Living on the Margins

Tonight I dragged my friend Bryan out to see Lost Angels, a documentary about Los Angeles’ Skid Row, and part of HRW’s annual film festival. The film is a compassionate look into a much misunderstood community, where mental illness and drug addiction are common. Skid Row is off the map, in many ways: the city does not provide the services it should, from its failure to ensure the respect of the inhabitants’ civil liberties to its refusal to clean the streets. Instead, a community has developed among the Skid Row denizens to cover these basic social functions -- one man has organized a volunteer brigade to clean and beautify the sidewalks, while another monitors violations in police actions, for instance. Many of the interviewees spoke lovingly of the acceptance they had found on Skid Row. This observation of the self-formed community reminded me of the work of Michel Agier, one of my favorite scholars. In the (long) video below, he talks of this phenomenon in slums and in refugee camps:
Michel Agier. Exils - Des mégapoles aux camps by labandepassante Agier is, as far as I know, the only scholar to write about slums and refugee camps, and I frankly think he’s brilliant. A very rough, jotted-down translation of one of my favorite parts, about 22 minutes in:

What I saw in the favelas and in the camps was that up to a certain point, and often in the absence of a social state (in the case of the favelas, etc) or with a minimal intervention of the international community in the case of the camps, people reorganize their spaces, reorganize their lives very quickly in the camps – I noticed that families were reformed very quickly in the camps, and after about a month or a year or two, the space itself of the camp transformed – at first they live in tents, but over time buildings of mud, boards, etc – they make their space livable. We see the same thing, though this is a different case, in the clandestine communities of migrants in Calais or in Patras, Greece, where I recently went to do some investigations – there too in the worst material conditions, people install themselves to create a livable place. This process seemed to me to be the process of the creation of a city – or a process of racinement; The root doesn’t exist there at first, but then we arrive and plant the root and all the stories of the city or the village or the house are always stories of someone who arrives: no one emerges from the ground. It’s this process of planting that seems to me to be very visible in the favelas and the refugee camps. The comparison is not at all evident, empirically-speaking – there are enormous differences, and yet, we see this with its minimal material infrastructure, and distance from normal life. We must detach ourselves from this European model of the city – and it is this European model that exists around the world to determine what is a city – we must detach ourselves from these ideas to reconstitute the process of the creation of the city that is a space of interaction, a space of multiple exchanges, a hybrid space, and thus find this process occurring in the refugee camps.

There are communities of people that slip through the cracks of society’s structure: refugees, slum-dwellers, the mentally ill, Roma, etc. And it is important to bear in mind that these populations recreate a certain amount of that structure on their own. Human survival requires cooperation, which is a very reassuring thought. But the other thing that’s interesting is that these populations aren’t totally free from control: they are contained in specific spaces (and often these neighborhoods live a precarious existence, at risk of demolition or forced displacement). Refugee camps are, in many ways, over-organized, managed in bureaucratic systems of control by UNHCR and other international NGOs. Similarly, the people of Skid Row cycle in and out of prisons—the containers for undesirable, “invisible” people, and also a space where personal freedom is explicitly constrained. Enter Agier, again, around the 46-minute mark, where he talks about the anthropological "frontier," arguing that identity dries up without territory because we are always the Others of others: the frontier is crucial as the meeting place where we can construct our own identities. The walls that are being erected to keep migrants out of Europe, for instance, are the opposite of the frontier. Humanity is about meeting, and the edification of walls is dangerous and desperate, he says. It is in this vein that the Safer Cities initiative operates. The second iteration of New York’s broken glass policies, the Safer Cities project is shown to be an assault on the poor and minority populations, as Skid Row residents are targeted for crimes that are ignored among wealthy white people. The criminal justice system across the country is already horrifically skewed to disproportionately impact minorities (who are often victims of racial profiling) and poor people (who often can’t afford appropriate protections). The Safer Cities initiative makes their very lives illegal, as it targets them for the actions necessary for their survival. I thought of Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed, which I read for my class on Indian politics this spring. Chatterjee’s key argument is that people whose voices are excluded from civil society make claims on the government’s responsibilities to look after and control them, rather than through the government’s constitutional duty to lawful citizens. When the urban squatters or rural poor mobilize to claim benefits from government programs, they are not acting as members of civil society, because the procedures in place have previously excluded or marginalized them. Instead, they must work against the distribution of power in society. They often act in extra-legal and paralegal ways to claim civic services and welfare benefits, maintaining that the illegality of their actions does not negate the state’s duty to provide for their welfare. Illegal activities are a fundamental part of their existences and political engagement. When these illegal activities are not tolerated but rather forcibly repressed, it amounts to warfare against the livelihoods of the poor and marginalized—who could be anyone: mental illness (a key factor driving people to Skid Row) affects 1/4 Americans, for instance. More importantly, they are not just anyone – they are someone to the people who love them, humans as much as the people who fear them are.

Causality?

Does one cause the other, or are they both caused by (an)other factor(s) not captured here? We can't really make any claims about the causality here just based on these graphs, but the overlap is pretty striking. Have more to say on this, but not right now.






Via afrographique.tumblr.com

Foreign vs. Domestic Policy

Earlier today my mother emailed to ask what I thought of this recent piece by David Brooks, Smart Power Setback. Trying to update here more before I leave for Ghana, so thought I'd post my off-the-cuff thoughts here:

My first reaction was to his refutation of "the modern prejudice that bad behavior has material roots. Give people money and jobs and you will improve their character and behavior" and his assertion that violence is really all about "grudges, tribal dynamics and religious fanaticism." He may be right to say that we can't just take away financial problems and expect everything to get better, however, I do think that there's a lot to be said for the role of unemployment and general social discontent that springs from a lack of economic opportunities. Maybe the conflicts do fall along tribal or religious lines--between groups that have already defined themselves as different from each other--but I think most people need an impetus to get involved in the disagreements. I think usually people want to see something changed in their lives or the lives of those around them, and the greater the economic difficulties they're facing, the more likely they are to want things changed (and the stronger they'll feel about those changes).

These things often aren't separated -- even here in the US we can see the economic downturn and especially growing inequality fueling a lot of the religious and political fanaticism that the Tea Party is thriving on, and that makes their violent rhetoric and exclusion of Others acceptable, even honorable as a "patriotic" stance. Just because the news doesn't cover things like the backpack bomb found along the parade route of a MLK Day this January (or the targeted attacks on Planned Parenthood centers) in the same way as they cover the underwear bomber or the bombings that signal a lack of stability in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, doesn't make those acts any less terrorism, at least within the contexts of these different places (I mean maybe people would take issue with the comparison of the Planned parenthood attacks and suicide bombers in Afghanistan, but given the war context of Afghanistan, they may be more equivalent than people are happy to admit).

I'm not unequivocally defending aid - definitely it has its problems, and I'm sure the projects in Afghanistan have been seriously flawed in many ways, including the effects Brooks points out. However, I think it's important to bear in mind the difference between the US and Afghanistan - we've created a war zone in Afghanistan, trying to replace entire government structures, legal systems, police systems, etc while we have little legitimacy (anymore) in Afghanistan. Not that we don't have milder versions of these problems here (there are gov't structures that should probably be overhauled--but they're less central than the ones in Afghanistan, our police and criminal justice system is horribly flawed, many people really don't trust US gov't anymore--regardless of who is in office) but they're problems of a different order of magnitude, and I don't think our failure in Afghanistan means we can just give up on people here. The suggestion that we should just tell the poor to suck it up is dangerously close to what politicians (particularly Republican, but also Democrat) are saying, and I frankly think it's an argument that anyone with a conscience has to fight.

Great Expectations

Graduation was unexpectedly delightful. I expected tears to flow—as I warned anyone who would listen—but it turns out that saying goodbye, mourning/marking an ending, and moving on are unpredictable processes. To my great surprise then and now, I remember graduation, including the week before and at least a couple weeks afterwards, as being a time of almost unbroken happiness. 

Which isn’t to say that there were no tears: how could I forget the last Amnesty meeting, which signified the official ending to an experience that has brought me more friends and comfort and feelings of belonging during both good times and bad than any other part of college? Even during the last days of graduation, there were both painful and unsatisfactory goodbyes (no, actually, facebook/blogging isn’t the same thing)…

But what I really remember about my last week as an undergraduate was the time I spent with friends – happy-houring at the Heights; in Marin’s suite discussing her Derrida paper while (absurdly) curling my hair for the Senior Ball in the middle of the afternoon; cheering for Barnard during the University Commencement ceremony, in the strongest display of school spirit I’d ever been a part of; standing on my chair at the end of the ceremony singing and dancing to “Empire State of Mind.” It bugged me a little bit that I wasn’t in a Goodbye State of Mind, but I think it was for the better.

It was so awe-inspiring to hear about the honorary degree recipients, and the theme of the Barnard ceremony--we’ve worked really damn hard to get here--rang true more than I would have expected a couple years ago. It seemed particularly worth acknowledging in light of my last three weeks of school, when I barely slept more than three hours a night and went days at a time without seeing my roommate (it paid off; I’m really happy with how the semester ended).

--- Since graduation, I’ve mostly been in NYC—I’m staying on campus until the end of June, in the same building with the same roommate, even—and I’ve been so happy. Actually I’ve been a little annoyed with myself recently for bumming around more than I should and not getting stuff done, but oh well. To be expected, I guess.

Staying on campus has had the unintended side-effect (well, ok, maybe it wasn’t so unintentional originally) of letting me live in denial. I forget that I’m leaving this place that has become more of a home than I would have expected. Campus is empty-ish and it’s mine. I’m constantly expecting to see certain people I fiercely miss, but have to remind myself that the earliest chance I have to see them is late 2012. That’s a Long. Time.

During a brief visit home, I was reading a book that referenced another, more famous text I haven’t read, so naturally I turned to Professor Google, where I stumbled on a site with discussion questions and paper topics for the book. And suddenly I saw myself so clearly in Milbank, on my way to some class I was shopping where we talked about all these questions, and happy and stressed-but-it’s-fine and inspired and curious and I realized that I’ve been subconsciously expecting that mental scene to actually happen in the near future. I felt the sharpest pang of loss to realize that it is all over.

I came back to campus and it felt different for a day or two: Low steps were suddenly just a public place, and I an outsider free to wander in at any point, those Milbank hallways now an irretrievable part of the past.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Heroes

There are a lot of people in the world whom I admire, in whole or in parts, but I don't have heroes. It seems such an unfair thing, to call someone a hero, to put someone on a pedestal and lionize them to the virtual point of dehumanization; such a terrible way to recognize the rarity of a person whose work and principles and decency are so abundant and meaningful that I aspire to follow their lead.

Instead of heroes, I have people, flawed people, who I respect, whose humanity I acknowledge as a fundamental part of what it is that makes them admirable in the first place.

After all, they live in the same shitty world that we all do, and have the same human foibles, but manage to be kind and wise despite the cultural cacophony of disincentives to be either.

To call someone a hero, it seems to me, steals them of the hard work they do to be good and replaces it with a distancing exceptionalism, which is really just a way of excusing ourselves from achieving the same goodness. So I don't have heroes.

--Melissa McEwan

Quoting because it's such a lovely articulation of something it took me a long time to figure out for myself.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

tinkers

...the secrets gathered in the shadows at the tree line that rustled and waited until he passed, and which made the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end and his scalp tighten when he felt them flooding, invisible, the road around him, were dispelled each time he turned his direct attention to them, scattered to just beyond his sight. The true essence, the secret recipe of the forest and the light and the dark was far too fine and subtle to be observed with my blunt eye--water sac and nerves, miracle itself, fine itself: light catcher. But the thing itself is not forest and light and dark, but something else scattered by my coarse gaze, by my dumb intention. The quilt of leaves and light and shadow and ruffling breezes might part and I'd be given a glimpse of what is on the other side; a stitch might work itself loose or be worked loose. The weaver might have made one bad loop of whatever the thread might be wound from--light, gravity, dark from stars--had somehow been worked loose by the wind in its constant worrying of white buds and green leaves and blood-orange leaves and bare branches and two of the pieces of whatever it is that this world is knit from had come loose from each other and there was maybe just a finger width's hole, which I was lucky enough to spot in the glittering leaves from this wagon of drawers and nimble enough to scale the silver trunk and brave enough to poke my finger into the tear, that might offer to the simple touch a measure of tranquility or reassurance.

I just finished this book, tinkers by Paul Harding. It's beautifully written, like a poem. The plot is slow/sometimes seemingly pointless, but the imagery and language are beautiful. In a nutshell, the book is a collection of the thoughts of a dying man. The best way I can describe it is if postmodern Faulkner and Wordsworth had teamed up to rewrite Nabokov's Speak, Memory (it's even got a lovely allusion to Nabokov's stained glass imagery).

The book feels very wintery -- I imagined all of the scenes from the past happening in the cold all the time. But then I went back and realized that most of it is set in springtime, so I guess I'm just a sucker for cover art (an undeniably wintery scene of white sky and white landscape with bare, fading trees and one small person), or the recent snowstorm is getting to me. Anyways, it was a pleasant read that made me wish for a fire in the fireplace.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

In the Heights

The view from our awesome seats - an early Christmas present from my family!


Last night I saw In the Heights, which I’ve been wanting to see for ages and which was everything I expected it to be and more. The whole show made me laugh and cry at the exact same time, as it recreated people and places and experiences that are simultaneously familiar and completely foreign. I know I can’t really articulate everything that it made me feel and think (in part because it’s one of those things that are just moving in ways that you can’t explain), but some initial reactions:

I think the show is really remarkable for how much it makes you conscious of the audience and your role as an audience in relation to the performance on stage, because you can’t help but notice that the people in the audience are not members of the society reproduced on the stage, and that the people represented on stage are not members of the audience. (The guy behind me actually told his companion during intermission that he’d love to steal the fire hydrant stage prop so that he could use it to save his city parking spot.) The show signals right away that it’s aware of this class and race divide, as Usnavi looks out at us and says, “I bet you’ve never been up past 96th street… Take notes, I’m going to test you later.”

And yet as the audience laughs, you know it’s because they’re recognizing things they see in life, characters they’ve encountered but probably don’t really know. I know I can’t speak for everyone in the audience – for sure, some of those people probably DO know people represented on stage and DO get jokes that I probably missed (and of course some of the laughter is because it is just funny). But sometimes it felt like the audience was recognizing things they hadn’t understood but which were now being explained to them in a way they could understand, or sympathize with. And at the same time the show was criticizing us for noticing these things without really trying to understand them—or worse, jumping to our own conclusions that assume the worst about other people.

It’s amazing to me that despite the fact that this Other culture is on display (literally) for us, it’s still very much not available to us. That this is no freak-show “look at these different people and how they live” but a recognition that we audience members do not understand and therefore do not appreciate this other society. I think we’re supposed to feel jealous that we’ve never had those experiences (and at the same time aware of how lucky we were not to). When everyone on that stage interacts in such a familiar way with each other (everyone knows everyone and accepts them and talks to them and jokes with them and dances with them, etc etc etc) and we are completely shut out from that, the show is proudly demonstrating that we are incontrovertibly on the outside. Enter ambivalence about trying to help other people, since it seems to me that the display of other cultures is most problematic when it comes with an assumption that we’re supposed to find what is “wrong” so that we, the outsiders can fix it.

That this world could be available to us (Columbia is so close to these neighborhoods) but isn’t is essentially the same message the elite institutions (of which I’ve been lucky to be a part) send to them. I have more to say about this, but that’s a whole ‘nother post that I’m not ready to write yet. In the meantime, see this article (courtesy of Melissa), written by a Barnard grad with almost the exact same background/experiences as me.

I also loved the show as an exposition on movement and displacement. The whole show bustles, with many dancers on stage doing different things – there’s so much movement on stage all the time, but it still stays within the space of the stage. No one ever goes anywhere (even “off-stage” is more likely to be shown as “somewhere inside one of the houses”). This movement evokes the bustle of the city and dance-like acrobatics necessary to negotiate your way down a busy sidewalk, but it also transforms the movement from a utilitarian act of getting from one place to another into an art form that deserves to be celebrated in its own right. The tension between moving and not moving is echoed in the overall structure of the show: there’s so much coming and going in and out of the neighborhood, as everyone’s families are coming from another country, but hoping to go to another place. But despite this movement, mobility still seems impossible.

On a somewhat related note: during the songs, when all of the different lines happen at the same time, the individual melodies and lyrics are obscured because everyone is singing. Everyone has individual hopes and dreams –- a story to tell, in short –- but when they’re all overlapping and conflicting with each other it turns into both a representation of the noise of the city and the sort of muddled chaos of life. There were moments when I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to feel like the whole was smothering the part or that the parts were coming together to form a glorious cacophony – because the show and the real life experiences it’s depicting make that line a little bit ambiguous.

But to get back to the idea of movement: at the end of the show, I felt like they had demonstrated that a person is a body and a story. When you look at a place (especially a place so full of movement) from a distance, over time, everyone comes and goes, and the faster they do it, the more replaceable they are. Each person becomes a placeholder for the one before and the one coming after, a mere body (only it’s even more chaotic than that because it’s not like there are specific roles that get passed along from person to person). But there was this staggering sense of the uniformity of people who come in, open up a small business, and then leave for the next person to do the same. BUT, the show turns it around and presents the fighting cry of the individual who fills that mere body – it says that the infinite-time version of life doesn’t mean anything because within a pocket of time there are individuals with stories, and those stories are important, define who we are. (For more on people as stories, I recently read (and loved) “Individualism and the Mystery of the Social Self,” by Wayne Booth in Freedom and Interpretation (Barbara Johnson ed. New York: Basic Books, 1993))

Human beings naturally move a lot – this is why I’m interested in refugees and displacement in general. If people naturally move around so much, if mobility is part of the human experience, why is it sometimes celebrated and sometimes a problem? Why do people choose to leave? Why do people choose to stay? If our identities are shaped in large part by those around us and the places we call home, what happens when those people and places are always changing?


And now I really, really have to stop watching youtube videos of Lin-Manuel Miranda (creator of In the Heights) and start writing my last two big papers of the semester. In case you haven't seen the show yet, it closes on January 9, and this is why you should see it:

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