What Happened to the Radicals?

Early in One Battle After Another, the director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning tale of insurgency in slow decline, Pat Calhoun, a guerrilla explosives expert played by Leonardo DiCaprio, makes a choice that sets the course of both his life and the movie: He picks parenthood over radicalism. As Pat drives into the night with his infant daughter snuggled in a laundry basket, viewers understand that he has forsaken one set of ideals—and battles—for another.

A very similar decision animates Bsrat Mezghebe’s debut novel, I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For. Its protagonist, Elsa Haddish, is a former Eritrean People’s Liberation Front guerrilla now living with her daughter, Lydia, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Lydia’s father died in the war, and Elsa is the only former fighter in the D.C. area’s large Eritrean diaspora. Her community admires her militant past, but she considers herself a failure. When the novel starts, in 1991, Eritrea’s 30-year war to free itself from Ethiopian rule is ongoing, and Elsa’s inner life is ruled by guilt at having emigrated to raise Lydia in safety while her “comrades weren’t leaving the war unless their mission was achieved or they died trying.”

I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For is written lightly—clunky title aside, it’s a novel you can tear through—and it draws on several tropes that habitual readers of 21st-century literary novels will recognize immediately: It’s an intergenerational immigrant story and a bildungsroman, with elements of what the critic Parul Seghal has called the trauma plot. But at its core, and at its most intriguing, Mezghebe’s novel, like One Battle After Another, represents a storyline that may not seem relatable, but holds a powerful appeal for contemporary audiences. I call it “what happened to the radicals.”

A what-happened-to-the-radicals story has one constant: It tracks guerrillas, rebels, or militants over enough time that their convictions either harden into dogma or, as happens to Pat and Elsa, get worn to shreds. Although some of these stories are warm toward their radical protagonists, they tend not to glorify them. Rather, they explore the moral challenges that intense ideological commitments—and the violence that often results—can create.

This is the case in Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction book Say Nothing, which begins with the Irish Republican Army’s kidnapping of a Protestant mother in Belfast and follows several of the militants who were involved through decades of the Troubles. But Keefe’s book also examines the corrosive silences that can endure long after militancy has been left behind—he shows former IRA leaders wrestling with disillusionment, isolation, and a growing sense that their illicit activities belong in the historical record. Dana Spiotta’s novel Eat the Document imagines a quieter version of this struggle. Its main characters, a radical couple who go into hiding separately after a bombing they planned went wrong, suffer as much from secrecy as from remorse.

In Mezghebe’s novel, Elsa is ashamed not of what she did in the war, but of having left it. These emotions render her unable to discuss her past with—or impart her political values to—her daughter. As a result, these values are not what propels their story forward; the novel becomes a tale of individual entrapment, not societal liberation. One Battle After Another, though more optimistic, renders the aftereffects of Pat’s radicalism very similarly to Elsa’s depressive self-regard, though Pat smokes a lot more pot.

These sorts of narratives explore how much sacrifice, and what kind of sacrifice, is enough to satisfy a true believer, and how long and fully a person can live according to their ideals. In doing so, these stories also challenge readers and viewers; even if they enjoy the vicarious thrill of radicalism, they may also discover a strange pleasure in watching revolutionary characters’ convictions wither away.

It’s no surprise that many what-happened-to-the-radicals stories hinge on parenthood. Few human experiences are stronger or more intuitive ideological tests. In non-guerrilla life, this can mean deciding what sort of school your children will attend or whether you, as a parent, will engage in civil disobedience.

Stories about radicalism and its decline contain extreme versions of these choices. Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s novel Retrospective fictionalizes the life of the Colombian director Sergio Cabrera, whose hard-line Communist parents left Cabrera and his sister alone in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution to be trained in Maoist thought, then brought them home to become guerrilla soldiers. The siblings survived, though barely; neither remained a militant in adulthood.

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Reading Retrospective may bring a dual sense of recognition and relief: Most anyone deeply involved in a young person’s life can connect to the question of how best to educate children, and regardless of your views on raising young revolutionaries, Cabrera’s training plainly did not justify the hardship he had to endure. Indeed, Vásquez depicts it as a parental failure—one that a parent of any political persuasion might read about and think, At least I’d never do that.

Even more dramatic instances of this effect appear throughout the playwright Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s forthcoming memoir, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, which chronicles his childhood as the son of the Weather Underground leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Dohrn evidently admires his parents’ values, but not their violence—or the intensity of their beliefs, which was stronger than any desire to give him and his brother a safe, stable childhood.

Still, he makes clear that he had it better than his adoptive brother Chesa Boudin, the son of the Weathermen David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin. When Chesa was a toddler, Gilbert and Boudin went to prison after aiding a robbery that went wrong, and Dohrn and Ayers took him in. In Dohrn’s eyes, it was unforgivable for Chesa’s parents to run such a risk together; he writes that “their ideological commitment had outstripped their judgement, their reason, and even their morality.”

Dohrn isn’t otherwise this condemnatory. In fact, the more notable emotion in his memoir is ambivalence. His complicated feelings highlight the draw of stories in which revolutionaries suffer from their convictions or slide into ordinariness: They affirm the choices of readers, even sympathetic ones, who have never lived on the political edge.

I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For does this, too, though the means are quite different. Mezghebe never glamorizes Elsa. Instead, she depicts her as an unhappy victim of her own beliefs. Although Elsa never considered remaining in rebel-controlled Eritrean territory with little Lydia, she also does not see raising a child as morally equal to war. Her grief and guilt about her decision harden into a shell of silence.

For Elsa, this is extremely painful; for 13-year-old Lydia, it’s even worse. She worries that her mother doesn’t love her or doesn’t want to communicate with her, and she yearns for stories of her father. Lydia feels adrift in a world where “everyone called her parents heroes,” because she “couldn’t imagine her mother as one.” Still, she tries to unearth Elsa’s history, which leads mostly to anger that her “mother could just open her mouth and start talking,” but won’t. (Willa, Pat’s daughter in One Battle After Another, might well feel the same way.) If Elsa did talk, Mezghebe suggests, it would bring Lydia closer not only to her mother, but also to the identity and values that Elsa has clung to in isolation.

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Seen together, these tales of radical and ex-radical parenthood suggest that there’s a clear ethical choice when these commitments clash, but also that the radicals can’t win. I suspect that this is the message audiences want. Although the secondhand excitement of rebel life might be enjoyable—most of the examples I’ve mentioned take on the texture of thrillers at times—many people would seemingly prefer if it came with the reassurance that choosing extremity, even if the cause is as righteous as Elsa’s, is compromising to the soul.

In these stories, radicalism that doesn’t lead to a violent death diffuses instead into smaller tragedies. That may be comforting to read or watch, but it also indicates a gap in our culture. I haven’t encountered many tales of sustainable, long-term idealism like that of civil servants who devote whole careers to quietly ensuring vital services or lifelong activists able to respond to changing times. Such stories may be less dramatic than those of rebels whose convictions flame out or trap them in time, but that doesn’t make them less fascinating—and in a moment of scarce optimism, they might be even more satisfying to read.