On Unfreedom
By Niall Twohig
Yesterday, I started class with twenty-three words that formed a cage:
Take out a pen and paper. We’re going to have a quiz because I suspect folks are not keeping up with the materials.
When I said this, I saw most of my students tense up, their breath froze for an instant. When I revealed I wasn’t serious, the tension eased and they breathed freely and fully again.
I pulled this little prank to put students, momentarily, in a cage. In this case, a word cage. The shape of this cage was made to make them feel small, to pressure their bodies and minds into a state of tension.
The brings me to a question I asked students this week: What is unfreedom?
Before this week, I saw unfreedom as a cage, but this prank showed me there’s more to it. Unfreedom has to do with the tension one feels when forced into a cage. This is how I now define the term:
Unfreedom: A state one enters when forced into a cage. This state makes it difficult or impossible to be at ease. Tension locks the body and mind. That tension makes it difficult or impossible to act or think freely. One’s choices narrow or eliminated; one’s potential is cut short or short-circuited. One who is in this state may marginally benefit from the tension, but the cage-builder is likely the main beneficiary. In extreme instances of unfreedom, one does not have the choice to leave the state of tension; one’s choices narrow to remaining in it or rebelling.
This definition is still too abstract. What follows are preliminary notes to give this definition flesh and blood and grounding in the world.
A state one enters when forced into a cage. These cages are not always literal. As with my initial example, the cage can be words spoken by an authority. The cage might be geopolitical enclosures that lock people into resource-deprived neighborhoods or warzones. It might be working conditions that force people into stressful positions or wearisome “grindsets.” It might be an ideological cage where one feels the tension of being objectified and dehumanized in the eyes of their beholder. It might be a technological cage where the tension of sensory overload is momentarily relieved by clicking on shiny ads or following algorithms to the next dopamine release.
This state makes it difficult or impossible to be at ease. To be “at ease” is to relax into ourselves in the present moment. To be at ease, we must be secure. We aren’t being manipulated into unwanted postures by external forces. Our senses aren’t being clouded or bombarded. At ease, we breathe without external restraints that restrict or shorten our breath, we move without external restraints that restrict our range of motion, we think without external restraints that restrict our thoughts.
One’s choices narrow or eliminated. One’s potential is cut short or short-circuited. A cage narrows the infinity of choices that exist for a free person. The more rigid the cage, the narrower the range of choices. As one’s choices narrow, so too does one’s potential. An emblem of this is a caged bird. Such a bird cannot reach the possible destinations it could reach if it took wing. We find such caged birds in the wage slaves of the Gilded Age who had the talent and potential to be great scientists or artists but who, because of their class and gender, were fated to be cogs in a machine.
One who is in this state may marginally benefit from the tension, but the cage-builder is likely the main beneficiary. We can think of the muscular tension of the slave, how that tension was required to build Pharoah’s pyramids and harvest the Master’s cash crops. We can think of Gilded Age wage slaves who felt the tension of the industrial machine as it manipulated their bodies to its motions and rhythms.
I also think of my mother, a nurse for six decades. She lives in the tension of work and of what happens if she stops working. That tension has taken a toll. Both her knees were replaced and she has high blood pressure. My family benefited from her work; we had a home, toys, food, good schooling. But corporate hospitals were the main beneficiaries. They bring in billions of dollars a year through the work of my mom and millions like her. As they grow bigger, she shrinks. Retirement is no option. She works into old age to keep family members afloat. After work, she comes home to a house emptied of children pulled to other cities for work. She has no time or energy for hobbies. She sleeps, a tense sleep, readying herself for the next shift.
In extreme instances of unfreedom, one does not have the choice to leave the state of tension; one’s choices narrow to remaining in it or rebelling. When it came to my word cage, it was easy to free students. I told them it wasn’t real. The cage disappeared. The tension dissipated. If the word cage had been real, they could have done what one student did. He initially tensed up, then told himself, “It is what it is.” Those words became his escape route from the cage. This is no small thing. Mantras of this sort, prayer, other contemplative practices have long been used to find freedom in unfree conditions. As an example: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist peace workers who used their mindfulness training to find peace amid the hellish tension of the American war in Vietnam.
Still, their example is exceptional. The psychologist Franz Fanon helps us understand the more likely response of people caged in inhuman conditions. Fanon worked in a colonial setting where people were dispossessed of land, where they were spat upon and brutalized, where their bodies and minds were twisted by the cage. Fanon saw that for those forced into such cages the only choice was to remain in a state of torturous tension or violent rebellion that unleashed that tension.
Coda: Song of Freedom
My definition of unfreedom is complicated by a profound statement from a student. Speaking of the occupied land of her ancestors, she said, “I felt freest in the most unfree place, while I feel unfree in the Land of Freedom.”
Her statement brings me back to the caged bird and to words Maya Angelou writes of that bird:
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
Herein lies a paradox: the tension of unfreedom gives rise to a song of freedom. These songs are best listened to rather than written about. There are many, but here are two sung by Nina Simone: Mississippi Goddamm and I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free. The rhythm of the first is the rhythm heard on the streets of Ferguson in 2014 and St. Paul in 2020. The rhythm of the second is the rhythm of those who marched on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The pause that gives the music its beat is akin to the pause of the Bread and Roses Strike, of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, of the Delano Grape Strike. In all these instances, the tension of unfreedom provokes a rhythm that shakes the cage, that breaks its bars, that lifts the tension so that people feel the weightlessness of a freedom not wholly realized.