My feminism is what makes my body politic. My feminism likes subvertising things, dissolving itself, switching, queering and raging generally. Because I am a feminist, I don’t have to be a woman. When I was little, I was a feminist by instinct because I hated being told what little girls can and can’t do. I may have been a bit of a bully. I played Barbies with my brother, who saved his pocket money for them; we made them all line up to fuck Aladdin and Ken, one by one. I played doll-free mummies and daddies with my friend Stephany – in that case we mimed the reproductive process ourselves. I got boobs, hormones, period cramps and fat, all too early, much too early. Then at 13 I got raped. I was in love with the boy at the time. I got persecuted at school, the way you do: ‘slut’, ‘nerd’, ‘ugly’. I developed an eating disorder. I hated my mother, who fought with me, hated me, kicked me out. I watched her marriage and her mind fall apart. But I reserved the deeper hatred for my father. Then suddenly I stopped, and constructed myself from scratch. I can say in 2010 my cup runneth over. I am surrounded by powerful women I love. I have found a polyamorous sex life that rewards and challenges me. I identify and self vindicate as queer. I dance and I write. In an environment where many suffer, binge, purge and hate themselves, I am delighted with my body and at peace with myself. I want an ecological revolution; strive for it a political activist. And that is only possible because of the personal issues I’ve just described. It’s still true that the personal is political. There is no me without feminism.
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An adequate expression of liberal guilt over writerly tendencies:
Astrophil and Stella, from sonnet 34. (Sidney, circa 1595)
Come let me write. ’And to what end?’ To ease
A burthen’d heart. ’How can words ease, that are
The glasses of thy daily vexing care?’
Oft cruell fights, well pictured forth, do please.
‘Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?’
Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare.
‘But will not wise men think thy words fond ware?’
Then be they close, and so none shall displease.
‘What idler thing, than speake and be not heard?’
What harder thing than smart, and not to speake?
Peace, foolish wit, with wit my wit is mard. …
Cintsa Bay
| Still I’m picking shells up with Mmabuka Rolled salt knees up and straight straight bending Eyes and ankles sea-deep, and descending sky On a gauze white scaping and her mouth The sucking borderless of many many sand On soles and wave-withdrawn things gapingthough she sits the lotus, sculpted, smiling, Snails coquettish, rock knots, disappeared Our toes are wet and bedded with them, dreaming,all our catchings dried and our T-shirts dried. |
Sophielle.
Sophielle on THE PILLOWMAN
http://www.cherwell.org/content/8178
[review]
our Valentine of Green pressure
http://www.cherwell.org/content/8504
[Cherwell report]
Sophielle on Narasainyo tribute
Mumbai theatre column, Cherwell
http://www.cherwell.org/content/7875
JANUARY 10th, 2010. Which Side Are You On?
Last month, I was beaten by riot cops on the peripheries of a peaceful protest outside the UN conference centre in Copenhagen. I was beaten because the Danish government (much like most of the Western powers) had decided I represented something dangerous. This is good.
We – the trade unions, the scientist-activists, the scholar-campaigners, the thinktanks, the NGOs, the impassioned individuals, the many international networks such as Climate Justice Action, Climate Justice Now!, La Via Campesina, Climate Camp, etcetera – were the largest bodily display of dissent the climate traders and carbon politicians have ever seen.
I repeat: the UN, protected by the Danish government’s neoliberal police army, bothered to beat us, pepper spray us, tear gas us, and let dogs off leashes to bite us, because we represent an insurrection that they know they cannot avoid.
They invented ‘pre-emptive’ arrest, and detained us in our thousands in freezing steel cages, because we sound good. We sound persuasive. We are non-violent. We make sense.
We are the atmospheric pressure that shall provoke the storm. We, the agriculturalists of the global south, the first nations, the communitarian resistance groups to fossil fuel imperialism, and we their allies in the North. The gathering storm will erupt as the sound of ideologies clashing.
We will clash with Canadian tar sands oil extractors, with greenwashers or Coca-Cola Hopenhagenists, with Republican ideologues, with NIMBYs, with First- and Third-Worldist cynics, and with all those who say that business will get us out of this mess.
We will storm the headquarters and investment boardrooms of those who commodify our global commons the sky, who degrade the language of hope, and who patent the embodied knowledge that has been developed over the centuries by the real custodians of this planet.
In Copenhagen, the mermaid who sits on a rock, with the tide rising to lap at her tailfin, was temporarily joined by an ice-penguin, but also by another bronze statue. Artists Galschiot and Calmar had created a grotesquely fat person sitting on the shoulders of someone very skinny submerged in the water. The piece was called ‘Survival of the Fattest’.
But the skinny of the earth will not allow the sea, as it swells to the burps of our carbonated binges, to drown them without a sound or a struggle.
The coming insurrection does not have to be graceful. But if we want to survive it, and/or look forgiveable in the history books, we have to put ourselves on the right side of this conflict. Which side are you on?
Midnight musings from a would-be councillor 26.APR 2010.
So, if elected, I’d want to rock’n'roll on the back of Matt Sellwood’s amazing record as Holywell ward councillor (2004-6). [www.matthewsellwood.blogspot.com]
Basically that means trying to push through pro-student things in a durable sense. Left-thinking crackdowns on pollution/traffic/pesky landlords, a living wage, resistance to mindless privatisations, and mutuals instead of mall expansions.
The reason I’m repeating this is this. I’ve put fair housing for students at the heart of my campaign. And I guess that’s why the Labour candidate, and the incumbent Lib Dem, thought a crazy housing-related smear on Greens was a good idea. It was in last week’s Cherwell. I doubt it really matters. But as a question of principle …
It’s not like Green councillors have always voted to protect students from ghettoisation, rent hikes, and de-regulated letting agencies. Apparently Greens want to, like, exile students from the city!!
Nah. Sorry messieurs Lib and Lab, your story doesn’t do any damage, I don’t think – it just sounds made up. Because it is.
Finally, if you can be bothered, folks, you can watch the following interminable Town Hall meeting video about the controversial motion, in which Greens welcome an amendment protective of students, and in which Mark Mills says absolutely nothing:
http://www.oxford.gov.uk/PageRender/decCD/FullCouncilVideo19April2010.htm
GRIPPING. Anyway. Hasta la vittoria &c ….
[see refutation of the fake Green story, by Nick, Why “churnalism” can’t damage the Green stand on student housing – 27.APR.2010, under Media Coverage on this site ]
On Copenhagen – 20 Dec. 2009
Climate is a class issue. Its sorry state is also a symptom of democracy’s incipient crisis; a symptom of global sociological disjunctions and malaise. Yet in small pockets, people are living despite capitalism. With widening reverberations, they are also demonstrating the appeal of an anti-consumerist, communitarian kind of society – not to mention the immediate and urgent necessity of it. Civil society is also testing what the boundaries of non-violence are for climate justice protest, within increasingly neoliberal/policed nation states. Here are a few notes looking back at COP15, from an activist’s perspective.
The cause of “climate justice” rallied more people in the freezing streets of Copenhagen this December than it has ever done before. The excellent and deservedly high-profile alternative COP15 conference, “Klimaforum”, run on a shoe-string, was rammed at every hour of the day with speakers from first nations, agriculturalists, third-worldist feminists and also figures more familiar to the Guardian-reading minority, such as Wangari Maathai, George Monbiot, Naomi Klein. Unlike the de facto neocolonialist format of COP15 itself, the Klimaforum model for proposing and agreeing dispensations of justice was participatory, inclusive (even of the inevitable corporate interests that had inveigled their way in) and – broadly speaking – fair.
Nothing has ever been more political, and less fitted to nonsense charitable ‘Make Poverty History’-type approaches, than the climate crisis. This is why I got angry when the president of the Wadham (yes, Wadham!) JCR told me my application for funding for the Oxford Climate Forum – an action planning and networking conference for, and led by, students – belonged in the ‘Charities’ committee meeting rather than the politically oriented main meeting. Can we get over the idea that tree-hugging goes in the same category as donating to Cancer Research?
In Copenhagen, an enormous number of people militated against the false solutions represented by COP15.Quite a few hailed from the global south (La Via Campesina, for example), and there were non-negligible ranks of those who, though from the West, represented leftist thinktanks, trade unions, hubs of scholar-activism, and internationalist workers’ movements. Then of course there were the predictable anarchist collectives, NGO employees, Climate Campers, etcetera: middle-class environmentalists from all over Europe, Canada, the States. The turn-out may have been dominated by the overprivileged, and our strategies may have failed to wash over the armed battalions opposing us, but our eco-politics were at an encouragingly advanced stage of enlightenment.
For instance, it seemed nobody bought the fluorescent green, vacuous brand called ‘Hopenhagen’ sponsored by Coca Cola, whose meaningless displays were plastered all over Copenhagen’s main square. Very few gave time or breath to carbon-trading apologists, techno-fixers, or rhetorics of energy efficiency that ignore the problem of growth. Our chosen enemy wasn’t carbon, it was capitalism. The fifteenth global Conference of Parties may have drawn us together, but a majority was uninterested, right from the outset, in its monumentally pathetic doings. You never trust a COP.
On Wednesday December 16th the Reclaim Power! demo was due to hit the streets surrounding the Bella Centre (where the Cop15 was being held). The flagship event of the Climate Justice Actioncalendar, it was towards this that the majority of British activists who had travelled as part of Climate Camp were working over the preceding days. Each day had seen a generous handful of marches and direct actions – the spacious, white-capped capital was beginning to feel like a protest themepark. The previous day, an unbelievably violent raid by the police on the freetown, Christiania, where some big names had been holding an evening of discussion and a pre-action party, had chastened, terrified and dispirited vast swathes of people.
The complex, consensually and non-hierachically organised Reclaim Power! plan involved a mainstream blue bloc advancing to the moated/fenced/policed Bella Centre perimeter, a mobile green bloc making a different route, a few autonomous groups creatively assailing the contours on their own, and a bicycle bloc composed of the recycled, customised ‘machines of resistance’ (mainly tall bikes, doubled bikes, bikes bearing useful tools and fence-cutting equipment…) which DIY type activists had welded for themselves in a cooperative community centre in the outskirts of Copenhagen. Alas, very little of our laborious enterprise ever came to fruition. The reason why so many people looked glum upon their return home was this: until we have training and organisation superior to the riot police’s, we are doomed to be a malleable mob, bound not so much by our own codex of non-violence (though that is key) as by our depressing inability to act tactically in large numbers. All we wanted to do was hold a people’s summit on UN territory. For the Guardian video overview of the day, watch this.
Of course, we did hold a people’s summit, right there on the road, and our talks suggested that water- and food-sovereignty are the people’s priorities. Meanwhile, within the conference, nearly a thousand delegates who tried to walk out in solidarity with the external Reclaim Power! goings-on were brutally kept back. African delegates found their numbers curtailed when they staged a stamping, clapping, dancing show of objection to the Annex 1 countries’ self-serving separatist hypocrisies (evidenced most crudely in the leak of the so-called ‘Danish text’) – see YouTube. Then again, Nnimo Bassey and José Bové were just two of the scores of ‘non-governmental’ delegates who, despite having (in addition to their standard accreditation) the secondary passes which were suddenly pre-requisite, were never admitted in the first place.
So the Orwellian exclusion of the civil society sector from the UN negotiations, in favour of the fossil fuel lobbyists and carbon financiers, was coupled with the systematic and undemocratic deployment of ‘special’ police powers to suppress dissent. The remarks that follow are perhaps unsurprising, but it is still worth being clear about them, and reflecting upon what they mean. Thousands of peacefully protesting people were ‘pre-emptively arrested’. We were stacked in steel box-cages (a purpose-built arest facility was dubbed by the arresting officers ‘mini Guantanamo’) without access to lavatories, food or water for hours on end. We were treated like terrorists. Interestingly, this applied whether we looked like ‘black bloc’ anarchists or like placard-wavers from Oxfam.
I was one of the 4,000 or so who failed to get inside the UN territory, who were brutally rammed into a nearby road by a line of armoured cars, and who suffered the beatings and pepper-sprayings of a veritable army of Danish ‘POLITI’. My right thigh (where the batons got me worst) still looked like a decomposing plum three weeks after the event. Incidentally, it proved to be a nice little tactic to flash it for the benefit of any disbelieving liberal, over Christmas, who would not believe “that the UN would hit a woman if she was doing nothing wrong.”
Then again, of course, I was doing something wrong. We “the people” (hem hem) were mobilising en massearound an international summit even more important than Seattle, in order to demonstrate a preferable alternative. This took place within the context of pre-existing instability. Traditional market logic was already off-balance. (See impossiblehamster.org and Andrew Simms’ recent pieces for a sense of the popularisation of the insight that, excepting cancer, things in nature don’t grow indefinitely – and it’s a bad idea for anything to. Including markets.) We looked like the coming insurrection, unavoidable, persuasive, and right. The sound of ideologies clashing could be heard behind the thump of steel on flesh, under the falling snow of Copenhagen. 20,000 pilgrim-campaigners or so in the city that week had created a dangerous and subversive culture of critique, questioning not only the effectiveness of ‘business solutions’ to climate change, but the very principle on which they are founded.
One zine among many in the activist utopia that Copenhagen became for the week, called ‘Perspectives’, circulated radical viewpoints amongst us. It was widely understood amongst the uninvited delegates to Denmark, that it is our prerogative to go beyond the abstractions of anti-capitalism, towards concrete sites of strain and tension where the system’s throrough-going weaknesses can be exposed. As the anonymous editors (“an invisible working group in Annex 1”) put it: “This demands us generalising our resistance … specifically amongst people in locations where these forces are easily visible. This means less Bishopsgate and more Kent, Mainshill, the Isle of Wight, and Calais.”
What are you waiting for?
Mainshill solidarity camp http://coalactionscotland.noflag.org.uk/
Calais Migrant Solidarity http://calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com/
Save Vestas http://savevestas.wordpress.com/
Climate Camp http://climatecamp.org.uk
CODA:
In Copenhagen, the mermaid who sits on a rock, with the tide rising to lap at her tailfin, was temporarily joined by an ice-penguin, but also by another bronze statue. Artists Galschiot and Calmar had created a grotesquely fat person sitting on the shoulders of someone very skinny submerged in the water. The piece was called ‘Survival of the Fattest’.
But the skinny of the earth will not allow the sea, as it swells to the burps of our carbonated binges, to drown them without a sound or a struggle.
The coming insurrection does not have to be graceful. But if we want to survive it, and/or look forgiveable in the history books, we have to put ourselves on the right side of this conflict.
On Valentine’s Day, Oxford Climate Forum – an OxHub and Climatico event – will bring together student leaders from around the UK to address the post-Copenhagen crisis. Follow us on Twitter (oxclimate) and online at oxfordclimateforum.org. 4th week will also see a spate of actions against universities and other fossil-heavy investors. I would suggest you don’t just watch this space. That you get involved and FILL IT YOURSELF.
(Preferably with direct interventions into the crazed, defensive path our leaders are taking in the face of system failure … and not merely with a retreat to a utopia. Although trust me, I know how difficult it can be to disengage from my absorption with the activist squats and their new strongly red-and-green composition, full of be-dreadlocked anarcho-libertarian tea-sippers, genderqueer vegan soup cooks and polyamorous Trots…)
Comrades, we need to sober up on global geopolitics, on Obama, and on China (après tout, fossil-fuel based economy, the 21st century’s rising imperialist power). But we need to take responsibility for the fact that our European Union was also hapless. It may, formally, have had the most progressive position of the advanced economic blocs going into the talks, but the EU did not table its big offer of a 30% cut in emissions by 2020. Like the UK government, it made noises in the right direction on targets, but was unable to force an agreement. More significantly its own plans are neoliberal to the core – market mechanisms like emissions trading will not do the job and will come at enormous expense for workers. As Workers’ Climate Action now says: “Climate change is a global problem that cries out for a cooperative commonwealth of socialist federations; instead it has a broken-backed regime of quarrelling thieves.” Let it never be said that we have nothing to fight for, here in the eased West.
So: international, working-class-based climate justice movement, anyone? I believe that what we saw last summer at Vestas, we can see again, and we can see it everywhere.
From the summer at Vestas Blades on the Isle of Wight … 30.07.2009
Nimbys vs radical Noops: it’s not a fair fight
It may now be called Vestival, but it’s no party for those (sacked) Vestas workers still inside their factory. Morale does remain high. We are strong, we are largely young, we are www-literate, we are radical, and we stand shoulder to shoulder in our resistance to the stupidest industrial planning move of the decade. We must save Vestas. I’m now blogging and coordinating migrating supporters and media workers for the Save Vestas campaign from the mainland, but Vestival footage is flooding over YouTube…
At the beginning of the summer, the internationally reverberating struggle that is “savevestas” consisted of a tentful of students, and not much else. Seven of us were camping near Newport, embodying “Workers Climate Action”. Every day we talked to workers at the factory gates, fomenting resistance, holding information stalls, gathering contacts, publicising meetings, and flyering locals. The revolution seemed a long way away, but in the meantime we met with ubiquitous expressions of support, and very little nimbyism.
Nimbyism – a word that for some has become common currency. And yet, how many of these big bad NIMBYs with eyes of flame does anyone actually know? We Vestas campaigners are facing off a worried looking Ed Miliband wherever he goes, and he keeps citing national ignorance and NIMBYism as an excuse to throw up his hands and proclaim himself powerless; but when challenged about this he quickly reverts to mumbles about planning permissions. I think he is worried because he’s been pointing – as the Vestas management have – to anti-wind campaigns in the UK which actually don’t stand up to scrutiny. That is not to say that they don’t exist, and they do deserve his recommended “social stigma”, in their bathetically named groups (THWAWT, CLOWT, etc). George Monbiot memorably exposed the director of the Campaign to Protect Rural England to ridicule in an interview last year. The Age of Stupid beautifully demonstrated the priorities of a clutch of posh nimbies, who “thought that revolving blades on their horizons would be a dangerous distraction for drivers”.
Nimbies are rare beasts, so why are the politicians so afraid, if not because of their money? Nimby populations dwindle in comparison to the people mobilising against fossil fuel- and aviation related developments, and yet, when you scan the headlines and governmental reports, nowhere can one find a word to describe these ground-swellings of protest. Corporate lobbies for oil, air and coal have ensured that any public consultations with local communities that have taken place regarding Kingsnorth, or Heathrow expansions, have either been non-existent or a sham. The wind power industry still lacks the lobbying capital required to get any local opposition to its plan quietly trampled.
We at Workers Climate Action are not merely anti-nimby. We have a positive message and a bold demand: nationalisation of the factory. Wind power and people power represent a common interest, we believe. Even Lord Mandelson’s department admits an overlap on the Public Perceptions section of its website, where it declares that a recent survey
“revealed that 84% of the general public support the use of renewable energy, 80% are in favour of the use of wind power and 64% would be happy to live within 5km (3 miles) of a wind power development.”1
These in their thousands are Britain’s IMFYs (In My Front Yard) and other sources suggest they constitute an ever larger majority when confronted with cold climate science. However this same website keeps markedly quieter about the number of respondents opposed to coal fired power stations or runways, or, as I would like to call them, “Noops” (Not on Our Planet). This is because the movement – alive online at a plethora of websites from www.nonewcoal.org.uk to www.2mgroup.org.uk – oppose the corporations Peter Mandelson likes to rub lapels with. E.on, Exxon, Shell, Enron and co. are terrified of Noops. They are fossil dinosaurs, and feel distinctly threatened, too, by the raw futuristic force of us Imfys and Noops.
Our majority is, alas, still substantially passive, or, as Monbiot termed it last week, “silent”. The bourgeois clamours of Nimbys, on the other hand, are amplified beyond all proportion. The whisper and whirr of wind turbines are calling upon us to carry away these twenty-first century carbon luddites with us. We must defend the six hundred green collars we have on the Isle of Wight by keeping the factory open for green business – in defiance of Vestas Blades itself, if need be. At the same time we must take a deep breath and blow obstructive Nimbys nationwide clear of our roadmap to “Low Carbon Britain”. Mr Miliband, Mr Mandelson, it’s time to deploy money and regulatory powers with the same cunning you used to try and flatten Noops at Kingsnorth and Heathrow.
Meanwhile, if the Danish firm is going to stay, corporate social responsibility from Vestas Blades may require more than a little coaxing. For now, the workers are standing strong. If they, our leaders, wish merely to pretend they act on behalf of the people they serve, they will (at the very least) save our only wind turbine factory. Else how will we hold our heads up internationally on the road to Copenhagen? On the question of climate change even the highest placed can no longer doubt where their loyalties must lie. Mr Miliband likes to quote the “Tck, tck, tck” the global Climate Justice movement uses to raise awareness of the imminence of this planet’s emergency summit in December. So, honestly, boys. Time is ticking, and which side are you on?
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