Creating Change In Our Lifetimes
A review by Sven Davisson
Shirt of Flame: The Secret Gay Art of
War, Ko Imani
(Goko Media, 2003, 111pp, $10.00)
In interviews granted near the end of his life, French philosopher Michel Foucualt spoke of homosexuality as “an occasion to re-open effective and relational virtualities.” He spoke of an inherent potential to “introduce love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule or habit.” Foucault’s premises are core values I have carried with me for years. Now reading Ko Imani’s Shirt of Flame: The Secret Gay Art of War, I have found a manifesto that merges Foucault’s positivist vision of Queer placement and a Buddhist-derived concept of universal compassion, while throwing in a healthy dose of Sun Tzu.
Imani’s book is a rare find—a work that has the potential of turning the reader in a complete 180°. Imani writes with a passion and palpable immediacy: “We must create change now or not in our lifetimes.” Imani writes:
As LGBT individuals and as a queer community, the time has come to make a bold and decisive commitment to the most congruent and effective means to create change that we can muster given our current knowledge.
He opens the book with the mythic confrontation between a prince and an ogre. After using up all his weapons, the prince defeats the ogre by telling him he has thunderbolt in his belly that the ogre will not be able to digest. It is from this image that the book derives it’s name and emblematic symbol: the shirt of flame. The weapon of love that we carry with us.
Imani sees this “thunderbolt” as the only mechanism available to create truly instantaneous change. He theorizes that employing current weapons based solely on protest and confrontation will only prolong the fight for centuries to come.
The only means Imani sees for ‘true victory’ is “the cessation of hostility as well as the co-creation of new harmony and the transformation of the enemy into benevolent spirit.” During the course of the book, he systematically sets forth the goal, methodology and underlying theory. Imani uses Martin Luther King, Jr’s name the “Beloved Community” for his shining city upon a hill.
In the course of his book he undertakes a critical analysis of LGBT activism—its gains and shortcomings over the past 35 years. Imani asks where FIGHTING for LGBT rights has got the community and, the more uncomfortable question, what has it cost us. While acknowledging the hard-won gains, Imani also points out areas that to his eyes the activism has hurt the cause for overall acceptance into a peaceful community.
In addition to his insightful critique on activism, he embarks on an even more profound critique on the LGBT community (or communities). In my opinion, Imani correctly locates a failure in the community when it comes to support and nurturing or self-love and sanity. “Unable to understand or practice love in our own lives on a personal, micro-level,” Imani writes, “we are also unable to induce loving behavior and policies on a macro-level, societal scale.”
Imani’s book continues with a call for self-empowernent:
We do the oppressors' hardest work for them by allowing ourselves to be boxed in. We assume the worst and that keeps us from our best.
You, yes, YOU, deserve a full, joyful and abundant life filled with Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Love, but if you wait for someone else, somebody "over there," to give it to you on a platter—it ain't gonna happen. You have to claim it for yourself.
After his astute analysis, Imani sets out his vision of a positivist activism based on the fostering of love and harmony. He calls on each person to use their personal shirt of flame to create change—the universal through the immediate.
He makes an interesting point regarding civil disobedience. He identifies an impulse within the activist community that one has to martyr oneself through civil disobedience and arrest. He suggests that this is misguided and asks the thought-provoking question: how can we be trusted to suggest laws, when we are breaking just laws ourselves in the name of justice?
Imani speaks from no one spiritual tradition, but his work draws deeply from a universal spiritual well. One can detect influences of Buddhism, Taoism and American Southern Baptist in his choice of phrase and terms he employs. Dalai Lama, Ghandi and King have prominent places in Shirt of Flame.
Imani writing style is erudite, clear and, at times, highly poetic. His vision is profound. Scratch the toaster, Shirt of Flame should be handed out with Queer membership cards.
For more information: http://www.shirtofflame.com