Tom Hodgkinson meets poet, author and activist Tricia Hersey, whose book on beating grind culture through napping is a manifesto for resisting systemic oppression

In 2014, Tricia Hersey was working insanely hard. In her book Rest Is Resistance, she describes a typical day. She’d be up at 5.30am in order to get her son ready for the school bus at 7.30am. (“Why are young children going to school so early?” she asks.) After a 90-minute journey she’d arrive at college, where she was studying theology. After several classes she’d get various buses for the long trip home, and open the door at midnight, exhausted. She started taking little catnaps during the day and noticed an immediate benefit.

And so the seeds of revolt against the system that was exhausting her, which had already been planted in her mind by her radical father, grew and eventually bore fruit with the Nap Ministry, launched in 2016. Put simply, the Nap Ministry is about helping people to experience the joy of napping and dreaming and doing nothing. Tricia hires a hall and stages a mass nap-in.

In 2022, she published Rest is Resistance: Free Yourself from Grind Culture and Reclaim Your Life. Overworked Americans liked it: it became a New York Times bestseller. I spoke to Tricia over Zoom at her home in Atlanta, Georgia…

Tom: This is a very radical manifesto. It strikes at the heart of the system, or whatever you want to call it – capitalism, white supremacy, the colonisers. It’s not a guide to sleeping well so that you can kick ass in the workplace the next day. Perhaps you can tell us about your dad because he’s an important figure in the development of your ideas.

Tricia: Yes he’s an important figure for me. So cool. He was a union organiser. He was a preacher. He was pastor of a church. He was also a deep activist. I would call him a Pan-Africanist. He was deeply involved in the Black Panther movement in the United States, in the seventies. He was a radical thinker. He got up every morning to read every newspaper before he went to work. I would ask him, why are you up so early? He said he wanted to get up and be human, you know, he wanted to reclaim his time to sit and read and pray. He had a beautiful library. When he transitioned and died, I was able to get all of his theology books. He taught me from a very young age what I would be up against as a black young woman in America. He told me it was all a lie. I remember him taking me aside and just being like, you’re going to be hated in this culture because of who you are, what you look like. You are a divine human. It’s all false. When I went to study theology, in a lot of ways I was trying to connect with him. I never thought I would study theology. I’m a poet and writer. And then I just felt a calling on my life to go. I didn’t know what I would do with it. I didn’t want to work in churches. I knew I was an activist organiser. I just wanted to ground my work in some way. And so fire and brimstone preaching! I mean, I watched him preach. He was in charge of the choir as well. He was a singing preacher.

Tom: He was obviously a deeply enlightened, brilliant person. But you also say in the book that he overworked. He worked too hard and died quite young.

Tricia: My father overworked because he was trying to provide something solid and stable for our family. I also think he wasn’t able to say “no”, or have boundaries. It sent his body into a quick deterioration. He was always being called in the middle of the night, going to pray for someone at a hospital. He worked with Union Pacific Railroad, which is a major railroad here in the United States, for 35 years, every day, cleaning cars, moving his way up to manager and always doing. The culture teaches us that our worth is connected to how much we can produce. Our productivity sits at the heart of how we feel about ourselves. At the same time, he was telling me, “You’re a divine, you’re a human.” He was caught up as a black man in a culture trying to push against the system, and also trying to make a living, to bring himself out of poverty. I’m the first in my entire family to go to college. They were just working class people working in the factories and steel mills of Chicago, blue collar to the bone.

Tom: In the UK, immigrant families will tell their children: you have to work ten times harder than everybody else. But at the same time, you, Tricia, want to resist the Puritan work ethic. It’s particularly ferocious in America. Americans kind of invented the work ethic, didn’t they? It was the pre-Americans with the international slave trade. It was a systematic way of exhausting people for profit. And slavery was abolished, but the work ethic is still there.

Tricia: Capitalism is a system that was created on plantations. It was created on the backs of enslaved Africans and also on indigenous people. So my work really started with a historic examination. My body was so weary. I was so tired. I was literally – spiritually and physically – killing myself. I was studying the transatlantic slave trade and then chattel slavery here in the South, in the United States. And so all of those things came together as a brilliant cocktail of ideas – the system really does not see bodies, specifically black bodies, or poor bodies, as humans. And so I think I knew immediately that this would be a global movement, even though it comes from black liberation. The system wants all of us working 24 hours a day. The more you can produce for us and make us wealthy… just keep going. When you look at corporations and the idea of the workday and how much people get paid… the entire system is running off the idea that bodies are not divine. They’re just here as a tool for production. Profit over people – that’s the central idea of capitalism.

This is an extract from a longer article which appears in the new edition of the Idler, No 96 May/June 2024 – out now.

Our May/June 2024 issue is available in Waitrose, Waterstones, Smiths Travel outlets, select Smiths high street branches and around 100 indie stores. Click here for your nearest stockist.