Homage to the Mosquito and to Thought:

The mosquito at night desperately fights with its own shadow in the lampshade cut from its own perception, not realizing it is fighting its own self.

Chris Hedges stated in an essay this week, that “in every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition” (Hedges). I hope that he is right, and that the excitement of 2011 mission to occupy and challenge corporate-financial control was not just a fling.

At a vigil the week of June 18 in New York City, a slim fifty progressives appeared in Washington Square Park. For me, it was a disappointment. It was a W.O.W (women of occupy wall street) session/general assembly. Now when I saw members of this group last March at the Left Forum I was excited about the edge the women had. However, when I went last Monday to Washington Square Park, none of the women from the panel at the Forum were there. Instead it was only a small 50 people and the activists there that I had been grouped in a discussion with flattened the edge. Rather than solidarity, they made me feel that I had to defend my voice.  

The skepticism toward silent straight men at the vigil made them want me to prove myself to them. Not a healthy chemistry. I tried my best to appeal to their cynicism to not cancel out those who reflect an image they are use to being hostile against. They made themselves appear hypocritical and wounded. I hope that the movement learns to grow.  The Occupy Movement almost feels dead and atrophied. So many have branched out into different less visible outlets.

So I sought some additional enlightenment. On an earlier Monday, June 11, 2012 the Nobel Laureate Jody Williams made a commencement speech in northern Spain at the Cantabria International Campus (I caught it on the internet). In her speech, she mentions that “People Need to De-militarize how they think” and this is essential to stop a closed-minded violent world. Disarmament can only happen when we educate the youth about the value of nonviolence (Williams).  Jody Williams’ passion is always an inspiring antidote to keep me moving forward. But how can I bring her ‘demilitarized mind’ to my experience of a possibly dilapidated social movement?

Albert Einstein, highly debunked and depressed after realizing that the knowledge he had, couldn’t foresee the doom of his atomic discoveries from energy to weapons made a moral observation. He stated: A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding (Einstein).  Freeing ourselves from our violent reactive visual prison is our responsibility and not that of the opposition. We have to learn to begin to see better than we have done in the past.   

In all HONESTY and the experience I had at the vigil on Monday June 18, 2012 was in part the continual backlash of progressive and protest frustration of many women and minorities with the Occupy Wall Street’s greater failure of going beyond dominant white straight male supremacy, even in the movement that claims to challenge the system. The greater Occupy falls ill to the same limits it protests, and the more selective protests have a harder time escaping ripple effects of discomfort with those who represent the status quo.  How can we slip out from this cycle effect?

Chandra Mohanty and Cherrie Moraga are two prominent intellectual activists who dwell on the idea of ‘home’. Mohanty, originally from India, states that ‘Being-Home’ refers to a place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; ‘Not being home’ is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within one self (Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders).

The location and function of one’s location acquires meaning when individuals assume a particular, singularly fixed essential bounded fortress as Mohanty suggests, and this leads to false limited horizons (from limits in conventionality, to limits in race and gender relations, to limits in ideology). In a reflection on Gloria Anzaldua in her book A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, Moraga sheds that “Anzaldua felt that she had to leave ‘home’ because its cultural restraints would have killed her – body and spirit (in more ways than one). Freedom resided elsewhere” (Moraga). On the contrary, Moraga suggests the opposite.

The Chicano activist and theorist strategized that “what I have come to believe through my political and spiritual practice is that as marginalized peoples, we all have to make our way back into the ‘home’ sites that have rejected and deformed us in order to reform them (Moraga).  Moraga pushes the notion that all marginalized voices must go back to the home and wreck house in order to make the heads-of-the-households know that they are not the sole voice. Given the opportunity that is self-created, a mosquito will enter the house, and will make itself present.

Mohanty agrees with Moraga when she states, “Home - is a warning to all feminists that ‘we are going to have to break out of the little barred rooms” and cease holding tenaciously to the invisible. All activists female and male need to “break down the subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh, through the images in her work and actions, how duality is transcended” (Mohanty).  Not all women are feminists, and not all feminists are women.

Change must come from the bottom up. Mohanty and Moraga remind us that feminism and masculine-ism from wealthy standpoints of those who have the luxury to speak out do not bring sufficient voice to represent the misrepresented, the poor, the homeless, and the minority positions. These voices have been excluded due to ‘cognitive dimensional constituted permissible thinking’ and inferring of inferiority. For example, just last week the Spanish Prime Minister used insulting apathy and indifference to his reference that Spain deserved a worthy bailout from the European Union because they weren’t ‘Uganda’. Such blind statements that ignore historic imperialism and colonialism reflect how out of touch certain classes of luxury shed no responsible steps of inclusion.

A debilitating generality is the callous act of movement failure, whether it is a protest, problem solving, or a social network; the object-status limits higher grip over significant yields.   

Cherrie Moraga encourages us to question, “How do we remember rupture beyond what we have been schooled to imagine?” and she alludes to the activist/novelist Toni Cade Bambara’s push “Can you afford to be whole?”

In the anthology African Women Writing Resistance, Adesola Mafe states: “Resistance - has generally meant ‘non-compliance’ to me. I know that my non-compliance is not always immediate, not always self-evident, and not always strong enough … but Audre Lorde warns us that ‘Your Silence will not protect you’” (Mafe).

Nawal El Saadawi acknowledges the silence, “Scared people are easy to control”. It is patriotism that protects us from the deeper, harder complicity. In that light, “terrorism will never be defeated by big guns”, and Jody Williams and Albert Einstein have been aware of this. Part of the means to ‘demilitarize the mind’ would be to “Be Among”. Chandra Mohanty explains, to ‘be among’ is to “choose to participate in defining the terms of one’s own existence,” she quotes a Filipina factory worker, “because the only way to get a little measure of power over your own life is to do it collectively, with the support of other people who share your needs” (Mohanty). We as activists must “Undo ingrained” trajectories of image and identity bias based social movements: Throwing yourself into the next century, we take ourselves seriously only when we go ‘beyond ourselves’ (Mohanty).

Richard Wolin states, in his 1992 analysis Terms of Cultural Criticism, “Specify very carefully what type of utopia one intends”.  By going beyond our selves and pushing past our visual barriers, will be the only way to break down the cycle. In some ways, we have to admire and embrace Helen Keller. Her insight was deeper than our limitations and our senses. She learned to see and hear though she was blind and deaf. She learned to read as her teacher taught her through her sense of touch. She opposed war and she utilized her ability to think. If need be, cover your eyes and shield your ears, just feel intuitively where the inclusivity is most evident.  

Scattered thoughts in multiple directions, I lose my audience as I reflect on the thoughts that double speak through me. Walter Benjamin said that there are limits and fear when a ‘meaningless emancipation’ leads to a human race with no cognitive self, no sense of purpose and need to exert identity, or to have an adverse obstacle to overcome. The fear of nihilism is a shallow accord; once activists find a cause to fight for we must not lose the meaning in the limits of our image.