haft-sin preparations 1
Okay, where to start. We need at least one goldfish for haft-sin. And we wanted to visit China town and then go for the fish in the Iranaian shop, but unexpectedly we ran into this fish shop in China town with all possible brands and sizes and colors of fish. After we made our aesthetic decision, the sweet Chinese shopkeepers refused to sell it! After decades of easy gold fish shopping for Norouz, for the first time Sahar confronted the challenge of fish RIGHTS… and she was lost… So in the middle of China town we found ourselves up against the Animal Liberation Front, disguished as fish shop keepers. The man, so friendly and entirely dedicated, explained to us, the ignorant, that the cute little bowl we wanted to buy would make the tiny fish we wanted dizzy and frantic. Mind you, we were having this conversation in a small shop that looked like an aquarium à nd was filled with aquariums overpopulated with fish. But of course we didn’t want to make our tiny fish dizzy and anxious. As we were thinking about the possibility to get a bigger fish bowl, the man kept on discouraging us: we would need de-clorinated water or the fish would die, and a water warmer cause we didn’t want to put the fish in cold water, and… Sarah had no clue that preparing the whole haft-sin business would be so difficult and ethically challenging… And if you’re still a bit lost by now with what exactely we are doing in New York these days: in a few days it is Norouz, Iranian new year, and to celebrate we need to set haft-sin which means a gathering a number of things on the table which symbolise all things good for the new year.
So in the end the Chinese man and woman, who were such sweet-hearts, flatly refused to sell us the fish, reluctantly sold us an (empty) bowl, and advised us to go home and think about it a bit better, taking a lot of pride in their dedication not to sell fish to the ignorant. Our New York haft-sin adventure continues… sahar & sarah
NYC beauty 2
… Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge…
NYC beauty 1
new york
altares
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A quick trip to the library this evening, meaning a brisk walk through the ancient forest and the cold that lingers in between the redwoods, and i find myself visiting the Gloria Anzaldúa Memorial Altares Exhibit at the McHenry Library much longer than usual. I remember my first visit to that library very well. A moment of exhilaration — if other spaces seemed small and closed upon themselves, the library held such a promise of openings to other worlds. And then there was the shock of finding out that Gloria Anzaldúa had died, already a little while ago (15th of March 2004). Ever since all visits to the library are made of a moment of pauzing among her books, objects from her alters and quotes from her writing. When i get back to Santa Cruz, i realized today, the exhibit will be gone. |
From a woman who understood the power of words and used them wisely.
“Through the act of writing you call, like the ancient chamana, the scattered pieces of your soul back to your body… the ability of story (prose and poetry) to transform the storyteller and the listener into something or someone else is shamanistic. The writer, as shape-changer, is a nahual, a shaman.”
I didn’t know that she used to live in Santa Cruz, near the Lighthouse. Maybe that’s where the picture is taken, or maybe the rock is a part of Natural Bridges. As i was looking for an image of the poster of the exhibit, I came across an online altar with condolences, and i was very much struck by this comment:
“Gloria Evangelina Anzaldua–another feminist, Lesbian, writer of color dying long before her time. Joining the ranks of other great women. How long before the health of sisters becomes a priority instead of just another problem to be lived and solved by minorities?” (Judith K. Witherow)
fredissimo
Some things must be said. People, here and back home, obviously resist this piece of information, but the winter is really cold here in Santa Cruz. Selma’s present, a warm and soft set of legwarmers, was providential, to say the least. When i was still living with MarÃa, we would complain about how cold the house and lousy the heating system was. Which we mostly only turned on when the temperature inside started falling below 56 degrees. Somehow this sounded a lot. Until i got myself to check, two weeks ago, how that would convert in celsius: around 13 degrees. When i moved to my new house and we first drove to the Capitola Mall to get a comforter and pillows, i got so lucky that MarÃa convinced me to get the “extra warm” comforter. Remember they are genetically modified here. As i was dragging the big thing behind me a shop attendent commented: “So you guys are cold sleepers, huh.” After my first night in my new house i understood that the new comforter was fine, but probably one of the lightest i ever had.
Cause this is the thing: it wouldn’t have to be so cold if everybody lived up to the fact that this part of California is simply cold in winter, and organized their houses and lives accordingly. Of course it’s not really cold, not like in Kazan for instance where during the winter the temperature regularly drops to minus 30. But in Kazan there’s a whole culture around protecting the body from the cold, and the house where i lived, situated in a run-down and shabby neighborhood of the city, was always intensly warm. Too warm sometimes, and then the only remedy was opening a window, since central heating meant that the heating system was regulated centrally for the whole neighborhood. (ah, rampant individualism here makes me nostalgic for these collective arrangements…) But here we are up against a persistent myth of warm & sunny California. So people go around in t-shirts and sandals, houses have lousy heating, and “extra warm” comforters need some fleece blankets on top to do the job during these wintery days. The best kept secret, Diana called it the other day. She had never been so cold than after moving from London to San Francisco, where she had to put on a jumper and socks in bed at night in order not to freeze. It was June. The secret is well kept, and so there are all these hard hermetically sealed bodies performing the myth of warm and sunny California. Meanwhile i’m freezing.
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An amazing winter wonderland storm hit the Bay area yesterday. Unseen, unheard of. It started with giant hail hitting the earth in the afternoon, and it continued all evening long with hail becoming snow as you move away from the ocean (or is it snow becoming hail in the ocean’s vicinity) and roaring thunder and lightening. Highway 17 closed down. The streets covered in white hail-snow. People making pictures, fighting with hail-snow balls. Today people asking each other “where were you yesterday night?” and telling their stories of winter adventures. | |
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And so we… we had a wonderful heart-warming dinner with Clea and David. By the time we had dessert we sat in the candle light to better witness all the rage outside. Then, in the excitement of the storm, David proposed to drive to the ocean. Amazing. This never happens in Santa Cruz, they kept on saying. It’s since the two ladies from Belgium came, Clea insisted. | |
a matter of degree
More of Baudrillard on America. Dans son style délirant, en effet il y a vraiment trop de délire dans son livre, but i guess the name of my blog oblige…
“Like many other aspects of contemporary America, Santa Cruz is part of the post-orgy world, the world left behind after the great social and sexual convulsions. The refugees from the orgy – the orgy of sex, political violence, the Vietnam war, the Woodstock Crusade, and the ethnic and anti-capitalist struggles too, together with the passion for money, the passion for success, hard technologies etc., in short the whole orgy of modernity – are all there, jogging along in their tribalism, which is akin to the electronic tribalism of Silicon Valley. Reduced pace of work, decentralization, air-conditioning, soft technologies. Paradise. But a very slight modification, a change of just a few degrees, would suffice to make it seem like hell.”
8th of March
It was the 8th of March yesterday and for the very first time since long, there was no 8th of March gathering to go to. Unsettling. Can’t think of a greater contrast with last year, when i had to decide whether to be in Belgium or in Istanbul for the 8th, and ended up being around for the preparations of Istanbul, and flying in to do 8th of March stuff in Leuven and Antwerpen. Can’t help thinking of the Belgian Women’s Day (11th of November) two years ago when MarÃa and i decided to take a break and not go (imagine, being able to make the decision not to go, yet another possibility in places where Women’s Day means something) where we got into the dream of coming to this place, and how disconnected i feel from that dream now.
But it ended up being sweet – Berna and Feza invited us to go to the screening of Darwin’s Nightmare with film-maker Hubert Sauper in the grand Del Mar cinema theater. Hubert just got back from the Academy Awards where those stupid penguins (of course the animals are not stupid, it’s the film) won instead of the fish. An impressive film about globalization, its big structural mechanism and its little agents who most often know well what they are doing, what is happening to them, but see little alternative. The images are still running around in my head, a film to be seen and digested slowly. Maybe i’ll write something more about it later.
There was a march on the 7th, Marcha Laboral – Custodians March for Justice. It was on campus at 6.30 pm, so custodians could join and we could we could march to the residence of the Chancellor, Denise Denton, to demand that the custodians’ wages are raised at least to the level of those in neighboring colleges (Cabrillo, Monterey) now – and then later we can go on to discuss living wages. There is no excuse, the financial scandals (of excessive spending on top wages) the university got itself involved makes it quite indecent not to do so. One custodian was talking about how she works on this campus since 15 years and earns only $ 4 more than when she started. And then everybody is hit by the high PG&E bills this winter – raising the wages now would amount to nothing more than very basic dignity.
Try to imagine how such a march looks like. A dark cold forest, for that is how campus looks like after 6 pm these days. There were more of us than last time, we were perhaps 80 (and yes, there are hundreds of students living in well-hidden residences all over campus, but most of them don’t come out for a march, that is how campus looks like these days). So there we marched through a dark cold forest, holding candles to light our way. And chanting for ourselves and for the ancient forest. El pueblo unido jamás será vencido never sounded more ghostly, and it so much more resembled some spiritual ritual instead of a political mobilization.
A great need to get my head around the difficulties (to think well, to write something that could make a difference, to do politics) and traps of campuses like these, and i take look at what Chris called the idiotic (and i think i agree) book of Baudrillard on America. Sadly enough his observation on the UCSC campus is not so far off:
“There is a science-fiction story in which a number of very rich people wake up one morning in their luxury villas in the mountains to find that they are encircled by a transparent and insuperable obstancle, a wall of glass that has appeared in the night. From the depths of their vitrified luxury, they can still just discern the outside world, the real universe from which they are cut off, which has suddenly become the ideal world. But it is too late. These rich people will die slowly in their aquarium like goldfish. Some of the university campuses here remind me of this.
Lost among the pine trees, the fields, and the riviers (it is an old ranch that was donated to the university), and made up of little blocks, each one out of sight of the others, like the people who live in them: this one is Santa Cruz. It’s a bit like the Bermuda Triangle (or Santa Barbara). Everything vanishes. Everthing gets sucked in. Total decentring, total community. After the ideal city of the future, the ideal cosy nook. Nothing converges on a single point, neither the traffic, nor the architecture, nor authority. But, by that very token, it also becomes impossible to hold a demonstation: where could you assembly? Demonstrations can only go round and round in the forest, where the participants alone can see them. Of all the Californian campuses, famous for their spaciousness and charm, this is the most idealized, the most naturalized. It is the epitome of all that is beautiful.”
the mission
Santa Cruz was established in 1791, by padre Fermin Francisco de Lasuén, as the 12th Spanish Catholic mission in Alta California; it was “baptised” on the 25th of September of that year as “Misión la exaltación de la Santa Cruz”. As the Spanish government feared that other empires (the British) were after the territory, a mission in the very north end of the Monterey Bay was of strategic importance for Spanish rule over the Californian coast. The mission offered an outlook over the whole bay; moreover, it was near the ocean which could be used for trade, next to the San Lorenzo River (named as such by the Spanish explorer Don Gaspar de Portola who “discovered” it in 1769) that could be used to irrigate the lands, and surrounded by the redwood forests that could be logged and used for wood.
Then the information leaflet from the Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park starts getting uncomfortable… Another reason listed under the heading “Why put a Mission here?” are the Native Americans who could start working at the mission. The phrasing remains a bit vague, and we’re left wondering exactely what they mean to suggest: that the Spanish were looking for (cheap) labor, that the Native Americans were unemployed and seeking for a major regional employer, that it was a perfect match?
The Native Americans. Central California had the densest Indian population anywhere north of Mexico before the Spanish arrived. Over 10,000 people lived in the coastal area between Point Sur and the San Francisco Bay. The Spanish called them Costaños, which became Costanoan in American-English. Since the 1960s all the native Americans who used to live around San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay are referred to by the name “Ohlone” – which might have come from a Spanish rancho called Oljon, or from the name of an Indian site near modern-day San Mateo. The Ohlone people who used to live in the Santa Cruz region – i did not even find traces of how this land used to be called before – were called Awaswas, and this included the Sokel (who lived at Aptos) and the Chatu-mu (who lived near the current location of Santa Cruz).
None of the Ohlone people who lived in this area survived. The mission started in 1791 and ran till 1834 (when the Mexican government secularized it) and none of the Ohlone survived.
The Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park is a very uncomfortable place. It is housed in the only original building of the Mission that remains – which makes it the oldest building in Santa Cruz. A white adobe rectangular building with 7 rooms one behind the other, part of what used to be a larger building with 17 rooms. It was build to house those Native Americans who were considered the most trustworthy and given certain privileges, neophytes they were called. Each of these rooms housed a neophyte family. There is something ironic and immensly sad about the fact that the neophyte dwellings are the only ones that remain from the whole mission enterprise.
Santa Cruz Mission was called the “hard luck” mission; it was also the first one to be closed down by the Mexican government. I suppose one could call the genocide of the Ohlone people “hard luck”, only the genocide doesn’t figure in the leaflet of the Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park. The leaflet does tells us that “many of the workers died of the new diseases”, “a group of native people attacked the Mission and burned buildings”, “natives who didn’t like the mission ran away”, “one of their priests was murdered” (only one, i can’t help asking myself, the Ohlone people were more generous with life than can be said of their colonizers…). Yes, all of this must have made it difficult to run the mission, i suppose. Not easy, to run a mission in those conditions.
And the mission was big. By 1814, an old report reveals, they had 3,300 cattle, 3,500 sheep, 600 horses, 25 mules, and 46 hogs. And imagine the crops needed to feed all those hungry mouths. A handful of padres clearly cannot manage this on their own. When the mission was founded word was spread that there was work in exchange for food, shelter and education; and many Ohlone people came to the mission to work. What they didn’t know: there was no way back. Once you worked at the mission you could not leave, and the mission could count on the Spanish army to make that rule effective.
If the language of the Historic Park’s leaflet and on the educational signs on the site is upsetting, it is a conversation in the Park’s shop during my visist last weekend that made me really angry. When i entered the shop a (white) lady of the Santa Cruz Mission State Park was talking to a girl who must have been 10 years old – one of these beautiful bright ones with inquisitive eyes and a reserved smile full of resolution. The State Park lady was infantilizing the girl with her story of the Mission, but the girl took ignorance with polite reservation. As the lady’s story of the mission unfolded the girls’ parents stopped checking out the merchandise, threw each other glances, and got closer to their daughter. The lady in turn happily continued infantilizing the whole family.
As soon as the Spanish priests came here, she explained, they wanted to get the local people involved. The language of Empire, and how it can make you grasp for air. Involved. Just imagine for a moment. One of the padres writing home: Hermano querido. Llegamos bien en Santa Cruz, y somos listos comenzar nuestra misión. Escucho, tengo una idea. ¿Qué piensa de implicar a la población local? ¿PodÃa ser interessante, no? Many months later a ship brings a letter responding: ¡Eso es una idea genial! Vaya, hermano. ¡Con nuestras bendiciones! And Lo and Behold, a succesful recipe of Empire was born: get the local people involved.
The conversation was marked by the language of empire in different layers. The lady was talking about the Spanish missions of more than 200 hundred years ago, but her discourse was of course situated in the contemporary U.S. Empire. The imaginary exchange between the padres is indeed quite unlikely, for sure their discussions and exchanges were not so tainted by efforts to draw upon a democratic-participatory rhetoric. “Involving the local population” is no doubt a very late capitalism way of talking, now that Empire has “involved” the people of Afghanistan in their own liberation, is “involving” Iraq in their own democracy, and has many more projects of getting people all around the world more “involved”.
In the lady’s story many indians liked to be involved, and some got involved so well that they made trustworthy and good Christians and as a reward got to move into the adobe housing and live with their families. So the others couldn’t live with their families? the mother asked. The lady explained that men were separated from women and children, to prevent them running away, you see. Running away? the mother inquired. So the lady explained that for some of the Ohlone the Mission wasn’t really… well, it wasn’t what they had expected. But once they worked at the Mission they couldn’t leave anymore, you see, those were the rules.
(Thank god for the neophytes! They saved the mission! Give thanks! How unfortunate that the mission didn’t save them.)
Yet another dimension to the conversation added to the anger: the lady remained totally blind for the way the (latino) family was increasingly uncomfortable with her hollywood version of history. There was no listening. The mother kept on asking questions seeking some kind of recognition – “so they couldn’t live with their families?”, “so they all died?”, … She wasn’t searching for a political recognition, it seemed, but a mere recognition of shared humanity and thus shared indignation. What does it mean to do this to other people. But none of that affected our happy guardian of State History.
Although at the end she did sigh. Yes, it had all been very sad, very sad indeed, for the padres, for the Spanish, for the natives. It had been difficult times for everybody…
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Anger that pushed me to find out a bit more about this history. Not easy to find alternative versions, but on Wikipedia i read that, as far available sources indicate, Santa Cruz mission as the first California mission to come under armed attack by the local population. A history of revolt to be reclaimed:
“On the night of December 14, 1793, Mission Santa Cruz was attacked and partially burned by members of the local Quiroste tribe who inhabited the mountains to the east of Point Año Nuevo. The attack was purportedly motivated by the forced relocation of native Indians to the Mission. In 1812, Father Andres Quintana was assassinated and had his testicles smashed by natives angry over his use of a metal-tipped whip in the punishment of Mission laborers.”
And i found a group that is working towards recognition of the Ohlone people, as there are people of Ohlone origin in other regions of California, see www.muwekma.org
Makkin Mak Haûûesin Hemme Ta Makiû Horûe Mak-Muwekma, Rooket Mak Yiûûasin Huyyunciû Éinniinikma!
We Will Make Things Right For Our People And Dance For Our Children!