Without Work, There are No Koláče

By Anna Blaedel

On my mama’s refrigerator is a small magnetized plate that reads: “Bez práce nejsou koláče.”

Translated from the original Czech into English it reads: “Without work, there are no koláče.” (Koláče, the sweet, yeast-based Czech and Slovak pastry known for its soft dough and delicious fillings; poppyseed and plum are particularly beloved in my family lineage.) My mom learned the proverb at a Czech festival we took my grandma to decades ago; she learned the practice of the proverb from her mom and grandma, ancestral wisdom passed down and circulated. Without work, there are no koláče.

We are surviving – we who are surviving – an epoch of unmeasurable destruction, and ineffable loss. Escalating forces of intensifying cruelty. Terror, inflicted. Fascism, unfolding. Plotlines of displacement, abandonment, annihilation, extermination, extinction – waged against whole peoples, whole places, whole value systems, the whole earth, our holy, only home. Undeniable, even as the denials come fast and furious. It is a strange time to talk of, to write about, koláče.

And yet, within the death-cult of fascism, the questions remain: What are we living for? What are we working for? How, and why? What will we do, poet Mary Oliver asks, with and in this “one wild and precious life”?

Gazan poet Fatena Abu Mostafa writes, in a poem titled, “Don’t Call Us Heroes:”

We are not made of steel.
We are not built for war.
We are human–
fragile, soft,
made for laughter,
not for sirens.
We hunger.
We thirst.
We love.
We dream
of travel,
of study, of a life
not written in rubble.

It is a potent time. A time of rupture and breaking; a time of portals and possibilities. “Do nothing,” Mostafa continues, “if nothing is all you can do.” But, she cautions, “We are not unbreakable.” We are made for laughter, for love, for softness, for savoring and sharing sweetness.

What, and who, will we protect? Who will we be, with and for each other? The tense of these questions is caught, fraught – urgently pressing into the present. What, and who, are we protecting? Who are we, with and for each other?

While imprisoned in San Quentin, George Jackson wrote, dreamed, and organized. Mere days before he was murdered by prison guards, he managed to smuggle out a copy of his manuscript, Blood in My Eye. He wrote, like Fatena Abu Mostafa, of living when life is written in rubble.

How does it feel, when we insist on another way? When we refuse to build or bankroll bombs? When we boycott and divest? When we heal and transform? When we dare to imagine, as Ashon Crawley teaches, “otherwise possibilities?” Otherwise remains impossible – an empty promise – until we practice it into promises we make to and keep with each other. Bez práce nejsou koláče.

“Settle your quarrels,” Jackson wrote. “Come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.” I hear in his Black radical dreaming the refrain written a few years later by the queer Black feminist Combahee River Collective: “we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.” Bez práce nejsou koláče.

Let me be clear: there are vital critiques of work, and necessary condemnations of productivity. Enslavement’s violent theft of bodies and labor. Colonialism’s violent capture of land and culture and resources. Capitalism’s violent hierarchies of value, and insatiable greed. Life made unlivable through forced, exploitative labor, while profit accumulates obscenely in the hands of a very elite few, leaving more and more of us without access to what we need. Blessed be the Black feminist and disability justice wisdom dreaming otherwise possibilities – the sacredness of rest; the revolutionary refusal to work with and on behalf of that which is killing us, or keeping us from freedom and flourishing.

May we refuse exploitation, and unnecessary production. May we resist the seductions of individualistic success. May we unlearn all that conflates accumulation with value, and separation with safety. And. Too. May we claim our inherent creative capacities, our holy offerings that can be made only through practice. Harbor, sanctuary, protection, survival, solidarity, care, accountability, belonging, healing – hard work. And. There can be such sweetness in working, together. Coming together, dreaming together, moving together, laboring together. Bez práce nejsou koláče. May it be so.