Left Alone: On Solitude and Loneliness amid Collective Struggle (Daraja Press), edited by Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn and Patrick Anderson, brings together 15 authors and seven visual artists from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe and North America to individually and collectively reflect – in words and images – on an urgent psycho-political issue that has not yet been explicitly addressed through a left-political lens, that is, Left Loneliness. Combining academic and more personal-political texts, including an interview, poetry, rap and a powerful short story, the book explores the contributors’ personally and/or vicariously lived experiences of Left Loneliness.

I have a short story 2084 in the collection. The entire book can be downloaded for a small fee or a hard-copy purchased here.

Read Yusuf Serunkuma’s review You are not alone on ROAPE: 

“ROAPE contributor, Yusuf Serunkuma, reviews a new book on the loneliness of the left. Left Alone is a highly original collection of urgent stories, reflections and short essays from around the world on the lived experiences of left loneliness from a variety of genres and left political currents. Serunkuma praises a volume that capture struggles in the trenches of authoritarianism, and on the streets of the capitalist world.

By Yusuf Serunkuma

In all struggles—before mass consciousness and awakening—strugglers, fighters, resistors or peasant/organic intellectuals have tended to start and sustain the struggles either alone or with very few comrades in arms. A few comrades.  Because these moments tend to be long and winding, they come with corrosive spells of loneliness—and are often exhausting.   The toll could be either mental or material or both. With the exception of openly violent exploitation (such as 1880s colonialism or earlier slave trade), where among the victims, the openness of violence itself mobilised resistance, most anti-exploitation struggles—especially against deftly disguised, fetishized and structured modes of exploitation—have fought to mobilise mass consciousness. A few inquisitive folks are able to make sense of the hidden hand of authoritarianism and extraction, which renders them enemies of the machine.  On the other hand, living from amongst the oppressors—say in capitals in Europe and the United States—among the profiteers of colonialism, capitalism, slavery, apartheid, wars entrepreneurs, is even more lonesome, and outright dangerous. This is especially because the exploiters—as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman  told us in 1988—tend to control the ways in which their exploitative practices are received in the public domain. This is the painful fate of Julian Assange or former UK labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

The same is true with present-day authoritarianisms across the world. Because of the violence cultivated within the public through a fear industry that includes killings, abductions, torture and arrests, entire publics are rendered helpless and afraid.  In turn only a few bold individuals—almost considered reckless—are willing to stand up and fight.  In the course of this, they are left alone because of the risks posed by their acts of resistance (which could be both outright activism on the streets or the intellectual radical positions they hold).

Daraja Press’ recent publication, Left Alone: On Solitude and Loneliness amid Collective Strugglecovers commendable ground on this discussion of the subject of loneliness and solitude in struggles supposedly meant to be engaged in collectively…”

Read the full review here.