not the motorcycle diaries

Just to lower the tone a little now that there is, all going well, only three months left for this blog.

“Roses are red, violets are blue, I forget the rest, but I rooted your Mum”
- graffiti down the road in enormous, beautifully drawn chalk letters*

“Melbournians think they’re so good with their nice art galleries and everything. But we’ve got race war and finance capital”
- my friend Chris

*I am SO jealous that I have never thought of doing this, especially smack bang in the midst of my rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood (which, consequently, bears many signs of race war and finance capital).

The origins of the Olympic Torch Relay.

My ongoing fascination with the unfolding of Stuff White People Like led me here today; which in turn led me to Black People Love Us!, from 2002. I think it probably does similar work on white identities (i.e. reconfirming them through self-reflexivity), but as a deliberately political strategy it perhaps directs the debate with more precision. Compare the media that it got with that of SWPL.

When I google my surname in a fit of idle introspection I find it imprinted on a town in Haiti, a slave revolt in Louisiana, church registers in the Channel Islands, various papers in France and Canada, and a colonial governor’s family in Angola (which perhaps accounts for the Haiti connection). The indexing that the internets does is odd like that: a chain of random connections showing up the circularity of history as the-named, its shaping in and by violence, its traces of resistance and liberation, its surprising affects. A series of patented, popular links scream at me: FindYourPast.com and so on.

We don’t want to bear certain histories or historicities, we don’t want to make space for it in suspensions or sorries. But we will fight for our names (my good name, not in my name). Our misplaced names reflect the displacement of history onto us. It’s bigger than us, like our names. We wear it, we wear them.

Diversity Boat, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre 2005.

Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Boat Ride, South Park, 1997.

The “alternative thesis topic” being “Boats in Multiculture: a history from colonisation to activism”.

“… in short, the capitalism of global neoliberalism is based on exploitation, plunder, contempt and repression of those who refuse. The same as before, but now globalized, worldwide.

But it is not so easy for neoliberal globalization, because the exploited of each country become discontented, and they will not say, well, too bad, instead they rebel. And those who remain and who are in the way resist, and they don’t allow themselves to be eliminated. And that is why we see, all over the world, those who are being screwed over making resistances, not putting up with it, in other words, they rebel, and not just in one country but wherever they abound. And so, as there is a neoliberal globalization, there is a globalization of rebellion.

And it is not just the workers of the countryside and of the city who appear in this globalization of rebellion, but others also appear who are much persecuted and despised for the same reason, for not letting themselves be dominated, like women, young people, the indigenous, homosexuals, lesbians, transsexual persons, migrants and many other groups who exist all over the world but who we do not see until they shout ya basta of being despised, and they raise up, and then we see them, we hear them, and we learn from them.

And then we see that all those groups of people are fighting against neoliberalism, against the capitalist globalization plan, and they are struggling for humanity.”

- from The Sixth Declaration of La Selva Lacandona, 2005, Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional.

(Translation from Spanish by irlandesa).

It’s times like this that I understand why the Zapatistas identify the history of Indigenous struggle against annihilation as being as long as colonization. There’s no closed chapters. There are troubling moments where justice might be done, followed by its vigorous disavowal …