Coming to Barcelona, I didn't know what to expect. I had wanted to go there for the past 15 years but didn't even have a clear idea why. I realize now that it was this scene from the movie Barcelona (1994):
That was my subconscious reason. Consciously, I'd heard it was a great city, full of great art and architecture, and I wanted to see the town that had been a last anarchist holdout in the Spanish Civil War and the site of great collectivization and resistance against the fascism of Franco, or so I'd heard.
It was strange, then, to see anarchist, communist, socialist, feminist, Catalan nationalist/separatist (more on that later) slogans in red and black and wheatpaste strewn across the city in response to the financial crisis but to find little public commemoration of Barcelona's incredible history during the Spanish Civil War.
Anticapitalist demonstration
Enough with the bankers, politicians, corrupt robbers, enough!
"How much are you worth/How much do you cost?"
"Wildcat strike"
"Capitalism IS the crisis"
"Independence, Socialism, Feminism"
"Capitalism is a Pyramid Scheme"
"Freedom for Catalan Countries"
It was only after taking an excellent tour led by Nick Lloyd of Iberianature and then reading Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell and other books on the war from the library that I realized why: while there may have been a good six months in which 70-80 percent of the businesses in Barcelona had collectivized and the feeling of liberation and possibility and the songs of revolution rang through the streets, there was also soon a brutal period when members of the left executed thousands of members of the clergy, destroyed churches and cathedrals, and desecrated religious icons and symbols (the Catholic church was aligned with the fascists and the right and was responsible for its own share of terrors, but still). It was a testament to this conflict that Nick told us that he'd had a dozen Barcelona locals tell him, "If you take people anywhere in Barcelona, take them to the Placa Sant Felip Neri. This is where they shot the priests." While in fact the damage to the church wall came from shrapnel from a fascists' bomb in 1938, the perception of what happened is as important as what actually happened, because it speaks to what lies underneath, in peoples' collective memories. Even if it didn't happen in this exact place, it did happen, and people did not forget.
"In memory of the victims of the bombing of Sant Felip Neri. Here died 42 people, most of the children, from the actions of a Francoist plane on the 30th of January, 1938"
The walls of the Plaza de Sant Felip Neri
As much as I'd seen images from revolutionary Spain in books of art and resistance, I'd never seen this or understood what it represented, even in its mythology, to the conservative side of Spain. Even now, I was genuinely shocked to see, on a church in the Poble Nou neighborhood, graffiti that said "Fuck the pope." But I'm not Catholic and so, as much as I have an abstract understanding of the archaic views of the Vatican vis a vis the rights of reproductive rights of women and the sanctity (or lack thereof) in being gay, I don't have the same visceral reaction to it that others do who have been steeped in its indoctrination throughout their lives.
***
What I did have a visceral reaction to was being in the midst
of a nationalist demonstration on the 11th of September, National Catalonia Day, when hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets of Barcelona to demand
independence from Spain (and, most likely, to also protest the economic austerity measures proposed by the Spanish government in response to the ever-deepening economic crisis in Europe).
Poster for Catalonian Freedom March
Just
like for gay pride in San Francisco, there were swarms of people draped flags and marching in what seemed like every direction. Only instead of rainbow flags they
bore the red and yellow stripes of Catalonia.
National Catalonia Day, 11th of September, 2012, Barcelona
Bikes for Catalonia
Even when it is for a potentially righteous cause, there is something about a large group of people bearing a flag *of any kind* that scares me. Because the flip side of belonging to the group bearing that flag is not belonging and then wondering if you are welcome at all. And that is not to say that community boundaries are inherently bad; sometimes they are critical for survival of the group; people have a human right to dignity and self-determination. It's just that with borders, while you might benefit from staying in, who's to say that you will be allowed to leave? (Think: East Germany.) And conversely, when you keep others out, how do you maintain your connections with the people on the other side? (Think: The Israeli West Bank Wall.)
When I asked Nick what the anarchists in Barcelona thought of Catalan independence, he said they were totally against it, but that overall half of his friends were against it and half of them were for it. (A split, see?) I don't know enough about Catalonia one way or another to have an educated opinion. It's just a feeling I get in my chest and one that I'm inclined to listen to. In a crowded movie theater, know where the exits are.
***
The day after the protest the newspapers showed emboldened Catalan leaders, promising reforms.
"The president shows his intention to start constructing structures of statehood; the government intends to combat the image of Spain as the enemy of Catalonia."
Last month, I had the opportunity to install an interactive mixed media piece at Streetopia, the large-scale group exhibition at the Luggage Store Gallery, 509 Cultural Center, and other spaces in downtown San Francisco, curated by my friend Erick Lyle and others,
to envision Utopian aspirations for the city.
When Erick put the call out for contributions to the show, I thought of a lot of things I wanted to do, including an interactive installation that only worked when two or more people cooperated on it together and workshops on paradigm-changing books by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, one on envisioning a shift back from social services to social justice, and another on the (im)possibilities of community accountability for acts of intimate partner violence in lieu of prisons, jails, and probation officers.
What got through the filter of my time commitments and feasibility within the physical and chronological space was this piece, called "What keeps you afloat?" Its components are simple: a question, a tub of water, and pencils, crayons, twigs, string, and paper boats--tools with which to answer the question.
The question came to me when considering my own participation in utopian social movements, of exhausting and exhilarating hours spent planning and carrying out actions--marches, squats, free cafes--to protest our society's ills--greed, hubris, war--and to show the world we want to live in, a world without those things.
It came to me when thinking about previous utopian social movements in the San Francisco Bay Area, like the Digger Houses, Wheeler Ranch, and Morningstar Ranch, places my mother lived before my siblings and I were born. It came to me when reading Cometbus #48, the zine in which punks whose parents had been "back-to-the-landers" recalled witnessing communities and families coming together, sometimes making beautiful things, and often tearing each other apart. It came to me when contemplating my own measured involvement in more recent manifestations of the immutable search for human dignity, like Occupy Oakland.
It seems to me, in connecting these different moments, that a fundamental difficulty that we face is in taking care of ourselves whilst participating in larger configurations, whether they be friendships or relationships or families or communities or movements for social change. By care I mean meeting our deep needs for connection and purpose and dignity while at the same time meeting our basic needs--for sustenance, for safety, for rest. (For me, this meant attending the General Assembly meetings at Occupy Oakland and then going home to bed rather than staying in a tent in Oscar Grant Plaza and fighting the cops at 3 a.m.)
But maybe what I should be asking is how we take care of ourselves in isolation from each other, and if this is even possible. Because as much as I know that I cannot sustain the kind of energy I had in my 20s for raucous riot girl shows or turbulent antiwar protests, I also cannot live without connection or community, much as I would like to try at times. What I have come to realize is that the two things are mutually dependent: In order to participate in community, I need to take care of myself; in order to care for myself, I need community.
My contribution to the conversation about Utopian visions of San Francisco was to pose this question, "What keeps you afloat?," in a way that enabled people responding to the question to take care of themselves--through reflection, and each other--through sharing insights. Here are some pictures of what the installation has looked like. I'm also keeping a list of the answers I've received so far.
May 18, Day One, Six Boats
By the end of the first night, the tub was full and the boats were saturated. Others had said to me, "I hope the boats don't sink, that would be so sad." But when it happened, it wasn't, somehow. Instead, to me at least, it just felt like the boats of others who had come before were holding the new ones aloft.
May 18, Day One, Full
Still, I wanted to make space for new additions and to preserve what people had written. So I came back and pulled the saturated boats from the water and strung them along clotheslines, for all to read.
May 19, Day Two, Clotheslines
And as the show continues, I repeat the process of pulling the boats out and stringing them on clotheslines, making space for more paper boats and messages, more signals to ourselves and each other on taking care.
June 4, Day 18, "Tacos, My Mom, Love"
(Streetopia continues through June 23, Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market St., in San Francisco.)
On May 20, 2012, the moon passed in front of the sun, making a ring of fire in some parts of the world, and a lovely crescent out of the shadows in Oakland. Shown here, finger shadows and light shining through the leaves on a tree trunk in the park at Lake Merritt.
"What I have to do is get in my bed and lay down. I want to fix on something harmless in this world."' "What world you talking about? Ain't nothing harmless down there." "Yes it is. Blue. That don't hurt nobody. Yellow neither." "You getting in the bed to think about yellow?" "I likes yellow." "Then what? When you get through with blue and yellow, then what?" "Can't say. It's something that can't be planned." Beloved, by Toni Morrison
What to make of the horrific deaths of Susan Poff and Robert Kamin at the hands of their own son, Moses? Susan, who spent hours calmly providing wound care to homeless youth at the San Francisco Needle Exchange in Panhandle Park, long before it was a legally-operating site. Bob, whom I never knew but who I hear was incredible in his work at jail psychiatric services in SF. --- My friend's partner D had an epiphany at the Catholic funeral service at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Oakland, in response to this question.
"This is a test," he said. It's like this is proof that people do evil things in the world. Susan lived her life loving and giving unconditionally. She and Bob gave their lives to service to the poor and the homeless and to people with mental illness. They gave a boy love whom no one else wanted, bringing him into their home at age five. And ten years later, when his brokenness, as Susan's father said so poignantly at the funeral, seemed beyond repair, he took their lives in murder.
Yet Susan's father also said quite clearly on behalf of the family, "We want you to know that we hold no malice towards Moses. He is in God's hands now. And he needs all the help he can get." --- Susan's death felt like a test to see whether, when learning that someone who gave of herself unconditionally had her life come to an end in such a shocking and brutally violent way, we, as the people she left behind, could rise to the occasion--could focus on her life as an example of how to move through the world--and not on the manner of her death, which at first contemplation threatened to leach out all hope and inspiration from the world. If we can react to this brutal irony and terrible tragedy with grief instead of anger--and I believe we have--then maybe there is hope for us in this world. --- Neuroscientists, particle physicists, philosophers, mystics ask the same question: Who are we and what are we doing here, together? How do we bridge our interior experiences, which are very private and entirely subjective, with the physiological happenings in our brains? More critically, how do we create a shared language with which to describe our internal experiences in a way that makes clear our need for--and inherent connectedness with--each other? --- In struggling to integrate into my internal universe the information of Susan's and Bob's deaths, I realized in a moment of silence that instead of focusing on the way Susan died, I could focus on the way she lived. If, as it has been said, "the mind imbibes the qualities of the things that it contemplates," then it is crucial to focus on what we are for and not just what we are against. --- This is what Jakada Imani from the Ella Baker Center said to me when he was explaining why they were suspending their Cop Watch campaign. "Because when you win," he said, "what you've got is you looking at cops." When in reality what you should get when you win is a city without police or one in which black and brown communities aren't so heavily policed, which begs the question: What would a healthy Oakland look like? I know this question is dangerously naive but, what if we made the police obsolete not by transforming them but by transforming ourselves? (This is the conversation started in "The Revolution Starts at Home, by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, which questions whether we actually have the tools to hold each other accountable when we can scarcely be accountable to ourselves...) --- It's like what Rubin "Hurricane" Carter said on the radio, incredibly, about spending twenty years in prison on a false conviction and, during his incarceration, reading Victor Frankl's account of being at Auschwitz. Carter decided that 'if he can survive Auschwitz, I can survive wrongful imprisonment' and concluded that 'our biggest maximum security prison is our own minds.'
What I got from what he was saying was that, while our wounds, and the injustices done to us and the people we care about are real, there is no end to our suffering when we internalize these harms. And so, keeping in mind the fact that there is violence and hatred and racism and fascism and fear and delusion in the world, we can choose to cultivate our own individual and collective liberation by holding a place of compassion for each other and for ourselves. --- And so Susan's death reminds me to live and to love and to open my heart unconditionally while also holding true that loving kindness need not come at the expense of ourselves or our safety or well-being. It is okay to walk away from someone who is hurting you. As Rabbi Sofer said in the 19th Century, "No woman is required to build the world by destroying herself." The question is how to be compassionate towards someone who has done such seemingly irreparable harm. --- Moses is 15. Young people kill their parents sometimes. It is horrible, and it happens. What teenager hasn't fantasized about lashing out against themselves or their caregivers? If he had been 10 or 12 years old, he wouldn't have been strong enough to really hurt them. Unfortunately, he was. Still. What happened was a fluke; it was not a consequence or logical outcome of his adoption. And it is not necessarily an indicator of what he will be like for the rest of his life. --- In California, youth are all-too-often tried as adults. I can only hope that he will be tried as a youth. There is tons of literature showing that teenagers are not yet fully able to contemplate the consequences of their actions. I was a runaway at his age. Now I'm supporting my Mom.
Given 10, 15, 20 years, I am sure he will have matured into an adult and will regret deeply what he has done, if he doesn't already. And I can only hope that, in twenty years' time, he will get a second chance at living the life Susan and Bob would have wanted him to live, a life of fullness and hope and learning and joy. One can only that judge and jury and prosecutor alike will show him the kind of compassion that Susan and her parents showed toward their own wayward son.
"When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate." Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson
This blog is my attempt, in a time of growing obsolesence of zines and print publications, to search for depth via the internet and, paradoxically, to forge connections.
