community

melissa is dropping off bits and pieces of her stuff and slowly moving in. leta mentions inner light to her; it reminds me how soon the church tends to come up in conversations in our house. to reassure melissa, leta emphazises: “it’s not about jesus or anything, it’s all about community, you know.” or liberal and new age religion in a nutshell.

intimate politics

i’m working hard to meet the deadlines before leaving. eh maría, 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.

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 maría 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, maría 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…

freedom’s just another word for… growing up in relation to each other

reading Claude Meillassoux’ The Antropology of Slavery. The Womb of Iron and Gold. i am reminded how refreshing it is to read a text so much out of the canon, language, perspective, references and contours of US academy. a book that looks at slavery in Africa, from the perspective of what occured in African societies, and not the Americas. in a macro-sociological and systematic analysis of slavery, Meillassoux at some point turns to the meaning of the opposite of slavery – freedom.

“In a penetrating and masterly work, E. Benveniste (1969) reveals ‘the social origins of the concept “free” on the basis of a semantic analysis. ‘The primary meaning,’ he writes, ‘is not as we might be tempted to imagine, “released from something;” it refers to membership of an ethnic stock described by a metaphor taken from plant growth. This membership confers a privilege which is unknown to the alien and the slave. Free men are those “who were born and have developed together.” […] Benveniste’s discovery conforms to analysis of the development of the domestic agricultural economy in its double process of production and reproduction and of the place which the (male) individual acquires in this society through his double participation in the productive and reproductive cycles. The Maninka, using terms which are nearly identitical to Benveniste, in fact say, when referring to their congeners, those with whom they can identify themselves, ‘ka wolo nyoronka, ka mo nyoronka’: to be born together, to mature together. This does not express ‘consanguinity’ but rather ‘congeneration’: the growing-up of individuals together and in relation to each other.”

raises a whole set of questions about the relationship between the ‘alien’ (with whom one didn’t grow up, has no relationships with) and the free, but as i’m poking into this american idea of freedom i’m struck by the discrepancy – freedom as no attachments vs. freedom as common growth.

spiral dance

yesterday evening we celebrated pagan new year, the feast of Samhain.
maría and i went to the Spiral Dance, the ritual by Reclaiming,
the activist wicca (witchcraft) group of Starhawk,
in the Golden Gate park in San Francisco.

mourning the dead of the year that passed away (all the names…
shoes of people who died in iraq… photos of young brown and black
men shot by SF police…). welcoming new life.

insisting chants, and a spiral dance with hundreds of bodies
spinning a circle of life with a promise of renewal of the earth.
(and as spirits strayed among us,
i recognized a guardian angel)

img_0625.JPG
(impression from the altar of the north | the winter )

for you

this summer back home i began to buy, in beautiful Tropismes, the works of Luce Irigaray. i feel how i keep on “thinking with” (this is maría’s mark) her and decided that i wanted to read and re-read her, in french. this autumn i’m reading quite some Judith Butler, and through her i stumbled upon Adriana Cavarero this evening. next time back home i’ll try to get some of her work, in italian. (oh, italian in need of practice, yesterday by accident, madonna, a spanish word crept into il mio italiano un po’ strano and it did not make giulia happy… pero giulia, sempre quando provo a parlare spagnola, le parole italiane vengono, voilà…) for the moment, Cavarero through Butler, on sociality:

“In her view, I am not, as it were, an interior subject, closed upon myself, solipsistic, posing questions of myself alone. I exist in an important sense for you and by virtue of you. If I have lost the conditions of address, if I have no “you” to address, then I have lost “myself”. In her view, one can tell an autobiography only to another, and one can reference an “I” only in relation to a “you”: without the “you” my own story becomes impossible.”

i don’t think it’s a coincidence that i’m interpellated and attracted so much by words like these, and Irigaray’s, and maría’s (who’s working with Haraway’s words) while being here in America, where i’m confronted so much with the sociality of the “I”. i’ve been tempted for a while now to write a small little intimate poetic personal-political-collective book about this america, as an investigation into individualism (…freedom…independence… the public /common good… and what i’ve come to call suburbia-subjectivity) and now a genealogy of thought to have conversations with is starting to shape up: irigaray, cavarero,… this involves re-appropriating european feminist thought, as sexual difference thinking isn’t exactely the most popular way of thinking nowadays, between equal opportunities and all things queer. and i like the thought of being an unfaithful blasphemous and recalcitrant daughter-thinker of irigaray, with her original basque connection, her forgotten belgian and leuven connection where there never was a place for her, fleeing away in, and then from, a violent psychoanalytical french connection and finding a political community through a communist italian connection.

what would it mean to start thinking here, in this america, that i exist only by virtue of you?

populated worlds

working on the porch today, reading maría’s beautiful article while she’s taking a nap. she must have just closed her eyes when three young guys decide the side-walk in front of our house is a good place to sit down and smoke pot and have a conversation. it’s the things they say…

… as long as if you take good care of yourself… it doesn’t matter if then you’re an asshole or a good person… cause if you take good care of yourself, nobody can hurt you… they can’t touch you… the most important thing is taking good care of yourself…

almost funny. if it weren’t for the fact that meanwhile i’ve heared too many americans say variations on that sad hermetic theme. soon the side-walk friends leave, in their own reality, stoned. i go back to maría’s writing, all about care for others, kinship and companionship, creating shared worlds and lives. how scarry it would be, to be here alone, with this rather wide-spread american illusion of fortress egos that can, with more protection (and security) remain untouched. (here they tend to call it independence, or even freedom.) but reading maría, and seeing her finally getting some sleep on the bench on the porch, brings me a smile of gratitude.

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.”