SABOTAGE, n. I caught myself repeating this word’s famous folk etymology in conversation this week—namely, that “sabotage” as in an act of deliberate obstruction/destruction comes from French sabot (clog, as in a peasant’s shoe), which is true, and that the word “sabotage” comes to us from disgruntled, mistreated workers stuffing their shoes into machinery in the early days of industrialization, which is not.
I don’t know who told me this originally. The friend I was talking to this week did share that this story appears in Star Trek VI: a Vulcan played by Kim Cattrall tells the story of “sabotage” to Spock, encouraging him to commit a little shoe-clogging-the-gears activism of his own. This explanation doesn’t apply to me. I haven’t seen Star Trek VI or, indeed, very much 20th-century Star Trek at all, to the great disappointment of my beloved, who remains married to me even though I have fallen asleep in the middle of a dozen episodes.
I do love Darmok, though. That’s the Next Generation episode where Picard is stranded on a planet with aliens who communicate in allegory—like if we could only express homesickness by saying “Odysseus, crying on Calypso’s island,” or if we could only express an astonishing, intellectually superior realization by saying “galaxy brain.” They don’t let you finish Metaphor School unless you love Darmok.
Anyway, as I was telling this cute little story about the origin of sabotage, the clog in the machine, I thought, “uh-oh.” It’s too good. As previously mentioned, my own version of Occam’s Razor is the dullest etymology is the most likely one. That’s a rude way of putting it—all etymologies are interesting!—but if the explanation of a word sounds like a fable, you gotta dig into it. “Sabotage” wrapping itself up in a neat package didn’t feel right to me, and indeed, there’s no real evidence for it.
What do we know for sure? Well, the shoe thing is true. A sabot is a shoe, specifically a hollowed-out piece of wood worn by peasants. Etymologically, sabot is cousins with Spanish zapato and, weirdly enough if you’re an English speaker who only ever encounters this word as a type of bread, Italian ciabatta. Supposedly a loaf of ciabatta is shaped like a slipper? Either way it’s delicious.
So sabot in French gives us the verb saboter, which originally means “to clomp around like you’re wearing hollowed-out pieces of wood on your feet.” You know, clogging.
Eventually saboter comes to mean “to do work quickly or poorly”—it’s in the 19th-century Littré dictionary with this definition, and the TLF (the French version of the OED) gives an example sentence from Émile Zola:
Il n’y a plus de bons ouvriers, tous sabotent la besogne.
There are no more good workers, they all bungle [sabotent] the work.
(Zola should be right at home in this newsletter, since the whole shoe-in-the-machine thing is a story about a labor dispute, and he wrote one of those.)
It’s not a huge leap in meaning to get from “clomping around” to “doing shoddy work.” The distance between “doing shoddy work because you’re lazy or indifferent” and “doing shoddy work on purpose” isn’t too far, either. If you’re doing shoddy work on purpose, you’re intentionally weakening or subverting or damaging something, so that gets us pretty much all the way to our contemporary definition of “sabotage” with no anonymous peasants stuffing their footwear into the gears of some undefined equipment.
The folk etymology of “sabotage” might not be borne out by the evidence, but I do have a lot of affection for the story. It feels believable, perhaps because we’ve all seen shoes put to iconic political use. Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush, didn’t hit Dubya, but his gesture of protest ruined the idea that the US was welcome in Iraq. A decade later, the Shoe Incident lives on in Youtube videos, gifs, and memes, its own “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” cultural shorthand. An act of politically motivated, deliberate damage. With a shoe. Sabotage.
The internet hasn’t yet provided me with a video of people clogging to the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” but somebody should, right?
In Capital-R Romance, I read nothing in French this week except the dictionary entries quoted above, but in small-r romance, I read…
Brothers of the Wild North Sea (m/m, both cis and gay, historical, fantasy) by Harper Fox. I love an unusual historical setting, and this book provides: Fara, in the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland, a few centuries after the fall of Rome. The main characters are Caius, a sorta-pagan sorta-Christian monk-physician, and Fenrir, the Viking who tried to kill him in a raid. Cai saves Fen’s life against the wishes of his fellow monks, and there is a lot of very surly hurt/comfort, and just a little hint of magic. I loved both Cai and Fen, who are dedicated to each other and also to their warring peoples, and all the details about monastic life and Celtic paganism and agriculture and seafaring really did it for me. Content warnings: war, some pretty gruesome wounds, a lot of supporting characters die, suicide, homophobia (specifically religious homophobia), sex.
Three for All (m/m/f, all cis and bi, contemporary, erotic) by Elia Winters. Full disclosure: a portion of this book was written across a café table from me over many months of repeated meetings, and I am mentioned in the acknowledgments. This is not an unbiased review. You should still trust me about reading it because (1) I’m right (2) in case my rightness is insufficient for you and you need outside sources, Elia Winters won a RITA this year (3) Three for All is great, with three likable and complex characters figuring out how to be in love with each other while having a lot of scorching hot, emotionally intimate sex. I particularly loved Lori, who just finished her doctorate and is dreaming of getting a job in NYC as a relationship therapist, so naturally her own relationship being a mess—and perhaps an obstacle to her career dreams—is an acute torment to her. She’s bold and smart and compassionate, and I wanted her to get everything she wanted. Spoiler: she does. Content warnings: a character’s mother has died of cancer (in the past, not on-page), sex, kink, BDSM.
Iron & Velvet (f/f, both cis and lesbian, paranormal) by Alexis Hall. This book might be more urban fantasy than paranormal romance, but it has a Happy-For-Now ending and this is my newsletter, so I’m putting it here. There is a mystery in these pages, but I do not now and have not ever cared about a mystery (I watched literally every episode of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries blissfully unaware of any crimes or clues) and also a sort of adventure quest. But for me this book is about Kate Kane, hard-living bad-decision-making paranormal investigator, flirting with or getting hit on by every woman and woman-shaped magical creature she encounters, and I like it very much. It’s got that noir tone and it really takes advantage of its urban-fantasy setting for humor: “Yes, I was a faery-blooded, thirty-something PI with trust issues and a drinking problem, and she was a psychotic undead nun with a pudding fixation, but I really thought we were in with a chance.” Good stuff. Content warnings: main character has had an abusive relationship in the past and her stalkery ex shows up several times, murder, violence, gore, a LOT of filth-and-sewage-related grossness, sex.
An Unconditional Freedom (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Alyssa Cole. I read two brilliant things about US politics and history this week, this novel and Adam Serwer’s essay “Civility Is Overrated” in The Atlantic, and I want to talk about both.
An Unconditional Freedom is a work of fiction, but there is truth in it. It’s common to assert that all historical fiction (or fiction set in the future) is really about the present, and sure, yeah, I have no interest in arguing against that. But the way we discuss and teach history is always impacted by the present, even when we’re supposedly sticking to the facts. There’s a whole scholarly field dedicated to the question of how to do history because the question of which parts we emphasize—who we emphasize—is so fraught. The past is too vast and complex for any history to capture all of it, so historiography is always wrestling with the map-territory problem: a map as big as the territory it represented would be useless (Jorge Luis Borges wrote a masterpiece of a short story on this subject), but any map smaller than the territory necessarily condenses things. History writing offers us many ways of mapping the past; so does fiction.
What structures good fiction is different from what you usually find in non-fiction history, but no less valuable. An Unconditional Freedom is a romance, meaning there is a central love story with a Happily Ever After, and also a spy thriller that sees its two Black protagonists journeying undercover through war-torn Mississippi. Every time they are stopped, they could be killed or enslaved. It’s suspenseful as hell. It’s also fiercely political, philosophical, and emotional, delving into its protagonists’ inner lives and huge questions—vengeance and justice, right and wrong—with the same care.
An Unconditional Freedom stars Daniel Cumberland, who was born free in Massachusetts and then betrayed and sold into slavery, and Janeta Sanchez, the child of a freed slave and a Cuban plantation owner who was raised in her father’s house. At the beginning of the book, Daniel has already had the brutal realization that his freedom is conditional. Freed from enslavement and deeply traumatized, he is now working for the Loyal League, a network of Black spies. He doesn’t really believe in the Loyal League’s mission of helping the Union win the war, though. He just wants vengeance for what was done to him:
He’d had enough of people trying to persuade him that there was good in the world; there was only what could and could not be tolerated, and what must be done to stop the latter.
Janeta, on the other hand, has not yet realized that the love and acceptance of her white family and her white beau are conditional. She has to support slavery and the Confederacy and reject her own Blackness in order to be in society with them, and even then, they will always look down on her. When Union soldiers occupy her family’s Florida home, her boyfriend persuades her to eavesdrop on them and pass information to the Confederates. Her actions land her father in prison. Janeta feels responsible for getting him out, and her loser boyfriend convinces her to undertake a dangerous mission: infiltrating the Loyal League as a double agent.
This being a romance novel, Daniel and Janeta are forced to work together. Naturally, they hate each other. Over the course of their assignment, they go from grudging respect to mutual admiration to risking their lives for each other, and all of it is beautifully written. The true skill of romance novelists—and Alyssa Cole is among the best—is to take the genre’s basic forms as a foundation and construct something memorably individual on top of them. When I say individual, I mean it both in terms of Cole’s own writing and also the characters she creates, fictional people whose conflicts and desires feel real, and personal, and very high stakes.
Daniel and Janeta’s story interweaves some of my favorite romance tropes—like an unexpected small kindness, where Daniel seems heartless and hard, but when Janeta crawls into their tent, she discovers he’s given her his bedroll—with perceptive, heart-wrenching discussions of what it means to be a good person in such an unjust world, whether you can ever right your own wrongs, and how can society free itself from pervasive white supremacy. Janeta’s arc is particularly piercing if you are, say, a white reader who was (mis)educated by the US public school system (ahem) about just how unconscionably awful chattel slavery is, as she realizes the cost of the luxury in which she lived at her father’s plantation: “…what she’d been taught was the natural order of things was a type of warfare, with more casualties than anyone would ever be able to count.”
Okay, no one taught me that slavery was the natural order of things in school. It wasn’t that bad. But still, this country is a place where people host weddings at slave plantations. Reading smart and truthful writing about US history is an experience I have only had as an adult. When you learn US history from a standard public-school textbook, Black history emerges at two moments, the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement—as if there weren’t Black people here all along, building the edifices of our nation while fighting for their freedom. The truth is that all of US history is Black history, that slavery and racism have shaped our nation since its beginning and continue to impact us now.
Our textbooks did their best to obscure that. Glossing over the horrors of slavery is one of the biggest lies Americans tell ourselves, but another is that that particular part of our past isn’t worth studying because it was all bad, nothing but misery, and instead we should look at when it ended. That Civil-War-and-Civil-Rights version of the story wants us to believe history is nothing but forward progress. We don’t have to spend time contemplating our failures because look, it’s all better now, that won’t happen again.
I think one of the reasons that my US history classes always elided the moment of post-Civil-War Reconstruction, discussed in Adam Serwer’s “Civility Is Overrated” article, is that it reveals this notion of linear forward progress as a lie. Even now, facts about Reconstruction remain surprising. There were Black people in local, state, and national offices in the late 1860s and early 1870s. More then than during most of the twentieth century.
Sometimes we go backwards.
That’s the other reason. It’s hard to look back at a moment of progress and know it was crushed. We failed. But we owe it to ourselves to think about those moments—as Serwer points out, we might be living through one right now.
We also owe it to ourselves not to reduce the era of American slavery down to nothing but misery—please don’t take this as me saying the misery isn’t important, because obviously it is. But we risk forgetting the real, complex human beings who lived through slavery if we do that, and the very least we could do for those people is to honor their memories. (We could also give their descendants reparations.)
A little bit of an aside: in Jewish history, there’s this idea called “the lachrymose conception.” I’ve mentioned it before, and the basic gist is the responsible way to do (Jewish) history is to emphasize the suffering. (Judaism sorta lends itself to this, cf. the song “Remember That We Suffered” from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.) But many historians have pushed back against the idea that Jewish history is only suffering, and I can imagine that this is a problem that anyone studying Black history in the US also deals with. When you focus solely on the suffering, you flatten people into victims. You distort the map.
Cole’s fiction is a beautiful way of restoring some of what is lost in the school-textbook version of US history. She makes space for this complexity, in particular in this passage where Daniel reflects on his traveling companions, who are all enslaved:
Listening to his traveling companions speak of their lives—the good, joyful parts of their lives—struck [Daniel] deeply. Instead of feeling his usual guilt and recrimination, he forced himself to focus outward, on others. To focus on the good memories they shared, and the full lives they’d lived in a society designed to squeeze the very joy out of them. The world wasn’t suddenly a better place, but perhaps it wasn’t so hopeless as he’d imagined.
Ultimately, inspired by Janeta, the good he’s seen, and the possibility of more, Daniel eases back from the self-destructive rage and despair that consume him after his enslavement. His revenge takes a different form:
Vengeance was happiness in a world that wanted to crush him. Vengeance was love in a world that wished him misery. Vengeance was stopping injustice, like what might be perpetrated against his friends.
It’s hard to choose a favorite part of this absolutely stunning novel, but this might be the most important. At the beginning of the novel, Daniel rejects the good in the world, and the possibility of making anything better, because it’s painful to accept the world in all its messy complexity. It’s painful for us, too. Yes, life was hard and society was viciously unjust, but enslaved people in the US had families and friends and inner lives. They sang. Sometimes they laughed. They fell in love. And for hundreds of years and in hundreds of ways, they fought back.
We owe it to them to remember that.
Content warnings for An Unconditional Freedom: slavery, mentions of beatings and lynchings and rape, PTSD, depression, passive suicidal ideation, racism, war, sex.
