The Solidarity Scream

September 27th was an unusually bright Thursday. It was 72 degrees with enough of a wind chill to warrant wearing a light jacket as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford detailed her alleged assault to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Millions of Americans watched. A group of people, mostly women, walked to Washington Square Park and screamed. 

I sat with my professor discussing grad school and thesis topics when we saw the group of people gather under the Arch. Recognizing them as NYU students and faculty, we moved from our bench and joined them in what I later learned was a demonstration called The Solidarity Scream. One of its organizers was the English Department’s own Sonya Posmentier.

Posmentier, who is an Associate Professor and teaches African American Literature and 20th Century Poetry, answered questions about The Solidarity Scream, as well as the connections between the English Department and protest. 

Posmentier says “The demonstration was a response to the impending confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice.” The action came from Posmentier “talking to some friends and colleagues about our frustrations and our confusion [...] and wanting to make a space where people from NYU could come together and give voice to that in a literal way.” 

“It wasn’t necessarily meant as effective political action in the sense of any kind of belief that it would change the minds of passers-by,” Posmentier says, expressing that the organizers were more interested in “making a space where people could come together.” 

Not even screaming was a part of the initial plan. 

“We called it the Solidarity Scream,” Posmentier says, “but I didn’t know that by calling it that we were necessarily going to scream. It was just an expression of the feeling behind it, and when we got together, people started saying ‘okay, when are we going to scream?’ So we did.” 

While the screaming wasn’t an essential part of the demonstration, the roots of that physical, audible movement are directly tied to Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony. 

“During her testimony, Dr. Blasey Ford had mentioned having her mouth covered as being one of the most unsettling parts of the experience, so I think there was a feeling of wanting to give voice to what she couldn’t give voice to.” 

As Professor Posmentier spoke, I took notes in her office, which is decorated with books and posters from other political moments. There’s a big NYU Sanctuary banner pinned to the walls. I asked her about the role of protests and activism in English Literature programs. 

We are English majors after all. I wondered how the action, which was partly organized by a major faculty member in our department, relates to the English student experience.

“For me,” she says, “it’s a very obvious connection because my field of study is African-American literature. And the history of  that literature has often, though not exclusively, been bound up in various kinds of political and social struggle.” 

From African-American literature, “we also get literature of joy and play and love, and that its to me just as important [as that of social struggle]. But it’s also one of our most important literary protest traditions. So for me it’s very obvious that to study that literature, to think about questions of citizenship and belonging that come up in that literature [...] it’s impossible not to think about the contemporary ways in which those questions are coming up in our political research, and the knd of political work that I’ve increasingly been drawn to.” 

She continues to say that she believes “literature is used in protest in various ways.” 

“The screaming in some ways comes from studying and thinking about chanting and how chants work collectively. And I think a lot of what we do in the English Department, aside from the context of protest, has to do with various kinds of processes of empathy and connection whether we read to see ourselves reflected or read to get beyond ourselves and imagine connections to other people. How does literature open onto other worlds and other people?” 

Literature, Posmentier says, “inevitably lends itself in a lot of different ways to thinking about time periods and places and people beyond our own.” Sometimes, as in the case of the Solidarity Scream, this way of thinking about people beyond ourselves is with protest.