“…for it was in dreams that the two girls had met. Long before Edna Finch’s Mellow House opened, even before they marched through the chocolate halls of Garfield Primary School…they had already made each other’s acquaintance in the delirium of their noon dreams. They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a some one who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream. When Nel, an only child, sat on the steps of her back porch surrounded by the high silence of her mother’s incredible orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing at her back, she studied the poplars and fell easily into a picture of herself lying on a flower bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince. He approached but never quite arrived. But always, watching the dream along with her, were some smiling sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as she herself in the flow of her imagined hair, the thickness of the mattress of flowers, the voile sleeves that closed below her elbows in gold-threaded cuffs.

           Similarly, Sula, also an only child, but wedged into a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, people, voices, and the slamming of doors, spent hours in the attic behind a roll of linoleum galloping through her own mind on a gray-and-white horse  tasting sugar and smelling roses in full view of someone who shared both the taste and the speed.

    So when they met, first in those chocolate halls and next through the ropes of the swing, they felt the ease and comfort of old friends. Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be. Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers (Sula’s because he was dead; Nel’s because he wasn’t), they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for." (51)


Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Vintage, 1994

“The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as superfluous to recall the existence of “native” towns and European towns, of schools for “natives” and schools for Europeans, as it is to recall apartheid in South Africa…The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations. In the colonies, the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression is the police officer or the soldier.” (3)

 
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth.  New York: Grove Press, 1963.                                                                                                           

This is not about me being a victim; it’s not just about me period. This is about a white supremacist, colonialist hierarchy that says that not only will we have our land and our rights stripped from us, but we must be happy to allow it, to unflinchingly support the autonomy of our oppressors, and to at all times battle “antisemitism” when it is defined solely as uncritical support for the movement that displaced our grandparents, the movement that makes it very difficult if not impossible for us to live or even visit this land. This is about the creation and proliferation of media that normalizes our subordinance, that normalizes the opinion that our lives are worth so little that we must enjoy being subordinate, we must praise our oppressors, we must protect their safety and take their abuse.

And it is even about confusion; mental warfare inaccurately disguised as criticism, designed to exploit the West’s collective memory in mobilization for our mental and physical deaths, designed to indoctrinate perpetrators, designed to make us doubt ourselves and hate ourselves.

Yet even so.

If a (wo)man who has witnessed untold, unspeakable crimes against humanity in the form of colonization–If a (wo)man who has held sobbing widows, witnessed children with no heads,  seen his/her nation blown to pieces and his/her history sold off to the highest bidder–if that person finally says, enough is enough you fucking dog…and that person throws not one but two shoes an a symbolic act of resistance–in the name of the murdered children, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, nation, history….If  throwing a shoe is all that a person has to remind an entire nation that they have the fucking RIGHT to be OUTRAGED about the violence that has been shocked and awed on them…Then I have to say more power to him or her.

Why?

Because, that’s why.  I feel no need to explain it–I will simply point to a conversation that happened over at Ilyka’s where it was said–some times you do things (like support somebody who does something you may not agree with) *because*. Just plain ol’ big fat fucking *BECAUSE*.

And that some people don’t *get* what “because” means? It is nothing more or less than an example of their lack of integrity and deficiency of humanity.

 

Period."

this article i really like came up when we were talking about cesaire and romanticized notions of authenticity in political philosophy today.

Wedding and War in Galilee

A view of the emerging India-Israel-US axis, from a wedding in Palestine with Israeli helicopters whirring above, to Indian towns filled with Israeli soldiers looking for Shanti, to deportations and surveillance in the U.S.