Songs My Mother Taught Me

Why the Artist Must Take Sides

Saul Williams

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9798888905852
• eBook ISBN:
  9798888907801
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Literature

Award-winning poet and performer Saul Williams explores how artists today must respond to systemic violence and injustice—in the words of Paul Robeson, by choosing sides.

Songs My Mother Taught Me is Williams' clear-eyed exploration of the role of the artist in these times by answering the question: what radicalized you? He answers by examining how his role models—writers and artists, from Amiri Baraka to local musicians in Brazilian bars to Palestinian hip-hop heads—have responded to imperialist violence, oppression, and genocide. Riffing on Paul Robeson's famous declaration, Williams builds a provocative case for why today's artists cannot remain neutral in the face of injustice. "We need songs that crumble empires," he writes, "films that teach, remind, and inspire, poems that would make a despot revoke your citizenship."

The radical artists of the Vanguard Series offer new poetry and prose to answer the question, What does poetry have to do with politics?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Call to Arms
• Introduction
• 1. In Terms of Culture, Shit, We Were Rich
• 2. The Artist Must Take Sides
• 3. Freedom Ain’t Free
• 4. Violently Antifascist
• 5. Race and Class Revelation to the Beat of the Drum
• 6. Zombification: Losing the Propaganda War
• 7. Where Poetry Led Me to Protest
• 8. The Pledge to Resist and the End of Empire
• 9. Boosting the Call
• Notes
• Back Cover