Togetherness: A Review of The Care Manifesto
Frank G Karioris
Sept 23rd 2020
In no uncertain terms, this is not an ‘objective’ view on this book. Throughout the years, I’ve had the great privilege of engaging in various ways with a number of the members of the Care Collective; and, further, to write ‘objectively’ about such a book would be to miss part of what I believe is the point of the text itself: the tending to of each other. In the same way that they note that “we have no choice but to live with difference” and to be “at ease with strangeness” (95), this book is something that is both of the now and demanding of a future.
The Care Manifesto bridges genres. For it is simultaneously a manifesto with the utopianism and urgency and demands that are requires of that; while also providing cases from throughout the globe. In fact, one might suggest that the book seeks to provide care to the readers of manifestos by provisioning them with not simply the talking point, but that which makes those talking points real or which has driven them into existence.
Beginning from the perspective that we live in a world dominated by – and whose dominate values are – carelessness, the collective propose that we must move towards a world premised on care as the primary goal and set of relations. Tackling this through politics, kinship, communities, States, and economics, the text is ripe with examples of the ways that our current regime of carelessness – or uncaring – has harmed us, individually and collectively.
In each of the chapters, they set up possibilities for new engagement and new forms and spaces of care. While they give examples from the past that assist us, the focus is heavily on the present – where worlds are being created counter to the dominant carelessness – and the future. Pulling from Queer Theory, Black Studies & Antiracism work, and the theories made and designed in communes and communities and activist work over the past forty years.
Demonstrating the presentness of the book is the way that COVID is deeply interwoven into the text. They utilize this as both a demonstration of the ways that uncaring has hurt us, as well as a statement about the possibilities that are emerging out of this. Whatever may be said of this book, it is not one of doom and gloom, but is pushing us closer to a world of relations and imaginaries that exist outside of “kinship structures, communities and nations states to the furthest reaches of the ‘strangest’ parts of the planet” (95). The life giving examples throughout the book provide new places to look to for hope on dark nights, and concrete realities for those who might say that care is impossible.
This is the book we need; the words of frustration and joy and love from a friend while walking through our old neighborhood. It is also a book to (gently) throw at those who refuse to listen and need most to hear what the manifesto says. For caring does not mean not pushing back against the violence of the system; what it means is that we must change how we respond, and that we must respond together.
