The Power of "No"

Hands Off demonstration in Washington DC on April 5, 2025. (Photo by author.)

I have no need of holes / for ears, nor prophetic eyes:

to your mad world there is / one answer: to refuse!

Marina Tsvetaeva, Poems to Czechoslovakia (Translation by Elaine Feinstein)

Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry often plucks the highest emotional strings. It etches in exquisitely-wrought verse so many of the cataclysms of her existence.

At some moments, Tsvetaeva’s work gives voice to the battle of the individual against larger political forces and fate, as it does in The Swan’s Encampment — her epic poem cycle about the Russian Civil War. In other verses, the emotional gales caused by her intimate relationships approach a personal apocalypse. (1924's “Poem of the End,” for instance.)

Yet the clarity we discern so quickly in Tsvetaeva’s radical effusion quoted above — written in 1939 as she processed Nazi Germany’s immoral annexation of Czechoslovakia — evokes something powerful that so many of us feel right now.

It is a comprehensive rejection of a retrograde political force imposed upon us and our society.

Marina Tsvetaeva, 1925. Image by Pyotr Ivanovich Shumov. (Public Domain)

If we seek to address the immense power that our own “no” can hold, Tsvetaeva’s utterance is a good place to start.

Absolutes represent our full embrace of the task at hand. Grand statements convey deep commitments.

Yet while our hearts may gravitate to absolutes, and our minds fix upon them as a start in rejecting threats to ourselves and others, we remain human beings.

So while a political “no” that proves sustainable in the long run can start in a large gesture, it cannot end there.

A “no” that sticks must be cultivated. Built upon a foundation of habit. We must make a commitment to say “no” with consistency to the vast number of requests for our assent to things that we can neither endorse nor endure.

A few weeks ago, I read an essay by Jarett Kobek in the Winter 2024 issue of The Swedenborg Review: “Ten Observations Provoked by Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life.”

One sentence struck me like a thunderbolt:

The capacity for formal refusal is built atop the small refusals of daily life.

This sentence has such a ringing clarity: We must cultivate a habit of “no” to make our beliefs stick when it matters.

Václav Havel, 1989 - Photo by Jaroslav Krejčí

There is a large existing literature on political dissent. The work of Václav Havel – and in particular, his epic essay, “The Power of the Powerless” – dives deep into the sense of how we must lay a foundation for dissent in our everyday activities.

Havel ends that essay with these words:

We do not know the way out of the marasmus of the world, and it would be an expression of unforgivable pride were we to see the little we do as a fundamental solution, or were we to present ourselves, our community, and our solutions to vital problems as the only thing worth doing.

Even so, I think that given all these preceding thoughts on post-totalitarian conditions, and given the circumstances and the inner constitution of the developing efforts to defend human beings and their identity in such conditions, the questions I have posed are appropriate. If nothing else, they are an invitation to reflect concretely on our own experience and to give some thought to whether certain elements of that experience do not — without our really being aware of it — point somewhere further, beyond their apparent limits, and whether right here, in our everyday lives, certain challenges are not already encoded, quietly waiting for the moment when they will be read and grasped.

The formulation offered by Kobek distills this thought so perfectly with its elegant and succinct link between “small refusals” and “daily life.”

Kobek’s words also underscore the fact that we cannot allow our sense of “no” to be governed by a notion that only perfection is acceptable. We can make small starts in saying “no.” Not logging into Facebook. Quitting Twitter. Going to a demonstration or a town hall. Not buying the products that we usually put in our grocery carts.

All of these steps are the sorts of small refusals that cultivate a capacity for a larger “no.”

Success also means a commitment to starting on the path of “no” right now, however hesitantly we do so. Better to make a slow start now than wait until the moment in which we feel we can run at pace.

The sooner we begin, the sooner we will see others doing it alongside us, as many people did on Saturday, April 5 at demonstrations across the United States. We will find encouragement and resilience in a community saying “no” — however imperfectly it does so.

The Bottle Rockets. (Photo by Cathy Horton for Undertow Management.)

Some of the most powerful ways that we can say “no” are not even overt refusals.

A commitment to turn bankrupt rhetoric inside out is another significant response. Expressing our unwillingness to honor that rhetoric as legitimate. Taking active steps to ridicule it and replace it with something authentic.

I think often of the Bottle Rockets’ classic song “Wave That Flag” — written by the band’s guitarist and vocalist Brian Henneman. (It’s on their eponymous 1993 debut record.) It is a song that explicitly overturns the rhetoric of “rebellion” often used to justify racism and totalitarianism in the context of the American South.

“Wave That Flag” begins with a simple observation – a truck sporting a Confederate flag – and then moves quickly to interrogate the associations raised by the emblem.

For so many of us growing up outside of the American South in the 1970s and 1980s, the Confederate flag was presented to us as the innocuous-seeming symbol of a particular sort of hell-raising and rebellious strain of music. Yet that flag cannot escape its fundamental essence as an immoral assertion of racism and forthright Lost Cause delusion.

What’s so potent in “Wave That Flag” is how Henneman flips the script entirely on the “Stars and Bars” in ways both simple (“It’s a red, white, and blue flag / But it ain’t ours”) and complex:

I'm a different kind / But I'm a rebel too

Like to do my own thing, man / How 'bout you?

“Wave That Flag” turns the trope of racism as rebellion inside out. It exposes the so-called “rebel” who puts a hateful symbol on his truck as an unthinking conformist.

The true act of rebellion — the true “no” — is not a mere gesture. True rebellion as a human being is embracing empathy in the tide of cruelty. It is inhabiting the full historical context of our present actions and choosing a different path.

Jonathan Pryce in Trevor Griffiths' play Comedians.

We are human beings. Often we measure ourselves against our greatest artists in moments where they seem to live in an absolute “no.” Usually, their “no” resides largely in the works of art that inspire us. (After all, artists have human lives, too. )

So we try. At times, we fail. But each little “no” that we do inhabit aggregates. It creates a greater collective wave of “no.”

Indeed, those larger waves of “no” we need so desperately cannot exist without imperfect people of conscience and good will uttering their singular “no” in unison.

So we must persist. And not only in trying and failing — but also in trying and succeeding.

The stakes are immense.

Among my favorite expressions of “no” in literature is a passage at the end of Trevor Griffiths’ classic play, Comedians. (Watch a televised version here.) This play is so richly observed and so carefully wrought that it defies easy summation. Griffiths’ task in the play is to offer a lesson in the mechanics of what makes a joke “funny.” He shows us how so much of what makes us laugh is silly, stereotypical, and even racist and sexist. That comedy is a currency which can be debased and corrupted.

The set up of Comedians is straightforward. An experienced practitioner of the art named Eddie Waters offers a class for aspiring comedians in Manchester. They are preparing for an appearance in front of a talent scout at a local club.

Waters’ students offer their middling and somewhat hackneyed acts onstage with one exception: Gethin Price, the most talented member of the class, launches a sustained and savagely funny assault on his unsuspecting audience. A bravura performance of anger and mockery.

At the end of the play, in an empty classroom, Waters and Price compare notes. The experienced comic recognizes Price’s genius — and, yet, Waters’ life experience compels him to warn his pupil of the transgressive darkness of comedy. He relates the tale of a junket he took to Germany after World War II to the young comedian, juxtaposing the horror of what he saw with the easy laughs that antisemitic jokes got — and confessing his own shame at the thrill that darkness conjured within him.

Price’s response articulates his anger – not at Waters, whom he clearly admires – but at the mechanisms of oppression that he wants to dismantle with his comedic art:

The Jews still stayed in line, even when they knew, Eddie! What’s that about? (He swings his bag off the desk, ready for off.) I stand in no line. I refuse my consent.

Gethin Price’s “no” is a view of comedy – and art – as a sword to defend the dignity of the individual against collective forms of hatred and stupidity. It is Trevor Griffiths reminding us of our essential responsibility as humans not to comply with murder and self-annihilation.

Which brings us back again to absolutes. The high pitch of Tsvetaeva’s verse. The simple but powerful assertion: “Never Again.”

These expressions articulate precisely why our “no” is so essential. And why trying to inhabit that “no” — however imperfectly — is so necessary in moments of crisis.

Moments like right now.

(This essay first appeared on the Stage Write Substack on April 7, 2025.)