During the cathartic year of 2020, the menacing and vigorous beast that is Feminazgûl soared into the awareness of the extreme metal world, and beyond. On their debut full-length "No Dawn For Men", the merging of literal themes from J.R.R. Tolkien, anti-authoritarianism and mythology with raw and atmospheric black metal, combined with traditional acoustic and more obscure instruments and original songwriting worked like a charm, and with the latest single "A Mallacht" the band ventures into even more experimental and avant-garde territories. I had a chance to interview the band on various topics.
Thanks to the whole band for taking your time to do this interview! How are each of you feeling here at the beginning of 2022?
Margaret: Overwhelmed. My friend rescued some puppies by the side of a mountain road and I took one home and it’s uh… gonna be some months at least before I get eight hours of sleep again.
Mer: RINTRAH! He roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air! Good thing he’s cute.
Margaret: That’s the puppy’s name, Rintrah.
Laura: I am also overwhelmed. I just moved and got accepted into school. Doing a fair amount of emotional and physical untangling. Shadow work, light work. Shedding skin. Molting. Whatever euphemism you would like to use. But yeah, overwhelmed is a good way to put it.
Mer: Same here. It’s an overwhelming time. Kiitos, Antti! Glad you’re interviewing us.
Laura is apparently originally from the state of New York, but currently resides in Georgia, while Meredith has a California background, and Margaret is based in Appalachia. How do these geographical areas on the opposite coasts of the U.S. differ from each other the most in your opinion? What can you tell me of the environments of your childhoods, do you view them as positive or negative?
Laura: So just to clarify, I was born in New York but I don't really consider myself a New Yorker since I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee when I was 5. I have very few memories of the place. I really consider myself from Tennessee to be honest, because that's where I spent my formative years. I have a tattoo of the Sunsphere on my right thigh. Haha. And I lived there until I was 28 when I then moved to North Carolina where I met Margaret and we got together to form the base of what Feminazgûl is currently. I recently moved to Georgia because mostly I felt the city I was located in had too much trauma, heartache, regret, and overall personal failure for me to bear any longer. I certainly don't entirely regret moving to NC. I got Feminazgûl out of it and I did make some solid connections while I was there. Honestly it just became too much.
Mer: It’s Complicated™. Culturally, I’m substantially Greek-American and a New Yorker. Biologically, I’m a Celt bastard whelped on Kumeyaay land. Psychologically, I’m a Shame Baby, mid-70s vintage, born in San Diego and relinquished immediately into foster care. My mom and dad, surname Yayanos, had recently moved here from the east coast. They adopted and raised me as an only child. I spent my late teens / early twenties at Bard College in upstate New York, moved to NYC right after graduating, and lived there for nearly a decade. I called Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Aotearoa (NZ) home for several years, too. Specifically Wellywood. Arrived back when Guillermo del Toro was still slated to direct one(!) Hobbit film. I should’ve left town as soon as he did, that lovely man. Anyway, various regions of the States are wildly different, culturally, with a majority of communities seemingly not thinking too much about what exists beyond their comfy consensus bubbles and often struggling to humanize outsiders. But isn’t that last bit true everywhere? Maybe this unprecedented global upheaval we’re swept up in right now is largely the result of countless bubbles finally bursting in on one another. “All that is solid melts into air”, etc.
As Feminazgûl started out as a solo-project by Margaret, how have the three of you come in contact with each other?
Mer: Margaret and I were vaguely aware of one another for years before we ever spoke. We both had spooky punk bands, made magazines, moved through the same circles in the aughts. It wasn’t until 2014 or so that we met up for Ethiopian food in San Francisco and chatted for hours. Buds ever since. I loved that first Feminazgûl EP instantly. And M was telling me great things about Laura for ages before we all started making music together.
Laura: I met Margaret on Tinder of all places. Tldr, I had gotten dumped. I was still new to Asheville and didn't really know anyone. So I got on Tinder and here we are. #tindersuccessstories
Margaret: Yeah, after putting out the first EP, and it actually getting way more traction than I expected, I realized I could do with some help. Met Laura, thought to run the songs by Mer for additional instrumentation, and it just all clicked so well.
Until now, has it been a rare case to meet a person with similar views and tastes in your life?
Laura: Offline? Yes. Online? No.
Mer: Nah. Which isn’t to say that this triad isn’t precious and rare, cuz it is!
While the originality of the band certainly attracts listeners of various kinds, especially after the increase in avant-garde vibes on the latest release, the overall atmosphere of the band is still very much rooted in underground black metal. What attracted you to extreme metal in the first place, and at what age? And what can you tell me of the other music cultures you are active in, sharing the same philosophical attitudes as Feminazgûl?
Margaret: I was a goth kid in high school. I listened to some metal… actually a formative experience of mine was the Helsinki Metal Fest in… 1999 I think? I saw Nightwish and Amorphis and a slew of other bands. But I didn’t fall more deeply into metal until my mid-twenties, when my partner at the time turned me on to the atmospheric stuff. Summoning, Wolves In the Throne Room, Agalloch…
Mer: ...waaaugh, I <3 Wolves In the Throne Room, too! And Itchy-O and Liturgy and King Woman and Zeal & Ardor and Boris and Melt Banana and Sunn 0)) and Bask and Free Salamander Exhibit and Anna Von Hausswolff and Fuck Buttons and Gazelle Twin and Anaal Nathrahk, and, and, and....
Margaret: ...and I got into folk metal around the same time too, because I was making my living playing accordion on the street. Finntroll, Moonsorrow, Turisas… anything with an accordion and I was in. At the core of it, though, my politics and my attitudes about life were shaped most by the anarchist punk scene and crust. I wasn’t as deeply into punk music, but punk subculture, absolutely. Being around people trying to change the world is inspiring and hard to walk away from. The music, frankly, was always secondary to me to this sense of “what will it take to be free?”
Laura: I've been a fan of music my entire life but I got into metal at the tender age of 13 in 2002. I didn't exactly have the typical classic/thrash metal upbringing that I see a lot of Americans have (Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Pantera, etc.).
Mer: The first piece of “extreme music” that I remember being totally amped about was Orff’s Carmina Burana. I was three. My dad would put that record on and my toddler ass was like LET’S OPEN UP THIS PIIIIIIT. Growing up, Russian violin teachers had me learning Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Stravinsky. Loved all that stuff. The heavier the betterer. One of the first cassettes I bought with babysitting money was Metallica’s Ride the Lightning. My first live concert was a Public Enemy arena show in 1990. Mind-blowing! A juvenile delinquent chum shoplifted every Anthrax CD he could from Sam Goody and literally laid ‘em at my feet on my fifteenth birthday. I was a Bungle nerd, too. To me, all that stuff was heavy, and revelatory.
Laura: My first brush with metal was with Children of Bodom's Follow the Reaper. (My parents didn't really monitor my internet usage all that much. Whoops.) I was immediately thrust into melodic death. And of course my journey through all the subgenres sprawled even further. At 14, I discovered Type O Negative. At 15, I discovered Nile and I started going to shows. Since that point, I have always tried my best to be active in whatever scenes that I am a part of. And then at 18, I discovered folk and black metal. It started with Dimmu Borgir and then it progressed. Then in 2010 when I was 21, I started hosting a metal college radio show because they just needed someone. I didn't even go to the college. But there in that time, because I was being exposed to so much music, I really developed my love for black metal and the further subsets of that sub-genre during my 20s.
During the years, you have been active with many styles of music, such as Margaret’s projects of synth pop, neofolk and black metal, while Meredith has been collaborating with many amazing acts such as Dresden Dolls and Faun Fables. What style would you say is the most dear to you, or reflecting your personality the best, or is it always an avant-garde mixing of many?
Laura: While I don't do much outside of metal, I think honestly if I were to branch out, I would want to make some psytrance.
Mer: Dude, that’d be baller, Laura. Lemme know if you need any Otamatone. Yep, for sure Faun Fables, and their sibling band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and that whole Bay Area aughts crew, are inspiring as hell. From even further back, my current Parlour Trick music partner and birthday twin Scott Gendel is a bright light in modern classical choral music, plus he cooks delicious food and tells theeee worst (aka BEST) dad jokes! Rachel Brice’s kindhearted approach to absolutely every dang thing she does has been providing me with a dependable moral compass for fifteen solid years. Same goes for my bestie Kristine Barrett, who contributed hugely to the Mallacht track. I’ve been watching LITVAKDance director Sadie Weinberg build entire worlds out of movement, veils, and light since we were five years old. Forty years later, the two of us are still making art and playing dress-up together. With Margaret and Laura, we’re cackling our asses off one minute, raw and vulnerable together the next. So I guess what I’m saying is, as far as styles go, mutually respectful creative chosen-family style is most dear to me.
Margaret: I can’t pick just one, but I’m equally drawn to dark pop, neofolk/classical, and metal. The latter two synergize better, of course, though dark pop does find its way into our songs occasionally, especially the drums here and there. Learning one genre really informs the others, too.
What can you tell me of the cycle of the songs coming together, starting from conceptions, compositions, lyrics, the recording process and the finalization of the songs? Would you say the way in which you work together is easier or more challenging that the other musical projects of your life?
Margaret: We’re experimenting with new forms for the next album, but at the moment, I don’t know I’ve been phrasing it as I make the bones, Mer makes the flesh, and Laura makes the teeth. Most of our songs start out with me playing around on piano, accordion, or some other acoustic instrument, then translating the chords and moods into guitars and drums. Then Mer just takes the whole thing and turns it transcendent. Lyrically, so far, sometimes I write them and sometimes Laura writes them.
The band has definitely gained a lot of momentum during the last two years. How has this affected your lives, meaning has the band started to take more and more of your time? Do you plan, for example, on playing live and touring much in the future? Have you received surprising offers for co-operation as the band has gained popularity?
Mer: Yeah! A lot of kinship building. (Mad love to Tridroid Records, our listeners, our manager Mallory, all the visual artists and merch-makers we’ve collaborated with so far.) The whole project’s definitely taking up more time and space as we go. But would you believe the three of us have yet to stand in the same physical room together, let alone play a song in real-time? The band booked a handful of shows on the east coast last summer; there were a bunch of rehearsals as a live five-piece band in Asheville (Nathan, Jason, Tommy, we <3 you!) with me scheduled to fly out and plug in a week beforehand. Then the Delta strain got real bad. Now Margaret’s building out her new home studio as we speak. She’s been bustin’ out the Goblin Box, wooo! Current plan is to meet up at her place at some point later this year to work on new music and figure out next steps. It’d be cool to eventually perform and tour, but who knows when that’ll be, or what that’s going to look and sound like. Plagues are weird, man.
When it comes to underground and extreme metal, it is no secret that the amount of openly fascist bands unfortunately outnumbers the bands of the opposite ideologies, while most bands fall somewhere in between, not taking a clear stand, which is sometimes worse. Have you seen any change in either direction in the underground metal culture lately? Are anti-fascist people just more into punk or other styles of music, while the traditional metal-head tends to lean right?
Mer: Bear with me, this is a bit of a leap, but here’s a clip from a turn-of-the-millenium documentary about Alan Moore: “I believe that our culture is turning to steam.” Moore was predicting that by 2015, the world as we understood it would be, just... gone. That bit haunted me for years. So did a bunch of Bill Gibson’s punk-informed sci-fi projections dating back to the early 80s. As it turns out, a whole lotta late 20th century writers who insisted that reality itself would reach a boiling point within our natural lifespans came correct. Various underground creative movements blend into one another and bleed into the mainstream more swiftly with every calendar year, where they get reified (or cannibalized) by the status quo. At this stage, the shitsucking UwU ouroboros of it all means you can easily end up rubbing elbows with rapey fascists in any subculture, not just metal, and have no clue. That’s definitely happened to me. Repeatedly. Ugh. I’ve had enough. I’m no longer unquestioningly loyal. Paying closer attention to a person’s actions behind the scenes than their public PR has become a crucial survival skill.
Margaret: When I first got into anarchism about twenty years ago, the anarchist scene in the US was heavily subcultural, especially punk. I mean no slight to anarchist punk, I will forever have love for it. But since then, politics in general have gotten more heated and more personal, and therefore positions like anti-fascism or even anarchism have become increasingly mainstream. Which is to say, they’ve become found in all kinds of cultures. Because I don’t really believe that there’s a single “normative” culture or whatever, just a million different subcultures that overlap in different ways. So there’s more leftist metal now, because there are more leftists. Being apolitical, or centrist, is increasingly scene as irrelevant and strange. People are picking sides. Which is good and bad.
Feminazgûl is indeed considered to be a feminist, antifascist and an anarchist band, and I am curious how the anarchism part manifests in your daily lives, besides the obvious philosophy and attitude. Personally, considering myself a socialist anarchist yet living in a modern urban world, I currently work as a cook in a kindergarten which is situated in a cool historical milieu, but that is as far from the corporate, capitalist or statist ladder I have managed to get myself in this lifetime, apparently. How about your working life, are you satisfied with it? Do you have to maintain day-jobs or can you live off your art?
Margaret: So the points of unity for Feminazgûl are that we are feminist and antifascist. Some of us are anarchists, but I wouldn’t say Feminazgûl is itself explicitly an anarchist band. A band with some anarchists in it. That said: until a year ago, I made my living entirely off my art and some freelance design. A combination of music, writing, podcasting, etc. But about a year ago I took a position at a nonprofit that I believe in. I wasn’t sure I wanted a job, I’d made it until my late 30s without a salaried job. But I work for a place called Seed Commons that fights capitalism and structural racism by empowering cooperative business and I actually believe in it, so here I am. I think though, that there’s no shame or hypocrisy, or even contradiction, in working within an all-encompassing system you would like to see dismantled, destroyed, or changed. There’s no specific radical value in staying poor on principle, as compared to gathering and redistributing resources by whatever means is available to you.
Laura: So at least for the past 8 or 9 years or so since getting out of college, I've just sort of been floating around career-wise. I was doing call center work for various companies and centers. And until recently, I had done it for 12 years. (Best believe, I have a lot of patience for people throwing insults at me as I have been called everything under the Sun.) Also I've been bartending for going on 5 years now. My original Life Plan however after college, was to go to mortuary school and become a mortician. But unfortunately, I let myself get wrapped up in a very detrimental relationship in my young adulthood and it never happened. I got involved with music, just floating around, and working bullshit jobs because I had resigned myself to thinking I would probably never get back to that original path. Not going to lie, I had a pretty recent existential crisis. I realized I was living in a city that made me deeply unhappy and exacerbated my mental health and illnesses. Pressure from parents, partner, friends, and myself (finally), realize that I had to move and had to do something with my time.
Mer: My career and reputation went down in flames a while ago along with my willing complicity! Messy. These days, “Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone”. My day job, such as it is since Coilhouse bled out in late 2012, has been a random churn. Patreon community support and steady sales from Funranium Labs’ Blood of the Harpy coffee have both been vital to maintaining a sense of agency. Hädässä ystävä tunnetaan! Fuck yeah, mutual aid. Brava to what Margaret said about fight-where-you-stand ethos. “No one way works”, right? That’s real for me. When younger Mers come swimming up to ask "how are things for us the 21st Century?", I say to them: “well, somehow, even after myriad flaming shitshows, we are not dead yet. We’re not in a cult. We’ve finally found ourselves in community rather than competition. Oh. and best of all, it’s extremely unlikely we will ever, ever be in the same room with the likes of Elon Musk again. Hallelujah!” #Blessed
Feminism obviously wasn’t invented in the nineteenth century, nor the sixties for that matter, and world civilizations and global myths throughout the ages are filled with powerful women standing against patriarchy and similar oppression. What are your favorite examples of female empowerment from history or mythology?
Mer: Mythwise I’m into fierce queers and monstrous femmes. (Have you read Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters? So good!) The Parlour Trick’s next two records are tethered to the myths of Inanna and Cassandra, respectively. Off the top of my head, a random brick of creative thinkers who have galvanized me in various ways: Nina Simone, Hilma af Klint, Wendy Cheng, Maya Gurantz, Lee Bontecou, Madeline von Foerster, Diamanda Galas, Martha Graham, Vali Myers, Adrienne Marie Brown, Gerda Wegener, Lou Reed, Anais Nin, Katie West, Oscar Wilde, Unica Zurn, Colin Stetson, Fred Rogers, Chris & Cosey, Virginia Woolf, bell hooks, Maya Gurantz, Carolee Schneemann, Anna J. Cooper, Klaus Nomi, Weldon Kees, Grace Jones, Theo Jansen, Pema Chodron, Ana Mendieta, Holly Bobisuthi, Delia Derbyshire, Pixie Colman Smith, Freda Diesing, the Wachowskis, Quentin Crisp, Ann Magnuson, Andy Goldsworthy, Yayoi Kusama, Courtney “Riot” Zalewski, Suzanne Valadon, Marjorie Cameron, Artemisia Gentileschi, Sylvia Plath, all of the lady Surrealists.
Margaret: I’ll add Fumiko Kaneko, Maria Nikiforova, Lucía Saornil, Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, and, fuck it, Kurt Cobain. (I will die on the hill that Kurt Cobain would have come out as trans had they lived long enough). Oh, and the woman in Ukraine who handed Russian soldiers some sunflower seeds to curse them so that when they died at least something beautiful would come of them.
When it comes to titles and lyrics, Feminazgûl features strong references to the works and themes of J.R.R. Tolkien, Margaret is no stranger to writing fiction, and Meredith has even been an inspiration for a comic book character. Besides the feminist themes, what are your personal favorites from the world of fictional literature, graphic novels, or world mythologies and religions in general?
Mer: Speaking of inspiration and character: shout-out to my siblings at So Many Of Us. Angela Carter’s a forever fave. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella The Yellow Wallpaper looms large. I’m in awe of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein. Michael Ende’s existential fairy tale The Neverending Story is a lifelong go-to comfort read, as are Mary Oliver’s poems about nature and ecstasy, along with Blake’s and Whitman’s. My sweetheart is currently building out a vivid fantasy novel; imagery from that world is beginning to inform my own music-making, which is… exhilarating.
Margaret: I’ve been living in more modern fantasy for a long time, but as I get older I’m more drawn to learn more about traditional mythological and pagan lore. The celtic traditions of course, but I admit I’ve always had a fascination with the Kalevala as well. I’ve usually avoided that kind of thing because of how steeped in nationalism so many of those traditions are, but I’m learning slowly that just because something is a slippery slope doesn’t mean its not worth traversing.
There is a strong element of witchcraft present in your music. What can you tell me of your personal methods of spiritual development, have you always associated yourself with for example European paganism or ceremonial magick, and have there been other interest as well such as Yoga or Buddhism? Do you find a certain eclectic or syncretic chaos-approach more efficient than digging for water from only one place?
Margaret: We each come at it differently, which makes for a real fun mix. That’s not sarcasm, either. Our different attitudes towards witchcraft, magic, folklore, the divine, etc. makes for excellent thematic soil to grow our music out of. Personally, I’m obsessively self-creating. I draw occasionally from existing mythologies (increasingly, from my Irish heritage), but mostly from mythology I’ve developed with my friends. Illa, the goddess of darkness and rot who is woven throughout the "No Dawn" album, is something my friends and I hit upon and work with. I also kind of, uh… lost my mind during the beginning of covid isolated in a cabin in the woods, and I’m sure more of that mythology will float up in our future work.
With the emergence of DNA-testing and genealogy sites, the study of one’s roots has become much easier in recent times, although unfortunately the compartmentalizing of so-called ethnicity gives us false impressions of race. How conscious do you think American people are these days of their ancestral past? How aware are you personally of your various family lines, and do you take anything to your personal life from the cultures of your ancestors?
Margaret: There’s this really intense and complicated discourse, especially when mixed with whiteness and colonization, about how to go about working with our roots and ancestry. You’ll find people on all sides arguing for and against it. Personally, my current working theory is “don’t let Nazis have things” and I think that as a white American of primarily Irish and Scottish ancestry, I figure don’t let Nazis have celtic culture and identity. There’s also this way of understanding whiteness as “you give up your connection to your ancestry and in exchange you’re in the privileged class and have it better than other poor people” and from that point of view, one way to shatter whiteness is to refuse that assimilation. For a lot of us in the US, it’s “too late.” My great grandparents refused to teach my grandmother Irish, because they wanted her to assimilate. There are threads, though, that remain. I’m interested in following those threads.
But there’s also a lot to be said about how culture and ethnicity are not determined solely or primarily by blood. In the US, Indigenous people are tracked by blood quantum, by how “pure” their bloodline is. Every Indigenous person I’ve been close with thinks that’s garbage. Culture is what matters more. So… does it matter that I have “Irish” blood? It seems sketchy to care much about that. Yet it does matter to me that my family endured two genocides at the hands of the British and fled colonization, to come be colonizers. Even though I barely grew up with any cultural connection, besides some relatives in Ireland and the fact that my family is Catholic.
Sorry, I know that’s a long response without any specific answers buried in it. I don’t think there are any specific answers. Hell, to be honest, if there’s any mythology and culture I grew up obsessed with, it’s Finnish. My high school girlfriend was Finnish, lived in Helsinki, and it was the first taste of “culture” that I had as a white suburban American kid. I play kantele better than I play the bodhran, and I’ve got a kalevala ring instead of a claddagh. Which makes me a poser I guess, I don’t know. Not sure I care. I don’t write songs set in Finnish mythology because it’s not my culture, but I question to what degree that matters, especially when it’s another white country I’d be risking appropriating. Honestly, all these complicated questions are part of why I just make shit up.
Laura: I am terribly fucking conscious of my ancestry and I'm rather horrified by it honestly. I can trace my ancestry on my father's side as far back as 1615 so I have 400+ years of white guilt. I'm predominantly English and Dutch so I'm descended from basically the apex predators of the white European colonizers. With that being said, I have the ability to join the Daughters of the American Revolution. But I never would. Apparently, my ancestors also owned slaves so yeah. Awful stuff really. It grosses me out to know that. I just do my best to acknowledge this information and try my best to be a better example to any possible descendants that I might have in terms of my white colonizer ancestry.
Mer: A couple years back I took some DNA tests that tore the roof off my entire identity as I’d understood it. I was unprepared for “second rejection” by members of my lifelong-lost biological family. The grief of a thing like that. I phoned a trusted guide, Angeliska Polacheck, for counsel. After hearing me out, they suggested investing in a practical animism and lineage-healing course led by educators they trusted, so I’ve since committed to doing organized ritual work on an ongoing basis. Still a total noob at it. But evolving a consciously anti-racist study of earth and ancestor reverence is helping me grow adventitious roots and reestablish connections with vastly older, healthier traceries. So far, so good.
Personally I am always dancing between the romantic notions of the past, with woodlands filled with creatures and customs of folklore, and romantic notions of a cyberpunk future, with neon-lit megacities filled with augmented neuromancers. Do you have a favorite place or era of fantasy or reality, or do you constantly mix all of them?
Mer: There’s a strong leitmotif dancing between these interview questions! For me, the answer is reliably gonna be to mix things up: faeries n drones, witches n glitches, punches n kisses.
Is your spirituality limited to altering states of consciousness or different perspectives, psychology explainable by terms of modern science, or are you very open to other planes of existence not currently explained or measurable by modern human tests?
Mer: I spend a lot of quality time with water and fire, beasts and stars, yummy rocks and plants and trees.
Laura: I'm an atheist but LSD is fun.
Margaret: I fully believe that reality can be understood as an ice floe over a sea of chaos, and that each of us by our actions choose which parts of that ice floe grow thicker or weaker, that we all collectively define what constitutes reality. The most adventurous sorts might find themselves diving into that sea of possibility, that sea of chaos, and getting lost, learning nothing, or learning the most wild and powerful things. Drugs are one way to do that, but the least interesting to me personally.
What do you think are the main forces or events which influenced you to become the liberal-minded persons you are today? Were you always socially aware, since a kid, or is this something that grew during the years? What would you say are the events in your life when you have really decided to rise up to the barricades more than before?
Margaret: I was a teenage edgelord, to be honest. I’m glad it was long enough ago that there aren’t traces of my teenage self on the internet. I didn’t know shit. When I was 16, I took an online quiz that told me I was a libertarian, so I tried being a libertarian (in the capitalist American sense of the word). My communist Finnish girlfriend told me that corporations would just run everything. I realized she was right, but I didn’t want to be a communist because frankly at the end of the day I don’t like when people tell me what to do. So I became a sort of bored social democrat. The Finnish system, there’s my teenage obsession again, seemed better than the US system, but it wasn’t exciting at all. Then I met anarchists. Their position was simple, reasonable, and exciting. It was over for me. That was about 20 years ago, and I haven’t looked back.
Mer: Being born LOL! Seriously, tho. Turns out losing your biological mother at birth, as a mammal, is gnarly. It does brutal shit to infants, developmentally. There’s this isolated chunk of my brain that’s been nearly permanently “on” and scanning the room for danger for as long as I can remember. It’s like I’m hard-wired to prioritize everyone else’s needs and wants ahead of my own baseline safety in order to earn the right to exist. If I’m not looking after myself, major codependent malfunction can kick in quick. Twelve-step chums regularly advise “Stop taking other people’s inventory!” “Put your own oxygen mask on first!” Etc. But how could a hypervigilant awareness of other people’s emotions not inform my politics? All of my most radical beliefs are rooted in my cuddliest, squishiest bits. I say “my heart to you heart” a lot and I mean it.
Being clearly literate and cultural people, have you educated yourself much during your lifetime? While we could give countless examples of the failings of the U.S. education system (and the western systems in general for that matter), what are your views when it comes to public schooling versus homeschooling?
Mer: Each of us is a compulsive autodidact in her own way. Not sure I have a concise post-Covid answer to the latter questions. This country’s K-12 educational system has been in crisis for decades, but what US public service hasn’t? All that home-schooled Quiverfull / Prairie Muffin shit is disturbing as hell, too.
Margaret: Yeah, I’m a compulsive autodidact for sure. I think school is great for some people, maybe even most people. It’s not how I learn. I mostly ditched class to work in the dark room and on the school’s publications, and I’m glad for that. Even more happy that I dropped out of college. I don’t take instruction well, I really have to learn by doing. But that said, I think socialization is important and I’m grateful that I wasn’t separated out from society by homeschooling. I believe in schools I just think they should be fundamentally different from what they are.
From John Milton to Anatole France, from Mikhail Bakunin to Noam Chomsky there have been great minds describing anarchist mentalities we can always recommend to people, yet our thoughts on many issues tend to mature and chance. If you had to choose for example three books to give to a teenager you, what would they be?
Mer: A whole bunch of my younger selves keep actively in touch with “Now Mer” like a series of nesting dolls or a network of redwoods. They love We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba, City Light’s most recent edition of Diane Di Prima’s collected Revolutionary Letters, and Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe. They’re following up a bunch of Maya Angelou autobiographies with every last bit o’ James Baldwin I can find for them. And we keep returning to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. (Whoops, that’s more like six! Sorry. Bad at integrated linear time and I suck at math.)
Margaret: Stone Butch Blues helped me figure out my sexuality more than anything else. Then, I don’t know, I wish I could have stolen my own copy of The Communist Manifesto away and replaced it with something more valuable. Homage to Catalonia maybe. And then the person who did give me Huxley’s Island did me a solid. I actually think I read better in high school than I do now. Grapes of Wrath, that one was important to me.
Actions like protests often split opinions about their efficiency, like in the case of Extinction Rebellion here in Finland, with a lot of people sympathetic to the message yet not accepting people parking themselves in the middle of the busy street. What are your favorite weapons of choice when it comes to protesting or reaching people in general in order to educate them? Where do you draw the line with positive activism, so that the message or method does not turn into the beast you set out to fight in the first place?
Mer: It’s always a good time for artists to be waging asymmetrical warfare against fascist death cults! Individually, collectively. I don’t have much time for figureheads or flag-waving, tho. Especially when it’s a bunch of goofy straight dudes manufacturing the imagery and dominating the conversation. Symbols should work for us and with us. At this point I place my trust in the non-hierarchical, non-punitive process of BIPOC-led abolitionist transformative justice more than any other modality.
Margaret: I like making zines to try to explain things as clearly as possible without ignoring nuance and then giving them out at demonstrations to participants and passerby.
While writing this, the popularity of Biden has been going down in polls, and the Republican Party has been recently winning important gubernatorial elections while apparently maintaining distance to Trump. Would you like to make predictions about the way the next presidential race is most likely going to be? How about the polarized nation of those United States, any hope of mutual understanding in the future?
Margaret: Shit’s gonna get worse. That’s what I think.
Mer: Yep. Agreed. We’re in the jackpot. This is Shit Mountain and we’re only at base camp.
Margaret: As we finish working on this interview, Russia is in the early stages of invading Ukraine. We wrote up this statement and stand behind it: “Feminazgûl stands with the people of Ukraine who are fighting against the invasion from the Russian military and with the Russian people who are fighting against their own government to stop it from its imperialist aims. We are opposed to imperialism wherever it is found. We are opposed to the imperialism of the US government, the Russian government, or any other.”
I don’t know if we’re going to have a civil war or not--we came close in the past year, but the immediate threat has passed. But the US is deeply, and possibly irrecoverably, divided. The right and the left literally are not experiencing the same reality anymore, so there isn’t much common ground available. It’s possible that divide will be slowly dismantled, but I doubt it. There’s no money in reconciliation, or returning to something like a consensus reality. The money is in riling people up. I don’t know who will win the next presidential race. Maybe Trump, maybe some other Republican. If their voter disenfranchise plans go through, it’ll be some Republican or another I bet. The problem is the two party system in the US is just a ratcheting system. The Republicans make things more right wing, then the Democrats come in and keep things from getting more right wing but do literally nothing to reverse the damage. Which is NOT exciting. And these are exciting times. People want exciting politicians. Trump is exciting. Biden is a bag of sand with a face drawn on it with marker.
What do you think of the various left-wing channels of the YouTube-generation, are they useful or just another form of the corporate media mentality they usually complain about? Do you find the tribalism rampant in the media outlets as something useful or just the opposite?
Mer: Beyond cat videos and vintage memes, I don’t mess with YouTube all that much. I will say, I think the queer kids are alright. I’m such a proud auntie. So many of these zoomer activists have been freediving through cyberspace since they were tiny. They’re building complex post-geographic concepts together in real time and basically digitally astral-projecting while they do it! It’s wild! I’m rooting really hard for them.
I want to thank you very much for this lengthy interview! What are your plans for the future of Feminazgûl as a band, other than what is already mentioned here? And where do your personal lives seem to go in the year of 2022?
Mer: There’s a lot in the works in a lot of ways for us right now, both individually, and as a band. Pardon our dust in the meantime. My resolution for each coming year is always the same, these days: Stay brave, stay curious, stay in the love. Love above all, rising like steam.