Becoming One of Those Nights

A bird is perched on the branch outside my window
“The-silhouette-of-your-cadaver-is-the-most-beautiful-thing-I’ve-ever-seen” is its name
and its species is suicide.
How alluringly it sings
my name. At times like these
the only thing holding the world together is the rain.

It is becoming one of those nights
when the pimple on my inner thigh becomes a herpes sore,
one of those nights
when the American bombers drop invisible leaflets on my house
that say (I am certain of it, there is no mistaking the print):
“subcomandante marcos is not a homosexual in San Francisco.
the greys are winning.”

I cry out “hug me, hold me, need me!” but there is nothing
but the rain
and the ceaseless song of the bird.

deeper, bluer

the bruises of an absence of touch are deeper,
bluer, than the crushed petals of my skin under violence.

THE SEED: A Poetic Response from My Sister

We are learning still to hold

this seed

in our broken bellies

to give it water

sunlight

plenty of attention

notice changes in color

shape

is a leaf growing now?

500 years we have borne

Despair flowing from cord to

umbilical cord

every generation a little more blind

every generation a little more

steel than blood

are we going to do this again

I kissed the earth

I watered it with my marrow

I wondered

where did they go

all of those people who said they

loved

me

Our seed is not afraid of sky

storm or sea

It is the bravest thing of all –

and the hardest

For when we are shadows only

How do we know to

Give sunlight

Can we be gifts

When our lives are

So cheap

We are soil

Let us squeeze whatever tears we still have

Yes every last drop

And water each other

For nothing is given

No scraps left

For the lionesses

Of

This world

Turned desert

We are the prophets of possibility

We wear wings that sometimes bear us high

And at other times choke us

We are still learning to hold this seed

In our broken bellies

Waiting for the rain

Love in A Season of Drought: Letter to A Sister

I will be honest: I myself often despair of the possibility that I will find a partner who loves me in the ways that I hunger for love and I try to live my life in a way that won't fall apart because I don't get this immense need of mine fulfilled. I am learning to survive on crumbs. Learning how to endure the hunger of the soul. I don't expect three meals a day and I've come to a place where I know how to metabolize despair and loneliness. And I've done this to survive.

In his biography, Black Boy, Richard Wright penned words that struck and resonated with me ever since I first read them:

Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America...[,] when I brooded upon the cultural bareness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man [sic]. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.

Perhaps these are controversial views, but they ring true to me. There is a bleakness to the life of the oppressed. It is not complete or total. It does not negate that there is a vitality and a joy as well. But it is there nonetheless. And the joy that we do have as well as the love and the hope and all the rest, is not something automatic merely because we exist. For, as Audre Lorde says, we were not even meant to survive/exist--not as human beings. We cannot take our existence, our love, our joy for granted. It is something that we can lose and something that we can gain more of. It is something at stake in our living. And I believe that if we don't want to deceive ourselves, if we don't want to silence one another from speaking our truths, we must be honest, even as we speak of the power of the love we have struggled for, that this love is still too scarce, too thin, not enough.

There are those who have tried to encourage me to believe that my experience of this lack---this absence of affirmation in my life and in this society---is a matter of perception. Those who believe that the love that we need is already there, that all that remains is for us to learn to see it or find it. My experience and understanding of history does not permit me to share this belief. I believe that the love that I/we seek is sometimes (perhaps often) beyond my/our reach. I believe that like food, shelter, and education, love is a need of which we can be deprived by a cruel and dehumanizing world and that unjust social relations can limit the potential for loving which each of us has. I believe that love, like all living things requires certain conditions, structures, and nutrients to survive and that it takes even more to make love thrive. Finally, I believe that new kinds of love are only possible when oppressive situations are abolished. I will tell you honestly: I do not know if the conditions exist for me to experience the love that I am yearning for. Perhaps it is a type of love that hasn't ever existed before.

But I do not, cannot, and will not accept that if I myself never find the love for which I so desperately hunger that that is the way things are "supposed to be" or the way that they always will be. No. Just as I do not accept that the reality of bodily hunger and starvation is the way that things are supposed to be, in that same way I do not accept that the reality of emotional, spiritualm and erotic hunger and deprivation is the way things are supposed to be. It is undeniable that these realities exist. But it is my/our vocation to change these realities; to contribute to a world in which love and dignity are abundant. Marx wrote that

Hunger is an acknowledged need of my body for an object existing outside it, indispensable to its integration and to the expression of its essential being. The sun is the object of the plant – an indispensable object to it, confirming its life – just as the plant is an object of the sun, being an expression of the life-awakening power of the sun, of the sun's objective essential power. (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy in General)

Precisely because I hunger for an abundant love, I know that we have net yet achieved it and that I am therefore called to act, so that this need can be met, not only by/for myself, but by/for so many others who also hunger. What I do not know is if I will live in the world which I am struggling for, in which this need is met. I do know that I have caught glimpses of it. That I have met and loved the prophets of that world. That I have experienced my own revelations of it. I know that I myself am called to love abundantly, above, beyond, in spite of and against the limitations of this soul-devouring machine. This love is the seed that I carry and despite this 500+ year-long season of colonial drought, I water it and care for it above all things, even my own survival.

Because I cannot and I must not forget: I am surviving, I endure, because I hope and I struggle for a time when the love that I desire will be more possible. I do not endure in order to suffer tomorrow. We may grow accustomed to living in a state of hunger. (How could we not, living as we do in this unfinished world of ours?) But we must never become resigned to or complicit with this state of affairs. I do not participate in the struggle for justice or in the raising of children merely so that others may live a few days (or years, or lifetimes) more merely in order to prolong the pain. I survive in the seasons of drought because I carry seeds, nurtured by my own desire and perseverance, of a new world. I await the rain and know that rain will mean nothing without the seeds (and the seedlings) that I have taken care of through the drought, the seeds and tender possibilities that are my inheritance from 500+ years of resistance; seeds passed on to me in spite of and against 500 years of colonialism and slavery. The drought, my sister, has been so, so long. And yet I wait, believing that despite it all, I am called. That I have been entrusted with a task specifically mine. I hold up this corner of the sky.

And yet...I often fear that I will be alone, inevitably, utterly and irrevocably. I am afraid that who I truly am (and could be) will go unnoticed/unchosen by others. I am afraid that I am a means to an end and not myself an irreplacable need for which others yearn. And this fear sometimes seizes me when I cook alone or when I am among friends and feel an unfathomable distance between us or when the Black woman who looks like my aunt frowns and wishes for my extinction because I am holding hands with a white boy who loves me. When I came out to my mother she wept and said "the road ahead of you is so, so lonely" and those words often make it difficult for me to breathe.

I want to pose this to you, companera: when we say that we are lonely, is it only a loneliness for a partner? Or is it a loneliness for something more expansive? As I've been writing this letter to you it is dawning on me that my loneliness springs, not (merely) from the absence of a partner, but from the absence of a society which affirms my significance. I am lonely because I live in a society which desires my destruction. What I yearn for cannot be compressed into a romantic relationship (and when I have tried to do this I have often hurt myself and others). I wonder if we have not been convinced to lower our sights and search for that sense of completion and love which only a life-loving society can give, in personal relationships. Or rather, we use personal relationships to cope with the scarcity of love in our social lives. This is not to say that our romantic, friendship, and community relationships are not essential. But I sense that the love of which you and I speak is not only about these kinds of relationships. I know that my isolation, my difficulty in loving myself and others, my loneliness all grow from inherently oppressive social relations, many of which I have internalized. And while I can internally resist this colonization of my self, decolonization of the self without decolonization of the land and society is self-deception. I wonder, will my loneliness disappear if I find someone who loves me deeply, but I continue to live in a society that does not love me? Does not love you and I? I do not believe that it will.

I say this because, as you know, I have recently had my ability to earn a living (what a terrifying phrase!) taken away from me because I would not cut my hair. And ever since the day that I was fired I have been overcome with the need to find someone to love me. I feel more strongly than ever the desire to be desired. I want someone to love my hair, to need me just the way I am. I need someone to affirm me against the social system which does not love me. It is true that I myself must love myself. It is true that I must affirm my own existence. But isn't the fact that I love myself against an entire society the root of my feelings of loneliness and isolation? If I am alone in valuing my whole self, who am I and what does it mean for me to live here, today, in this united states? The sense that our lives are significant and the sense that our lives are (socially) valued are two different (though related) things. And in many ways the realization of my own self worth against my social devaluation is the source of so much pain, hurt, and loneliness as well as a source of strength and defiance. Perhaps this is something like what you said about being a single mother. Knowing that you have not been able to rely on others has become, in some ways, a source of strength. But it is also at the root of so much pain and it makes it difficult to reach out and ask for help. This kind of contradiction which we daily and hourly negotiate in order to survive, generates a deep-seated longing for communion. And the absence of that communion takes the form of loneliness.

But loneliness, my beloved, will not destroy me and I have faith that, if we can struggle together, it will not detroy you either. We have endured it before and we are still here. I know that I have survived because I have been a part of relationships and struggles that have made new types of love possible where they were not possible before. When I was growing up I did not have the conditions--the knowledge, the community, the space--to love myself. But I have struggled against it all and, with ever more comrades, today I can say that I am able to love myself in ways that I previously could not. And in similar ways I have struggled to make love possible between myself and my white and my hetero companer@s. Each of these struggles was more than "realizing" an already existant love. It was more than "learning" to love. Our love---and the character of solidarity and intimacy of which that love is composed---is possible because of abolitionists and the freedom movements and because of feminists and queer radicals who ended situations of oppression that limited our capacities and our abilities to love one another more fully. And in turn I pass on and make more possible through my everyday living, seeds of a world more dignified and loving, more beautiful, more human. A world where each of us will be less and less alone.

And so I must ask myself, what will it take, what kinds of struggles are necessary to make the love for which we hunger (more) possible? Sister, let me rephrase my question: how does the hunger for a love which we have never (fully) known but always needed, how does that hunger help us understand how and for what we must struggle? What kinds of relations must be destroyed and what kinds of relations must be created to bring that love into being? And what of the meantime? How will we survive in struggle?

I have only begun to think of answers. Rather, I have only begun to live the answers that I know and I am still finding ways of living the question itself so that one day, perhaps, I will arrive at more complete answers (as Rilke suggets and I have come to believe). I do not know how to "find" someone to love me. But I am learning how to create the conditions which make this kind of love possible for myself and others. I am teaching myself and learning with others how to infuse our struggle with a fierce and tender kind of love. With accountability and recognition of desire. I do not know how or if or when someone will fall in love with me in the ways that I feel a need. I know that if they do fall in love with me it will be because they see that I am living what I have been called here to do.

I know that we will need affirming community, dignified housing, nourishing food, and meaningful work. I'm fighting for more of us to have more of these things. I am fighting to live my life as an out QueerBlackRadical so that others can see that it is possible to be and to love ourselves--and that the struggle to do so is worth the trouble. I am fighting to be there when someone needs to hear/know that they are something miraculous and invigorating. I am learning not to wait for a crisis to let them know this. I am learning to celebrate all the beautiful things even in my moments of defeat. I am fighting to do intellectual work which helps us imagine something new and understand ourselves in new and liberating ways. I am learning to speak even when I am afraid. That is I'm fighting for a world in which it is more possible to love more fully. This is what I know how to do. It is the way that I know how to love abundantly. And although this work has not yet led to the kind of love for which I yearn, it has begun to bring that love into my life. Through friends, through self-realization, and through changing broader social relations. It is my hope that someday it will attract the love of a partner. But I do not struggle simply in order to receive this love that I need. I struggle because I love; because I need to express the love which is the life-giving force of my existence. And such love is so desperately necessary in this season of drought.

Theory of Surplus Value

the mania of a new moon
the acuity of a desire that longs to fulfill itself and become extinct
the dogs that won't stop barking at night
poetry that tastes like medicine
the silver bell that lives on the altar

the straw mat my blue shoes the overdraft fee
and the reading group

over and above the clamor of this population
i dimly perceive something that bids me continue

i write another proposal open another book
start another conversation answer another phone call
continue to put my left foot in front of my right foot and then
the right in front of the left

4 Ingredients in My Identity

1

Sitting on Alexis' porch I am surrounded by the most copies of Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider that I have ever seen in one place. A group of Durham movement folks has come together for the first "Summer of Our Lorde" event to discuss the uses of anger and the experience of racism; to read an essay from a book that saved my life because it had changed someone else's and they had passed it on to me.

2

Sarah Vaughn's "When Sunny Gets Blue" playing in the dark of an apartment somewhere in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Raleigh, or Durham: When Sunny gets blue, his eyes get grey and cloudy, then the rain begins to fall. Pitter patter, pitter patter, love is gone so what can matter? No sweet lover man comes to call...Just one gendered pronoun tells me I am not alone and not the first...and pretty dreams rise up, where the other dreams fell through...

3

Belia, Alba, and Aleh all laugh because we've all seen But I'm A Cheerleader. We don't all know each other or live in the same place but we are all laughing together, in the same generation.

4

I sit on my kitchen floor while Kenya cuts open a cigar, carefully dumps out the tobacco, adds the herb, and rolls a blunt in a state of meditation. She tells me, in a voice that speaks past me like the wind on its way somewhere, what it takes to make a change in our own lives. Soon the children will come back from the playground and we will take the gingerbread out of the oven.

A Movie From My Childhood

So there I was wondering how to pass time on one of those unemployed days. I was too saturated with social theory to do any serious reading and I didn't have a good novel in which to get lost. And, since it was raining, I couldn't pass time by going anywhere. Even if I had wanted to go walking in the rain the fact that I was babysitting my neighbor's dog precluded any longterm absence from the house (I couldn't bear to see her sad eyes when I closed the door behind me).

Naturally, my mind went to thoughts about movies I could download on my brand spankin' new internet connection. But what to download? I found myself on the netflix website looking for inspiration. Inevitably I decided to browse through the gay/lesbian theme. I couldn't help myself. I knew it was probably a narrow selection of bad movies with the same theme. I had browsed that section when I had a netflix subscription. But I felt compelled. It was the same kind of inexorable pull as opening a refrigerator every 10 minutes looking for something to eat even though you know that nothing is in there that wasn't there the last time you looked. The hope, I suppose, is that increased hunger will make you see things differently.

But luckily, on this occaison I immediately saw something that caught my eye, a film entitled But I'm a Cheerleader. I went into a flashback. When I was a pre-teen I had seen this movie one odd sunday at my grandmother's house (my memory feels like a sunday, though I can't be sure). It was on TNT or some other movie channel that you only watch because nothing else is on. I remember the title screen and the opening music being totally unattractive. What, after all, could a movie about cheerleaders have in store for me?

As fate would have it my boredom won out over my aversion and I didn't change the channel. I soon discovered that the movie wasn't about cheerleaders as normally portrayed in high school coming of age movies. Oh, no! This was a comedy about a cheerleader whose parents and friends suspect that she's a lesbian and send her to a crazy rehab camp. The movie is chock full of hilarious scenes of "heterosexual simulation therapy" and gender reorientation exercises.

Seeing the title in the netflix browser brought back my memories of the movie and I wondered why I had never remembered it before. I saw it long before I had come out and way before I was able to think of my Queer identity positively. Watching the movie again (I watched it online since no one seemed to have it available to download on Acquisition), I realized that this movie offered some positive counter-narratives to the heteronormitive discourse. Of course from my Queer radical stance today I would critique it as a largely middle-class, white because it ignores the roles of race and class in gender and sexual identity. But back when I first saw it it was probably the first time I had ever seen a satirical commentary on heteronormitivity from a lesbian perspective. I wondered to myself how in the world it had made its way on to TNT, which usually shows action flicks and old westerns and I wondered if any other Queer youth had seen and been influenced by this movie.

The movie does have funny parts. It's pretty corny and there's little depth to the characters but it's not meant to be a profound drama. It doesn't make it onto my list of favorites, but I'm glad I watched it again. This time around my favorite part was probably realizing that the cute Filipino gay wrestler is the same guy who plays Rufio in the movie Hook. Back in the early 90's, when I first saw Hook (a wonderful version of Peter Pan with Robin Williams), I had such a crush on Rufio. Back then, of course, I didn't know that this feeling was called "homosexual," but I did know that my interest in Never Never Land was less about the idea of never growing up and more about Rufio and a place where boys lived with other boys and weren't expected to fall in love with girls.

Anyway, the guy who plays Rufio in Hook (Dante Basco) plays a gay athlete in But I'm A Cheerleader. How rewarding to see my childhood movie crush making out with another boy! That alone was well worth the watch. If you want to see the movie yourself you can check it out here. I don't promise you'll like it, but for me it was a warm memory that I almost forgot.

PS: for all you Avatar fans, Dante Basco is also the voice of Prince Zuko.

Poems for the Erotically at Risk

Blogs are terrible places to write poetry. The formatting is so SHITTY. Anyhow, I am determined to share these poems and get folks' feedback. I'm really trying to workshop them so please sit with them for awhile before getting back to me....or tell me what your first responses are and then sit with them again to get another taste. The subject matter is kinda heavy which makes analysis hard sometimes. But I trust you fabulous folks can find a way to engage the poems as both my own expressions and as tools needing refinement. Here's the link to the document with the poems.

MySpace...WTF?!?

So last night, instead of getting my rest (I woke up at 7am to work on the El Kilombo garden/farm), I stayed up till 3am designing the MySpace page I recently signed up for. I have been shunning MySpace for years now but everyone says I need to get on in order to stay connected with people.

Well, I'm gonna try it out for a little longer but if I keep getting friend requests from make-believe women who say they want to share their nude photos with me I'm outta there. I mean, I don't know how people stand the constant ads of women sucking lollie pops or the annoying fake videos of blondes pulling back their hair while pretend typing at a computer and laughing. UGH! The hetero-sexism of MySpace is disgusting. I might stick to self-created blogs and wikis...

Does anyone know if I change my gender and relationship status these stupid ads will stop coming in?

The Worth of Our Work

Recently I've been wrestling with being an unorthodox intellectual. Since moving to Durham I've met all these amazing people who know all these incredible things. Some folks know how to raise animals and grow food. Other people know woodworking and mechanical engineering. Still others are academic intellectuals with impressive command of ideas and language or local history and culture. I've been learning a lot from all these folks.

The trouble is that I often find it hard to see what it is that I have to contribute. For one thing, many of the people I've surrounded myself with focus more on working with their hands and the ideas related to this work. For example, the agrarian people I'm working with do intellectual work around both the technical aspects of farming and the social, spiritual, and ecological dimensions of farming. This is amazing stuff, but it's often hard to find a place where my work-- economics, epistemology, and historical sociology--connects and makes sense.

Writing it down this problem appears superficial and foolish. Obviously the issue are connected. The real difficulty I face is that the "high theory" work that I've been engrossed in for two or more years isn't something that most people feel is relevant to their interests. Why should folks be interested in Hegel's critique of causation and empiricism? Why should people be interested in the conflicts between feminists, Black radicals, anti-imperialists, and marxists over the labor theory of value? In activist and many other spaces I find myself in "abstract" theory is looked down upon or, at the very least, shunned.

Most often the reason is because abstract theory is often alienating and jargon-laden. But then, as I learned from my neighbor how to rebuild a bicycle I realized that there is jargon and technical knowledge associated with those things as well. When he asked me to hand him the crescent-wrench I froze. Which one was the crescent? Which was the allen? If I didn't know what would he think of me? Obviously he expected me to know. I felt stupid, as if something was wrong with me or as if I lacked a proper (male) upbringing which would have taught me which wrench was which. And that was just a bike. Learning to drive, how to use power tools, how to slaughter a chicken. All these things have jargon, skills, and knowledges that must be learned and not knowing them can be frightening and intimidating. Those who command these things have power.

The difference, perhaps, between the knowledge/work of abstract theory and the knowledge/work of so-called "manual labor" is that one is often connected to greater social privilege. The concepts and theories of so-called "mental labor" are often kept away from the vast majority of people and used to organize and govern society hierarchically. I think there is a certain resentment and anti-intellectual sentiment in many activist and anti-authoritarian/communal spaces because intense intellectual work is associated with power over others, privilege (higher income, better standard of living, etc), and leisure time.
But here I am trying to live my life as an intellectual against all of that (which is not to say I do not have privileges, because I have a great many). I believe that the theoretical and philosophical work I'm doing is important and relevant to the people I am working with but they often show very little interest in that work. This often makes me question myself. I sit in my house looking at all the books I've collected and loved and struggled with and I wonder sometimes if all that work was wasted. If I am an abstract theorist drifting in a vacuum of detached ideas and petty scholastic debates. Isn't the value theory debate the modern version of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?

But then something happens that makes me remember why I do this work. The latest experience was talking with a friend, Nathaniel, who's been struggling with his relationship to "the other side of the tracks". Nathaniel is a bi-racial brother who's dating this middle-class white woman and is basically living in the social circles of non-profit, yuppie, white folks as the token person of color and token working-class person. We got coffee the other night and talked about what it's like to live in a city as segregated as Durham (someone once said that capitalism is "class apartheid"). Our conversation ranged all over the place and we touched on tons of subjects.

Somewhere in the middle of the conversation (before talking about Queer politics and after talking about Frantz Fanon, gentrification, and yuppie settler colonies), I realized that my very ability to think and respond to his questions and struggles was a product of my theoretical work. My ability to connect issues, to provide advice, to listen and to re-present issues in ways that helped people see the world differently, and to offer critical yet affirming analyses is a direct result of my work.

It's like learning dance. When you are learning a complicated step and you are counting the beats and repeating the motions it seems so different from dancing. When you are doing your conditioning exercises and your stretches it seems so abstract. The "moment" of dancing, when your body "spontaneously" responds to the music and feels as if it's moving almost by itself, however, is not a "natural" or purely "instinctual" phenomenon (no matter how much the white hippie exoticists might want you to be a native more in touch with nature). Muscle memory and spontaneity are the result of a learning process. We teach ourselves to be natural.

My friend Justyna says that re-wiring our minds is hard work, and it's the truth. The work I'm doing, learning to re-wire the ways that I think about knowledge, about spirituality, about economics and social life--all of this is expressed by the way that I live and speak. And that has real worth. It can be as much about living as anything else. The fact that it is abstract needs to stop being a reason to discount it.

We need to stop being so utilitarian about knowledge and intellectual work and recognize that all of our work is an expression of questions we are working out; questions about how to live. We need to learn to pay attention to all the ways that people ask these questions and support the ways that they go about living their way into the solutions.

For my part I'm glad I'm learning new questions and new solutions to living from new folks. What I'm no longer interested in is proving to others why my ideas are relevant or valid, trying to make my life and questions meaningful on someone else's terms. Rather, I want to demonstrate, through living the contradiction and synthesis of intellectual and manual work, the ways that our various ways of living are connected, how they are limited and set into antagonisms by the system we live under, and how we can begin living our way into some new ways of living...together.

pondering the far side of the moon because it means something to me and my soul mate,
Don Petro
Southern Liberation Front

After Urbanism: Comprehensive Land Reform

Something like ten years ago I started growing plants in my room. It started with a devil's ivy clipping from my aunt and became a room full of tropical plants complete with a vaporizor machine (for humidity), hanging lights, a fan, and a tub of 108 gold fish (one for each name of Shiva). Eventually my family built a small house and I got a yard. I quickly went to work planting a small orchard and a vegetable garden. I tried to grow some grains, but it didn't work out.

I never felt so good as I did when I was working that garden. It was hard work, but it was also calming. Not only that, I was continuously amazed by the things I saw in my own backyard. The white snails with their enormous shells, the flambouyant red fungi that exploded in the nooks of trenches, even the hedgehog that always ate my blackberries the day before I planned to pick them. I didn't know it then, but something in me germinated during those early times of gardening: a desire for a less urban life.

But it was difficult to know this, since many of us city folks are raised without a concept of anything but an urban life. No one encourages us to grow up and move into the country. Of course, the big reason for this is economic. There is little money invested in non-urban areas. Jobs are scarce, infrastructure (water, electricity, paved roads) is often shitty , and poverty is much more common. Folks have become urban because that's what most people have had to do in order to survive.

What has forced this migration? The mechanization of agriculture, the concentration of land ownership into fewer and fewer hands, corporate monopolies over agricultural products, and the sheer brutality and violence used to enforce the 'order' of rural social hierarchies (e.g. slavery, latifundas, sharecropping, debt peonage, para/military terror, etc). At the same time cities have become places where more and more capital has been invested, generating jobs.

Thus, 2008 is the year when, for the first time, more than half of the world's population is living in urban areas. This is a huge change from the beginning of the 20th century (the 1900's) when only about 14% lived in cities.

Why, then, am I talking about life after ubanism if now is the most urban period in human history? The first and most obvious reason is that such cancerous urbanism is unsustainable. On a basic level the growth of cities, which has been mostly in the global South, has meant the growth of slums with little access to basic services and needs like jobs, water, housing, and safety. Ecologically as well cities on the scale that we are seeing them today are not practical. They simply suck up too much energy and belch out too much pollution.

If that isn't enough then consider the fact that even though the main motivation for moving from the rural to the urban areas is economic, urban areas are not structured to provide all these folks with employment. Rural to urban migration has always been something that urban industrial capitalists have encouraged because it put more people in competition for the same jobs, thus lowering wages. Landlords and real estate capitalists have also profited from the shifts in the uses of urban land, whether by building labor camp housing (i.e. slums, projects, etc) or luxury, leisure and business properties. Meanwhile the rural land owners, from families to megacorporations, have snatched up more and more land for themselves.

One of the greatests losses that many of us urban folks have endured is the fading away of our rurally based cultural heritages. Often that has meant losing our autonomy--our capacity to do things for ourselves--as well as our ability to form healthy communities. Land is the basis for community and for autonomy. Forced into becoming renters and wage-slaves we have lost many of the skills, knowledge, and cultural folkways that grew from sharing land.

I moved to NC to reconnect to my rural heritage. (The South not only has the largest concentration of Black folks in the u.s., it also has the most rural folks of all the u.s. regions). Up North Black culture is an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. No doubt we have developed strong and powerful traditions, but we have lost a part of ourselves. The South is also increasingly urban, but there still exists a rural tradition amongst Black folks and other folks too. This is what I'm immersing myself in. Learning about raising animals and also killing them. Learning about fixing things and making them. Learning about families and geneaologies and the overlapping histories of Black folks and white folks and indigenous peoples and brown folks of all kinds.

The other day I went out to a dairy farm and listened to a man talk about cows. I saw the calves and pondered over the fact that conception rates for cattle have gone from 80% to 40% in the last 50 years. Why? How? We don't know yet, he says. I rode out and sat with a six-year-old girl named Eden and watched the bald eagles circle their nest in the pine tree over the corn field. The corn field where the corn is a foot shorter than it should be because we are still in a drought. And I thought how much work has to be done in our generation. How many questions of an urgent nature, such as "What's happening to the life-systems that are the foundation of our foodways?", that need to be addressed.

A few weeks ago my brother's girlfriend came to visit from Baltimore. That city that so many know through The Wire HBO show. A city of poverty, drug dependence, violence, and desperate hope (often called despair). She stayed for a few days on the farm where my brother works and by the end she was agreeing with my brother and I that our people need to get beyond urbanism because that culture, that way of just-barely-living (i.e. hustling) is killing us.

But I am not advocating simple flight from the cities. We can't run from the city looking for a utopia in the rural areas. It didn't work when we came to the cities, so why would it work in reverse? The problem isn't the idea of living it cities by itself. The problem is that the cities that now exist are capitalist cities. They are cities where all the contradictions and hierarchies of the system are concentrated into a tiny area. If we learn anything from our combined rural and urban experiences of migration, wage-slavery, debt peonage, gentrification, and ecological disaster, it should be that what we need is comprehensive land reform.

By comprehensive I mean land reform that restructures both urban and rural ways of dealing with land. These days there is exciting work being done on the "right to the city" fights against gentrification. But there are also rural or non-metropolitan struggles going on outside cities by small towns and rural areas against hog farming that poisons the water and the air; against resorts and tourist industries that monopolize, exclusivize, and destroy beaches and other ecological areas; against highways and wal-marts. We need to connect these struggles.

But we need to go further. We need to begin envisioning and fighting for a world beyond urbanism. That means a world where resources are invested outside the big cities as well as inside them. The right to the city is important but we also need a right to the country. Our people need to have access to land to grow food, raise animals, care for the earth that is the basis for the communities and life-ways of both cities and non-urban areas. According to the Right to the City Alliance, 85% of people in the u.s. live in urban areas and these areas account for 85% of jobs. But then, who owns and controls the use of the vast majority of non-metropolitan land in the u.s.? And how does that effect those in the city, who are dependent upon their jobs (for which there is increasing competition and decreasing wages) for food and everything else? And what about the quality and price of our foods? The inflation on food products should be a wake-up call y'all!!

We need rural development. Not capitalist accumulation in rural areas, but services and resources to (re)build social life in our non-metro areas, to repair soils and waterways, to exchange skills and develop just and democratic (self)government. We need farm co-operatives and resources for small farmers. This is crucial if we are going to topple the corporate agricultural armies who are destroying rural life in the global South and are the top dogs in the neoliberal juntas. It is the genocide of NAFTA and other "free trade" deals that is at the root of the uprooting of so many folks who migrate to the u.s. from México. It is the ecocide of factory farming, mountain top removal, strip mining, and deforestation that is killing the planet and driving the weather crazy.

We need new maroons who are willing to build new types of rural/semi-urban communities for re-building the land, uniting rural and urban traditions and struggles, and teaching skills from food production to herbal medicine to construction trades and converting engines to biodiesel. That's how I see myself: a contemporary maroon, connecting the urban and the rural, finding new ways to carve out autonomous spaces outside the metropolis as both a liberated territory and as a staging ground for struggle in/against/for the metropolis.

We need cooperative ownership of land in cities and outside of cities. In fact, I would propose that every land cooperative should own land in the city and in the surrounding rural area. In Cuba there was a program slogan that called for the "urbanization of the country and the ruralization of the city".

An increase of resource investment in rural areas must be ON TOP OF social investment in cities. That is we cannot allow them to be played off one another. WE WANT EVERYTHING, DAMMIT! And how we gonna get these resources? We gotta learn from our comrades in the South: occupy, protest, organize, cooperate!

In this moment when the struggle over housing and gentrification is setting its sights on the question of land, we need to seize the opportunity to broaden our vision. Land is not something that ends at the city limits. It is an interconnected eco-social system. Our food and water and air depend on rural areas. The city and the country are one organic unit. The separation of the two has been no less damaging to our peoples than the separation and antagonisms around race, gender, nationalities, etc that have been set into hierarchies to the benefit of those who rule.

By connecting the rural to the urban we will begin to regain the land and the social relations (for land is an eco-social relation) that are the foundations of autonomy and community.

Down with the tyranny of landlords, urban and rural!
End landlessness/homelessness!
Comprehensive Land Reform in the u.s.!

from the mountains of desire,
Don Petro

Doin the Damn Thang!

Comrades and compañer@s, friends and enemies,

Good news: as of today, 1100 hours, I've got internet at home! I've been cut off from communications with all you other guerilla units for way too long. From now forward expect regular updates from the Durham, NC fight against yuppies, nihilism, apathy, capitalism, michelle obama (that's right, i said it), and multi-culti hippie la la la. Now's the time for the radical imagination, anarchist eroticism, and home baked bread (down with Aunt Millie and Sara Lee!). Now's the time to rise up against jedi liberalism and luxury condominiums. Keep ya eyes open and your heart full of passion cause there's beauty in this here struggle. I know cause I've been living it.

This and the previous entry have been short, but expect some substantial material soon!

Affirmations

“I imagine a flower in bloom, except the petals endlessly unfold and grow until everything outside has been embraced by the flower itself, and ‘outside’ is ‘in’ and there are no barriers between.”
--Sean Connelley

My mama called to tell me that my trees are bearing fruit. The two black cherries, the granny smith apple, and the pear in the front yard and the two red delicious apples in the back yard—all of them have fruit. This on top of the grape vine that’s been producing fragrant fruit for two years now. And how appropriate this is as I come of age, as I become the me that I wanted to be for so long, as I bear my own fruit. It affirms, participates in, bears witness to, and confirms all that I’ve been through and all that I’ve become. And inside the fruit of affirmation is the seed of the world of which we dream and for which we struggle.

What is the Court of Miracles?

A few years ago I was watching The Hunchback of Notre Dame (I admit it, it was the disney version). In the story there is an underground city of gyspies called "the court of miracles". This place was contrasted to "the court of justice," where Frolo, the minister of justice in Paris, was in charge. The court of justice was a place where those in power imposed their rule on the people of the city. The court of miracles was the place where the marginalized and persecuted built community outside of and against the ruling relations. Of course, that's not how the disney movie put it, but I have a tendency to read a lot into disney cartoons.

Anyhow, I was excited about this idea. In a lot of ways it connected to my research into the resistance of enslaved Africans during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. The court of miracles was a sort of kilombo (runaway/maroon community), where new relationships were built beyond and against the current system.

Little did I know how accurate this comparison was. A week or so ago, I was reading Karl Marx's account of the enclosurement movement in Europe. This movement basically turned land previously used for subsistence agriculture into land for pasturing sheep, whose wool was sold for profit as part of the emerging cloth manufacturing industry. What this meant was that thousands of people were thrown off their land and turned into vagabonds. As if this wasn't enough, the States of Europe passed laws which said that anyone able to work but found begging or wandering about was subject to cruel torture, enslavement, and even execution. Against this persecution many of the uprooted formed clandestine communities. Marx writes that "by the middle of the 17th century a kingdom of vagabonds (truands) was established in Paris" (Capital Vol. 1, pgs. 736-7). What this connection does is relate being a vagabond to two things: being dispossesed and creating new, autonomous and insurgent forms of community.

That suites me just fine! I consider myself a present-day vagabond. And when I look around me and see folks who are un(der)employed, who do not own the places in which they live, who must slave to survive or face the consequences---when I see all of this and the despair that it breeds, I know that we need autonomous spaces more than ever. The Court of Miracles, my blog, is the digital expression of my efforts to create this kind of space. It's the idea of a mobile community of resistance.

But there is something important about the disney movie. In that movie the citizens of the court of miracles are also the people who make the feast of fools (a peasant festival) come alive. During the festival, the people who usually must hide, come forward and turn the world upside-down and inside-out. Everyone in all of Paris joins in, breaking out of the roles proscribed by dominant social relations. This is crucial because revolution, resistance, and transformation are often at their most radical when, through expressions of creativity and communal celebration, people re-connect to what is essentially human in us all. Just a few thoughts on a few lines that made a few more connections....

Dispatches & A Communiqué

9 May 2009 (friday)
at approximately 11:30pm my neighbor Cole and I decide to head down to the cornerstore. Everything seems normal. My neighbor purchases a cigarello and goes back out to the car. I wait in line to buy some cookies to go with the masala tea we plan on brewing. The man in front of me takes longer than expected to purchase his food (I use the term loosely. Most of the "food" in these stores has little nutritive value). In come a few Black guys. Our eyes meet. I become hyper-conscious of the fact that I am wearing my rainbow jacket (looking FABULOUS, for the record). There is a moment of tense uncertainty as I am looked over by each of them. I purchase the cookies and get into the car where Cole is waiting. Once in the car I exhale.

"It's probably not a good idea to wear that in this neighborhood at this time of night," Cole 'informs' me. Of course, comrades, I am very aware of the dangers of being Black, working class, and Queer. He continues to 'educate' me:

"I know wearing that jacket probably has something to do with your values, but you gotta think about where we live." I remain silent. I wonder if he knows what his words mean in the context of my struggle. He doesn't know. Doesn't know how I joined this army whose struggle is the right to be. Doesn't know that these colors are not about "pride". They are a declaration of independence, a declaration of war, a challenge, a refusal to be made to hide.

"...I wouldn't mind so much if I was a girl," he says. For a moment I'm confused. Then the meaning strikes me. He means that people assume that he and I are together, or at least that both of us are faggots, and that that is dangerous for us both.

"It's not that I don't want to drive with you wearing that shirt. I mean, it's your call. But a quick change of shirts can save a lot of trouble." The blow I had expected doesn't come from the men who eyed me threateningly. It comes now, when I thought I was 'safe'. I say something about realizing the dangers and look out the window.

Cole and I moved in to the same duplex on the same day. After we met we went to the Wal-Mart to get things for our apartments. I was wearing the same jacket then. I remember we were standing in the check-out line. The cashier woman was talking to Cole and then she realized we had come to shop together. The air shifted subtly under the inquiry of her gaze. The conversation continued as if all was normal, but the tempature seemed to have risen three or four degrees. I remember thinking after that, each time Cole and I went somewhere together, that he was really cool because he didn't mind people's assumptions.

But on friday that changed. He did mind certain assumptions in certain places, at certain times. That is, he did mind being put in danger by the assumptions of the queer-bashing fascists who frequent the streets in working-class, Black neighborhoods. In some ways I didn't blame him. He never signed up for my crusade. I hadn't asked him if he would be my comrade in my people's struggle for the right to exist anywhere we went.

While he was educating me on the dangers of my political fashions I thought about about Bob Moses from SNCC. I remembered reading about how he had been assaulted by a police officer and by racists and how he had kept going. Beating after beating he kept fighting. Why? He had faced that violence head-on because he needed to break the fear that kept Black folks from standing up for their rights. I think to myself that I would take a beating for being militantly and unabashedly queer in a Black working-class neighborhood. I think of the queens and the transpeople of color who I've always revered for their courage to be Queer in working-class environments. I refuse to only be "out" in white, middle-class areas. I think to myself that it is worth it to continue to wear my declaration of war unabashedly, even if it means violence. Because I intend to conquer the fear that set me running last year when the queer-bashers in Raleigh chased me down the street.

Of course, war requires comrades, strategy, and arms. Perhaps I should learn martial arts and carry a good weapon or two. And perhaps I should inform people that my life is a struggle and that walking down the street with me at night could mean joinging the fight whether they believe in it or not. And I think to myself that more than anything I would love to live with other militant Queer people and put a sign on our door:

BEWARE: SOMETIMES QUEERS BASH BACK!

12 May 2009 (monday)
I go to the dentist to get a filling (I'm supposed to get two, but I can only afford one). While the dentist is working he tells me, since I'm such a good guy and since the economy is so bad, he'll do the other filling 'on the house'. I thank him as sincerely as I can with a drill and a wedge in my mouth. He then proceeds to ponder out loud with the assistant whether or not good deeds get one into heaven. My appreciation turns a bit sour. The "charity" for which he is praising himself is a mere $200, chump change in comparison to the $2,000+ I've paid out in the past two months.

"Oh well," he says, giving up on the idea of buying his way into heaven, "Maybe St. Peter will just bless me in some other way."

The receptionist at the dentist office has not been informed of the dentist's "charity" and asks me to pay the full price for both fillings. "I thought you could only afford one. Did you change your mind?" I swallow my pride and tell her that I can only afford the one but that the dentist said the other was on the house. "Oh!" she says, and makes the extra $200 disappear with a few key strokes.

As she looks up from her computer screen she sees my rainbow bracelet. "Oh! My son has one of those. They handed them out at his school." Surprised I ask what school. Turns out it's an elementary. I'm a bit puzzled.

"All colors, all cultures, all equal," she pines. "That's our motto!" I look at her face beaming with pride. I won't tell her what this bracelet has cost me. I won't tell her what I think about her son's "inclusive" school or what I think about her crusade on behalf of "the ESL population" of the school. I won't tell her that I am not set at ease by the fact that she was willing to be a surrogate mother for a gay couple. I simply smile and nod when she says, under her breath, that some of best friends are gay couples (I must admit I am shocked that she uses this phrase that today even most liberal white folks know is cliché and evidence of patronism). I won't say that "safety" and "inclusion" is a commodity like everything else, available only to folks like her who can afford it. That I am going home to a place where battles must be fought to make it safe to be Queer. Where bracelets and rhetoric must be made into weapons rather than flags. I smile and pay my bill.

War Is Never "Just" A Metaphor
Scattered across the planet are people who refuse to be silent. Who refuse to wear heterosexual camouflage and fiercely lead the attack against our oppression. These fighters--effeminists, trans folks, queens, butches, femmes, crossdressers, androgynous sabateurs--require your solidarity. We are presently engaged in an all-out battle to break the encirclement of our bodies and our desires and every bit of ammunition is crucial.

The war is not about "rights," comrades and allies. It's about power. Perhaps this power seems incosequential to you. Perhaps the struggle to wear what one pleases and to love who one wants to love seems like a minor thing next to the struggle for housing or for an end to hunger and AIDS or for the abolition of capital(ism). Perhaps you think my "militarist" language is hyperbole and histrionic. But consider this companer@s: the struggle against oppression is and can only be carried out by those who fight with their entire selves. We are not fighting for higher wages or better environmental protection or better schools. We are fighting for better lives. For dignity. For a more human world, less ugly and more loving. Ours is not a struggle "next to" the material struggles. It is one within them.

Within the fight for better conditions are people---living, loving, beautiful human beings---whose unexercised potentials and capacities alone constitute both the source and the subject of our liberation struggles. Ours is a war against the limit on human freedom, the impoverishment of human capacity by poverty, fear, abuse, patriarchy, violence, imperialism, heterosexism, white supremacy, and despair. What besides the blossoming of our very human love could be worth all this effort? And what besides the power to defend our right to be free can secure our liberation?

Those who live this struggle know that it's not merely about "discrimination" or "prejucide". War is not "just a metaphor." Homophobia is not an attitude, it's a fist, it's a threat, it's the fear of going home because something violent lurks there. War is a concept that captures our experience and re-organizes it in a way that lets us fight back. This is why I speak this way. This is why I appeal to our allies to understand the nature of our struggle and to our people to understand that we can change things when we learn to organize and to fight.

Concerning change and fighting back: resolutions and legislation are a beginning, but they will not be enough. Legislation does not protect us on the street at night. Resolutions do not help us defeat the strategy of suicide and despair imposed on us. "Rights" do not reach into the "private" world of the family where so much oppression against Queer people occurs. Nor will police patrols, the regulation of families by the government, or "diversity" training make us safe. Ours is a struggle to organize ourselves and change the conditions and consciousness of our communities. Our is a fight to unite our forces into guerilla units to advance the struggle everywhere by the power of our own hands, lips, libidos, words and fists.

Public displays of Queer affection defended by our strength and our willingness to defend one another and our homes are one way that we can begin. Not as some performance protest, but as an aspect of our everday lives, where we need to be able to love and defend our love. Challenging all the faggot jokes because we know we will be backed up by our comrades with whom we have committed to changing the world. Keeping an eye out for our Queer youth and elders who are still prisoners of war (that is who hate and hurt themselves because they are trapped in the psychological prisons manufactured for us). Preparing ourselves to help those who need it. Training ourselves to listen and to respond to the trauma and violence that characterize our collective experience. These and more are the kinds of tractics and strategies we must consider if we intend to win this war.

Viva Vagabundencia!
Sodomía o muerta!

from the mountains of desire,
Don Petro of the Southern Liberation Front

"Military" Spending

This year has seen a flurry of government "intervention" in the global economy as a result of the cascading "crises" that have struck the u.s. and the world from every direction. While I would love to go into a discussion of what these "crises" really are and why they actually benefit certain people (Exxon Mobil recently recorded the highest profits EVER recorded). Unfortunately I am still compiling my data and sharpening my arguments. So, alas, we'll have to settle with a small aspect of the issue: the recent request from the White House for more funds for the occupation of Iraq.

Why take a look at this? Because nestled within this "Iraq Supplemental" bill are some very interesting allocations of funds. One is a $770 million earmark for food aid for countries sinking into mass starvation as a result of the current explosion of food prices. The other is an appropriation of $1.4 billion for "Plan Mexico" or the "Mérida Initiative," which is supposed to set up a "regional security cooperative initiative" between the u.s. and mexican repressive military forces.

Although earmarking $1.4 billion in a bill supposedly about Iraq seems shady to me, it could be argued that they are both military expenditures. We will return to this point. But what about food aid? Why is that part of a war bill?

We can begin to understand the connection between war and food aid policy when we look at the social rebellion that so-called "food shortages" are causing. Under capitalism "need" only exists when there is money behind it. Economists call this "effective demand". Other ideologues call it "dollar democracy" (one 'votes' with one's income....if one has an income).

Despite all of this, sometimes people get angry and desperate enough to vote with their fists. People have nasty habit of thinking they have a right to eat and live. At least people in Haiti and many other places think so...Such rebellious attitudes can topple governments and threaten the rules of private property. They encourage the idea that people should take what they need from an unjust system and those who are hoarding food to make profits.

Bush, expressing concern as rocketing world food prices intensified unrest in poor countries, promised...that the United States would take the lead as hunger takes hold of a greater swathe of the developing world.

One solution would be to force an increase of income (notice that NO major pundit is suggesting that the solution to current economic crises is increased income for the poor and lower segments of the working class). But this would cut into profits. Instead, capitalists and their governments use "aid" (in Bangladesh corporations are providing food for their poorest workers--to keep them working--rather than paying them better). Rather than increase real wages, they choose instead to "provide" a little food. Of course, along with this "aid" comes stipulations. For example, of the $770 million, $395 million is marked for food, while the other $375 million is to be put in the hands of the US Agency for International Development, so they can continue their neo-liberal "structural adjustment" as a requirement for aid. (Anyone who has ever been to a government office for welfare knows this game very well). Failing to follow the rules can mean starving--a useful club to hold in a period when the largest rice producing countries are talking about forming a "rice cartel" to control prices like OPEC does oil and when workers get that itch to do "unwise" things together.

What I'm trying to emphasize is the use of food "aid" as a tool of social control. Once we grasp this we can see how these policies link up with the general policies of "low intensity, perpetual warfare," where the point of militarism, strictly conceived, is only one aspect of a broad and brutal form of social control (rather than the obliteration of an enemy). Food aid is a carrot, the military is the stick. The occupation of Iraq is one piece in the puzzle that includes "Plan Mexico's", the military arm of NAFTA, the record oil profits of Exxon, etc.

Amilcar Cabral, leader of the national liberation movement in Guinea-Bissau during the 70's dealt with a similar tactic being used by the colonial Portuguese government. While the government was drenching rebellious villages in napalm, they simultaneously were providing services and goods for those who cooperated with them. The Portuguese, like the French and u.s. in Vietnam, set up "strategic hamlets," where peasants could live and receive aid. Of course, these hamlets were isolated from the rebellious villages and kept under strict (though benevolent) control. The people of Guinea-Bissau called this "the policy of smiling and bloodshed". An appropriate name.

Meanwhile NAFTA's inclusion of Mexico in the "first world" doesn't seem to be going over too well with the vast majority of the Mexican people. And so, there is a need for better planes, helicopters, and criminal "justice" funding in order to help the Mexican people understand that resistance will not be tolerated. "Plan Mexico" is one and the same with the continuation of "Operation Iraqi Freedom".

Today the u.s. government is a conspirator in a global policy of guns and grain which amounts to about the same as "smiling and bloodshed": death. The fact that the "aid" is part of a military appropriation bill which seeks funding for the further strengthening of the Mexican military and the occupation forces in Iraq should tell us something about what's going on. At moments like these it is essential to remind ourselves that the State is nowhere near exhausted as an institutional bulwark of capital(ism). In moments of "crisis" when food prices and profits sky-rocket, the State makes possible the continued accumulation of capital by means of crisis.

Like addicted gamblers, the rulers of the world couldn't be more excited about the current economic crises. But they are also worried that someone might find out they've stacked the deck and things might get ugly. So, they hedge their bed with a few million dollars of grains and a few billion dollars of guns.

Keep your eyes on the connections comrades!

Durham

yesterday i moved into my new apartment. i burned incense, set up the altar on the mantle of the (bricked-in) fire place, and put on the afro-peruvian/flamenco music mixes that Belia sent me. "i am finally here," i thought to myself. i carefully unfolded the fan Justyna brought me from sevilla, spain and placed it on the altar next to the tibetan prayer wheel Adam gave me. the room, strange because it was new, slowly filled with familiar and loving memories and presences.

i had spent the day at Darion's garden a few miles outside of town. mostly i prepared potato eyes for planting. but i also sat and soaked in the environment from the hammock: the air, the trees, the red clay soil and the flowers with the densely yellow petals, the sun. i adjusted to being in a place where the language of interaction was foreign to me and felt just fine. i listened as people straddled two languages discussing tomorrow's community assembly. what was this feeling? contentment. being in harmony with where i am.

when i got home i sat on the porch, looking up and down the street at nothing in particular. (how wonderful porch-sitting is!). the neighbors waved from their own porches, introduced themselves and asked a few things about me.

durham feels good.

sometime towards the late evening it started pouring down rain, so, naturally, i went outside to sit on the porch and listen to god's applause. a handsome young man was sitting on the porch of the apartment next door. he said his name was Cole. after introductions he made his way over to my porch. my apartment is one half of a duplex, so the two porches, though closed off and separated by a foot or so of ground, are pretty close. so there we sat in the rain talking about where we're from and why we came to durham.

he talked about working on farms, construction, and in factories (mostly in georgia) and i talked about hotel work, school and being queer. we debated the pros and cons of socialism and workplace democracy and talked about weddings, love, and rain. he brought out his sketch book where he works on mechanical design and i brought out some of my poetry. he talked to me about being in love with his fiancé (damn! the good ones are so ofteb hetero/taken) and asked me my thoughts about god.

why am i saying all of this? because in one day i spent more time in warm conversation and environments in durham than i have had in a long time. i was living in space that wasn't hostile to me. a space that affirmed me, asked me questions, wanted my opinion. these people who had never known me took a kind interest and piqued my curiosity. we invited each other into our spaces almost spontaneously and share resources just as freely.

Cole's fed me two bars of chocolate in just two days and today we went shopping for house stuff together. Darion helped me move and is teaching me to drive a stick shift tractor from the 1940's. I gave Cole a carpet, made us a jumbalaya dinner, and am letting him use the washer/dryer in my apartment. I gave Darion some books on agriculture and have been discussing garden plans with him and offering analyses of the current economic crisis. it's amazing really. strangers who want to become friends; this immediate mutuality between us that i have had trouble finding my way back to over the past few years.

i introduced Cole to Darion and they talked excitedly about rigging car motors to propane, fixing motorcycles, and other mechanical things that i have no idea about. i just sat and soaked up the enjoyment of seeing two people share and inspire each other.

i have said that all of this is spontaneous, but it's not really. there's a sense of a shared experience, despite all our difference (Darion from méxico, Cole from georgia, me from michigan). we all stay as far from bourgee folks and have been on the subordinated end of a lot of power relations. there's a certain point of view that is common but unspoken: an anti-authoritarian ethic, a love of sharing our passions and listening to those of others (since work so often crowds out our passions), and a talent for relaxing.

this is not to say that we don't have different ideas, we surely do. but we could see our lives being complimentary, rather than antagonistic. and, of course, other people have other responses to working-class experience. but we had chosen to build a communal approach to the world with our experiences in a way both radically common to all of us and fundamentally unique for each of us. it was good to feel this with new people, to remember that it's possible, miraculous, and common. here we are, making and re-making working-class culture.

in just these past two days new relationships have established themselves. soon we'll be building bookshelves together and planting peanuts. Cole agrees now that workplace democracy is a great idea and i realize that i need to learn how to repair basic mechanical things and drive a tractor. Darion and i will go to lunch together for the period that i'm unemployed (his job is up the street from my apt) and put in a good word for Cole's girlfriend who's trying to get a job where he works.

already, durham feels like home.

The Land & I

it's been raining for almost a week now. the land is healing and i'm beginning to as well. the grasses are springing out of every nook and cranny and the wild scallions give the air everywhere near an open field a pungent hint of onion. the other morning, as i was walking home with my head bowed, i noticed bunches of wild strawberries, their white flower petals thrown open, loose and casual, like the legs of unchaste and unashamed lovers. a layer of yellow pollen covers everything, including anything i leave in front of my open window. the tulip trees unwrap their fleshy blossoms.

and that night that there was a thunderstorm, i can't remember the last time i sat by my window with such a sense of peace.

a people and their land live together, suffer together, celebrate together. north carolina, like myself, has been experiencing a drought. the worst one in recorded history (they say). and that makes me trust her. it's funny. i don't think anyone for at least 1,000 miles really know who i am or what the hell i'm doing. it's only when i see the raucus dandelions spurting out of the newly wetted soil that i feel like someone knows what it's like. the river, who must run downstream nevertheless meanders, unsure if gravity is really all that he should be following. i understand. i know which direction i'm going, but i too doubt, deter, meander in order to come a little closer to someone i love.

you woulnd't believe how the world changes when it rains for a week. the whole world turns green. the impoverished knoll behind my apartment building bursts into life. never mind that the pampered tulips who have been shipped in from the netherlands, fed fertilizers, and kept in the cool shadows of the pines; never mind that they too are blooming. on that hill where the weeds eke out a living, that's where you'll learn something about life. about me. only there do the plants lift their brilliant banners to honor the advent of moisture. the whole earth knows what a carnival is!

rain is applause for life.

A Discussion of Electoral Politics pt3

Here is the last email exhanged between Gary and I:

Peace,

First, I also lease my labor and no-one could ever own it but me. Thank you for the crucial correction. In the shop, when people ask me, "where's your boss?" I've been known to respond "I don't have a boss on this planet, let alone in this building" - I think thats a correction in the spirit of yours.

I guess my thoughts on your response are this. I agree with your analysis that he creates a narrative of unity in a framework that does not challenge capitalism, and significanly downplays a solidarity based on an understanding of how racism creates different levels of oppression within the working class. I think this may be his genuine analysis though it also allows for him to attract capital investment. I think in part though the Democrats got much more investment in part because their policy allows for capital to grow, but also because Capital assumed they were going to be the winners of the election and wanted to build that relationship, because I think there are substanative ways where Republican policy is much more capital friendly and working people -fuck em a over.

When my Hotel brings in a nice smiling African American woman like Julie Coker, as a new General Manager, she is purely an attempt to co-op, as she answer to exactly the same capital aggression as her the predaccessor who was an ass-hole, I don't know that Obama fits completely into her place in the metaphor - which is the question of to what extent is he a reprsentative of the ruling class.

But I think the other thing is...in my hotel. The Front Desk petitioned to unionize unanimously. The Hyatt's response was to give them a $2/hr raise ( a huge fuckin' raise!). That was purposely designed to co-opt them, but I think it will be a matter of leadership whether or not that group of workers will go from just getting the raise to also getting health care, retirement funding, protection against disicipline, and the ability to negotiate over working conditions that comes with being a full fledged Union member. My point is, I think, I don't want to fall into the "I rather George Bush because he tells me he is fucking me over" mantra, I want to develop leadership within a social movement that can challenge people to know that they deserve more than the crumbs of the Democratic party, and all the while be using the electoral system to act much more sophisitatedly in our own interest.

paz

A Discussion of Electoral Politics pt2

Continuing the discussion begun in the last two posts, here is my response to Gary's email:

Salutations,

Yeah, I agree with you that his approach to talking about u.s. history was more than just a few comments. There were incredibly powerful truths that he was giving some voice to. But there is an incredibly subtle but meaningful way that he spoke about this which is co-optative. Talking about racism as a "legacy" of slavery and Jim Crow rather than an inherent way that capital organizes labor hierarchically, talking about corporate "greed" as a "culture" and emphasizing "inside deals" and scandals rather than talking about profit and capital as structurally opposed to worker's well-being, etc.

It is true that what he put forward was indeed different from what the mass media usually presents. I was particularly impressed by his discussion of resentments and consciousness in Black and white communities and the discussions that are going on beyond "polite company".

Yet, I feel it is necessary to see his activities as strategic responses of a particular sector of a class to political pressures. Obama has been forced to take up this discussion. We cannot lose sight of the fact that his narratives are directly related to the denunciation of militant Black nationalist narratives. While one may or may not agree with the rhetoric, the substance of Black nationalism is Black power. Coming together across "race" lines, if it is to be a unity of mutual respect, must mean that Black folks come with their own power. Obama's "unity" erases and even joins in being suspect in attempts to build Black autonomous power. He characterizes it as "left over" resentment. Further, he suggests that really we all have the same interests. That if we simply fight for better schools, jobs, etc, we will all move forward. But this fails to recognize that this does not solve the gap in power/resources between sectors of the working-class. Only power among the most oppressed can do that. But he cleverly undermines the basis for autonomous and militant Black organizing.

Let me clarify my position on Obama as a strategic enemy. I see the electoral system as a battleground between interests like any other social sphere. On the federal level the grounds are incredibly skewed to ruling class interests, but even then these interests must respond to pressure from many different angles. I don't think the struggle for democracy and the vote was meaningless. It creates new pressures and opportunities, it remakes the organization of power on the battlefield. When I said that Obama was my strategic enemy I meant to communicate that while although he represents a good defensive choice among the representatives of ruling class interests, it is crucial to remember that he does indeed represent an attempt to salvage capitalism and make it more attractive to workers. Obama, like any other president, would oppose any attempt to overthrow the system. Not because he's Obama, but because he has been financed and supported by the very corporate elite who he rhetorically critiques, as you point out. [For the record, Global Hyatt/Microtel leases my labor. I own it. Small distinction that is crucial.] He would never go for an end to private ownership of major worksites. He would defend private property to the death...well, maybe some soldier's death, probably not his own.

I do think he is a better candidate than the republicans and perhaps better than Clinton (I don't really have a position on Clinton/Obama). But I think it is essential to remember that he represents an attempt to reassert the power of capital. He may give out important concessions, but he is fundamentally a representative of the ruling class(es). I think it is possible for the ruling class, or sections of it, to be rhetorically critical of certain aspects of the social system. This is even necessary at various times and is sometimes combined with more social spending by government and more leniency towards certain social demands. But they are still ruling class policies in that they give concessions with the ultimate goal of maintaining power and will fight like hell against radical movements.

I think he's worth voting for, however (if you've decided that federal elections are a place you're gonna fight). If you wanna vote for me you'll probably need to move to durham, nc. look for me or someone I really support in 5-10 years. By then I'm hoping there will be something worthy of the title "People's Republic of Durham".

paz

A Discussion of Electoral Politics

My friend Gary and I have been exchanging views around Obama and the meaning and opportunities of the current prez election campaign based on some of the things I said in the previous post. After we sent a few emails back and forth Gary suggested that we post the conversation so that others could participate and/or comment. I thought that would be a great idea so the next few posts will be made up of the discussion that we began. If you want to have your contribution posted then just email it to me. Otherwise just add your comments as usual.

We'll begin with Gary's first reply:

Peace Sendolo,

I also found myself moved by Obama's speech and am struggling with that.

I found your ideas helpful in processing my own.

To be honest I was moved not just by certain parts, but by the worldview he put forward, a view which included recognizing America's sin in slavery and it's legacy still existing today, a critique of the Reagan Coalition of hate, and a call to move forward by recognizing a stake in one another, and even described racial tensions as a distraction from the attacks from corporate culture.

I feel like much of this worldview is still very much in conflict with the popular media affirmed narrative of America, but that he not only put it forward but tried to organize his audience around the truth in this view by connecting it to narratives they could relate to. Of course it's true that one such narrative was American exceptionalism and nationalism.

I think our current political system, its electoral process and such are inextricably linked to ruling class power, but I don't know what extent it is true that Barack Obama's engagement of that process makes him so linked that he himself becomes a strategic enemy.

Hmm. Though its worth recognizing that his engagement of this process has demanded that he get a Chief Financial Officer by the name of Penny Pritzker who actually own both your labor and mine and is an executor of the corporate culture he critiqued.

Well I guess I'll vote for him unless I find out you're running.

La Otra America

So, I just finished watching Obama's speech on race and I need to be honest. I was moved. at various points i wanted him to say something terrible because I know that he is essentially a representative of the ruling class and I hated being moved by someone I know is my strategic enemy. And, at various points, he did say terrible things, like blaming "radical islam" for violence in the middle east and calling israel an ally. But by and large Obama said things that...spoke to me. Dammit, i never thought i would say that, but it's true. Does that mean I support him? No. But it does mean I have to write at least one more post on someone I have been trying to move out of the center of my writing. Well, here goes...

About a year ago I finished reading Lawrence Goodwyn's The Populist Moment, a book about one of the most amazing mass movements in u.s. history. And one of the things that really impressed me was when the historian who wrote the book characterized the populist movement as a struggle for the soul of the country; a struggle to determine whether everyday people would finally take hold of democracy or whether the wealthy would beat back the people and impose a still more oppressive system. I was reminded of something I had read in The Many-Headed Hydra, a quote by Thomas Rainborough (a radical of the English revolution): "Either poverty must use democracy to destroy the power of property, or property in fear of poverty will destroy democracy".

The populist movement was an attempt of the "plain people" (as they called themselves) to use democracy and organizing to destroy the corporate power that was killing them. Theirs was indeed a class struggle. But Goodwyn emphasized that it was a class struggle in a time when it was thought that the wealthy could be subdued. When "America" actually meant (for some/many people) the triumph of the working-classes over aristocracies. Today, however, the oppressed do not think of "America" as a beacon of hope. America is the symbol of the new aristocracy, of the power of property and wealth to destroy democracy. But the populists were not ready to concede "America," its land, wealth, labor, creativity, or people, to the ruling classes. Theirs was a fight to unite the plain people, the hands and hearts that were this country. For them America was working class. it was the corporate bourgeoisie which was "anti-american".

Being raised a Black nationalist, I was weened on discourses like those of Frederick Douglass' July 4th speech, in which he says that the day of independence for whites is a lie and a hypocrisy for enslaved Black people. I was raised to understand that "America" had gotten rich on the blood and sweat of Black folks, Brown folks, the genocide of the indigenous, labor of Asians, and the pillage of the world. Later on as I became more and more attracted to marxism, I began to understand that "America" had been built on the backs of "white" immigrants as well. America became the metaphysical entity that embodied the exploitation and destruction of the entire world.

But this past summer I was struck, once again, by another vision. It happened when I was reading James & Grace Lee Boggs. In The American Revolution and in Revolution & Evolution in the 20th Century, and also in Grace Lee's aurobiography, Living for Change, I found a different way of seeing America. James Boggs once said "I love this country not only because my ancestors' blood is in the soil but because of its potential, what I believe it can become." Clearly it was not the America of corporate executives and power with impunity which he loved. No. It is the America that is the living and the now passed people who struggled for a more just society. The Boggs' maintainted that in order to change something, you must love it. I was reminded of Paulo Freire who said: "If I do not love the world--if I do not love life--if I do not love people--I cannot enter into dialogue" (Pedagogy of the Oppressed).

Reading and meditating on these things I realized for the first time that the vast majority of people in this country have a real material and humanist interest in ending the system of social oppression that holds us all down. I realized that there does indeed exist a broad working-class interest and even consciousness. For the first time, reading these texts, I was consumed by a faith in the ability of our people to achieve an American Revolution. I have not really been a Black nationalist since (though I don't suggest that anyone test me on my fierce stance on the right of Black people for autonomy in struggle and in culture).

But my experience over the years is what has made these readings so meaningful. I have spent the last few years in a pitched struggle with the people I love the most around issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class. I know that these divisions are real and that they must be confronted. But I believe that it is extremism to declare that they are differences that cannot be united. That unity, as Amilcar Cabral said, must be one built through struggle. Queer people, women, people of color, and all sorts of other folks must have their own autonomous power to demand that unity does not mean limiting the issues to the lowest common denominator. Yet our struggle with one another is not a struggle against one another. It is a struggle for unity, a unity so that we may struggle to transform the world. Paulo, when he spoke of dialogue, was speaking of the love that must infuse the struggle among comrades in the effort to change our world.

I sit here today and know in my heart that the unity that I am struggling for is a unity, dynamic and characterized by the autonomy of its members, of the working-class. I do not mean simply those who work in factories. I mean those who are forced to labor for others in order to simply earn enough to live. Some live more or less decently, in this country and around the world, but we are all workers in the sense that our labor does not belong to us and instead contributes to the amassing of wealth, power, and tyranny amongst a very small minority of people.

Now, what does this have to do with Obama? You see, Obama speaks to the desire of people to come together and transform the world. He knows that we crave this and need it. His messages are crafted to cut through the cynicism and rally people together. The trouble, however, is around what he is rallying them. The ruling class, here in the u.s. and around the world, is in a panic. No one believes in the system anymore. So many people are jaded and dissatisfied. Obama represents the most visionary arm of the ruling class trying to mobilize the working-class of this country to achieve what nothing else can: a more powerful country.

They want a more powerful United States. That is, amore powerful military, a more "competitive" economy, a more powerful corporate-state system with which to meet the new challenges in a world no longer beholden to u.s. power. They are doing their best to rally people around the unity of the nation-state. The idea of a unity between people, the political-economic system, and the rulers. That's what a nation-state is. The conservatives are doing it one way, by declaring that some people are "un-american". The democrats do this in another way, by telling us that we are all americans.

The truth is that the vast majority of us are Americans. I mean this in the most expansive sense. We are the people whose lives are tied to the history of the Americas (plural). We are the people whose future is irreducibly interwoven with the life of the land of these two continents. We are the inheritors of a vast, tragic, triumphant history. We are indeed American, from the southern tip of Chile to the northern reaches of Canada. But we are not the united states. We are not the ruling class. The unity of the American peoples is not a government, but a comradery, a solidarity of many peoples; the circulation of struggles and culture and hope.

When the indigenous peoples of Chiapas speak my African heart knows the language. When my friend Jacob speaks of his struggles, I know them. I have learned that I have a place in my sould for Poland because I know Justyna. I have felt an obligation to understand or at least listen to the efforts of straight men to love and be loved. When women speak about patriarchy I am moved because I am implicated and I am asked to join in something common. This is La Otra America, the Other America which continues to be robbed and humiliated.

Today I know that if we are to struggle together and love together we need to bring forward our vision of La Otra America. Unity is not unity of a country or a continent. It is the unity of many different peoples struggling against the various and vicious ways that capitalism manifests: slavery, peonage, unemployment, alienation, work, schooling, prisons, starvation, AIDS run rampant...

Our unity must come from our unique heritage(s). All of the America(n)s have been subjected to the domination of the United States (which contrary to rhetoric includes the comprador states that claim to represent the peoples of latin America).

Obama teaches us something: unity is powerful. But we must struggle against the false unity with the ruling class. What unity is this that deprives so many of simple needs so that some may live in grotesque luxury? What unity can there be between those who buy and sell jobs, retirement, whole countries, food, the land and water itself only for profit and allow the vast majorities to suffer? No, this is not the unity we want.

The unity of the working-classes, against capital, against exploitation, against the degredation of women, queer people, the environment. Against the marginalization and humiliation of people of color. Against the attempt to erase the radical history, culture and dignity of our french-, english-, irish-, jewish- American comrades. The struggle for the soul of a continent is ours and in it we join the struggle of a planet, of many histories.

Obama's appeal is really an appeal to what is, at its heart, the awakening of many people to the understanding of the need for unity in order to bring about change. I am profoundly convinced, however, that this "change" must mean an end to the capitalist system which is racist, hetero-patriarchal, imperialist, and alienating. The task before us is to show that La Otra America, the American peoples, rather than the united states, have an interest in the overthrow of the global system of capital. The task is to grasp the fact that in some ways Obama is speaking to working-class consciousness and that it is a representation of the current moment's uncertainty that the ruling class must reach out in such a way.

The contradiction is that once it is grasped that the broad, collective interest is the overthrow of corporate capitalism, then the ruling class will carry out a full-scale attack on this unity. They want to include themselves in our unity and elevate their interests as the common interests. We must show that, while our interests are many, it is only the wealthy elite who have a continued interest in the maintenance and deepening of capitalism. Our struggle for unity must be clear on this point or "unity" will simply become the fascist unity that erupted in the wake of the economic crises of the world war period.

Now, more than ever, when even politicians in the republican party have to at least appear opposed to corporate greed in order to win over even the small sector of the American people who vote, we need to be part of building a new vision and a new unity. An anti-capitalist unity, a working-class unity in which the people(s) are many but the struggle, for dignity and liberation, is shared. This does not mean we reduce everything to 'economic' issues (wages, benefits, etc). It means that we, each of us committed to real change, come to understand that the endless imposition of work by capital and the endless accumulation of wealth by capitalist is the single biggest barrier to having time with those we love, living in harmony with our ecosystems, having enough to eat, learning and growing, loving how we want to, travelling, becoming artists, coming to understand one another, and knowing that life is really worth living.

Obama knows that unity is the only way forward to change. But he wants unity without struggle against capitalism. He wants to unite us under the banner of the nation-state. We want a unity of the coming together of many nations--queer nations, black, brown, indigenous, youth, etc nations--against the united states. Obama quoted in his speech the motto of the united states: e pluribis unum--out of many, one. Let us reject this attempt to regroup us once again under the banner of states and corporations. Out of many, many I say. Many chiapas, many selmas, many caracas, many porto alegres, many zapatistas, cimarrones, xigonas, sodomistas!

Long live the many-headed hydra!
Long live La Otra America!