INSURRECTION: A Conversation with Hawa Allan
The last time I saw Hawa Allan was at Clandestino, a cozy LES bar with a speakeasy vibe. It was a cold February evening, but inside, we were warm with libations and conversation. Hawa and I discussed many things including our struggle to balance writing and demanding day jobs. Learning that she is a lawyer, I felt an instant kinship with her. Being a woman of color in a male-dominated profession meant always having to prove and explain oneself. She knew these struggles firsthand. At the end of the night, we parted ways with a promise to meet again soon. When the lockdown came, the gathering that was supposed to become a regular occurrence never took place. Instead, we got to know each other through our writing. Each week, I waited eagerly to read what the other columnists wrote. Our columns, which were supposed to be cultural and literary criticisms, became increasingly personal as the pandemic and the movement for social justice evolved.
We recently reconnected to discuss her new book Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship, which blends personal narrative with a legal history of the Insurrection Act—the act Donald Trump threatened to invoke in order to deploy federal troops in response to the George Floyd protests in 2020.
Yoojin Na: Your book opens with former president Donald Trump posing with a bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church on June 1st, 2020. When I first saw this image on the news, I remember feeling befuddled and disturbed yet not fully understanding why. Your book elucidated for me how insidious and dangerous Trump’s seemingly buffoonish actions actually were. Can you elaborate on the significance of this event and how it relates to the Insurrection Act of 1807?
Hawa Allan: It was definitely an odd and striking image. And, of course, Trump engaged in this photo op after threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the George Floyd uprisings—basically, to domestically deploy federal troops to suppress the unrest. The Insurrection Act confers an extraordinary power to the president, allowing the executive to domestically deploy federal troops and/or federalize the National Guard in order to quell “domestic violence,” “unlawful combinations,” and/or “insurrections.”
I used the image to introduce the book because, to me, it calls to mind the wrath of the Old Testament God who visits devastation upon those of his children who dare to defy him. The image works to symbolically merge Trump’s executive authority with higher authority, or man’s law with God’s law, perhaps attempting to impress upon his audience the supremacy of his rule and, in that case, his will to punish those who would challenge it. There was some contention over whether the Bible he was holding was upside down, which it seemed to be, but nonetheless the entire picture was incredibly awkward and stiff, in that way also betraying the inevitable tension between human and higher authority, especially given the stereotypical fallibility of the former. So, there’s a lot going on in that picture.
Overall, I thought the image set the tone for the book, which continually revisits the theme of authority, particularly the tension between legal authority and the other authorities that “insurrectionists” tend to call upon to justify rising up against the legal order. In the opening scene, we see Trump symbolically merging himself with a higher authority—recalling the divine right of kings—and throughout the book there are depictions of “insurrectionists” like Nat Turner, John Brown, and the purveyors of non-violent civil disobedience, associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr., who specifically appealed to a religious authority in challenging slavery and segregation, respectively.
Even with rebellions appealing to non-religious authority, there have been appeals to a kind of inherent authority one has, that is intrinsic to each human being and must be honored over any external authority that purports to overrule it. Meanwhile, “insurrectionists” or rebels who were white reactionaries, including vigilante terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and staunch segregationists like George Wallace, also beckoned to an authority other than the legal paradigm established post-Civil War or after Brown v. Board of Education, attempting to reinstate the prior order, whether through extra-legal violence and/or outright defiance of constitutional law. So, permeating this history is the age-old struggle over which kind of authority should predominate—God’s or man’s, inner or outer, the supervening or prior, etc.
YN: You wrote “The Insurrection Act of 1807 was enacted in silence. It has no legislative history.” Why is that?
HA: This basically means that there is no record of legislative debate or other documentation associated with the bill before it became law. So, I don’t know definitively why this was the case, but in the book I speculate about the unspoken influence that the ever-looming threat of a slave insurrection might have played amid the enactment. For example, the Act’s antecedents are the Militia Acts of 1792, which were passed one year after the Haitian Revolution began in 1791 and instigated deep fear among enslavers about the ripple effect of revolt spreading to their shores. The revolution officially ended in 1804, three years before the Insurrection Act was enacted, yet the nearby presence of a free black State represented a dangerous symbol among white citizens in the United States who feared rebellion and revenge—a fear that was so overpowering that in parts of the antebellum South there was an unofficial moratorium on any discussion of the successful revolution at all.
Also, while I don’t have a definitive answer to this question, I found it interesting to contemplate the role that silence might play in this legal history, particularly the impulse to suppress and deny inconvenient truths to maintain a semblance of “peace” and “order.” In that vein, I consider the aversion to using the words “slave” and “slavery” in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution alongside this curious silence that contextualized the passage of the Insurrection Act, among other things. There is a way that what is technically silent and absent is nonetheless loud and present, like the proverbial elephant in the room.
YN: “Complicit silence is actually the sound of fear.” That sentence rang true to me on a visceral level. I admit I don’t speak up as much as I should. I learned the hard way that pointing out prejudice and injustice comes at a personal cost. You also mention having to constantly monitor yourself because “any inkling of anger . . . I express will be overblown and misconstrued.” It’s as though our existence as people of color requires us to internalize others’ perceptions of us. Where do you find the courage to veer away?
HA: I often think of this quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “If you’re silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” This perfectly captures the way in which I can be complicit in my own maltreatment, and how my silence abets distorted narratives that might be crafted to justify or whitewash my pain.
Ideally, of course, courage is best expressed when responding to injustices and affronts in real-time. But one of the foibles of being human is to not always know how to do this in the moment, and to come up with the perfect comeback days or weeks after whatever transgression happened. I think one of the luxuries of writing is that I can find words to articulate my thoughts and feelings at any time, and even give myself the last word.
On anger, as I discuss in the book, I do have this illicit fantasy of basically allowing myself to regularly pop off and express my rage—something that anyone who enjoys pulp revenge films might allow themselves to enjoy vicariously. This is obviously impractical and prone to get me, say, fired or arrested. However, I believe there is a certain gift that is cultivated from internalizing this limitation—and that is mastering my emotions and shifting my perspective.
Similar to the passage in the book, where I refer to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic—where the enslaved is forced into a situation where they must transform fear into courage—facing one’s anger without necessarily confronting the person who triggered it spurs a kind of self-mastery and opportunity for meaningful action that is not just reactive. (Like, find a new job instead of popping off on your boss, or at least do the former before the latter.) Just as with the master-slave dialectic—where the enslaver is afforded a kind of crude mastery, which must be exerted over the Other in order to seem realized—raging at other people, no matter how satisfying it is in the moment, provides temporary sense of control over a situation or the appearance of “mastery” over another person, which pales in comparison to mastery over self.
YN: Was there a specific moment that convinced you to write this book?
HA: I knew I had a book-length topic for exploration after finishing the legal article that preceded the book. In that legal article, I uncovered a pattern with respect to the Insurrection Act, where I saw that it was largely invoked to either suppress so-called race riots or enforce the civil rights of African Americans—thereby painting an unstable portrait of black citizenship, the full realization of which has been punctuated by bloody battles that at times correlate with the Insurrection Act’s invocation. That said, ultimately, it was my editor at Norton, Alane Mason, who instigated this book project, and who also suggested that I write it in a hybrid style that incorporates personal narrative.
YN: In another passage that resonated with me, you write: “History, though, happened a really long time ago. And yet history also happened just yesterday . . . In other words, all of history is happening now.” You demonstrated this point beautifully in your examination of a viral video. In it, a middle-aged Caucasian woman tells a Native American woman to go back to her country. You frame this one horrid interaction within the context of the Wounded Knee Occupation in such a way that forced me to reconsider my own idea of what constitutes history. Have you come across anything else lately that has had a similar effect?
HA: In that chapter, I briefly consider history through a kind of telescopic effect, where past events can seem recent to some or very long ago and far away to others. I also consider the simultaneity of time and how that adds another dimension to how history may be experienced—as if “all of history is happening right now.” And, in using the Insurrection Act as a lens to consider history, I also consider how the American Dream is in a sense a recurring nightmare, where incarnations of the same essential struggles continue to repeat themselves in different guises. In the vignettes depicting the white and indigenous woman, it is as though this mundane and fundamentally violent spat is rehashing and reliving history, both the entitlement of the white settler and violent erasure of indigenous inhabitants, and the ongoing attempts of reclamation and resistance by descendants of indigenous survivors.
I haven’t really seen anything on my social media feed of late that drew my attention. It seems as there was a spate of viral videos depicting racist incidents that made the rounds during and not long after the George Floyd uprising, including the white lady (or seemingly white lady) who tackled a black teen in a hotel lobby after wrongly accusing him of stealing her cellphone. For some, that was an isolated and unfortunate incident, and, of course, for others, it is a reincarnation of U.S. history.
YN: What was it like to research and write about current events as they were unfolding?
HA: It was surreal because Trump and his followers were basically living out a lot of the themes I was writing about in real-time. I would never dedicate my book to Trump or anything, but his antics definitely helped provide bookends to the work—opening with his threatened invocation of the Act and ending with the January 6 “insurrection”—and in his bombastic way, he helped drive my thesis home. As they say, that which does not kill you makes for good material.
YN: I think Trump’s presidency has been traumatic for many immigrants and children of immigrants. Being Korean, I’ve seen democracy grow and triumph against a string of despotic leaders, and having such a reference point helped me cope. Does being a child of immigrants influence your views? If so, how?
HA: In the book, I compare the (white) American Dream to the Immigrant Dream, with the latter being one about the triumph of “hard work” and “meritocracy.” I mention that I was somewhat entranced by the Immigrant Dream, which in my case overlapped with the African-American Dream of striving to be at least “twice as good” to help ensure that I attain at least the same position in life as my fellow white citizens. All of these are myths, stories that we have inherited and continue to tell ourselves in order to make sense of the larger world and effectively navigate through it. In this way, they are both true and false—just like a regular dream. These myths are in and of themselves parallel and overlapping worlds, and as a writer, I believe that embracing as many of my categorical identities as possible makes my perspective more valuable, because the quintessential writer is both insider and outsider, in the world and not of it, therefore being able to shed light on life from unique perspectives. Just like travelling to another state or another country can help you see your hometown more clearly, it’s invaluable to have the foundational experience of cultural difference—in my case, every time I stepped in and out of my childhood home.
YN: What did you learn about yourself in writing Insurrection?
HA: I learned that I could write a book, which I was not always certain of during the process. The main challenge was finding a way to interweave the personal narrative in a form that would not seem too disjointed to the reader. To do so, I had to really surrender to the material in front of me—meaning the legal history represented by the episodic invocations of the Insurrection Act—and allow it to tell me what the underlying themes were, and to use those themes to figure out what personal anecdotes and other interludes would best illuminate it. Fundamentally, I learned by necessity the importance of allowing the material and the writing to guide me rather than the other way around.
Yoojin Na is a writer and a physician. She lives in Brooklyn.
Hawa Allan is a lawyer and writer of cultural criticism, fiction, and poetry. She is an essay editor at The Offing, and her work has appeared, among other places, in The Baffler, the Chicago Tribune, Lapham's Quarterly and Tricycle magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Her book Insurrection, an interweaving of personal narrative and legal history, was published in January 2022 by W.W. Norton.
