JAY MARTIN
75
and cliches derived and imitated from a wide variety of sources. Im–
mediately following this exchange, Patty is taught "the
SLA
salute,
which was a clenched fist thumped over and away from the heart."
Here she began to acquire the fictions that eventually were to
displace her own identity.
Each member of the
SLA
was given a special name, another
ritual meant to indicate that the old personal identity had been
obliterated. Hearst tells how this occurred in her case.
Cin also christened me with my revolutionary name in the
SLA. It came casually and caught me by surprise. He simply an–
nounced: "We got to come up with a new name for you." He
thought for not more than a moment or so and then added:
"We're going to call you Tania. She was a guerilla, a wonderful
guerilla fighter with Che Guevara in Bolivia." He handed me a
book and said, "Here, you read this and you'll see she was right
on ." The book was
Tania : The Unforgettable Guen'lla,
and I im–
mediately started to flip through the pages. I vastly preferred to
read a book by myself than to be forced into any of their more
strenuous activities.
This renaming has a vaguely mythological quality to it, as ifby tak–
ing the name of a deceased heroine, one could acquire some of her
strength or dedication. On a rriore practical level , Patty is asked
directly to read, identify with, and imitate a fiction.
By the time she was apprehended by the FBI, she had absorbed
a wholly new identity, based on imitation of radical fictions. Her
thoughts as she was brought to the FBI headquarters where the press
was waiting were purely: how should a "revolutionary" act? What
gestures should a "revolutionary" make? What radical models are
appropriate?
As the flashbulbs went ofT in my face, I remembered the press
pictures of Susan Saxe, a revolutionary who had recently been
arrested, and like her, I smiled broadly and raised a clenched fist
in salute. This is how I'm supposed to act now, I thought. Those
pictures would show me being taken off to a fascist concentration
camp, like a true revolutionary. I had a role to play and I knew
my part well .
At this time, she says, she felt "as though I were outside everything,
floating through a surrealistic Jean Cocteau film." The whole por-
