Gandr on fire.

Pointing fingers won´t work when we´re talking about the massive and terrifying disaster that is being perpetrated upon the people of the RDC. (The women, specifically, who are being raped. There are over 450 000 of them.)

It´s lighting a fire inside, a slow, burning, enduring fire, that will be stoked by our tears. By our fears. For these children, and their mothers, and the men who weep for them.

It´s not because they´re African. It´s because it´s Africa.
It´s not because the continent is backwards and cut-off from civilization. It´s because Africa serves some precise purposes in the capitalistic system, and those purposes it serves just as planned, just as designed.
It´s not because barbaria is unpredictable, uncontrollable. It´s because death and destruction and horror were set into motion by several decisions by those who control us.
It´s not because it´s the RDC. It once was Rwanda.

It´s not about AIDS, either. It´s about Dr Mukwege. It´s about Stephen Lewis. It´s about Alfonsine, mostly, and the smell of pee that now permeates her world.

It´s about coltan. It´s about leaving the endless loop where we just wait for the following cycle.

How can this hurt so much? How can they stand so strong?
The heart of darkness, I suspect, was always meant to be the heart of civilization.

Maybe pointing fingers won´t help, but not mincing words will.

"There is no map", and the right question is "who isn´t raping them?". But there are hands, and shouts, and stomping feet, and we can love back into living.

Sleepless furries that go bump in life.

One of a kind, or simply with(in) her kin? While we fell into I, Zombie.

"... But he is actually intensifying the policy of George Bush... I know his election has great symbolic value in terms of the struggle of African-Americans for equal rights, and this struggle is one I admire and respect. But what is important for the world is not whether the President is black or white, but his actions. You can't eat symbolism."

Sometimes, that´s when fatigue settles in. We search for these moments of ecstasy, of passion, where we transcend. We want to transcend from ourselves, mainly. We want to forget our soiled souls. But it becomes more difficult each time, because the crimes to which we are complicit weigh ever more heavily on us. The Nintendo war (page 9, The Media as Theatre of Conflict)may be one of the biggest fallacies of U.S policy, one of its most useful cover-ups, one of the most hideous style of war crimes looming upon us. It´s also the way we think.
We intellectually know suffering is real, we intellectually loathe war and its devastation, we know who the bad guys that must be defeated are, we understand and can actually imagine with a faraway look in our eyes the battle of good versus evil play out in the horizon, with the right factions playing the adequate roles. Maybe we could even draw intricate diagrams with an amazing amount of information concerning the issue, and explain it with real feeling. The battlefield is so clear in our head... No smoke no fog no thundering hearts no deafening silence during the runs no cries.
It´s like a video game to us, most of the times. Our strategic maps may be the most detailed ever, but its actors are cardboard-cut versions of the real people living through what happens. Do we believe we would go mad if we were NOT to be viscerally detached from what´s happening? Would we? Or are we actually going mad when we see the many jarring injustices of the world through the lenses of a removed but concerned spectator? Are we mad already? "Que ninguna injusticia perpetrada me sea ajena."

Spanish sociologist Jorge Riechmann talks about how we now live in "la época moral del largo alcance", which could be loosely translated to "the moral epoch of far-reaching choices". The term was coined primarily to illustrate the ecological issues we face, since every little action of ours causes ripples over space and time, but it applies just as judiciously to matters of social justice of humans across the globe.
Malalai Joya points out, rightly so, that it is foreign intervention that has permitted the rise to power of the Afghan brand of misogyny, first because of the Soviet invasion and the leeway it gave to warlords and then the Taliban in the nineties, and nowadays because of the OTAN-led occupation that has reinstated those warlords in their old fiefdoms.
Many people in the Western world decry the war in Iraq, but keep on acting as if the war in Afghanistan was just and necessary. Barack Obama became a visible candidate for the U.S presidency, and eventually the President, thanks to a speech against the war on Iraq. And as the Afghan MP points out, he has actually increased military presence and spending on the Afghan front.
How can we live with such cognitive dissonance? It is true that March 2003 saw the biggest demonstrations in the history of the planet, and that it didn´t prevent governments (except for Turkey) from ignoring the will of their people, executing their plans and invading Iraq. Those global protests meant a lot. Is that symbol enough, though? Reason to think we did all we could, perhaps, and wait for the end of war?
We are waiting for the end of war... Quoting Brecht, Joya says that "those wo do not try have already failed". No path to peace can truly open while invasion forces occupate and regularly bomb the Afghan territory, and because of the asymmetry in power, it is not the actions of Afghan people that will make the withdrawal of foreign troops a reality. That decision will have to come out of the Western powers themselves.
The end of war... Do I want to just wait for it? Am I strong enough to not tire, to not despair, to not give up? It is what Rahella´s voice churns out in my scorched spirit, what those young girls´s wonder animates in my reading memories, what that old woman´s wish inspires me to.

´Tis true that the weight on our shoulders seems unescapable and bone-crushing and unmanageable and apathy-inducing and just plain too much. We didn´t ask for it, but it is the measure of the inmensity of our privilege. It was my idle fingers struggling to find a crack to fit in a future for myself that wrote the footnote of war "and still the world went on"; that let a crack wide enough to swallow the lives of so many Afghan people mar the face of Earth.

Toni Morrison once wrote that the chains that link the master to the slave go both ways, that we are bound by our own oppression. Our own oppression. I´ll stop being unfrightened of this thing I´ve become when we´ll stop being unfrightened of this thing we´ve become when I´ll stop being unfrightened of this thing I´ve become. And then maybe I will be frightened by this thing we´ve become, and I won´t have to.

28 de mayo no se olvida.

"Toi ce solitaire qui n’a pas d’orphelinat pour l’accueillir, qui n’a que des fous de dieux pour l’applaudir
Toi que l’Occident a oublié, toi qui reçoit de la pitié qu’au moment du journal télévisé
Toi qui croit qu’on en à rien à foutre de c’qui s’passe à l’Est
Toi qui n’a pas totalement tort, vu qu’on goûte notre liberté bien au chaud dans notre confort
Toi qui n’a que 15 ans, qui n’connaîtra jamais c’qu’est le bonheur d’être un enfant"*

"Qui tue une âme innocente tue l´humanité toute entière".

In our name.


*Soprano, Bombe humaine.

Mach 12 through the wall of silence.

For Angie.

Maybe the trial is over and done. Allen Ray Andrade was declared guilty without wavering by a jury of his peers more than hers, if external markers were all that mattered. And maybe we did learn. Maybe we did learn that indeed, no matter what, trans panic is absurd and an insult to all of us. Maybe we did learn that it is high time a trial caused by the victimization of a person member of a "minority" stopped being the trial of that person, of that "minority". Maybe we did learn that walking the walk is saying something, anything supportive, even if we don´t really feel we have something intelligent to say, because not saying anything is not only isolating those personally in the trenches, but even silencing them. Maybe we did learn that when a trans woman is covering the trial, we should indeed pay attention if we are allies, and recognize that her presence there is part of justice being served.

But what is justice? What is justice when Angie´s family will never stop feeling the staggering weight of her absence? What is justice when no one, ever more, will ever be greeted by Angie´s smile and Angie´s dreams and her courage?

And still we do not breathe freely. May the atoms that conformed you be there the next time a butterfly becomes a storm and touches us all. May the atoms that made you live, that you made alive, triumph with all the transgender kids out there who will be and know happiness. May the image of you accompany me everywhere life searches, and give it its blessing.

May we all be as beautiful and unflinching as your family and those who loved you. May we all be as honest as you, Angie, as determined to be in truth and with truth give.

May the memory of your life, the joy of you, be there the next time I look at my body and feel the hurt that it´s not how I am. May I recall the world, with my body and my words, that you lived. That you were as you were, that you chose to be, that thus you were. That you are. In all of us, because no matter what, we are all your peers.

May we never forget Angie Zapata, and where our strength comes from. Ourselves. All the history of ourselves, the histories of ourself.

For Angie.