Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

Aight reader, let's keep it a buck: when was the last time you read a whole collection of poetry? A year ago? This morning? No shame regardless, but let me put the urgency of the question to you another way: When was the last time you let a Black grxl's Southern English serve as a love song, funerary rite, and freedom anthem for Black femme folks? What about one that also serves as corrective to the doublespeak of feigned white solidarity?

If the answer is never, let your first time be today. Because here's the truth, Black as ever: Aurielle Marie's debut collection Gumbo Ya Ya slaps.

Black English/AAVE/Ebonics has been forced into the same fugitivity as its speakers, constantly evolving to avoid capture, comprehension, and decipherment by those who might mean to do us harm. Aurielle brings their commitments as an abolitionist to the page in their treatment of dialect and resists the policing of our speech, allowing our words their rightful sovereignty: "absolute and unresolved."

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Marie's Gumbo Ya Ya shows just what Black Southern speech can do when we aren't so busy forcing it to translate.

"[W]hat I was also trying to do in the book is create a safe space for Black femme folks at the expense of other people's comfort, right? Like, we will be comfortable here and gathered here to whatever degree is necessary, even if it means shunning people outside of the we," Marie said.

The Atlanta-raised poet intros the concept of gumbo ya ya (the sensory experience achieved when all your kinfolks are talking at once) as a way to live into the messiness and multiplicity of an intersectional Blackness. With poem titles, like "grxl gospel i: all the women were white all the Black folk, men & so, we were brave," Marie's poetry collection is one of the most thrilling debuts released in years.

Gumbo Ya Ya was selected by poet, performer, and librettist Douglas Kearney as the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize Winner. Cave Canem is the premiere bastion of Black poetics, and has supported many Black Southern voices, including Jericho Brown, Taylor Johnson, Nicole Sealey (and even me) but it's not the only hush harbor around. The natural affinity between Marie and Kearney, the contest judge, is no surprise. Kearney often surfaces the hidden kinships and quadruple-entendres undergirding Black linguistics and performance. If you haven't read his Mess And Mess And, do.

The marvel for me is the fidelity to spoken language that Marie is able to achieve. I just wanted to say everything aloud. Through the permissiveness of the multiple grammars at work, Marie reveals the paucity and meagreness of a whiter-tighter English. Freed from the shackles of apologetic apostrophes, and bucking the constraints of traditional typeset in Douglas Kearney-fashion, Aurielle's words overlap, fugue, and multiply on the page.

Many reviewers use the word conjure when talking about recent poetic works but few collections actually do it. Aurielle welcomes the presence of all their egun, or ancestors. That also includes biological family, even the problematic members.

It's clear Aurielle has made a practice of loving their folx honestly on and off the page. "I was able to utilize [that practice] as a way of stringing together all of the ways that violence kind of crosses over from the structural to the personal, from the institutional to the intimate, without making monsters," said the poet.

In deftly powerful verse, Marie acknowledges the ubiquity of assaults, the precarity of safety and the audacity of queer Black grxl survival in the thick of it all. My God was chastised, and my pen reignited.

"oh, god. oh, me.

Oh, yes. damn i'm slick! damn, i spill the thick of me

and it is not blood. i'll say it as many times as I see fit. Oh,

the possibilities of being ego. thank you"

gxrl gospel iii: marigold

Scalawag was the first publication to publish Aurielle's work back in 2014. It was an honor to catch up with them years later to talk about their new release, poetics as praxis, and pushing back against the mythology of "good Southern girls."

The following excerpts from our interview were edited for length and clarity.

Alysia Nicole Harris: Talk to me about the title of the book, Gumbo Ya Ya.

Aurielle Marie: Gumbo ya ya is a term that I stumbled upon in random conversations with family throughout my life because I've got some real lineage in my family, and stuff trickles down, you know. Things and phrases and practices trickle down So Gumbo Ya Ya was a term that I heard in my family space and kind of knew what it meant. I just thought it meant that folks were loud, and like, you know, needed to stop yelling.

"They didn't understand how to hold all of me and all of the book."

I've been on this long arc of deepening a spiritual practice, and I was reading a book called Jambalaya by Luisah Teish, who is wonderful in a lot of ways, and not so wonderful in other ways, but wonderful in a lot of ways. She talked about gumbo ya ya as a sensorial experience, you know, the sound that takes over a room when family is getting together, that sort of buzzing humm that happens. And for me, it just stuck. It's like, 'Oh my God. That's like, the Blackest thing!' And one of the things I love so much is that thrumming, people are talking over one another, you jump in and out of conversations. Amazing. I just held on to it.

I had said that I was going to write a book and for a long time the project I was working on was just about being Black and queer in the Southbeing a Black girl in the South, and queerness, kind of like, pop sprinkled in there, because I don't think that I understood myself as queer until I wasn't a child anymore. So it didn't really intersect until I started to think about gender as an expansive thing, and how I was maybe operating outside of binary gender. What I've come to now know, I understand myself as a genderqueer person, and how I was queering gender for myself as a child. And then it started to get really intricate in the book. We were talking about gender, and then I was writing about gender-based violence. Then I was talking about fathers, and then somehow I was starting to talk about fathers and police. Then I was talking about mothers, and it just got really full, and I was like, 'What is happening here?' And I was like, 'Oh, this is that noise.' This is just the hum in the room when you know that you're alive and living.

AH: You wrote in the title poem, "If I put a gun to your head, could you explain how this is not a book about race?" Can you tell me why it was really important to ask that question to the reader?

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AM: My background is in community organizing. For a long time, I thought I had to choose between [poetry and organizing]. I've been trying to figure out how to do the both/and, how to be the artist and also someone who is deeply committed to racial justice, abolition, and anti-capitalism. Gumbo YaYa, I had a publisher before I won the Cave Canem prize. I was working with that publisher, and it was just, it was a really difficult relationship. They didn't understand how to hold all of me and all of the book. And there were questions that came up in the few conversations we had about the text itself that let me know that they were hoping that I could sanitize or clarify some of the rhetorical play around race or confrontation that I was writing up in the book toward the white reader specifically.

"I have an intimate relationship with pigs and they guns and they batons and all of that. It was much harder to talk about how the man I love can't love me back beyond his own wounds or his own hurt, and in that way, hurts me."

[The editors] never asked me, you know, is this a book about race? But like white folks don't often ask directly. I felt that the critique that I was getting was that I needed to make this a book that made sense to white people, or at least to my white editors. And in order to do that, it couldn't be a book that tried to tackle race in the ways that I wanted to, which was to be very clear about who the "we" and the "you" are when I'm talking. So I think I was just being a bit of a Sagittarius and being sarcastic and petty [with that line], in that I was trying to acknowledge that I understood that there is a wide readership, that there are people who are going to read the book who aren't a part of my "we."

In many places throughout the book, but especially in Gumbo Ya Ya, the title piece, I was trying to anticipate where non-Black people would try to land with some of the work and how they would try to make it applicable to themselves, and trying to call them out on that landing spot, because what I was also trying to do in the book was create a safe space for Black femme folks at the expense of other people's comfort.."

AH: I was gonna ask you a question about repetition and interruption, because it feels like there are sometimes multiple speakers in poems. You use forms like the ghazal, the pantoum, and the sestina, which all utilize repetition. So I'm curious what the importance of that kind of repetitive invocation is?

AM: I'm very much in my linguistic bag, you know, about how multiple diasporic cultures repeat things to articulate importance or urgency. I'm thinking about how Southern folks will say now, now, the same way that West African folks who speak English will say now now, to mean right now. Repetition in a cultural sense is not seen as proper English; is not seen as correct. That [repetition] leaks its way into spiritual practice, whether an invocation, or a hex, or chant, or some conjure work. Sometimes you're just repeating a word over and over again, and it changes and you envision different things each time, depending on what you're doing. As someone who does have a lineage of folks who are conjurers, repetition is the thing that makes other things possible. So, I tried to utilize it intentionally throughout the book, and was just naturally drawn to forms that did that work too, because that bias is in my blood.

AH: There's so many aspects of kinship in your book where you're talking about family, friendship, or love, or violence. I'm curious how you define kinship, or how you are coming to experience kinship in the book, when so many of the examples that we have are also examples of very deep instances of violence?

AM: Our relationship to our familiesno matter what those relationships are, even if there is no relationshipare our first practices of love, our first practices of trust, our first practices of audacity. They are our first. And so troubled though the relationship between Black femme folks and our peoples may be, they are our first.

If I'm talking about fathers and police, it's not to make them synonymous but to articulate how violence slopes upward or downward and kind of moves through the body in similar ways.

You know, it's easyit's easy to talk about police. It's easy to talk about police violence, at least for me. I have an intimate relationship with pigs and they guns and they batons and all of that. It was much harder to talk about how the man I love can't love me back beyond his own wounds or his own hurt, and in that way, hurts me.

AH: In "transhistorical for the x in my gxrls," you wrote: "I find antithesis to be a powerful origin." Could you expound on that phrase?

AM: There's this very particular thing that happens when folks raise Black girls, where there are narratives about our personhood that we either take on and adjust beneath them, or we reject them and try to create ourselves in the void between what we've rejected and where we are. And I went that way. I couldn't deal with the dissonance [and the distance] between what a good Southern Black girl was supposed to be and what I was. I mean from jump, like out the gate. Four years old, like, just fighting it. I'm climbing trees, I'm cussin', you know. I'm running around with boys, and then I'm being salacious, and then I'm being fast, and then I'm like, you know, dating white men. Like my first date was with a little white boy because, "Oh don't bring a white boy home if you a Black Southern girl."

I knew that I wasn't the frilly-sock, church-dress, hair-staying-straight, crossing-my-legs girl. I knew I wasn't that. I didn't know what the hell was going on, but I knew what I wasn't. That really was the only articulation that I had: What I wasn't. It was scary. There were a lot of consequences that seem trivial now, right? Like I got in trouble for not wearing dresses to church. My mother would make me wear the ugliest thing in my closet that she knew I hated because I wouldn't put on the dress. That seems frivolous now, but at the time, it was a whole world. And so that [dissent/negative articulation] has continued. It has continued because, even as an organizer, I don't know what freedom looks like. I don't know what liberation will be. I don't know what the landing place will be. But I know there are no police there. There are no prisons there. I know that everyone eats good. I know that there is no sexual violence.

I have the space and capacity to do some world-building, because at least I know what is not going to be there. I know what I got to get rid of to get there. And that, at least for me, is a starting point. The antithesis, the negative space is a starting point. And it's very Black. That's a Black gxrl anthem.

Originally posted here:

Talking with our mouths full: The spells of Gumbo Ya Ya - scalawagmagazine.org

How can Democrats win more votes in rural America?

I dont know if thats the most important question for progressive politics right now, but its the one I think about the most. Democrats have had their share of victories lately after all, they currently control the White House and Congress but the reality is that its not enough, due to the idiosyncrasies of our electoral system.

To pass a meaningful agenda, Democrats need to win more rural voters rural voters is often code for white people, but it also includes Black and brown voters who dont live in cities.

Theres a raging debate on the left about how to do this. Depending on who you ask, the problem is either too much wokeness on the progressive side or too much milquetoast moderation from the centrists. A great deal of this argument not all of it, but most of it is about how to navigate the politics of race and class. And that is part of an ever broader conversation about identity and culture and the media landscape.

My views on all this are hard to pin down, and the more I think about it, the more questions I have. But one thing seems clear: The left needs to build a more sustainable working-class coalition, and rural Americans have to be a part of it. The best way to do this is, well, not so clear.

So I reached out to Briahna Joy Gray, host of the podcast Bad Faith, for the latest episode of Vox Conversations. As a Black woman and former press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanderss 2020 presidential campaign, Gray brings a unique perspective to these debates, and Ive wanted to engage with her for a long time. She has a lot to say about race and class and why the problem with Democrats isnt merely about strategy or messaging its about policy.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, theres much more in the full podcast, so subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The big debate on the left right now is over what people are calling popularism. The basic idea is pretty simple: Democrats should figure out which views are popular, and which arent, and then frame their message accordingly. Theres some obvious wisdom to that, but also some limitations. Why do you think Democrats are losing non-college educated whites, and even increasingly losing ground among Black and Latino voters? Is it a policy problem? Is it a messaging problem? Is it something else?

Well, Id say that it is definitely a policy problem, but not just that they werent running on popular policies, which is true. Theyll either run on them and betray those promises, the way Biden has done with a $15 minimum wage, canceling student debt, marijuana decriminalization, etc. Or, they wont run on them to begin with. So thats, lets say, Joe Biden, ignoring the fact that 88 percent of Democrats support Medicare-for-all.

But my feeling about it is having policies that are very, very popular is useful rhetorically. If I can say that 88 percent of Democrats and 50 percent, approximately, of Republicans support Medicare-for-all, I can use that as a rhetorical cudgel to ask why the Democratic Party can only get 118 members of the House to sign on to the Medicare-for-all legislation. I can use it to draw a contrast between the will of the people and what our elected officials are willing to do, and then use that to open up a conversation about whats motivating elected officials, other than their constituents.

What I dont think is right is to exclusively support policies that you should be supporting ethically, as a matter of principle, just because theyre not popular. And we all are familiar, I think, with the examples of how unpopular the civil rights movement was, and Martin Luther King was as a human being, when that activism was ongoing. And some people look at, say, slogans like defund the police, principles like police abolition, that was polling up to 40 percent last spring and summer, after the murder of George Floyd really horrified the country and galvanized all those protests.

What happened then was an entire summer of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party making the argument that to support defunding, to support these protests, was to jeopardize Joe Bidens chances of defeating Donald Trump. And ... when presented with that zero-sum equation, people started to back away from the slogan and their support from protests in the media and in the public sphere, and the polling started to shift.

Now, you could also imagine a world with a different kind of candidate, who rode the coattails of the popular movement, and the fact that even Republicans were very sympathetic, after the on-camera murder of George Floyd, toward meaningful police reform. There was some openness, there were some cracks there among the libertarian right on this issue, to push the polls the other way.

But polls are only weaponized by corporate parties to explain why they shouldnt do something. And when polls are inconvenient, theyre ignored. There is absolutely no conversation in this country about the ability to use persuasion, and what I would argue is the true work of politics, to push polls for principles that you believe in, in a positive direction.

Youre a comms person, so I really want to hear your take on message discipline. I have to say Im very skeptical of the possibilities of this and Id love to be convinced that Im wrong. My view is that what Democrats say is far less important than what the voters theyre trying to reach can hear. We have a polarized media environment, and because of that theres a wall between what Dems are saying and what voters are hearing, and that wall is an insulated right-wing media machine that exists to reinforce conservative propaganda and define the Democrats in the minds of voters.

Im not saying the Dems should say dumb or unpopular stuff, but Im also not sure it matters as much wed like to believe. Where am I going wrong here?

I think that Donald Trump putting those checks in peoples pockets mattered, I think that Joe Biden promising to put more checks in peoples pockets, and then delivering less than was promised, mattered, left a bad taste in peoples mouths. Look, were on Covid, were still shut down. Im a professional podcaster, I dont get out much. But one of the ways that I can try to judge what people who are different from me, in different contexts, are thinking and feeling about politics is to look at the comment sections in nonpolitical spaces. So Ill go to something like The Shade Room, pop culture websites, who occasionally post clips about political news, and see what the people underneath are saying.

People are still talking about how they were promised $2,000 and didnt get it. People are still talking about it. The Biden administration is clearly trying to present an image that the crisis has been handled, and the recovery is well on its way. And not to diminish what has been achieved on that score, but it does them a disservice to gaslight enormous amounts of Americans who are in a more precarious situation than theyve ever been in their lives, and for whom a $2,000 check, a $1,600 check, got eaten up immediately.

I feel like a lot of people in those comment sections are still talking about, Well, I thought my student debt was getting canceled. Forty-four million Americans have student loan debt. Seniors are the fastest growing population with student loan debt, and Social Security checks are being garnished at quite a clip to pay that student loan debt. If those 44 million Americans had their student loan debt canceled, which Joe Biden could do by executive order, I promise you, voters would feel that, and it would cut through a lot of noise of the Fox News machine.

I think that when you actually deliver for voters, they absolutely feel it, and it matters. And my last point of proof for that would be FDR, who delivered in such a way, that they had to change the rules. He had to die to get out of office, and they had to change the rules, so nobody could do that again, because he got reelected so many times. Right?

This is why I keep coming back to the media landscape. Its a totally different world now. I think less about changing minds and more about dictating salience, because I actually think most people dont really have fixed or coherent views, and theyre pretty pliable. Its all about what issues are salient at any given time, and why. If a conservative candidate, or the Republican Party, is determined to make critical race theory or something like that a salient issue by constantly talking about it, and talking about it to an audience that is pretty insulated, what the hell is a Democratic candidate supposed to do about that?

You cannot be reactionary, you cannot respond, you cannot spend all of your time explaining why CRT is right and good. I simply will not discuss CRT. Look, the answer is not to say nothing is happening in schools, the answer is not to say that its a figment of your imagination or try to argue what the definition of CRT is. I might do that on my show, Im not a politician. I would not advise any politician to get into the weeds and say, But okay, whats being taught is not really CRT.

A lot of the anxiety was actually about school closures, which Republicans were able to capitalize on, this anxiety that parents had, that their kids were not going to get the full benefit of the education they need, because Covid closures have kept them out of the classroom. You have to redirect. And to your point about salience, counterattacking with an issue of greater natural salience than whether or not some acronym that nobody had ever heard of before a year ago should be at the top of the list.

So if I were Terry McAuliffe running for governor in Virginia, and someone asked me a question about CRT; Arent you concerned about CRT being taught in school? I would say, I am concerned, like many Virginia parents, that our kids are not getting the quality of education they have come to expect, because Covid closures cut them out of the classroom, and distance learning is really hard. And I want to make sure, as governor of Virginia, that I bring parents and teachers together to make sure we have these kids prepared, maximally, for the rest of their lives.

That doesnt just mean the workplace, that means to be good citizens of this country, that means learning about all of our history, good and bad, and I know that Virginia parents want the same. Now, lets talk about ways we can deliver on what your economic and social priorities are here in this state.

I hear all of that. And let me just say very clearly that I think Terry McAuliffe was a bad candidate. But if you told him, Hey, look, the CRT stuff is hurting your campaign, just shut the hell up about it, or pivot in the way that you suggested, which I think is the smartest thing you could possibly do, Im not sure it makes much difference in the end. How much do you think that will help or matter if the right-wing media machine is working in concert to systematically make CRT, or defund the police, or whatever the thing is at that moment, the central issue? Do you really think thats something that can be circumnavigated by staying on message?

I do. And that is not to say that its easy, but here is one thing that Ive observed. And theres some people on the left, the Bernie left, the left left ... Weve been having this conversation about why it is that our media ecosystem is operating so differently than the right-wing or conservative media ecosystem. And part of it is that the left media ecosystem is divided. There is very little coordination, there is a very different kind of messaging thats going on in the corporate MSNBC media cycle or the marginalized, online left media space that I am in, and that Ive been cordoned off in, because the mainstream media, fundamentally, wont have someone like me on.

I am aware of the fact that I have screengrabs of some poor booker somewhere who suggested me for a popular MSNBC hosts show, who was blacklisted from working for that show again, just because they brought up my name. Theres like an internal war here, and its because theres a real, fundamental disagreement about whats motivating voters, and what kind of messages you should use to redirect.

So liberals and moderate Dems are very confident that just saying everybodys racist all the time is going to motivate people, and that is the punch to land. They did it with Trump in 2016, and lost; they did it in Trump in 2020, and Covid saved Biden; and they did it with Terry McAuliffe. And the Lincoln Project. Former Republicans, literally, staged that tiki torch thing. And I dont know how many times they had to ... they even tried to make up instances of racism, because thats the only play that they have.

Because what do they have in lieu of identity fear-mongering? Nothing, because they wont simply support the basic policies that everybody wants.

Now, I could be wrong. It could be that Joe Biden passes a $15 minimum wage, gives everybody another round, or two, or three, or recurring, of $2,000 checks, cancels 44 million Americans student loan debt, and people still decide to go and vote for whoever the Republican nominee is.

If that happens, sue me. I think youll still like the fact that your debt has been forgiven, and that your life is demonstrably better, but Ill reevaluate if and when Democrats deliver on core promises that are enormously popular and still lose. But we literally have not seen that happen. The last time we had a minimum wage raise was 2009, the year of our Lord 2009. It has been the last longest period [without a] minimum wage raise since my guy, FDR, founded the thing nearly a century ago.

To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to subscribe to Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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The limits of popularism - Vox

The Truro-based Three Spires Singers founded 40 years ago this year by the late conductor Richard Hickox marked their anniversary with a substantial commission from the Cornish composer Graham Fitkin. It was premiered in Truro Cathedral by the singers and their orchestra, together with the Cornwall Girls and Boys Choirs, and soloists counter-tenor Rory McCleery and narrator Samuel West, conducted by Christopher Gray.

Fitkin was asked for a Cornwall-centred work, and he settled on the Penzance-born chemist Humphry Davy as its subject; the composer himself was a pupil at Humphry Davy grammar school in Penzance. He sees the relationship between science, culture and political movements as constantly fluid and interdependent, and his text for Humphry Davy The Age of Aspiration combines extracts from Davys notebooks detailing his experiments and discoveries with passages providing a wider context for the period around the turn of the 19th century when the scientist worked, when the industrial revolution was gathering momentum and the horrors of the slave trade were being revealed.

Davys observations, many of them dealing with his work on gases and breathing, are mostly given to the counter-tenor, while the narrator supplies the historical detail, including an extract from William Wilberforces 1789 Commons speech on the abolition of slavery; the chorus provides a gently shifting, dappled background to it all, fastening on individual words and phrases, as well as the sounds of breathing. It all builds slowly, with the orchestra mostly in a supporting role, and just occasional outbursts providing a reminder that all the scientific and industrial progress came at a huge social cost; the ending is quietly beautiful but at the same time profoundly ambiguous.

The texts are elaborately interwoven, and the performances from the choirs and soloists did a remarkable job in making so many of them audible in a cathedral acoustic that in the first half of the concert had largely reduced the text of Poulencs Gloria to incoherence, and played havoc with the balance between the soloist and orchestra in Cordelia Williams brisk, no-nonsense account of Ravels G major Piano Concerto.

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Humphry Davy: The Age of Aspiration review Fitkins intricate reflection on the costs of progress - The Guardian

ZAKA TOTO is a writer, editor of the Martinican journal ZIST, and co-founder of La Fabrique Dcoloniale, a collective of scholars, educators, and artists aiming to foster conversations and projects around matters of cultural decolonization in Martinique.

Zaka and I met online for this interview as he sat in his home in La Trinit, on the Northeastern coast of Martinique, the northernmost of the Windward Islands in the Caribbean. Though COVID-19 came later, it has not spared Martinique, which has seen the virus rampage through a mostly unvaccinated population. A small but overly active anti-vaccination movement has made headlines with violent actions that mixed hostility against vaccination policies with long-held resentment against the centralized French government. This is but the latest in a series of activist outbursts that have highlighted Martiniques colonial malaise: the island remains a French colony and a French anomaly. What does decolonialism mean when the colonizer never left? Zaka and I discussed Martiniques history, its present, and its future.

GRGORY PIERROT: The sense I get living in the US, but also in continental France for that matter, is that people might know some of the big names (the Nardal sisters, Aim Csaire, Frantz Fanon, douard Glissant, etc.), but Martinique as a place tends to be largely an abstraction to them.

ZAKA TOTO: They were not thinking at the expense of Martinique or against their own island. When you read Fanon, you can have the sense that he feels betrayed by the place he came from, that he could only achieve his revolutionary destiny elsewhere, in Algeria, the fight of the time. But actually, many in the independence movement both in Martinique and Guadeloupe were also with Fanon in Algeria and elsewhere before and after that.

Glissant was prevented from returning to Martinique for five years because De Gaulle, who was president at the time, felt that he was the main threat for possible independence. At the time, the first figure of the independence struggle was Csaire, and when he decided this was not his strategy, the second was closely Fanon, at least as a figurehead of the intellectual and political. Csaire never left. He was in power for 50 years and everybody felt he was a traitor because he never achieved independence. When you read his poetry, everything is hidden. There is a very strong understanding that Csaires literary work is political not just his pieces about Haiti or the Congo, or the Discourse on Colonialism. When held against what was happening at the time in Martinican politics, his poetry reads like hidden diss raps!

For those generations, when you tried to talk about Martinique, you couldnt say everything out loud. The generation of creolization (Raphal Confiant, Patrick Chamoiseau), when they read Csaire, they know all the small things, the hidden references they had this thing about opacity: if something was written, published, seen, read, then the colonizers would read it too. So, you had to hide behind words.

For example, a famous agricultural strike occurred in 1974 in the banana plantation of Chalvet. The military, police, and planters sent hired commandos from South America against the strikers. Officially, two people were killed, a few dozens wounded. The first record of this event, before even the newspapers, is in Malemort, one of Glissants novels, published the following year by Seuil, a major French publishing house. Except you would never know its about this strike. Its two pages where all the words are stuck together. When Glissant started experimenting with typography, hed write like you were entering a forest. He made it hard to walk through, hard for the white gaze, but also for us. Thats the difficulty of opacity. The people of your time will understand you, but they have to pass on that knowledge. If you read it without references, you cannot see it.

Opacity can be useful when you try to further guerilla fighting, but what if you somehow manage to gain political power at the ballot box, through unions and you gain leverage? Boomers achieved social and political empowerment, and they dont want to let go. And they maintain this by keeping things between themselves.

Opacity becomes a thing in itself; not for a greater purpose, but to maintain those who achieved political power and cultural empowerment. A lot of those things were not transmitted to my generation, and even less to those afterward.

What I meant to say is that the ideas of Fanon and Glissant have traveled far and wide, almost despite Martinique. But it is such an idiosyncratic place. Caribbean history is unique, and can be so different from one island to the other. Martinicans may have fueled decolonial thought, but Martinique remains colonized. It raises the question of what a decolonial movement might look like in Martinique today.

For me, the principal decolonial struggle facing Martinique now is chlordecone.

My dad, Karl, is a farmer. After doing his military service and working in France in the 1970s, he came back in 1974 wanting to build independence through a farmers movement, to feed the people, and to prove that we could live on our own without anybodys help. Everybody who was in the movement knows him, but you wont find him in history books: opacity, again. Hes not much of a talker, or a meeting-goer: he does. He farms, he occupies land, etc. My dad was famous because he tried to plant yams, to make people understand that yams are actually a crop on which you can base an economy. You can export it and feed yourself. He was planting yams in the south of Martinique on the Atlantic coast, on a piece of land that he, his brother, and other young farmers fought to divest from export production (i.e., bananas) and move toward sustenance, food for locals to eat: lettuce, yams, dasheen, etc. a bit of everything.

I was born in a utopia, basically, in 1984. When I was seven years old, the project floundered. Their experiment in trying to change the agricultural model in Martinique was a failure.

Before my father and his friends took over, the land had been used to grow bananas, and so it was poisoned with chlordecone. I was basically born in the heart of Chernobyl. The little city I grew up in is a very rural town, Saint-Esprit, we have the highest rate of chlordecone contamination and prostate cancer on the island.

My dad was very much involved in the fight for ecology in Martinique, so he was among the first to alert people to the danger of pesticides, because he himself had to use them when he was working on banana plantations. When he first started working as an agricultural worker on a lettuce farm on the western coast, the owner was using so much pesticides that when he was carrying heads of lettuce, the stuff was dripping all over him.

Some time in the early 1980s, they used the stuff on a plot of land and the next day it was littered with dead animals. Around then, one of the founders of the only ecological association at the time received information about the Hopewell disaster in the US, and pictures of what was happening in South America, so they knew something was wrong with chlordecone. But because the people carrying this fight were also political, and because Martinique was a rural economy, chlordecone meant jobs, companies. We had fairly progressive people in power at the time, but they didnt want to rock the boat.

You couldnt talk about it to anyone. It was a myth; if you were in the know, you knew, and often if you were in the know, you didnt want to talk about it anyway. Officially, there was no issue with chlordecone.

And these were also local elites, doing this. I was talking about opacity: I think chlordecone is a striking instance of opacity becoming a bad thing.

Activism around chlordecone has picked up in the past few years, along with social activism in general. The social movement in the Caribbean at the turn of the 2010s was sort of an early version of the Yellow Jackets movement.

Life in overseas regions is very expensive. At the end of 2008, a movement to protest the cost of living started in French Guiana, and spread first to Guadeloupe and then Martinique. It was biggest in Guadeloupe. There had been a very strong nationalist movement there, but it disappeared in the mid-80s. They refused to participate in French elections, so what was left of that movement were the unions. They are very strong and politically driven, and they seized this occasion for a massive strike. The main figure is lie Domota: had he run for elections the following year, he would have won in a landslide. But he refused, and what was left was a void. So, this massive movement didnt translate into political or social change a few tweaks here and there, agreements with the French republic, but no massive transformation.

Csaire died in 2008; the strike happened in 2009. In 2011, Glissant died. Figures from those social movements did not participate in elections. So, what was left was a void, the rupture of the transmission of knowledge, and it had consequences.

Political figures who rose almost from the ground up, from the grassroots, refused to stand in front of the people and take their responsibilities. What we heard instead was strict identitarian discourse: Lets be proud to be Black. That is obviously not a bad thing. But this had never been a political program as such in Martinique or Guadeloupe. We built our own institutions of representation and empowerment in the last 70 years, managed to gain leverage, seats, produce results, economic and cultural empowerment. Most of the population was out of poverty. Not one white planter is a mayor, here, etc. Those are massive changes.

But in 2009 and afterward, a spirit developed that seemed to say, Maybe the state of things is okay. Because there was no renewal of ideas and personnel, what was produced instead was, on the one hand, identity politics and, on the other, a political class that was very happy with this situation, because the focus on identity was not a focus on economics or other things and it didnt require them to do more to challenge the status quo. People unaccustomed to their own political traditions, or even their own recent political history, became obsessed with a politics bordering on hotepism you know: Our ancestors were pharaohs and queens and people saying this come from very mixed backgrounds, in creole societies where people come from very diverse heritage: ancestors from Africa, India, China, Europe.

This new, cultural-nationalist movement made waves in international media in the wake of the assassination of George Floyd, as movements around the world toppled statues celebrating the colonial past. Can you tell us more?

Heres the thing about decolonizing public spaces: in Martinique, it happened 40 to 50 years ago. It was everywhere, in history books; there are streets, squares named after those heroes. Through the years, we gained a modicum of political power and some form of empowerment through militant action. But in the 80s, bombs were exploding everywhere; all things representing French colonial power were attacked. For example, the statue of Josephine de Beauharnais [Napoleons wife, born in Martinique] was beheaded 30 years ago, in 1991, when I was a child.

We also gained through electoral politics. Csaire became mayor of Fort-de-France, and all across the island things were renamed to echo a global, decolonial Third Worldist revolutionary heritage: Gandhi, Maurice Bishop, Ho Chi Minh The square where the French chief of police resides in Martiniques capital city celebrates the victory of Vietnam independence fighters over France and the United States! If you drive around Martinique, almost every roundabout has a statue of the enslaved breaking their chains, etc. We have more monuments to the enslaved gaining their freedom than all of the independent islands in the Caribbean combined. So, this part, decolonizing the space, was already done.

This militant movement in 2019 was not the same kind of massive mobilization you saw in other places around the world. It started with the demolition of statues of Victor Schoelcher, an abolitionist well respected by the likes of Csaire, for what its worth. But as a figure of white French politics, he was problematic. Schoelcher was a white guy, and the movement focused solely on racial identity. After Schoelcher, they moved on to actual colonial statues, like the statue of Martiniques Columbus, Belain dEsnambuc. And there was a statue of Empress Josephine.

A lot of people here, even if they didnt participate, felt kinship with what was happening. In a place where nothing is changing anymore, something that looks like movement always looks good.

Precisely. There was something about this movement that made it look like much more than what it was. It was very well organized as a media event, but as a political gesture it seemed odd.

At any point in time this could have turned into something great. Thats why people were looking and waiting to see what would come after. You dont have to be perfect as a militant. The action doesnt have to get everything right, and people were ready to accept that: Okay, Schoelcher, we can get where youre going with this. The problem is what came after. Their only demand was to rename places, so elected officials said: Okay. Lets invite historians, activists, were all Martinicans, lets discuss. But they didnt come.

The second wave was the destruction of Josephine and DEsnambucs statues. But when this came, the mayor of Fort-de-France had already decided that they should be removed. The activists said, You want to do it next week? Fine: Well do it two days earlier. And at that moment, it becomes something else. The statue of Josephine had been standing beheaded, red paint running down her neck, for 30 years! Once the statue is beheaded and left there, about 100 feet away from the palace of the French governor, whats its power? What does it signify? Not the power of French colonialism in Martinique, surely. Symbolic decolonization had already been done. The gesture is no longer directed only against colonial power but also against your own form of representation, political history, etc. They called Black elected officials overseers of the white mans plantation over this.

This culminated in a protest in front of the police station that ended with a young drummer getting beaten up by the police. They marched to the mayors office and demanded that the man be liberated. And the mayor actually left his office and came down to sit and talk with the crowd outside. As he was talking to them, suddenly they stopped speaking to him, and as he tried to leave, they put chains on him, and tried to carry him to the police station while spitting on him and calling him overseer. This is a Black mayor, in a Black city.

So, thats where it got weird and people stopped following the movement. This looked like BLM and movements happening elsewhere, but it was new and different, and not in a good way. There was a deep disconnect between them and the population. Ideologically what transpired was this complete rejection of the political and social experience on the island and the Caribbean in general.

Everything that was not African in a very clichd, mythical vision of Pan-Africanism, of what is African was rejected. And their action with the mayor symbolized this.

Though it has poisoned the land, chlordecone was banned back in the 1990s. What are the stakes of the struggle now?

In the last decade, theres been a consensus across the political spectrum. Everybodys against chlordecone. But it hasnt moved the needle much. A massive investigation commission was organized in the French National Assembly started by Martinique representative Serge Letchimy, which led to some initiatives about the traceability of agricultural products, etc. But to fix the chlordecone problem we need more than half-measures; we need an upheaval of the way our entire rural world works. The issue with this recent movement is that they dont have a seat at the table, and they do not demand that elected officials be vocal about this. No one wants to take their place and get in the political struggle, pull levers, do this judo with France. They just say no, we dont want to talk to the government, local authorities, or the local population. So, in the end nothing moves.

We need to put an end to bananas as the main export crop. Thats the only way, actually. To decompose the chlordecone molecule, you need to clean the land for a couple of years not a hundred, just a couple. You can do this in one of two ways: have a massive revolution, take the land from the landowners, chop off some heads, make it happen, or you can try to figure out a political solution, think of the future of these people, and propose a bargain.

But we also need to change the way people work on a massive amount of land; its long term, and it would happen over 10, 20, 30 years. It requires a lot of thinking, power, knowledge. Working the land demands very specific skills. You have to love it. It is backbreaking, daily work. But Martinique, like Guadeloupe, is losing its youth: for the past decade weve been losing one percent of the population every year. So, you need people with energy on the island, people who are forward-thinking, who can project themselves 15 years ahead, and these people are not here. Theyre elsewhere, helping somebody elses country. So, I think that we have to somehow fundamentally reverse the dynamic. Something is missing; where are the new ideas, the new generations?

You spoke about your youth: what was your journey like, in adulthood?

I was born and raised here. I left for France when I was 20, and at 25 I went to Asia China and Taiwan, where I stayed from 2009 to 2017. Coming back to Martinique was always the plan. When I came back, I had literary ambitions, but I understood that it would be difficult to come out of nowhere at 32 and be read, and at the time the atmosphere was very anti-intellectual. It was bad to think critically, historically To be intellectual was a swear word in political circles, among the youth, among educated people, so I thought, If its bad Im going to do it.

I started with a blog with a group of friends I felt we should have fun talking about the Caribbean, being political-minded but not political, bringing ideas, without necessarily trying to be philosophical, etc. And people started reading; there was interest. The blog was read in 65 different countries. In 2017, after the blog shut down, I started to work on a literary review, ZIST.

There had been no literary review in Martinique or Guadeloupe for a long time, so I figured, lets do that: lets be the Tropiques or Carbet of our time! If you see something missing that existed in previous generations, the first thing you can do is some iteration of it. So, that was the idea: get writers, poets, slammers, in French, in Creole, lets mix it up, put something together. I had this knowledge of things done before me, and this was a way to also try to pass on some of that knowledge through literary creation, historical essays, etc.

ZIST was an online venture from the get-go. Half of our population is diasporic; with the web, you can put diasporas in touch, different places and thinkers. For me it was liberating, because at the time, people would say, You wont make any money, and no one will read you. By the end of the year, we were read, quoted, and three years later, Im quoted in international newspapers even before local newspapers do. The one print issue we did, issue number 18, was about chlordecone and how to talk about it, how to express the feelings of my generation about it. At the time, locally, it was in the news for maybe a week. On the web, it circulated far and wide. Maybe a year and a half after it first came out, people were contacting me, telling me about the fake ads in it, asking, Who did that? And for over a year, I had no idea of its impact, how many people had read it. The internet was liberating in this way, in terms of impact and visibility.

Recently youve also started getting involved in activism, notably with La Fabrique Dcoloniale. Tell us more.

I tried to reconnect with previous generations but didnt find much support. I found a lack of collective involvement on the part of the people who should have been passing the torch. My generation was not so political, but we had some knowledge of previous years, yet theres something completely different and disconnected from our political history in this new generation. Something got lost with time in terms of politicization and connection with political history.

So, by 2020, ZIST started getting traction and visibility. I wrote about the problem I thought we had with the new nationalist movement. I have friends among historical independentists; some raised me, so this was personal for me. And five months later, the statue moment happened. On the day they destroyed the Josephine and DEsnambuc statues, something happened. I was in Fort-de-France with a friend whos a marine conservationist, cleaning a beach. The organizers were just trying to catch the attention of officials, but people came, motivated, and ended up doing much more than was planned. We pulled a whole car out of the mangrove! This was so empowering: kids, adults, grandparents, people wanting to do something positive, transform their own reality. Right as we were finishing, I got a phone call telling me that militants were trying to destroy the Tricentennial Gate a colonial monument that was also decolonized a long time ago: it was renamed, used for something entirely different, transformed into a place of cultural empowerment. Csaire asked a local artist involved in the nationalist movement to paint a fresco depicting the indigenous population revolting against the French thats the gate now, not exactly a celebration of the French empire. In any case, they were going to attack it because they had no idea what the gate symbolizes, and we managed to talk them down.

So, knowledge stopped that action, which told me that there was a role to play. Toppling statues, renaming streets is great, but then what? Does it change anything? Does changing the name of a place, toppling statues, etc., change the material conditions of living? Of course not. Symbols are important, but they do not emancipate.

A couple of people were involved, and we thought, Were not going to wait for more famous people to join; were going to do it ourselves. We talked about it and decided we need to do more, to get involved in society and cast a wide net across disciplines, forms of expertise. In a colonized space, the job of the person in the know is not just to produce books that will get read in Paris, London, New York, or Los Angeles. You have a double burden. I feel that at some point people in the know became more Western, our elites became less involved.

Painters, photographers, teachers, and professors: We got together and wrote a text. When things calmed down, it was still clear that, while we need decolonization, we need doing, not just undoing.

We chose to call ourselves fabrique because we mean to make stuff. Not commodities, but we can try to build bridges between the different sectors of society we come from: art, education, politics, workers, etc. Whats missing is people. Our island is losing inhabitants. So maybe we can try to build a different dynamic between people outside and inside Martinique.

Then COVID happened. You cant be with people on Zoom; access to computers and the internet is discriminatory. Even though we use social networks, those are elite practices. You have to do physical stuff to connect with people; you need to, in order to undo the past 40 years.

Now there are more than 30 of us in the group. Were planning a big event on reparations from slavery that will also address reparations for chlordecone. How do you build that? We invited Sir Hilary Beckles, the head of the reparations committee at CARICOM and professor at the University of the West Indies. Hes already agreed, but we still have to figure out vaccination issues, etc. Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian political philosopher, is also supposed to come at the end of the year.

Im trying to make people understand that contemporary history is as important as the history of slavery. Many things happened between 1848 and now that should be of interest to us. The history of rebellions is of course important, but so is more recent history. We have to think of ourselves as a society that produces knowledge. Our intellectual tradition has proven this. One hundred years ago, a bunch of students in Paris were like, Hey! Ngritude! Our experience as Black people, in the middle of the Caribbean, is specific and important knowledge. We will write about it and create knowledge about it, and it will be as important as whatever white people produce. So, we need to recenter ourselves and say whats next for us and what is the knowledge were producing right now.

You mentioned Beckles, and the wider, non-Francophone Caribbean. In the aftermath of the volcanic eruption in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) earlier this year, you were involved in organizing help. Tell us a bit about it, and about how you see the work you want to do in Martinique in relation to the greater Caribbean.

The Caribbean is not a view of the mind, its an actual place. I was lucky to be able to travel across the islands and down to Brazil, to New Orleans, which I think is also part of the Caribbean. When I went there, I thought, Oh! Im home. We have this real relationship with each other. Were all mirrors, sometimes distorted, bigger, etc. but were all mirrors of each other. The space is fragmented, certainly. I was in Taiwan, along with many other students from all over the Caribbean, during the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Living the aftermath of the earthquake with Haitians in Taiwan was a shock. It revealed many layers of the Caribbean in the world. We were trying to think of what we could do, so we did fundraising. I realized a few things in the process: the Haitian ambassador to Taiwan is a minister of state, for example. Haiti is independent and much bigger than Martinique, but it made me think, So, we have to think this far out, and think of the layers to this. Theres the devil we know former colonial powers and the rest of the world, who want you to change allegiances, etc. I was also struck by how the whole network of NGOs was also predatory. Your country might be independent, but it depends on networks that are much broader, and if youre weak, everybody will want a piece of you. They will come, they will get you, and they will not miss. Principles may prevent this; but in their absence, you will get eaten.

So, I came back here. In the years between, major hurricanes hit Guadeloupe, Dominica, then went and hit Haiti, Puerto Rico. It made me wonder, What kind of NGO do we have here to raise funds? The Red Cross, thats it. At that time, organically with young people of Martinique and Guadeloupe, we built a small network of people with skills related to risk prevention. Some of those guys are geniuses civic hackers, people who build warning systems for coming earthquakes, etc. When the eruption happened in SVG, the French islands took a long time to get involved, not just during the earthquake. Six months prior, there had been a meeting of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States to plan for an earthquake, prepare to welcome refugees, etc. It was all set, except for Guadeloupe and Martinique, even though were members. Martinique is a 45-minute flight from SVG. It didnt make any sense.

Earlier this year, in May, for the month of commemoration of the abolition of slavery, we wanted to organize a cultural event about the maroons of the sea. The unionist and historian George B. Mauvois wrote a book about the kind of marine underground railroad the enslaved built around the Caribbean; he calls them maroons of the sea. Our idea was to rebuild a 21st-century version of this network, with 21st-century issues in mind, and to think of ways we can solve them by bypassing remnants of colonial separations that make no sense in this space. All our islands are creole. We share the same language. Were intertwined, but we are divided politically, so how do we go above or under that as maroons of the sea? That was the plan before COVID. When the eruption happened, we decided to do something like it anyway.

What did you do in SVG?

We raised money, tried to make people understand that we need to think differently in relation to our neighbors and that we need to act. We dont need to wait for some grand declaration of independence, or a decision by France: we can build by ourselves. We worked with Rasta and Native American communities in the north of the island. We went straight there, brought cultural crops ready to grow yams, tomatoes, etc.

And importantly, people responded. When we called for help for Saint Vincent, we had hundreds of volunteers willing to host refugees in their house, who gave stuff, who were willing to load boats and go there. Decolonizing in 2021 may also require thinking about what it is that we do to define ourselves. The way I see people act when we do something for ourselves, not against something its always short in time, but you see a lot of energy, people getting mobilized. People react to things. As colonized people in the Third World, we have many reasons to be resentful. It is 100 percent justified. You cannot go to people and say: Lets just forget about the past. But you have to do things to get out of the past. Do things for for the future, for the betterment of yourself rather than just in reaction against the system that oppresses you.

What would you Decolonize?

Who: The Taiwanese indigenous peoples.

What would you Defund?

Bananas.

What would you Abolish?

Frontiers between Caribbean islands.

What must be free for all?

Education and culture.

What three songs form the soundtrack to your struggle?

1. Kassav, An ba chenn la.

2. Eugne Mona, Bwa bril.

3. Kendrick Lamar, Bitch, Dont Kill My Vibe.

Grgory Pierrot is a writer, translator, and professor of English.

Read this article:

What We Do to Define Ourselves: A Conversation with Zaka Toto - lareviewofbooks

Pick a humanitarian emergency in any part of the world, and the needs will seem remarkably consistent. Once people have escaped immediate danger, they need food, shelter, clothing and medical assistance the things, in other words, that sustain us physically. The most pressing questions are about how to source the items and services required, and how to distribute them effectively.

What determines whether an emergency is resolved quickly or allowed to persist, however, is politics. And if you want to see what happens when political solutions fail, then the scrubland of the northern French coast, just across the Channel from England, is an instructive place to look.

The recent decision by Choose Love a celebrity-backed charity set up in the aftermath of the 2015 European refugee crisis to withdraw most of its funding for aid projects based in northern France, does not indicate that the needs there have changed in nature. There are an estimated 2,000 migrants camped out in and around Calais, looking for a way to reach the UK fewer than when the crisis was at its peak in 2015 and 2016, but more than at other times in the past. Many of these people are destitute; as winter approaches, local aid organisations, which provide everything from clean water and cooking equipment to phone charging, have launched an urgent appeal to make up the shortfall in funding.

Yet if the situation on the ground has not changed significantly, the context in which aid is distributed has been transformed. Political leaders have never wanted migrants to travel to Calais. For at least two decades now the French authorities, with British encouragement, have tried to make living conditions as difficult as possible, by demolishing camps and evicting squats. But the outpouring of public sympathy in 2015 when hundreds of thousands of people across Europe demonstrated in support of refugees, and many others joined volunteer efforts to provide material help forced them to temporarily back off.

Choose Love was founded, initially under the name Help Refugees, amid that wave of sympathy, by a trio of media-savvy campaigners. It won the backing of celebrities including Coldplays Chris Martin, and actors Olivia Colman and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and raises money partly by selling fashionable branded goods online and in a London boutique on Carnaby Street. Today, the charity has expanded to work with refugees in 22 countries and has raised 35m.

Now, politicians talk once again of migrants in Calais as an inconvenience that must be eliminated by repelling people rather than establishing routes to safety. In one recent statement, the UK Home Office implied that aid volunteers in northern France were part of the problem, telling the Guardian on 3 November: It is dangerous to encourage these Channel crossings, which are illegal, unnecessary and facilitated by violent criminal gangs profiting from misery. This is in keeping with the more hostile attitude of European governments in recent years to humanitarians whose actions they find inconvenient: this month, Sen Binder and Sarah Mardini, two volunteers who saved lives in the Aegean Sea, went on trial in Greece accused of human trafficking, money laundering, fraud and espionage.

In a statement posted on its Instagram page, Choose Love said that it had been forced to make some difficult decisions in a strategic review, and that factors including the pandemic had prompted the decision to largely pull out of Calais. (Funding will still be provided to two charities working with unaccompanied minors in northern France.) But its decision tells us something broader about the limits of this type of humanitarian activism, which seeks to mobilise the might of branding and celebrity endorsements. It can be a powerful way to raise money and distribute resources in targeted ways but what happens when the attention moves elsewhere, leaving a political problem unsolved?

The promise of this type of action is that it offers us the opportunity to address the worlds problems with minimal disruption to our own privileged lifestyles, or to the system that enables them. As the late theorist Mark Fisher wrote in his book Capitalist Realism, its a form of social protest, but one that offers the fantasy that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.

Fishers point is not that celebrity-driven activism is inherently fake or insincere, as opposed to other more authentic forms. Rather, it epitomises a culture in which we are encouraged to think of ourselves as consumers instead of political subjects. During the triumphant era of global capitalism, before the crash of 2008, this model of action aimed high. Live 8, a string of benefit concerts in 2005 that marked the 20th anniversary of the original Live Aid, demanded nothing less than the abolition of global poverty. Bonos Product Red, a fundraising partnership with corporate brands launched the following year, went a step further. Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands, the U2 frontman said. Red is more like punk rock, hip-hop, this should feel like hard commerce.

The picture today is more fragmented. A new class of global billionaires have little need for even the illusion of popular consent, using their vast wealth to pursue individual passions from space travel to disease eradication. Campaigns that capture popular imagination, meanwhile, are now more likely to centre on crises closer to home. Think of the fundraising drives that have dominated the British publics attention in recent years: we have been asked not only to help keep refugees alive on our doorstep, but to raise money for the NHS and to stop children from starving during the school holidays tasks that our government, one of the worlds wealthiest, should be able to carry out itself. Its more obvious than ever that charity is a response to a faltering system, not a sign of its success.

Choose Love was the product of a moment when thousands of ordinary people intervened in a situation they found unjust. Its priorities might have shifted but that situation persists. Calais is not the site of a natural disaster, but a place where governments have deliberately created scarcity for political ends. It goes right to the heart of a debate about how states police migration, which itself is a proxy for the wider issues of war, global inequality and increasingly the climate crisis. In that context, the simple but urgent act of providing aid to others takes on a potentially greater significance, because it is a challenge to the established way of doing things. We should keep giving that help in Calais but we should also be asking why it is necessary in the first place.

Read the original post:

Choose Love cutting back Calais funding shows the limits of celebrity philanthropy - The Guardian

The Claremont Student Worker Alliancefocuses on bridging the gap between students and workers at the 5Cs to support the needs of staff members. (Corina Silverstein The Student Life)

This piece is the fourth in a series on mutual aid groups at the 5Cs.

Kali Tindell-Griffin PO 23 and Mei Ge PO 23 wanted to take action during summer 2020 politically and artistically.

They both wanted to expand and experiment with their art, as well as foster connection in place of the art community they were used to in Claremont.

We started thinking about ways that we could build more community digitally since social media was kind of the only way to connect with friends at the time, Tindell-Griffin said.

The two soon created 5C Art for Liberation as a platform for 5C artists to sell their artwork. The Instagram page doesnt have a central fund, functioning more like an e-commerce site. Artists can choose if they want to keep the funds they receive for artistic endeavors or redirect them to an organization or community member.

Ge said that they want the platform to support artists themselves and also the organizations that they hold close to home or just that matter to their communities.

The two emphasized that they dont want to be widely recognized as the faces of 5C Art for Liberation because they would rather showcase the artists that they support.

One group that saw a resurgence during the pandemic also takes a different approach than most mutual aid organizations: supporting the staff that keep campus running. According to Indira Grief PZ 23, Claremont Student Worker Alliance focuses on bridging the gap between students and workers at the 5Cs, aiming to support workers needs without centering themselves.

CSWA has been around for at least a decade, Grief said, raising awareness of the systemic inequalities between wealthy students at the colleges and the conditions of staff members.

I think you have to build relationships and see what tangible ways students can support workers, she said. Like our mutual aid this year.

CSWA has been fundraising to help with workers expenses like rent and healthcare throughout the pandemic, Grief said. The group raised nearly $60,000 for over 100 workers based on financial requests submitted through a Google form or word of mouth. Despite the groups success in fundraising, it did not fill all the need.

I do know that this [Scripps] worker, who there was a post about on our Instagram, has cancer and the schools health insurance doesnt cover her treatment, Grief said. And so there was a specific mutual aid drive for her that was actually started by her friend who is a worker and then students spread the word.

Greif emphasized that while mutual aid fundraising has been a way for students to support workers with immediate need, CSWA ultimately looks to create lasting systemic change for workers at the 5Cs.

Part of their mission is recognizing that the mutual-aid stuff isnt a long term thing, she said, and differentiating mutual aid from charity.

Its not just like, Oh theres this person that needs our help. No, we all work together and were in a relationship with this. [Mutual aid] is not enough to really change the structural issues, even though it is so important, she said.

A significant moment was the unionization of dining hall workers at Pomona in 2013. According to Grief, although this effort was worker-led, students backed workers during the fight. In the spring, the workers union contract will be up for renegotiation and CSWA plans to support workers in renewing their contract.

5C Art for Liberation aims to support artists, start conversations about liberation and provide a platform to students who need it. Their Instagram often reposts informational resources as well as individual mutual aid fundraisers.

Grief said that CSWA also utilizes its social media platform to share fundraisers and information about events.

On Thursday morning, Grief and other members of CSWA joined a picket line at the Ontario DoubleTree hotel to protest for fairer wages and better working conditions for the hotel staff. Grief said that attendance at the protest was partially supported by information they circulated on Instagram.

5C Art for Liberation maintains contact with other student mutual aid organizations for instance, Nobody Fails At Scripps directly contacted them to donate art pieces. The group often participates in raffles, reposts infographics and shares knowledge and resources with other student groups.

CSWA is part of a leftist coalition of groups across the 5Cs that all share information and support, Grief said. For example, an event CSWA hosted last week featuring organizer JR Herdandez was promoted by the 5C Prison Abolition group.

Like other mutual aid groups on campus, 5C Art for Liberation is experiencing some difficulty transitioning to in-person organizing. Ge and Tindell-Griffin said they both have significantly less free time than they did during remote instruction, and artists who normally donate work have less time to create art now as well. Additionally, the group is finding themselves unsure what the community needs most from in-person action.

To kick off its in-person work, 5C Art for Liberation hosted an event at Pomona Colleges Benton Museum of Art on Thursday night. The event had more than 10 booths for 5C artists to sell their art. It also cultivated a space for students to meet each other, with more than 50 attendees at one point. Ge and Tindell-Griffin said they were hoping for in-person events like this one since the beginning of summer 2020 and said the Benton staff helped immensely.

Moving forward, 5C Art for Liberation wants to both continue its current work and expand into new areas. They are considering hosting another art show in the spring, one that would hopefully have the space to accommodate more artists. The two organizers also expressed interest in tackling the issue of accessibility to art at some point, especially concerning the cost of materials. All the while, they will continue to build and support their community.

In the future, Grief said, CSWA wants to continue to support the existing union at Pomona and educate the college community about labor rights.

This Pomona fight is a really big deal. We want to meet with Pomona unionizers first and see how we can demonstrate student support and maybe get familiar with their contract, she said. I think thats also a tangible way to train students.

Greif said that CSWA plans to continue to fight for labor rights in the surrounding community as well.

Some of our students are working with the leads of Unite Here Local 11, which is the union that represents [the DoubleTree hotel staff], to try and plan some student actions at the hotel, she said.

Ge and Tindell-Griffin believe 5C Art for Liberation demonstrates that mutual aid and community-based work can be for everyone, regardless of their interests and passions. The role of art as an avenue for passion, empowerment and healing is often understated or forgotten in liberation movements, they said. They invite any students interested in helping to reach out to them on Instagram.

Art can be daunting for some people, Ge said, and the group hopes to reframe the way students view art.

Its really just a practice for skill building and healing and community knowledge just being passed around, she said.

Tindell-Griffin added that a persons passion for art and community dont need to be mutually exclusive.

Whats better than doing something you really, really love while also supporting your community? she said.

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The art of solidarity: 5C groups take a hands-on approach to community building - The Student Life

Today the Toronto Biennial of Art (the Biennial/TBA) announced its confirmed roster of Canadian and international artists for the second edition of the city-wide event, on view March 26 to June 5, 2022. Tairone Bastien, Candice Hopkins, and Katie Lawson are the curatorial team for the free, 72-day event with contributions from former TBA curators Clare Butcher and Myung-Sun Kim. The event will include 23 new commissions at nine venues across the city and Greater Toronto Area. As the curatorial team has worked on two editions of the Biennial, a number of artists from 2019 are returning in 2022 as part of a longer-term engagement, including Aycoobo (Wilson Rodrguez), Judy Chicago, Shezad Dawood, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ange Loft with Jumblies Theatre & Arts, Jumana Manna, Abel Rodrguez, Susan Schuppli, and Syrus Marcus Ware.

Commissioned and invited artists contributing to TBA 2022 exhibitions and programs include: Derya Akay, Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Andrea Carlson, Jeffrey Gibson, Hanyaterra | Jatiwangi Art Factory*, Marguerite Humeau, Timothy Yanick Hunter*, Tsm Igharas and Erin Siddall, Janet Kigusiuq, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Amy Malbeuf, Victoria Mamnguqsualuk, Anne Zanele Mutema*, Joar Nango, Eduardo Navarro, Aki Onda, Jessie Oonark, Paul Pfeiffer, Dana Prieto, Augustas Serapinas, Buhlebezwe Siwani*, and Denyse Thomasos. They join the following list of previously announced 2022 Biennial artists: Nadia Belerique, Brian Jungen, Waqas Khan, Mata Aho Collective, Eric-Paul Riege, and Camille Turner.

*Artists invited by Chiedza Pasipanodya and Sebastian de Line, the Curatorial Fellows for TBA 2022.

"We are beyond excited to launch the second edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art in 2022," said TBA Founder and Executive Director Patrizia Libralato. "Having postponed our event by six months, we are eager to invite our local audiences and communities back, and excited to once again welcome the world to Toronto this spring to experience ambitious contemporary art by among the most compelling artists working today. Our curatorial team has expanded on the themes of the 2019 Biennial to create a second edition that speaks directly to many facets of Toronto's history, geography, and culture that inform what our city is today. The Biennial team is also honoured to welcome back partners and sponsors who continue to support our bold vision."

In total, the Biennial will bring together 37 local and international artists, hailing from over 18 places of origin including Argentina, Canada, England, France, Germany, Indonesia, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Lebanon, Lithuania, Norway, Pakistan, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, United States, and Zimbabwe, as well as Indigenous communities in Canada, Colombia, Aotearoa | New Zealand, Norway, and the United States. The range of contributors reflects Toronto's status as one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world and the Biennial's commitment to inspire people, bridge communities, and contribute to global conversations. Additional participants will be announced in February 2022 along with details for the Biennial's extensive public programs and creative partnerships.

TBA 2019, titled The Shoreline Dilemma, was the first chapter of the two-part biennial, tracing various interconnected narratives and ecologies of the ever-changing shoreline of Lake Ontario. These connections revealed systems of resistance against and movement away from industrial colonial culture, uncovering polyphonic histories embedded in and around the shoreline.

The second chapter of the Biennial, What Water Knows, the Land Remembers, will explore locations near above-ground and hidden tributaries that channel water into Lake Ontario, as well as the ravines that shape the city's geography. Extending the interconnections of those locations and expanding the notions of the central question from 2019, "What does it mean to be in relation?," the curators envision expansive forms of kinship - with each other, their collaborators and the more-than-human, a belief that humans are in deep relation with other living beings. To frame and help guide their collaboration, the curators have generated a lexicon - a shared vocabulary - to ground their thinking and ongoing processes of exhibition-making. Examples of lexical words are bolded and underlined in the following descriptions of 2022 Biennial Highlights.

Artists have responded to the lexicon with new works that contemplate different kinds of relations and examine the past and present to project alternative futures. Highlights of new works for the 2022 Biennial include:

Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) is creating I AM YOUR RELATIVE, a multi-purpose installation featuring 15 moveable stages that will populate the ground floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA). Co-commissioned by MOCA and TBA, the surface of the stages will become an archive over time as they are covered with posters created by Gibson that incorporate text and images from local historical archives and from the public. This visual archive, which prioritizes Indigenous, Black, Brown and queer voices, speaks to what histories are remembered and how. Over the course of the exhibition, the stages will host Biennial artists' performances, talks, workshops, and gatherings, amplifying community voices past and present. MOCA and TBA plan to record many of the stage events to create a permanent archive. I AM YOUR RELATIVE will be on view at MOCA February - May 2022 with an installation of related work by Gibson at the Small Arms Inspection Building, Mississauga, during TBA 2022.

Tanya Lukin Linklater (Alutiiq) explores Indigenous geometries and ideas of inheritance. Linklater's Biennial project features four dancers responding to her concise texts and instructions of a physical investigation of water through intimate performances filmed in their homes. Linklater has edited the performances into a video presentation for her installation at the Biennial. In the exhibition space, two performance platforms showing the videos will be activated by linear sculptures made of brightly coloured "kohkum scarves." Kohkum ("grandmother" in Cree language) scarves are worn by powwow dancers, water protectors, and people who want to cite grandmother knowledge. The artist recognizes writer Saidiya Hartman who relays that inheritances are chosen. The inheritors are then concerned with what histories are claimed and what stories are surfaced.

Dana Prieto will work with soil and water from land adjacent to the Small Arms Inspection Building, to create a site-responsive ceramic installation for the site. Prieto's commission, Footnotes for an Arsenal, proposes an exercise to think about the ground where we stand, an invitation to enact an unflinching, caring, and responsible attention to that ground, and to the profound social, historical, and chemical enmeshments that link us to it. Prieto will create terracotta tiles that will cover a portion of the gallery floor bringing the land back to the fore in a place that has had a complicated environmental history. In 1990, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) conducted an environmental audit of the site - a former large munitions manufacturing plant - revealing the presence of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), volatile organic compounds, and combustible gases across nineteen acres. The site was acquired by TRCA in 1992 and underwent extensive remediation.

Eric-Paul Riege (Din) is an artist who creates woven sculptures, wearable art, and durational performances that directly link him to generations of makers and women weavers in his family. Inheritance and ideas of material faith figure into Riege's decidedly matriarchal practice. His new installation, a home for Her, is a year-long project drawn from a collection of weavings made by Riege together with the women in his family. In his installation a series of looms create the outline of his childhood home and Riege asks the question, "how do we survive settlement?" As Riege explains, "our stories, our craft, our teachings, and our gifts as Indigenous peoples are woven into our bodies." For Reige then, inheritance is woven from the intersections between cosmologies, family, story, and Indigenous knowledge, collapsing any division between the maker and the material, the warp and the weft.

Camille Turner will create Nave, an immersive multimedia installation exploring the link between the nave of a church, a tomb, and the hold of a ship, which Turner calls "the womb of the world." This poetic reference relates to the forces that came to shape the world as we know it, of which the transatlantic slave trade played a major role. Revisiting the ship's hold and impact of the slave trade on Canadian history, Turner's video features the ancestor from the Age of Awakening - an afro

futurist time-traveler played by the artist - who visits a church in the Age of Silence, circa 2021, in order to perform a ritual to connect with ancestors of the past. Called upon is an ancestor from the sea, standing on the coast, dedicating song and dance to become a bridge to the past. A church is, in and out of view, a constant reminder of Canadian history, Black histories, the legacy of the slave trade, and the ideological beliefs at play therein.

Syrus Marcus Ware is one of several artists TBA curators have been working with across two editions of the Biennial. As a continuation from his 2019 Antarctica commission, the artist presents MBL: Freedom in 2022, as the next chapter of his expansive, multimedia, multi-year project that predicts a near-future wherein Antarctica has become the only habitable place on the planet. Three Antarcticans from Black, Indigenous, and POC communities abandon their mission to colonize Antarctica by swimming in icy waters towards the only part of the continent not claimed by a country, Mary Bird Land or MBL. The three set out to create a free territory for all activists and abolitionists to come to. When they land on the shores of MBL they make an unexpected discovery that changes their trajectory.

Reflecting on climate change, white supremacy, abolition, and disability justice, the work will be presented as an interactive film experience, situating participants on the Mary Bird Land campsite. During the Biennial, the audience will be invited to participate in a series of workshops and potentially performance nights with actors Yousef Kadoura, Heath Salazar, Ravyn Wngz, and Dainty Smith.

Toronto Biennial of Art Publications is a growing library of content, contexts, and concepts emerging from and expanding on TBA's exhibitions and public programs. Aligning with TBA 2022, Publications will expand to include an Exhibition Publication that spans TBA's 2019 and 2022 editions as well as further iterations of the Programs Publication. TBA recently launched Part One: This is Not An Archive, the first chapter of a digital publication that brings together the voices and process-based methodologies of past and present contributors, and traces ever-changing networks of relationships between practices, ideas, and questions that shape Biennial Programs over time.

Shared via a newly-developed interactive digital platform designed by Ali Shamas Qadeer and Chris Lee, the publication invites readers to engage with content online, and offers free, downloadable print options. Its editorial team is composed of Clare Butcher (managing editor) and Myung-Sun Kim, with editorial support from Ilana Shamoon and Melody Moon-Kyoung Cho (editorial assistant). Part One: This is Not An Archive does not attempt to offer an overview of TBA Programs but rather intimate insights into ongoing conversations, embodied activities, roving networks, and more.

Building creative partnerships through collaborative installations, exhibitions, and programming across Toronto and beyond is an integral part of the Biennial's core activities. The 2022 Biennial will work with established art institutions, artist-run centres, arts organizations, community organizations, educational institutions, and repurposed spaces.

Exhibition Venues: 5 Lower Jarvis Street; 72 Perth Avenue; Arsenal Contemporary Art; Colborne Lodge; Fort York National Historic Site; Mercer Union; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA); Small Arms Inspection Building (SAIB); and Textile Museum of Canada.

Exhibition Partners include: Aga Khan Museum; Agnes Etherington Art Centre; Art Gallery of York University (AGYU); Art Toronto; Artica Svalbard; ArtworxTO: Toronto's Year of Public Art 2021-2022; Castlepoint Numa; Evergreen; FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; Gardiner Museum; Institut Franais; Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts; Mercer Union; MOMENTA Biennale de l'image; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (MOCA); Oakville Galleries; OCAD University; Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA); Textile Museum of Canada; The Daniels Corporation; and Toronto Sculpture Garden.

Additional partners will be announced in the coming months.

The Toronto Biennial of Art is grateful to all contributing donors for their generous support. Major funders to-date include: The Pierre Lassonde Family Foundation; RBC Foundation; Polar Foundation; The Michael and Sonja Koerner Charitable Foundation; Michelle Koerner & Kevin Doyle; Delaney Family Foundation; Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation; Miranda Hubbs; TD Bank Group; Castlepoint Studio Partners; Hal Jackman Foundation; Newpoint Developments Inc.; Nutrien; Woodbridge Investments Corporation; Yamana Gold Inc.; Goring Family Foundation at the Toronto Foundation; Waterfront BIA; NAMARA; Ouellette Family Foundation; and our many generous individual donors, including our Founding supporters.

TBA is also grateful for our government supporters: ArtworxTO; Toronto's Year of Public Art 2021-2022; Canada Council for the Arts; City of Mississauga; City of Toronto; Government of Canada; Government of Ontario; Ontario Arts Council; Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund of the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Heritage, Sport, Tourism and Culture Industries, administered by the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund Corporation; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council; and Toronto Arts Council.

TBA also acknowledges the support of our media partners to-date: Akimbo; blogTO, Cineplex Media; Destination Toronto; St. Joseph Communications; Toronto Star; and Yonge-Dundas Square.

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Toronto Biennial Of Art Announces Confirmed Artists For Its Second Edition On View March 26 - June 5, 2022 - Broadway World

But in the United States, its difficult for people to talk about prison without assuming there is a population that must stay there. When people are looking for the relative innocence line, Gilmore told me, in order to show how sad it is that the relatively innocent are being subjected to the forces of state-organized violence as though they were criminals, they are missing something that they could see. It isnt that hard. They could be asking whether people who have been criminalized should be subjected to the forces of organized violence. They could ask if we need organized violence.

Another widely held misconception Gilmore points to is that prison is majority black. Not only is it a false and harmful stereotype to overassociate black people with prison, she argues, but by not acknowledging racial demographics and how they shift from one state to another, and over time, the scope and crisis of mass incarceration cant be fully comprehended. In terms of racial demographics, black people are the population most affected by mass incarceration roughly 33 percent of those in prison are black, while only 12 percent of the United States population is but Latinos still make up 23 percent of the prison population and white people 30 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. (Gilmore has heard people argue that drug laws will change because the opioid epidemic hurts rural whites, a myth that drives her crazy. People say, God knows theyre not going to lock up white people, she told me, and its like, Yes, they do lock up white people.) Once you believe prisons are predominately black, its also easier to believe that prisons are a conspiracy to re-enslave black people a narrative, Gilmore acknowledges, that offers two crucial truths: that the struggles and suffering of black people are central to the story of mass incarceration, and that prison, like slavery, is a human rights catastrophe. But prison as a modern version of Jim Crow mostly serves to allow people to worry about a population they might otherwise ignore. The guilty are worthy of being ignored, and yet mass incarceration is so phenomenal that people are trying to find a way to care about those who are guilty of crimes. So, in order to care about them, they have to have some category to which they become worthy of worry. And the category is slavery.

A person who eventually either steals something or assaults someone goes to prison, where he is offered no job training, no redress of his own traumas and issues, no rehabilitation. The reality of prison, and of black suffering, is just as harrowing as the myth of slave labor, Gilmore says. Why do we need that misconception to see the horror of it? Slaves were compelled to work in order to make profits for plantation owners. The business of slavery was cotton, sugar and rice. Prison, Gilmore notes, is a government institution. It is not a business and does not function on a profit motive. This may seem technical, but the technical distinction matters, because you cant resist prisons by arguing against slavery if prisons dont engage in slavery. The activist and researcher James Kilgore, himself formerly incarcerated, has said, The overwhelming problem for people inside prison is not that their labor is super exploited; its that theyre being warehoused with very little to do and not being given any kind of programs or resources that enable them to succeed once they do get out of prison.

The National Employment Law Project estimates that about 70 million people have a record of arrest or conviction, which often makes employment difficult. Many end up in the informal economy, which has been absorbing a huge share of labor over the last 20 years. Gardener, home health care, sweatshops, you name it, Gilmore told me. These people have a place in the economy, but they have no control over that place. She continued: The key point here, about half of the work force, is to think not only about the enormity of the problem, but the enormity of the possibilities! That so many people could benefit from being organized into solid formations, could make certain kinds of demands, on the people who pay their wages, on the communities where they live. On the schools their children go to. This is part of what abolitionist thinking should lead us to.

Abolition, as a word, is an intentional echo of the movement to abolish slavery. This work will take generations, and Im not going to be alive to see the changes, the activist Mariame Kaba told me. Similarly I know that our ancestors, who were slaves, could not have imagined my life. And as Kaba and Davis and Richie and Gilmore all told me, unsolicited and in almost identical phrasing, it is not serendipity that the movement of prison abolition is being led by black women. Davis and Richie each used the term abolition feminism. Historically, black feminists have had visions to change the structure of society in ways that would benefit not just black women but everyone, Davis said. She also talked about Du Bois and the lessons drawn from his conception of what was needed: not merely a lack of slavery but a new society, utterly transformed. I think the fact that so many people now do call themselves prison abolitionists, Michelle Alexander told me, is a testament to the fact that an enormous amount of work has been done, in academic circles and in grass-root circles. Still, if you just say prison abolition on CNN, youre going to have a lot of people shaking their heads. But Ruthie has always been very clear that prison abolition is not just about closing prisons. Its a theory of change.

When Gilmore encounters an audience that is hostile to prison abolition, an audience that supposes shes navely suggesting that those in prison are there for smoking weed, and wants to tell her whos really locked up, what terrible things theyve done, she tells them shes had a loved one murdered and isnt there to talk about people who smoke weed. But as she acknowledged to me, Part of the whole story that cant be denied is that people are tired of harm, they are tired of grief and they are tired of anxiety. She described to me conversations shed had with people who are glad their abusive husband or father has been removed from their home, and would not want it any other way. Of her own encounter with murder, shes more philosophical, even if the loss still seems raw.

I had this heart-to-heart with my aunt, the mother of my murdered cousin, John. On the surface, we were talking about something else, but we were really talking about him. I said, Forgive and forget. And she replied, Forgive, but never forget. She was right: The conditions under which the atrocity occurred must change, so that they cant occur again.

For Gilmore, to never forget means you dont solve a problem with state violence or with personal violence. Instead, you change the conditions under which violence prevailed. Among liberals, a kind of quasi-Christian idea about empathy circulates, the idea that we have to find a way to care about the people whove done bad. To Gilmore this is unconvincing. When she encountered the kids in Fresno who hassled her about prison abolition, she did not ask them to empathize with the people who might hurt them, or had. She instead asked them why, as individuals, and as a society, we believe that the way to solve a problem is by killing it. She was asking if punishment is logical, and if it works. She let the kids find their own way to answer.

Continued here:

Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your ...

It has become a tradition here at the Journal and the Sounder to share anonymous submissions of what community members are grateful for each year. We are always thankful for you, our readers and supporters! We couldnt do this work without all of you.

Below is a list of what some of our readers are thankful for:

The generous eye-crinkle smiles and sparkles seen around town. The rich sweetness in our bright air that evolves with every season from the lusty hot forest in the summer to the tingly refreshment of frost on a winter morning.

I am deeply grateful for the visionaries of the past, who inform the change-makers of the present that will support the transformative leaders of tomorrow. I am grateful for a future that holds indigenous sovereignty, reparations, abolition, and healthy communities are being worked on in real tangible ways.

I am thankful for those who, though apprehensive, were vaccinated knowing it was for a greater good. It is not always easy to separate ones personal goals and feelings for the greater good. However, there are times in history in the effort for humankind to survive we must recognize the survival of our species and make selfless decisions for all human survival. The noise around such actions can be deafening in todays world. I am hopeful ones moral compass can turn that volume down long enough to savor such selfless actions.

I am grateful for my deep friendships.

I am thankful for my friends and family who I disagree with about tough topics but at the end of the day were still close and our relationships are stronger because of our differences. Theres nothing like a good old-fashioned opinionated debate followed by laughter and hugs.

My boat, and that there is the skill and knowledge to on the island to keep it floating.

I am thankful that my parents are alive and well and we can share this Thanksgiving all together as a family.

I am most thankful that Orcas Island is my home.

The Moat. Quiet. Partnership. Kindness. Friends.

To summarize everything I am thankful for this year, I can draw everything back to the concept of space. That is: to create space, hold space and rejuvenate in our own human expansion of sensing and deciding what has room in our lives to stay, and what is worthy of clearing out for new. The people and creations in my life who are meant to stay, sparkle with a brightness that can send me to my knees. Likewise, the areas or people that Ive had to let go of in whatever the circumstances find themselves, have allowed for the most beautiful and ascended, new relationships and creations to come in. I am thankful for all of these people and beautiful conceptions that occupy, as well as the space, however challenging to make or hold, that bring in the new. Lastly, I am thankful that the tools needed to gloriously evolve are already within us and that we are able to co-create in the magic of all the insights that somehow find their way to us.

Im thankful for the people that really support me right now. I couldnt do this thing called life without them. And Im thankful for my health and my body. And the rights I have in this life! I am so thankful for the blessings bestowed upon me from every single ancestor indigenous and otherwise who made way for me to exist in this space as I do now. As always, grateful for the clean water that keeps coming. And Prince. Im forever grateful for Prince.

Though I try to live a life of daily gratitude, Thanksgiving offers an opportunity to focus on just how deeply grateful I am for this life I lead on this island I call home; for all my siblings who are still alive with thriving and growing families; for the long-lasting friendships I cherish and hold dear, and for new friends in my life who mean so much; and for the friendship of those who have recently passed; for my aging four-legged furry feline who, in her own way, greets me each morning and each evening; for the energy to work at a job I love; for the overwhelming love and support I have felt from this community as I try new things, share my stories and work at being a better human. Thank you, thank you, thank you I whisper to the universe, I am most grateful.

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Giving gratitude | Readers share what they are thankful for this... - Islands' Sounder

The worrying increase in sanctions against people claiming Universal Credit comes against a backdrop of MPs earning millions through second jobs

The number of benefit sanctions imposed on Universal Credit (UC) claimants has soared in the space of three months, with the Department for Work and Pensions phasing out COVID-era measures that at one point saw deductions fall to zero.

Sanctions rose from 1,696 in May this year to 8,687 in June and 15,929 in July, the most recent month for which data has been published. This amounts to a near-tenfold rise in three months.

When a sanction is imposed, the Government suspends the claimants basic benefit payment for a period of time, although money for children and housing costs is not generally affected. Low level sanctions can last up to 28 days for a third sanction in a year but are usually much shorter.

During the first wave of the pandemic last year, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) suspended sanctions and the requirements on UC claimants to look for work, with job centres mostly shut during lockdown and large sections of the economy frozen. As a result, the number of sanctions fell to almost zero in the summer of 2020.

The DWP began to restore work search requirements for claimants from July 2020, but sanctions didnt rise above 100 per month until that October and didnt pass 1,000 until this April. Since then, the rise has been dramatic.

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The figures were spotted by welfare expert Dr David Webster, who circulated an email alert this week (reproduced by Frank Zola). The exceptionally harsh sanctions regime introduced in 2012 remains almost completely unreformed, he wrote in the circular. The abolition of three-year sanctions by Amber Rudd was in practice a minor change.

The rise in sanctions also raises the question of what has happened to the DWPs study of their effectiveness, which was originally to be published in late spring 2019 but has not appeared, he continued.

Charlotte Hughes, an anti-austerity activist who provides support to benefit recipients in Tameside, explained how sanctions, along with the withdrawal of the 20 per week uplift payments, leave many individuals and families without the means to feed themselves and their families. Nor will they be able to heat their homes. This will cause mental distress as well as physical poor health. To take away a persons financial means of survival by sanctioning them is cruel beyond words.

The rise comes against the backdrop of the MPs second jobs scandal which, Hughes said, shows that its ok for MPs to have two high incomes whilst a claimant can have their money taken away for very trivial and often untrue allegations. Its one rule for them and another for the poorest and most vulnerable, many of whom will struggle to survive this winter.

July 2021 saw the highest number of UC sanctions since February 2020, but a lower figure than those seen in 2019, when more than 20,000 sanctions were meted out in some months. The most recent figures are also far fewer than in the early-mid 2010s, when well over 100,000 sanctions a month were regularly imposed on claimants of the old Jobseekers Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance benefits.

Given the huge rise in UC claims during the pandemic, the proportion of claimants being sanctioned now is lower than pre-Covid 0.78% of UC claimants had a sanction deduction in July 2021, more than double the percentage in June 2021 but well below the 3% recorded in September and October 2019. What is not yet known is whether sanctions will rise further.

Nearly all sanctions now relate to work-focused interviews, which are meetings between claimants and job centre staff that are supposed to help people find work or training. If a claimant misses an interview, they can be sanctioned. Virtually no sanctions are now caused by other factors, such as the claimants availability for work, the rules of job centre employment programmes, or the reason a claimant left their previous job.

The rise in UC sanctions has been due to the resumption of face-to-face interviews following on the return to full opening hours for Jobcentres, which took place on 12 April, Dr Webster told Byline Times. When combined with an unchanged sanctions regime in relation to missed interviews, this was bound to produce an increase in sanctions, since there is always a proportion of people who miss their interviews.

Webster explained how we are already most of the way to the rate of sanction for missed interviews seen immediately before the pandemic, and it appears that there are still some areas which are yet to resume interviews in serious numbers. So I would expect that on present policies the rate of sanction for missed interviews will return to the immediate pre-pandemic level.However, at least at present, DWP does not seem to be relaunching sanctions in significant numbers for any other reasons. So I do not currently expect that UC sanctions for all reasons will return to pre-pandemic levels.

He added: The imposition of a sanction for not attending an interview is seen by DWP as an inevitable feature of the structure of UC. But then we have all the evidence pointing to DWP having decided that they are not really keen on sanctions any more at all. So I have the impression that they dont really want to go back to large numbers of sanctions, but feel trapped into the special case of missed interview sanctions by the structure of UC, which they are reluctant to unpick.

A DWP spokesperson said: With a record number of jobs available, its right that people who can work take steps to prepare for employment.

People will only be sanctioned if they fail to meet commitments they have already agreed to without a good reason and in August this year just 0.78% of Universal Credit claimants were sanctioned.

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Sanctions Against Universal Credit Claimants Increase by 14000 in Three Months Byline Times - Byline Times