I wouldn’t be alone. I didn’t bring my car even though I was carrying large amounts of product, because I didn’t want to risk the possibility of having my tires slashed again. I played through the likely scenarios, concluding that the most likely thing would be for cancellers to pour water on my table or otherwise destroy my zines and books. I decided to take this risk, knowing that my audience has my back financially when cancellers destroy my personal property. But I still felt scared and I hate that I feel scared. I hate the feeling of living in fear so much. Not fear of judgement, gossip, shit talking, slander, cool 30 somethings flexing their in group status, or whatever else — I have gotten over all that shit. Fear of violence. Fear of assault. Fear of someone escalating things further than they’ve already escalated. Fear of degradation, humiliation, but more than that — fear of not being able to get away. My body knows the story of violence so well, and that information is always readily available to me.

If I’m so scared why do I do things like this? If I knew full well that my property would likely be destroyed? If I was scared in my bones that something even worse could happen? Why don’t I just let it go? I believe my writing is important and necessary. I know that it saves lives, encourages people to become more responsible and have more integrity, helps people to face the things they’re most afraid to face. I know that it contributes to a more functional, emotionally mature, and empathy based style of relating that is absolutely necessary in our fractured political movements and our alienated society as a whole. I believe in my work and I know it does good in the world. I also feel deeply and unstoppably compelled to do my work. I always have. I have been traumatized and abused and stalked and controlled before. I absolutely hate it. I think I hate it maybe more than anything and I never wanted to have these types of fears again. I thought, now that I don’t live a sketchy life anymore I won’t have to. But it turns out that following my dreams and living in my integrity gets me into very similar danger as being a crazy, traumatized alcoholic. People have violent contempt toward me and think they have the right to control me.

I really can’t submit. Not out of pride. I don’t care about pride. You have to give up pride to be a writer. You have to give up pride if you want to love and be loved and change and be changed. You have to develop humility and you have to develop strategy. Sometimes the safest thing to do is to let yourself be humiliated. That doesn’t mean surrendering or submitting. It means choosing your moment and knowing where your power lies. I’m a writer. My power lies in words. And honestly, the only place people should be coming for me is in the space of discourse. Come at me in the space of discourse, because that is where I am. But all my haters refuse to read my work or to try to understand my perspectives. They laugh with mockery and contempt at the idea that they should be expected to read such garbage. SHE’S NOT EVEN SMART! they insist to each other repetitively while never reading more than a few sentences I’ve written.

I have no business pretending to be a tough guy. I think in an economy of fronting people are confronted by an admission of weakness. We think in a binary: either a helpless baby who needs every emotional need predicted and attended to, who feels in danger in every context for many abstract reasons, or, a tough guy who is not afraid to use physical intimidation, who admits no fear and no weakness. I am not powerless. I am not in danger in every situation. I know the difference between hearing things I don’t like or agree with and me being in danger. I know the difference between people not liking me and me being in danger. I know where my power lies and how to use it effectively. I know where I have less power and my awareness and honesty with myself about this is essential to my survival. I am not a tough guy. I am 5’1 and I have very little physical strength. How do I know? From my many experiences of violence! I am not strong. My best bet is to run.

So — I went to the book fair even though I was scared. I took the best precautions I could for my safety and told myself, they’re going to destroy my zines at worst and hopefully nothing will happen. For several hours I sat with my friends laughing and talking. I saw many people I’ve known from many contexts over many years. Lots of people bought my zines and books and talked to me about the importance of my work. A fan asked to take a picture with me. Someone asked me to sign their book. Lots of people said knowingly “I’m glad you’re here” or “it’s really good to see you here.” I’m sure there were many haters in the room as well, but as much as they pretend they speak for everyone, they don’t. Many people were very happy to have me and my ideas in the space.

At one point I got up to get water and I was standing in front of the table while Tara stayed at the table. At that moment some friends of mine arrived and I was talking to them. I was in the middle of making the joke I’d been making all day “I haven’t been antifa’d yet” when I noticed the masked person standing next to me lean over my table and pour a large, full cup of coffee over as much of the zines as possible before quietly turning and disappearing into the crowd. There was a chilly, eery silence as me, Tara, and my friends who just witnessed this slowly took in the fact that that really just happened. I knew it would happen and it happened. I was already dissociating in that soft and spacious way that comes on in an emergency. My friends started getting napkins and separating the zines that didn’t get wet. I took a picture of the zines. Then I checked my phone — my partner, C, was saying that he was arriving soon. I told him what happened. Tara counted up all the damaged zines and books and how much money I lost. After this it is somewhat of a blur, but I think Tara escorted me to the bathroom while my other friends watched the table. I told several people what happened. My partner arrived and his presence and touch were extremely grounding for me. I told my friends I was leaving and Tara, being the realest best friend there is, told me she would stay till the end and sell what wasn’t damaged and bring my stuff home for me. My partner took me home and took care of me.

I made a gofundme before I went to bed that night. I posted it and then lay in bed talking with my partner some more. Before turning off the light I checked it: in only 25 minutes the $470 goal was passed and it was now at more than $900. I was absolutely shocked by how quickly my audience had my back. See? I don’t actually pretend to have no power. I know that the support of my audience is a huge power. Trusting my audience to have my back is part of what gives me the courage to do really scary things like this. Knowing that my audience will pay for the slashed tires, the tow truck, the car wash, the coffee soaked zines, means that I only have to deal with the fear and the stress and the trauma. It still sucks but the financial backing helps a lot. And it is more evidence that the cancellers are speaking over people rather than on behalf of the community. I don’t need to threaten anyone to receive this support. My audience supports me because they believe in my work and they know I shouldn’t be intimidated and harassed for doing my work.

I knew that a debate would be happening about whether or not I deserve this treatment and that this would bring up a whole rehashing of the wild ride that is the wide ranging and wacky accusations against me. The whole thing would have to be discussed! The 2020 allegations of white fragility and problematic refusing of accountability. The very serious website that accused my partner, Jay, of being polyamorous and using dating apps to seek dates (gasp!!), while managing to sound both like a corporate HR department and a stalker ex boyfriend screaming jealously IF I CAN’T HAVE YOU NO ONE CAN! And then the ever deepening rabbit hole of broken telephone accusations: I’m a member of the NXIVM sex trafficking cult, I once started a terf anarchist book fair where no trans people could come, I am secretly dating either a millionaire or a cop, someone knows someone who knows someone who knows one of my victims, I’m bad news, sketchy af, a grifter profiting off an anti cancel culture grift, a known harm causer, a plagiarizer of the words and wisdom of BIPOC thinkers, a racist who constantly spews racist garbage, and if none of it makes sense or adds up or has any credible evidence at all: who cares. The bitch deserves it.

So I linked my “statement” about how the accusations against me are fascinating fanfic but nothing else and I wrote a public letter to the Constellation Collective asking them to acknowledge and denounce the violence against me at the book fair. It seems extremely obvious to me that the attack against me at the book fair amounts to political repression by self appointed ideological police who think they have the right to use physical intimidation and personal property destruction in order to prevent a community member and influential leftist thinker from being present in the space. But of course, I can only assume what the critique of me even is, because this masked canceller said literally nothing. There was no indication of why specifically my stuff deserves to be destroyed. That is obvious and goes without saying, because it is an essential badness within me and therefore can only be remedied by my permanent removal from all spaces.

Of course there’s been some chatter from the haters on the internet. One unexpected reaction was to pretend that I’m basically lying by presenting an accident as an attack. This internet stranger decided to add the detail that the masked person was wearing a covid mask (that is not the case, they had a scarf wrapped around their face to conceal their identity) and that it was probably just an accident. It was definitely not an accident because you can’t accidentally pour an entire cup of coffee all over a table like that. It would also be bizarre behaviour to then just immediately leave without saying anything. But people need to undermine my credibility so of course there’s a version where I’m just making stuff up.

The other narrative, which also popped up when I expressed how upset I was that people slashed my tires and poured shit into my air vents in Portland, was that me being upset about this or calling it violence is hypocritical because my whole thing is that we shouldn’t call things that aren’t violence, violence. I received a long email from someone genuinely confused about how pouring coffee on my zines was not just a political action like burning a cop car, smashing a Starbucks window, or damaging a pipeline. Anarchists love to argue with me about this stuff because they’re so fond of this type of direct action. But I find it shockingly willfully ignorant to pretend that you cannot see the difference between a cop car, a Starbucks, a pipeline, and me. It really reveals how confused about power our ideas have become that we could think an independent writer with zero institutional backing who hand staples zines is the equivalent to the police, capital, or government. I am literally just some guy. Yes, I am an important and influential thinker much to the chagrin of my cancellers who insist I’m JUST NOT SMART, but my ideas, popular as they may be, are still marginal, fringe, and controversial. They are not hegemonic. They are also just ideas and I use no force of any kind to prevent or dissuade people from openly challenging them.

All the talk of my dangerous ideas, and my never specifically defined harmful behaviour, and the ways in which I make people feel unsafe, hides the reality of who I am as a person and what is happening to me. I am a tiny woman. I am not physically strong. I am a survivor of very intense and repetitive traumas: child sexual abuse / incest, psychiatric incarceration, domestic violence and rape, and many physical and sexual assaults from both strangers and people I knew. Not to mention literally 4 break and enters but that’s not even the really scary stuff. Why does this matter? Because when we stop pretending it’s okay to treat me as if I have the level of power of the state or the police force then we have to look at what power I actually have. Unlike the state or the police I certainly cannot easily defend myself from violence. I am literally just a person and the kind of person I am is a physically small woman with an extensive history of trauma that causes me to immediately start dissociating when I am threatened.

I don’t know why that canceller attacked my table, because they honestly didn’t say. But one of the common justifications for this behaviour is that I myself am dangerous — in particular dangerous to women and survivors, because I oppose cancel culture. The fact that I am a woman and a survivor does not deter these people from threatening and intimidating me, because I am not the type of woman or the type of survivor who deserves safety. I am the bad kind, because I disagree with them. I am the bad kind because I challenge THEIR abusive behaviour and I’m only supposed to challenge the abusive behaviour of the bad evil abusers not the righteous anarchist kind.

Here’s where it might be helpful for these cancellers to read any of my work or listen to my podcast. If they did, they would see that my stance against cancel culture flows directly from my opposition to abuse. If they gave my work even a tiny amount of good faith engagement they would see that I am a survivor who has spent my entire life thinking about trauma, violence, and abuse, and that my work is my sincere and heartfelt contribution to a world with less abuse, and more skillful responses and interventions to abuse. They would, of course, still be welcome to disagree with my conclusions. But pretending that I don’t care about the safety of women and survivors is an incredibly bad faith thing to do. I certainly never physically intimidate women and survivors. I don’t destroy their property right in front of them to make sure they feel scared. Which is more than these cancellers can say.

Some people got really worked up that I called the attack on my table violence when I’m always insisting we should be careful with how we use the word violence. I don’t think violence is a very useful word on its own because it is so nonspecific and can mean many things. If I were to say I was attacked at the book fair, or that violence was carried out against me at the book fair, without being more specific, I agree that I would be leading people believe that something more happened. It is important that I say coffee was poured all over my property. That’s what happened. But, it is also, in my opinion, accurate and important to call this violence.

Someone asked me to define violence, which I don’t think I’ve done before so here is my definition. Violence is a viable threat to or an attack on someone’s bodily autonomy, a denial of someone’s personhood, and/or a denial of someone’s basic survival needs. Violence is the “not seeing” of the person in front of you, and acting upon them in ways that violate their autonomy, the recognition of their personhood, or the necessity of them having what they need to survive. In this sense, it is violent for capitalists to design anti homeless architecture, it is violent to lock someone in jail, it is violent to employ a racist stereotype instead of actually seeing the person in front of you, and it is violent to threaten to attack someone. Violence takes many forms, which is why we need to be specific about what we actually mean when we say violence. Not all violence can be effectively responded to the same way. And not all things that hurt us, scare us, or overwhelm us are violence.

I think some anarchists will be frustrated with this discussion of violence because they are interested in discussing the legitimate uses of violence. You’re talking to the wrong person. I am, much to many people’s disappointment, a pacifist. I abhor violence. I oppose violence. I reject violence. I believe, as my friend Tara said somewhere, that once we use violence we have already failed. I have already explained my pacifism multiple times but a quick recap: I believe that violence is morally wrong and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. I believe that the only justifiable use of violence is self defence and intervention: protecting either yourself or someone else from violence through the use of violence. Even in this case, I believe the intention should not be to inflict damage. The goal should be to prevent violence while enacting as little of it as possible. This is at the interpersonal scale (the scale, I would argue, that exists at an anarchist book fair). At a larger scale, against powers like capital, the police, and the state, I know that violent uprisings and resistance, property destruction, and even killing have been part of the understandable use of violence as self defence and intervention. As a pacifist I would prefer that we commit as little violence as possible.

The second reason I oppose violence is because I don’t think it’s practical or strategic. When people succumb to violence they are filled with trauma and often a desire for revenge. The skills people need to become responsible are not taught by violence. I believe that if we rely on violence to change the world we will unfortunately just end up with more violence. Yes these are complex ethical questions that many thinkers have grappled with for a very long time. I’m not the first. I don’t need you to agree with me or like my stance, but I oppose violence in most cases. If you want to discuss legitimate uses of violence, I am in favour of you doing that. From my perspective even legitimate violence is a failure, and there is so much illegitimate violence happening constantly that I would rather focus my attention on stopping that.

Abstract discussions of violence aside, I would like to make it clear why pouring coffee all over my zines is, in my opinion, violence. One of the things that annoys me about abstract discussions of violence is how often I can tell no one involved has ever been around much violence. I hate self defence classes for example. I get angry and triggered whenever I have to witness the teaching of “self defence.” The idea that you can learn some quick and easy moves to get you out of being assaulted totally misunderstands what the experience of being assaulted is like, and what the dynamic is between you and your assaulter. First of all, you will be terrified. Terrified in an animal way. Terrified in a no prefrontol cortex activity kind of way. Secondly, I can assure you, if you are a woman and you are not an advanced athlete of some kind, it is very unlikely that you can wrestle your attacker to submission or otherwise incapacitate him. If you try to fight him it will make him angry. Your weak attempt at some totally out of context “move” while you are terrified out of your mind will only infuriate him — trust me, I know.

I know violence very intimately. I know the terror of impact, the feeling of slow motion under water chaos. I know what it’s like to have my feet kicked out from under me and suddenly I’m on the ground while he’s still kicking, and I’m screaming I’m sorry and trying to protect my head. I know what it’s like to feel my body break through the drywall only to be thrown in the other direction, knocking a table out of the way with my body, only to land hard on the floor with his knee on my chest stopping me from breathing and looking in my eyes to let me know I’m such a stupid bitch for crossing him. Do you know what always precedes this mind numbing violence? Property destruction.

The first time he did it he took the bong I was smoking out of my hands and threw it off the balcony, smashing it. Any domestic violence survivor knows all about the flipping of furniture, the punched walls, the ripped clothing. Once he took the dirty kitty litter and dumped it all over my clothes, rubbing shit and piss into my stuff. When abusers destroy your property they are communicating two things. First, they are expressing contempt. They are saying: you don’t matter at all and I have no respect for you. They are saying: the basic rules for how people should treat each other don’t apply to you. They are saying: you are nothing. Second, they are showing you that they are unafraid to cross your boundaries and use force. They are breaking basic social codes of respecting people’s personal boundaries and showing you they are not constrained by the normal rules of conduct. The message is clear: right now it’s your stuff, but if you don’t submit to me, it will be you.

The stalkers in Portland who drove through the streets looking for my car, slashed my tires, and poured shit in my air vents, and the masked coffee pourer in Montreal, have more in common with domestic abusers than they do with cop car burners, rioters, or those who damage capital’s infrastructure. The scale they are working at is interpersonal no matter how much they want to deny it. I am a community member, an individual woman, and an independent writer. There is no planet on which my power can be compared to that of the police, the state, or capital. I am not a fascist calling for genocide. I am not even an abuser. I’m literally just a writer naming the abusive dynamics and misuse of power in our leftist communities, and I get stalked and abused for doing that.

People are mocking me for being scared after having coffee poured on my zines. These same people who find divergent views so dangerous that they must use force to prevent them from being read, think it’s not scary at all to have a masked stranger destroy your property as a message that you are not welcome. In fact, these cowards have not even a fraction of my courage. None of them would dare even walk into the anarchist book fair if they were even half as cancelled as me lol. None of them know what its like for me to stand by my views in public despite the onslaught of slander, dehumanization, and harassment. They’re too scared to even say out loud why they are mad at me, because they know I will have an intelligent and coherent reply to their nonsense. I don’t like being slandered and dehumanized and widely disliked — no one would. But honestly, I’m used to it. I draw the line at physical intimidation. It’s fucking wrong and everyone knows it.

But guess what? I have absolutely zero power to enforce this position and people will continue to intimidate me. I will use all the skills I know from surviving domestic violence and years of stalking — they are very relevant and useful here. And I will continue to advocate for a cultural shift in which we openly oppose and challenge these clowns who put themselves in charge of everyone else.

If you think what happened to me at the book fair was wrong, say so.

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Clementine Morrigan is a writer and public intellectual based in Montréal, Canada. She writes popular and controversial essays about culture, politics, ethics, relationships, sexuality, and trauma. A passionate believer in independent media, she’s been making zines since the year 2000 and is the author of several books. She’s known for her iconic white-text-on-a-black-background mini-essays on Instagram. One of the leading voices on the Canadian Left and one half of the Fucking Cancelled podcast, Clementine is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and a proponent of building solidarity across difference. She is a socialist, a feminist, and a vegan for the animals and the earth.

Browse her shop, listen to her podcast, book a one on one session with her, or peruse her list of resources and further reading.

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