There are many ways to make merry on May Day, big and smaller.

A dear friend in Greece, already ahead of us here in North America in getting a jump on our anarchist holiday, texted me to say that the top news story is about all the things/places/people that are on strike for May Day and that the minister of health was pelted with yogurt while eating at a restaurant.

Another dear friend, @eff_charm, shares in the May Day spirit in what might be seen as a less grand gesture then workers refusing to work or pranksters spoiling a government official’s meal, yet it’s equally delightful and meaningful. He creates a special May Day book, prints many hundreds, and freely gifts them out.

It feels huge to hold his little 2023 book in one’s hands, with his design and layout inseparable from the words of Saidiya Hartman, as if the two are in riotous conversation. Powerful, poignant, poetic words seem to leap off the pages, grabbing you by the hand. These “Notes for the Riot”—maybe your May Day one, or maybe for another date and time that too will be remembered as an anarchistic holiday—grasp just the right tone for May Day, on which we mourn our dead, our losses, and yet simultaneously twirl with joy, with living, celebrating those moments when the impossible is possible.

As Hartman writes, “Is the riot like the general strike a bridge between now and the free territory?”

For that’s also what May Day promises: that bridge.

So I took my copy of @eff_charm’s May Day book out onto stolen Anishinaabeg lands as the sun broke riotously free from the rain clouds and spring burst riotously free all around me in a confetti of buds tumbling from trees and a bonfire of tulips ablaze like the precinct in Minneapolis in 2020, and read the pages into my heart.

Here’s a little sampler, in these photos here, my re-gifted gift to you—all of you who, as Hartman pens, “dream a new set of arrangements. … dream the end of involuntary servitude.”

For May Day is for dreaming. And dancing. And other merrily riotous fun.

(To get a copy of the book, see @eff_charm’s IG post for details.)

#MayDay
#AnarchistHoliday
#ReadWriteRebel