i’m working hard to meet the deadlines before leaving. eh marÃa, i’ve been working in your room today – it is beautiful to know your room like this, and it reminds me of you. mihui sneeked in with a book, asking if it was okay if she’d read while i wrote (this is becoming the collective working room). she made me laugh: she seemed hesitant at first, and when i made it clear that of course she’s welcome to do so, and of course i don’t mind that she’s in pyjamas, she did a mihui cheer: “all right, this is like family!”
but despite all the work clea convinced me to come to the Santa Cruz Bookstore tonight to hear Bettina Aptheker present her memoires – Intimate Politics. and i’m happy that i went. there is something fascinating and challenging to the way my brain tends to order things and history about having this small woman in front of you talking about growing up (with parents who were part of the communist party and targetted by the communist witch hunt; with W.E.B. DuBois as an affectionate grandpa-style friend coming to the house; with Angela Davis as a friend since they were eight) and going to college (Berkeley in the sixties, becoming a leader in the student movements). something about how quotidian (and familiar – oh how student movements can resemble each other…) it all sounds, only to be constantly interrupted by the sense of “big history”. how she campaigned to get Angela Davis out of jail in the early 1970s. her split with the communist party in the early 1980s, after years of struggling to reconcile feminism and marxism (they wouldn’t publish the book on women and race they commissioned from her, it was deemed too feminist).
what stuck most with clea was the friendship between these two woman – angela and bettina – since they were 8 years old, studying at the same university then (berkeley), teaching at the same university now (santa cruz), and all of their radical political trajectory in between. it made me think that these kind of memoires should be written in a collective way.