violence – somebody else's paradise

academic tourism

(a Boston view from Cambrigde)

so after a brief early morning session of conference, we escape. this first escapade takes place under the standard of what this place is famous for – education. perhaps appropriately we start from the motherchurch of the Church of Christ, Scientist, established by Mary Baker Eddy sometime in the second half of the 1800s, where the Christian Science Monitor is house, just besides our hotel. the way the impressive space is set up, it really seems that people walk on water…

we walk Massachusetts Avenue over the river, to Cambridge, and find ourselves in M.I.T. territory. before Massachusetts Avenue brings us all to Harvard, there’s glimpse of a terroritoy of warehouses that seem to lead to a different world than the overwhelmingly elist academic spaces. Harvard gets us a bit recalcitrant, this is where nadia does her Allahu Akbar video shot (and see, we keep on thinking Samuel Huntington… of course he’s able to come up with his wonderwarland fairy tale theories in this environment… where would he be now… if we dropped in his office and said, hey samuel, now listen to us…). David had insisted i should go to the Widener Library, but when we’re standing in front of it rickard tells us a story he just heard about a student who was asked to show his student card at the library entrance, and before he knew it he was shot down. (later we realize it was the story of the student who got tasered in the UCLA library that got modified along the way… watch the video here if you want to see images of the Patriot Act in action. disturbing in many ways, including the tone of the officer’s voice when he says “stop fighting us”) doesn’t encourage us to go in. (ay, thinking bad of Harvard, after we already got a bit worked up about the “M.I.T Police” and “Harvard Police” cars, when the violation took place at a University of California campus…).

we end up warming ourselves up in a Starbucks near Harvard Square.
hm, so what do we think about this place…

south west

since the flight to Poland earlier this year, i’ve made a habit of the study of the company magazine on board. the advertisements and articles draw the contours of a region which SouthWest seems to target, and identify with – California, Nevada (and lots of Las Vegas ads…), Arizona, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida. this month’s issue includes a special feature on New Orleans, more than 30 pages, all geared towards getting tourists back as part of the reconstruction – the part of reconstruction that the authorities focus on: making the French Quarter ready for tourism. from an interview with hotel manager in the French Quarter, in the article ReNew Orleans: “It is OK to come to New Orleans. That’s the message I’d want to leave you with, that I’d want everyone to get. The city that you’ve always loved is still here. So if you don’t know how to help, coming here is really helpful. Come to New Orleans and have a great time. It’s OK. We want you here.”

cramped in my row with two fellow passengers from California flying east. a young guy who works at Google. with his yellow Google t-shirt and his enthousiasm, he’s a natural ambassador for the company. “What is it that attracts you,” asks our fellow traveller, who shares my google criticism (mind you, i use it all the time…) but is genuinely interested in the attraction of things. “I’ve never been in an environment with such a bunch of intelligent and creative people. I feel I’m being stimulated to think, to be creative, all of the time.” i think i get it, yes, this is how Silicon Valley works, this is the creative and dynamic side of capitalism that the Communist Manifesto invokes so magnificantly. the other travel companion turns out to be professor in Monterey. she’s a theologian, working on the intersection of women, religion and violence. (i had already spotted her taking notes for a lecture on globalization, WTO and popular protests.) we talk and talk. she did fieldwork in asia and focused on buddhism, looking into liberation movements that at some point or another use violent means. the contradictions of what she calls “militant pacifism”…

women’s day

antwerpen, the (flemish) women’s day. a heart-warming way to make a very brief visit to vlaanderen, surrounded by a bunch of familiar faces, political companeras and friends. some friends said i look really different these days, some insisted it was the californian influence that made me look mexican… (okay, maybe the rose in my hair played a role in this; and of course women in mexico all wear roses in their hair. i had thought there might have been an opportunity to sing bread and roses during the day, but then i realized i didn’t know all the lyrics…)

and we had quite some work to do – our gebroken wit workshop which developed out of things we learned from the challenging white supremacy sessions with sharon and many other sources. haar antwerpen is screened and sold – pleasurable to feel a material product in hands that now is starting to spread and lead its own life. and i have to participate to the general debate, for nextgenderation of course. (oh god, as the facilitator was increasingly working on my nerves, and curtailing what i felt was an expression of political passion with a flat and annoying “but i thought women would do things differently, less violently”, it slipped out of my mouth: “well there has been no struggle for liberation without violence.” as nadia added afterwards: “it’s merely a sociological observation.”)

what i most enjoyed came after all the work. the beautiful meeting with rauda morcos from ASWAT, a palestinian gay women’s association based in haifa, and hanging out toghether with the Women in Black from leuven who had invited her (leuvense WiB insisting i connect with the bay area WiB; rauda insisting i connect with the bay area network of arab queer women – it seems that every time i leave europe to the US there’s a new set of facilitated contacts… and then we do the little plot to get Aswat T-shirts to friends and to Helem in Beirut). and plenty of laughter in good sweet company at the end of the day with the queer cafe and stand-up comedy, and singing our hearts out and dancing with hilde to beautiful french chansons…

(rauda morcos, photos by lieve snellings)

halloween

the noise of a helicopter policing the skies, sounds as if it keeps on making circles above our house, as if it were that damned mosquito one doesn’t manage to shake off. sirenes of police cars. halloween 2006 in Santa Cruz. because last year hell broke loose and downtown Santa Cruz was the scene of riots unseen in this small town, this year the police made sure that everybody knew last year’s gig was not to be repeated. warning adds in the local newspapers, massive law enforcement troops all around, extra lights on Pacific Avenue and a helicopter.

tonight was my cooking night, so i do a pumpkin and butter squash (from our garden still!) risotto to stay in the orange tune. we didn’t really plan on disguising, but as the trick-or-treaters come and the excitement in our kitchen grows, i all of a sudden see a black cat where marÃa stood just a second ago. after dinner, we go all together to stroll down Pacific Avenue. thousands and thousands of people. (and massive police forces.) walking up and down Pacific Avenue to show themselves, to look at others.

i had thought that i wouldn’t like it at all. downtown on an average friday or saturday night, when the streets are full of loud drunk (and puking) kids usually gets me depressed. but this is different. this is not usual santa cruz – people come from all over the valley and the hills. never seen santa cruz so brown, so latino. the air, the glances are filled with tension. the night is still young and we don’t stay long, yet we witness one arrest. i imagine how another set of riots this year might crack open the nicely cultivated weirdness of santa cruz. forget weirdness, this is real, albeit “pre-political” as the arrogant and annoying comrades would say… earlier tonight on the corner of our street, marÃa saw a group of latino kids disguised as a gang, looking for action. ah, i feel that i long for it… let this break open, at least for tonight, at least on halloween, when ghostly presences come to haunt… that politics comes to town in the guise of a ghost, seems more than appropriate. but police is everywhere, it’s scary (oh, this could have been made in a game, if the whisper would have spread: let everybody dress up like a police officer…). i want to sleep now, but i can’t escape the sound of this helicopter that keeps on circling around our house…

replacing the whip

a fragment from this week’s readings for Theories of Slavery that caught my attention, from Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. Terror, Slavery and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America. how “tethers of burdened individuality” and its accompanying hallmarks of individuated responsibility, morality, will and self-discipline replaced or supplemented the whip in the post-Emancipation era.

“Given this rendition of slavery, responsibility was deemed the best antidote for the ravages of the past; never mind that it effaced the enormity of the injuries of the past, entailed the erasure of history, and placed the onus of the past onto the shoulders of the individual. The journey from chattel to man entailed a movement from subjection to self-possession, dependency to responsibility, and coercion to contract. Without responsibility, autonomy, will, and self-possession would be meaningless. If the slave was dependent, will-less, and bound by the dictates of the master, the freed individual was liberated from the past and capable of remaking him/herself through the sheer exercise of will. Responsibility was thus an inestimable component of the bestowal of freedom, and it also produced individual culpability and national innocence, temporal durability and historical amnesia.”

sankofa

from Sankofa, the “homework” film for Theories of Slavery:

“Spirit of the dead rise up, lingering spirit of the dead rise up and posses your bird of passage. Those stolen Africans, step out of the ocean from the wombs of the ships and claim your story. Spirit of the dead rise up, lingering spirit of the dead rise up and posses your vessel. Those Africans, shackled in leg irons and enslaved, step out of the acres of came fields and coton fields and tell your story. Spirit of the dead rise up, longering spirit of the dead, rise up and posses your bird of passage. Those lynched in the Magnolias, swinging on the limgs of the weeping willows, rotting food for the cultures, step down and claim your story. Spirit of the dead rise up, lingering spirit of the dead, rise up and posses your vessel. Those tied, bound and whipped from Brazil to Mississippi. Step out and tell your story. Those in Jamaica, in the fields of Cuba, in the swamps of Florida, the rice fields of South Carolina. You waiting Africans, step out and tell your story. Spirit of the dead, rise up, lingering spirit of the dead rise up, and posses your bird of passage. From Alabama to Suriname, upt to the caves of Louisiana, come out you African Spirits, step out and claim your stories. You raped, slave bred, castrated, burned, tarred and feathered, roasted, chopped, lobotomized, bound and gagged. Spirit of the dead rise up, lingering spirit of the dead rise up and posses your bird of passage. You African spirit. Spirit of the dead rise up, lingering spirit of the dead rise up and posses your bird of passage.”

march for peace and unity

marÃa, veronica and i arrive at the Watsonville plaza just in time to hear the song of this year’s march played on the harp and the blessing by Lutheran priests. the churches should be here, he said, this is where our struggle is. jesus of nazareth is with us at this march, she declares. in 1994 the Brown Berets marched for the first time through all the neighborhoods of watsonville, to insist that the violence must stop, that the community must empower itself. this is how they started a work that still continues; they stand, in their brown uniforms, in silence and dignity.

los alteres. pictures of those who died, flowers and objects, the Virgen of Guadalupe. marÃa had noticed it: in the spanish text people were invited to bring objects for the altars, in the english translation the altars were not mentioned.

the White Hawk group which i had seen before at a march against violence in santa cruz. they are the head of the march, dancing the whole way through. stopping at some places, to perform rituals with incense. our intuition about these places turns out to be true: killings happened here.

names of peoples, their ages. placards at the front of the march, which we help carrying for a while. i ask the guy next to me, eventhough i see that he is not wearing the uniform, whether he is part of the Brown Berets. i don’t go to the meetings and stuff, he responds, but this is part of my heritage. this is my community, this is where i come from.

there are not so many people. if one would start counting the people affected by violence in this community, it doesn’t make sense. yet the march is powerful, in the way it stands for commitment and remembering.

see more reports and pictures on indymedia

uncanny locations

left on a kitchen table: a magazine which introduces Santa Cruz to the new students. as a glance through it i find out that Hitchcock lived just around the corner, in Scott’s Valey, for a good number of years. that the infamous house in Psycho stood not far from here. that the story for Birds was based on a real story that took place in a Californian village a bit up north. how the uncanny character of this place can be very inspiring…

stop the violence

Por el amor a nuestros hijos
Alto a la violencia!
For the Love of our Children
Stop the Violence!

in respons to more shootings and killings in the area, Barrios Unidos called for a march today. i join the arrival of march at the Louden Nelson Community Center in our street. a rally of some hours with kids and young people speaking about the issues of drugs, alcohol, gang violence and, basically, suburban boredom. social problems that are shot through with race politics, as is reflected in the communities that come to denounce the violence today: mainly latino and also native indian communities. (but none of the speakers, i notice, speak of poverty or the economic architecture of the social problems they raise.)

the dances and rituals performed by a native american group (from outside of Santa Cruz) affect me very much. i keep on trying to understand why, and i realize it’s the first time i see native american performances for an audience of a political march, and not an audience of tourists or researchers or a documentary…

(my thoughts wander back to those stories of and encounters with “indians” when i was 6 and which impressed me very much at the time. first cloud of memories. the lessons in american history at school, which in our school often included an afternoon of playing out the stories we had just been taught. i remember us playing the arrival of NiÃ±a, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. that was still fun somehow. then we played thanksgiving and “cowboys and indians”. in our class back then, 1977-78, in NY, indians were not very popular. most kids wanted to play pilgrims or cowboys. except me, i used to ask to play the indians all the time. cloud of memories number two. travel through america that summer, and getting all excited as we drive through new mexico and arizona. we would see indians, our parents told us. the reservations. the misery of it. the gaze of the little boy about our age throwing a stone at the car as we drive away. maud, do you also remember?)

the power of the performance has a grip on me. then the audience become participants as the dancers begin to draw people in and teach us the steps. there must have been a hundred of people dancing in a big circle, till one of the native american dancers breaks free from the circle. she becomes the head of a serpent of people that tries to catch up with the pounding of the drum. in the end we are running, out of breath, trying hard to hold on to the hands of those besides you. when the rhythm is finally broken, the people fall to the ground and thank the earth.

the Brown Berets are present. marÃa and i have been wanting to get in touch with them. i go to talk, and they invite me to their meetings on thursdays. i leave with the phone number of sandino, who drives every week from SC to Watsonville, and a happy plan for when i’m back in SC after the summer.

just before leaving i see a couple of elderly white women with small table and some flyers. about violence against women. we talk and i learn that Santa Cruz has an inexplicably high rate of violence against women. whether the statistics are compared to other towns of similar size, other beach resorts, or other college towns, an amount of violence consistently remains unaccounted for. the “this is a safe place” stickers and the (almost) free self-defense courses for women are starting to make sense. marÃa and me had wondered whether they were part of the progressive image Santa Cruz prides itself on, or whether there was another reason… and i think back of sahar’s impossible question if, objectivily speaking, and artificially disconnected from the rest of the world, Santa Cruz was a more liberated and more emancipated place. good to know the facts… the Commission or the Prevention of Violence Against Women just published a report on violence against women in Santa Cruz, to be checked out when i get back…

american dream

i am driving through endless fields of waving corn. i get tired and pull over, in the shadow of an old barn. i get out the car to strech my legs and i light a sigarette while my eyes wander over the horizon. my thoughts are interrupted by laughter, which i figure must come out of the barn. curiosity guides me to a crack in the wood, and i look inside. the time my eyes take to adjust to the dark… holy shit. bush, rice, cheney, rumsfeld, wolfowitz and more of their ilk are sitting around a table. the words i managed to catch in between the bad jokes tell me that they are designing the new middle east. my eyes quickly scan the barn. some security guys, but they are all facing the table. i move away from the crack and look around me. no other soul to found. then my eye falls on some red shiny dynamite between the corn. it all happens very quick. grab the dynamite, take my lighter, shove the sissing dynamite near the crack and jump in the car. drive away as one life depends on it. the big bang, the image of the barn blown into pieces in the rearview mirror.

hours and hours of driving till the adrenaline is gone. a gas station and a diner. i slide in with the hope of not being noticed, and find myself an empty booth in a corner, with a view on the television. no need to be worried about getting noticed, i can’t even get my order taken, the few people in this place are glued to the screen. a big black whole in a cornfield. digital reconstructions of how the barn must have blown up. looks like a video-game. people are mesmerized. their mouths open, unable to produce a sound. no witnesses, no clue about the terrorist group behind this attack. i keep on driving for days and days, from diner to diner, from small town to small town. gradually people find words again, they start speaking, laughing, it’s over. whoever did it, maybe it was god, or perhaps the people, the important thing is that it’s over. a new fresh day.

i wake up in a great mood. go to pergolesi to work with marÃa, but we can’t begin before i’ve told her the dream. i also talk about the need to be in brussels now, for the first time ever i feel we need to be able to push and work the european institutions. is it about a feeling of political powerlessness connected to being in santa cruz? or connected to how mass mobilizations all over the world against the war on iraq ultimately failed to stop that war? i do not know…