another bag search at the airport security. i only have carry on luggage, so i went through some trouble of figuring out the liquids, risking my magic trick of juggling two transparent bags each with the approved amount of liquid stuff. and it works again! neither is it the old patch on my sweat shirt, empire will be destroyed, which maggie gave a doubtful look when she dropped me off at the airport. it’s… a potato. the single potato wrapped in cellophane that i got at the New Market supermarket, well hidden in my bag, provoked their suspicion. for once i couldn’t agree more with the homeland security people, this potato is a most dangerous and explosive object.
Category: tennessee
country music
we get into Nashville later than planned, and there’s not enough time for me to join maggie to the FCC hearing on the music industry and media. maggie had been telling me about her observations on country music in the last couple of weeks (see http://deriva.wordpress.com/2006/11/14/country-music/), and while we were on the road, the effort of searching for yet another radio station that plays music that we like kind of underscored the point.
and there’s not enough time for me to check out country music tout court by the time we get into Nashville, but one can’t really leave the place without getting some, so we make a brief visit to the Ernest Tubb Record Shop. wandering through an amazing collection of country music, i suddendly pay attention to the lyrics of the song playing. i’m for the Bible and i’m for the flag and i’m for the working man… i’m one of many who can’t get respect – politically uncorrect. hm, just the right place to buy the Dixie Chicks.
[more on the hearing, http://www.stopbigmedia.com/=nashville and chez maggie http://deriva.wordpress.com/2006/12/13/country-music-part-ii/]
[i checked out the politically uncorrect song, it’s by the popular Gretchen Wilson, currently on her Redneck Revolution tour, with a song on her latest album “ain’t you glad we’re not all california girls”.]
back to nashville
knowledge
without action there is no knowledge
goodbye to the Highlander –
an encounter that left me impressed
et avec envie d’y retourner
we shall overcome
waking up with the view.
today we meet guy and candie carawan, whose lives have been intertwinned with the Highlander since the early 1960s. after many years of an itinerant existance, also following the Highlander’s move to New Market, they built a house on the farm land, a cosy log cabin filled with music and folk instruments, and now they gently age in the shade of the Highlander that they helped to shape, and that shaped their lives in turn. candie made warm cider for all of us, guy shows us the books they made – collections of images, stories and most of all music from Appalachia and the South – and then he also dozes off in his rocking chair. guy’s name is connected to the song We shall Overcome, as he helped to spread it throughout the civil rights era, and today he is still part of a foundation that gets the royalties of the song and grants it to social justice projects. (interesting, the fact that they thought of copyrighting it, before anyone else did, with a vision to get the money back to the movement.)
they are folk musicians, artists, cultural workers, activists who organize and build movement through music. it feels wrong to begin talking about what they do in terms of a connection between art and politics; how they bring things together feels too organic. the taken for grantedness with which music is part of the fabric of the struggle against oppression and for social justice, or perhaps it’s the other way around. but it does invoke the disconnection between these things back home.
when i think of europe, especially when i think of flanders – the way in which folk music remains associated with the right, with nationalism. my thoughts wander back to the music project in slovenia that i was part of, many years ago, during the war. we wanted to work through – with instruments and our voices – the mobilization of folk music for war and nationalism. half of us from former yugoslavia, half from other european countries. seriously heated discussions about different approaches: in search for authentic versions, as a defense against political manipulation, or creating versions that say something about our politics. or as i insisted, working with the recognition that also “authetic” folk music grew out of concerns and struggles in people’s lives, and continuing a living tradition of creating musical expression of what people struggle with. (our CD became a testimony to the fact that the first tendency was more popular…) candie tells us that guy’s teacher of folk music was a staunch defender of authenticity, and it seemed that guy recognized the value of that, but in their involvement with the civil rights movement people’s songs of freedom became central to their lives.
my thoughts also go to the analogy with religion: how religion tends to be disconnect from the left and progressive movements back home. then candie talks of a group of Catholic sisters in the mountains who radicalized in the struggle of the rural community in which they were living.
before we leave them, they give us a video about the Highlander to watch – You’ve got to move it.
highlander
we got very lucky this time. it’s around noon when we arrive at the Highlander Research and Education Center – a place that people whom maggie encountered in her journey through Appalachia had spoken highly of. by the time we drove into New Market, just north of Knoxville, yesterday, it was dark, and our attempt to find the Highlander made us go in circles. we also knew that, even if we would have found it, chances to find the center open on a Friday night were slim.
we reach the center at noon today and are impressed by the immense beauty of the landscape. the office does look closed. but wait, there’s one other car and when we knock on the door Tufara shows up. she wasn’t supposed to be there, she insists, but you know how it goes with these kinds of social justice jobs… Tufara is just a wonderful delightful presence who tells us tales about the Highlander and the world. she’s a coordinator for the art and youth programs, and emphasizes how important it is that all the projects have an culture and youth dimension. and she tells us about the African caravan from South Africa to Nairobi, for the World Social Forum, that she’s part of.
trying to understand how the Highlander is connected to its environment, i like how she distinguishes neighbors and community. it comes as no surprise that the relationship with many of the immediate neighbors, after all these years, is full of tensions and hostility. we had a brief taste of the disconnection when we stopped at a bar on the road to ask directions. the woman behind the counter wasn’t sure, and a guy hanging around looked at us with suspicion when we told him what we were looking for. “The private club?” he asked, which made us want to make sure that we’re talking about the same place. an opportunity to poke a bit into his vision of the place – “so what do they do there?” a vile laugh and evasive respons, “well, you’ll just have to use your imagination about the things that go on there.” and Tufara tells us about the time she a dental emergency which forced her to go to the local dentist. while he was putting all the instruments in her mouth, he asked where she was from. (apparently a black woman could not be from ‘here’.) Alabama. “Good, i’m gonna fix you up so you can go back there.”
a widespread and well rooted racism that is so much part of the landscape here. on a number of occasions while driving through this landschape, and usually just after a sensation of beauty, the thought came to me that this is the land where the KuKluxKlan emerged. when looking through indymedia Tennessee before coming, i read reports of an intensification of racist actions in the region, this time specifically against new latino migrants – from actions to ban spanish (and spanish books from the library) to putting a burning cross in the yard of the home of a latino family.
yet then Tufara speaks of the Highlander’s community – some folks in the neighborhood (and with great enthousiasm she’s the godmother of a local girl), many goups in Knoxville and around (too many to start naming them, she says), groups in Tennessee, in the South, in the rest of the country. all kinds of organizations for social justice, poor people’s struggles. the current focus is bringing together white poor folks of Appalachia, black folks from the south and new latino immigrant communities in these regions.
the Highlander is all but an island, it is a node in a dense network of social justice groups. it functions as a place where people and groups gather and work together – they connect, strategize collectively, build networks and campaigns. it is a place of resources and peace to work, but it is clear that whatever takes place here, is meant to be taken (back) to other places.
Tufara also gets other people to come and meet us. Amber, an intern, and Pam, the director. a cup of coffee in the kitchen of the office. i’m impressed by the humanity that speaks through Tufara. when she talks about checking the stories she wants to tell about social justice with her grandma, to know if they are comprehensible. or about bringing together the older folk music people and the young hip-hop kids in a way that they understand why it is important to listen to each other. and when she talks about new orleans – about how the discourses about the opportunity for new ways of organizing, a discourse that i know from in the Bay Area, forgets that it’s about human lives.
Pam takes us around to show the place. the view on the Smokey Mountains is amazing. the house were most of the education takes place. the best idea of the world: the chairs set up in a circle in the big meeting room, are rocking chairs. just imagine how different a meeting must be if everyone is in a rocking chair… a dormitory pavilion with one sleeping room in particular where the beds are aligned with a hugh window opening up to the Smokies. the library pavilion full of precious resources, including a section with the original (marxist) books from when the Highlander was started in 1932. and a small house on the top of the hill, with a working and sleeping room for about 7 people. the board had decided that this spot would remain open but then one day they found that Myles Horton, who started the center, had build the house. imagine the work that one can get done here…
this weekend turns out to be one of the few without a workshop or meeting, so we don’t get to see the Highlander in action. but the gift of having this space for us…
running around in the grass, watching the colours in the sky, mountains and fog as the light fades away – from green and pink, and lots of purple. wandering through the house and reading the posters. an image of a campaign denouncing Dr. Martin Luther King’s visit to the “communist training school” that is the Highlander. Tufara also told us it had been denounced as a place with lesbians. but of course the most scandalous of all was the mixing of black and white people during the civil rights ear.
we go to New Market, to get food to cook for our hosts. while driving through this area we had already noted the presence of money. hills spread with houses and barns and meadows like in the Columbia area of two days ago, but new, big, houses inbetween. New Market is clearly developing. it shows in the supermarket. thinking what to cook, i first come up with risotto (predictable, can’t help it…). it’s unlikely they have arborio rice, maggie says. unlikely, but this super market in a small Tennessee town tells another story, about its development and globalisation of food. there is arborio rice, and an entire mediterranean food section, and a large section of fresh vegetables of all kinds. (and potatoes individually wrapped in cellophane, which i need to get for the small america bookproject…)
a late night discussion after Pam and Amber have left us. maggie describes her observation of how a consciousness of privilege among white (middle-class) kids in this country keeps them caught in guilt, and also a kind of jealously, that life is really going on elsewhere. a discussion of white privilege, once more, and important to keep on having these, perhaps especially in this country. but i notice to what extent the guilt part really irritates me (ay, not a good attitude for organizing workshops… i must find another way to respond…) – it strikes me as yet another strategy of avoidence, of self-indulgence, of nestling in the comfort of the familiar, of simply not doing one’s work.
to knoxville
the coldest night in a motel in Murfreesboro (with heating this time).
a hamburger breakfast (lunch for the workers) in just the perfect
delightful home-cooking place (maggie definately has an eye).
buildings from the 1950s that suggest not much has changed since.
on the road to Knoxville.
at some point we get off the highway
and onto a small road that takes us through a beautiful landscape:
hills spread out with barns, meadows and old wooden houses
made soft and golden by the light of a late afternoon sun.
and i swear to god that it’s not much exaggerated when i say
that every second or third building along the road was a church.
looking for public spaces in this alien social geography deprived of
a center as we know them in Europe? here they are.
alongside the gas stations and the occasional small supermarket.
(that is before we hit mall-sized towns).
the farm
we drive south to check out this place called The Farm. checking the Tennessee indymedia last weekend, i came across the announcement for an exhibit ‘The Happiest Days of My Life’: Searching for Utopia in Tennessee about the history of utopian communities in Tennessee. most of these utopias are these social experiments of the 19th century (why have most utopian experiments ultimately failed, is one of the questions of the exhibit) but also then there’s The Farm, founded in 1971 and still existing today.
i checked out their website (here) before going to Nashville and had not been very impressed: a colony of californian hippies settling in tennessee to build a new land and community. but i was curious.
as we drive south the landscape changes. gently sloping (almost) hills and the sun comes out and gives them a golden glow. the Farm is in Summertown, which turns out to be very small. a gas station and small market at a split of the road might just be the center of this town, although by now i should know better than to calibrate north american social geography in terms of a center (as i know it). these towns boil down to a fabric of small roads with houses and farms (and churches) scattered around, almost at random. the gas station or market is a place where one can actually meet another person and ask the way.
without words the woman behind the counter reaches out for a small piece of paper with a drawing of how one gets to The Farm. i would like to know what’s on her mind; i strike a naive conversation about how we’re not from here, and don’t really know what the Farm is about. a man in the shop (they clearly know each other) hears us talking and comes out eager to join a conversation. when he figures out it’s about the Farm, he goes silent. for a moment the woman starts looking for words, then her hand waves her thoughts away. the man looks at me and says: “Just go there and you’ll see.”
we get lucky. the website asks people to announce their visit beforehand, but door of the office at the gate opens when we knock and Penny has some time for us. she tells us the story of how the charismatic leader/teacher Stephen Gaskin with a couple of hundreds of people around him left California (San Francisco) in 1971 and came to Tennessee to find a piece of land where they could create a commune. this was, and still is, a poor region, and it was possibile to get land relatively cheap. Penny gives us a panorama of the fruits of The Farm’s labor – while the produce of the actual farming activities mainly flow back into the community itself (with the exception of their Soy bean business), the Farm consists of a number of businesses, cooperatives, assocations. a company that produces radiation detection devices, which kind of surprises us, but apparently there were issues with radioactive waste in the region and no doubt the Cold War climate at the time played a role. a publishing collective. the school. a development aid organization (Plenty) that on first sight shares the problematic charity approach of many organizations in that sector. a peace organization that also doesn’t seem very promising. an ecovillage, which does look more interesting. a summercamp program to get urban and poor kids to the country side.
what interests us most in her story is the great change of 1981. the community was much larger at the time, with more than 1000 people living on the Farm, and was in permanent debt. then one of the community members got into an accident and needed serious medical care, and there was no escaping the fact that they could not pay the bills. the community decided, not without many discussions, fall-outs and bitterness on the part of some who left, that the Farm should be de-collectivized. the Farm had been set up in a collective way – property was collective and income generated by members would be collectively managed. after the 1981 transformation some parts of the infrastructure remain collectives, but people would own the houses they live in. if people want to come or stay on the Farm, they need to prove that they are self-sufficient, able to make their own living and contribute to costs of the collective infrastructure.
another thing that caught my interest is the importance of widwivery at the Farm. women come to give birth at the Farm, and the Farm midwives deliver babies in the region. midwivery on the Farm was initiated by Ina May Gaskin and is said to have contributed to the home-birth movement in the USA. but i’m interested in how the Farm’s midwivery effectively covers a part of health care in the region (with better success rates than birthing in hospitals) and what kinds of interactions and bonds that might establish between the Farm and its surroundings. penny tells us how the midwives notably provide reproductive health care for an Amish community close by.
the tiny “museum”, which includes a display of hippie clothes, is cute. before i leave the office i see a map on the wall with the territory of the Farm, entitled The Motherland. the land is beautiful and the ecovillage looks interesting. our visit ends in The Farm’s purple shop (where my eye falls on Ecover, straight from the Antwerpen region, imagine), which is all nice and cosy but we’re not tempted to (try to) stay overnight for what is announced as the coldest night.
in honesty it looks better then what i had imagined when looking at the website (yep, i got all worked up about Californian hippies behind my computer screen…). but it also becomes clearer why projects such as these make me uncomfortable. something about a project of a new settlement, creating a new society, rabula rasa, pioneers all over again – in a country where these gestures have such a violent history. i would so much long for some critical engagement with the meaning of that gesture…
when we drive away we soon hit an obscene overdosis of stripmalls and car dealers in Columbia – kind of surreal in this small place. (i eat a big rare steak in one of these meat places with buckets of peanuts on the table and where everybody throws peanut shells on the ground.) the contrast with the Farm is sharp, yet it’s also the contrast that tells me that i’m not so sure that i like the Farm better. it strikes me that somehow these two keep each other smoothly in balance: a small alternative community focused on itself (and here the Farm doesn’t look all that different from the Amish) and the big bad capitalist world outside. with respect, but i can’t help feeling this is not a time and place for this kind of retreat.
(view on the Farm at the entrance)
(at the Ecovillage)
capital of country music
maggie got us a room at the Drake Motel, with an office decorated with country music icons. this morning she woke up singing: Tennessee, Tennessee, there ain’t no place i’d rather be.
it is so cold in this southern state – thank god for the bottle of whiskey maggie brought me. much to discover in nashville but we decide to hit the road, and come back to the capital of country music in some days time. the guys in the cowboy gear store already told us about a music place where the ladies get in free on friday nights, and we’re curious about the cowboy church. driving out the city, passing the Grand Ole Opry (a number of times…), with the wind rushing something that looks like dry snow into dancing formations on the road in front us.
going to nashville
chirps, cries and laughter wake me up in the morning. sweet housemates all happy with what they discover in their shoe. with marÃa and me living in this house we just knew that Sinterklaas would not forget to come by, despite the distance which must wear the old man out. it did take some convincing to get our housemates to put out their shoe (“you mean, a real shoe, one i actually wear?” yes, this is from way before stylized Santa stockings). i just have time enough (in between packing and finishing up yet another article…) to pour my Sinterklaas goodies in a bag, put my foot in that shoe and run out to the Santa Cruz Metro station.
a long day of travelling. once more i get blessed with a clear sky and see the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains. i even get to see the Mississippi this time, shining in the dark. an overlay in Denver and i find myself, yet again, investigating how cities and regions get branded in these transitory spaces (so what is one supposed to bring home from this place…). Denver airport is quite an impressive one among its species, i had already noticed. on the flight to Denver i shared the row with an engineer who was (vaguely…) involved in its construction and who remained filled with admiration for the project (i learned that the building is supposed to be storm and tornado proof).
walking through corridors of gates my eyes fall on a guy leaning on his guitar. i look at the gate number and sure enough, this is my flight. i’m going to Nashville. to meet maggie.
