Who is Weaker Than a Child?

by Joe Auciello / May 2009

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, When Skateboards Will Be Free, (The Dial Press, New York , 2009), 287 pp., $22.

"Life strikes the weak—and who is weaker than a child?" Leon Trotsky, "My Life."

The subtitle of this book, "a memoir of a political childhood," is at least partially right since the author’s parents were members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The real issue in the book, though, is the absence of a father and the conflicting emotions that flow from that loss: "My father abandoned me when I was nine months old, and with only a few exceptions I did not see or hear from him for eighteen years."

The son’s natural feelings of disappointment and anger were stymied by the mother’s account of the father as "not just a man who had abandoned me but a noble man of adventure who had no choice but to abandon me…"

The memoir, then, is the author’s largely unsuccessful effort to reconcile his conflicting emotions of anger and admiration with a father who is largely indifferent and almost always elusive. Saïd would have it that these family dynamics resulted from his parents’ political activities, but that belief is only partly true. Political activism does not necessarily equate with bad parenting. Most SWP parents have been distinctly present in the lives of their children.

While faulting the SWP, Saïd ignores the fact that in class society some parents neglect their children’s lives because these parents place the demands of career first. An executive job that consumes 60 or 70 hours a week may pay for the nanny, but that kind of career leaves little time for knowing one’s children, much less raising them well.

There is another way in which this book falls short as a political memoir. Saïd never joined the SWP, and his contact with it lasted only until his mid-teens. Thus, with only a superficial understanding of the SWP and its policies, Saïd is an unreliable guide. Imagine a child whose father was an executive in a Fortune 500 company and who, before abandoning his family in some midlife crisis, brought his son to the annual picnics. The resulting memoir could, with equal inaccuracy, be subtitled, "Memoirs from a Corporate Childhood."

Yet, Saïd’s criticisms contain a grain of truth. The SWP did not officially prohibit members from having children, but some leaders misinterpreted the ideal of the “worker-Bolshevik,” seeing it as describing someone always ready and willing for any political assignment anywhere—which would leave little room for raising a child well. This sensibility became more pronounced the more the SWP abandoned its programmatic heritage and devolved into the cult-like group it is today.

The most startling and sensational part of the book is Saïd’s brief description of sexual molestation, at age four, by an unnamed SWP member. In Saïd’s account, his mother reported the incident, apparently to local party leaders who, with callous, even criminal indifference, merely shrugged it off. Saïd claims, with no evidence, that his father would have concurred with that judgment.

There is no basis to doubt the author’s recollection, but anyone familiar with SWP internal practices would realize that an accusation like this would normally have resulted in an immediate investigation. Anyone found abusing a child would, at the very least, have been expelled.

Throughout the memoir, Saïd implies that his personal misfortunes, including this horrific one, were typical. A greater knowledge of the socialist movement and SWP policies would say otherwise.

At one point Saïd admits his lack of political understanding. On a date with the woman who would eventually become his wife, Saïd attempted to explain the meaning of communism. "Eventually I stopped trying to answer, and muttered to myself, ‘I guess I don’t know what I’m talking about.’ And she had responded, more surprised than accusatory: ‘Yes, it sounds like you don’t."

A little more knowledge of SWP tradition would have helped mother and son. The book’s main title comes from the mother’s explanation for refusing to buy young Saïd the skateboard he coveted. Apparently, his mother felt that deprivation was a revolutionary virtue obligatory for SWP members and their children.

It is instructive to recall the example of James P. Cannon, a founder and principal leader of the SWP in its early decades. Writing from prison in 1944, where he was serving a 17-month sentence for revolutionary opposition to the Second World War, Cannon frequently discussed the well-being of his family, especially his granddaughter. "Mickey is to have a sled and skates," Cannon wrote. "The lack of skates was a wound that never healed. …

That is why the determination to see to it that little Mick gets a sled and skates is not the least important of the ‘projects’ I have laid out for myself" (Letters from Prison, pp. 290-291). Like most adults, socialist or not, Cannon wanted his children and grandchildren to enjoy a better life than he experienced as a child.

Cannon realized what some SWP leaders and party members of a later generation did not: Life requires bread and roses. That is, political activity will be at the center of a party member’s life, but it will not be the sum of a life. Those who are committed to transforming the world must still find a way to live in it with happiness, even joy. There will be relationships, families, and, perhaps, children. There will be personal interests pursued for their own sake. In the long run, healthy, well-rounded human beings make the best revolutionists because they can sustain the long run.

Saïd comprehends nothing of these points. He is a talented writer; that is, he arranges words skillfully into vignettes that reveal his emotional wounds. He is not, though, a particularly insightful or profound writer, able to reflect well on the significance of his personal experiences.

Saïd’s early years were more difficult than was necessary. His parents were socialists, and so he blames socialism for his troubles. This is too simple. Saïd excels in writing from the perspective of a child; his weakness is that, at 40, he still thinks like one.