Last Day in Bogotá

Good-bye to Camila

Photo of Camila Reyes, smiling. She has long, wavy brown hair and brown eyes. — Camila Reyes, founder of Resuena

The picture I had of Camila for our final day together, didn’t really express who she was. So I took something from a webpage describing her what she does. Her current work is with Resuena, an organization “set out on a dream to expand the access to Nonviolent Communication in Colombia so that it becomes part of the day-to-day culture.”

Below is the bad picture I took of Camila at a diner for breakfast. She really wasn’t unhappy at the time. One of the aspects of Colombian cuisine that Michael really appreciated is the soups, and the fact that Colombians eat soup at breakfast and lunch. I remember with fondness Colombian pastries on previous trip. I

t struck me that this simple diner had works of original art all over the walls. I said it seemed like I saw art everywhere I went in Bogota. Camila told me its presence was especially prevalent in her bohemian neighborhood.

A love of beauty and plants also helps describe Camila’s character. She has plants in every room of her apartment except the utility room. I documented them here:

A tiled gallery of various plants in different rooms of an apartment

We decided to go to the Bogota public market and eat all the fruits we hadn’t eaten yet (and we had eaten a lot of different fruits.) The excursion turned into buying fruit that doesn’t need to be turned into juice. Of the fruits you see here, we liked the mangosteen the best (the little brown ones). Since Colombia is full of microclimates, almost anything can be grown. Camila also took us to visit her friend who organizes community-supported agriculture (and allows artists to use her space, because, well, it’s Bogotá).

What else? By the time I got to Bogotá, the bruise I got from my fall in Medellin had grown considerably worse. As it dissipated over time, I realized it had hematoma at the center, which explains why the muscle in my thigh hurt so much when I moved it. I used one of my hiking sticks as a cane for the rest of the trip.

In a moment alone with Camila shortly before we left for the airport, she was discussing her goals for the next few years. She then asked me about my goals. Without thinking, I said, “I’d like to make compassion cool again.” She asked how I planned on accomplishing that, and I said, “Well, maybe that’s what my next novel will be about. Right before we left, she handed me this pin and told me, “This is to remind you that your job now is to make compassion cool again.”

Back to Bogotá

And a graffiti tour

Clothed animals that look like a cross between mice and rabbits flee from pink lightning

Our guide Camilo told us this artist is famous for painting animals in apocalyptic situations

Returning to Camila’s place gave me a chance to rest my knee—which I did the day after a graffiti tour of Bogota with a young man from a tour company run by Camila’s friend. His name was Camilo, and he had been an art student at one of the more than 100 universities in Bogota. He went all the way back to graffiti as a movement in the 1960s, to Cornbread, a young man who began ,spray-painting, “ I am Cornbread“ on walls all over New York City to impress a girl. People began to ask, “Who is this Cornbread guy?“ However, when the girl rejected him, Cornbread wrote on a wall, “Cornbread has retired.” The graffiti movement started in New York and then Philadelphia, and soon began spreading. Bogotá is now the global center of street art, with 500 km of painted walls.

Tagging is the most basic form of graffiti, in which individuals or “crews” paint their logos on walls. The higher up on a wall, the more street cred you have. Camilo says he has seen them as high as three stories. The artist that painted the two homeless kids kissing (whom he had seen on the streets) incorporated tags from all over the city into their pants. The painting is called The Invisibles, which, Camilo said, is appropriate, because graffiti is a way that invisible people use to make themselves feel visible.

Tags evolved into “bombs,” huge, balloon-like letters. When Camilo began his career as a street artist, he used stencils, and only then began to appreciate how much skill it took to spray paint these bombs freehand.

Felipe Diego Becerra used Félix the cat as his logo. One night in 2011, as he was painting a wall, the police shot him in the back. At the hospital, the doctor asked his parents why the the police had shot him. When they told him the reason, he asked them to quickly come into Diego’s room and take a photo of his hands covered in blue paint. The police accused him of pulling a gun on them. Graffiti artists all over the city went on a 24-hour graffiti-thon, in protest, many of them painting pictures of Felix the Cat.

The Diego Becerra story continues oddly, two years later when Justin Bieber came to town for a concert. Noticing the art on the walls, he asked if he could try his hand at it—with a police escort.

Sergio Elmir writes about the event on HuffPost:

….Justin Bieber performed his first ever concert in Bogota on October 29, the following night he decided to hit the streets and show Colombia his skills with a spray can. But instead of stopping him, ticketing him, even hassling him, local police gave him a personal escort.

For several hours he painted about 40 meters of wall on 26th street in Bogota with his entourage and security in town — local police were on hand, again, not to stop him but to make sure no one bothered him while he “tagged” the wall.

Traffic was redirected and Bieber was allowed to “paint” several crudely drawn cartoons, phrases and his own signature at his own leisure. At one point, Bieber looks to be ordering his police escort to remove the news cameras that were shooting footage of his foray into street art. If this wasn’t bratty enough, he even shows his support for fellow-pop-brat with misplaced machismo, Chris Brown, by painting the words “Free Breezy” on the wall.

The only thing that sets these two young men apart, aside from questionable talent, is fame. The same people who killed Becerra are protecting Bieber yet both kids were doing the exact same thing.

When artists like Banksy are blurring the line between fame and infamy in the street art world and forcing us to ask these questions — someone like Bieber takes an already controversial art form that has spent years building credibility to misfit-status.
It goes from high-art to simple vandalism for the sake of street-cred. Nothing Bieber was doing that night, on that wall, in Colombia was for the sake of art or in the true spirit of graffiti. It was just as contrived a move as his attempts at rapping. It’s an effort to be rebellious without any risk — and to have the police there, as your backup, is as soft as it gets.

Without even getting into the quality of the art that Bieber threw up on that wall, the real concern is his coopting of graffiti for his own personal gain. Was this his way of showing the world how “street” Bieber is? And was the open police escort their way of trying to make amends with the already marginalized graffiti community in Colombian?
The same group of people that for years views the police as the enemy? Hard to say.
Instead of the police, Bieber could’ve easily tapped any one of the many local, talented graffiti crews in Bogota to take him out — and I’m sure they would’ve gladly taken him on a tour of all the amazing street art in Colombia. But instead, police cars, flashing lights and security guards — a whole show was put on so that Bieber could clown around with a spray can. Maybe his swag coach felt this was cooler?

When most graffiti artists around the world work in stealth, worried about the police showing up while they’re painting, Bieber seemed more concerned with locals showing up while he was throwing up his pieces.

In fact, by the next day, local graffiti activists Mochila Ambulante did show up, with spray cans in hand, to cover up Bieber’s “graffiti.” They had no police escort and wore bandanas over their faces to cover up their identities. And while their work won’t make international headlines or cause outrage, perhaps Bieber got what he was looking for after all — attention.

The public protests that followed Bieber’s visit compelled the Municipal government of Bogotá to decriminalize all graffiti and street art. Three of the art departments in Bogotá’s 100+ universities teach street art. The community of street artists has established a consensus that everything that goes up on a wall is graffiti, so that some will not be more privileged than the others.

Some businesses ask street artists to paint their walls, and sometimes Bogotá chooses particular walls to become art exhibitions, asking artists to express themselves on them.

A Belgian artist came to Bogotá and added little men dressed in typical workers’ uniforms to some of the art.

Political graffiti also abounds in Bogota. One of my clear memories of the 1982 course I took through Bluffton College here in 1982 was seeing all the graffiti by M-19, a militant group opposed to the government that eventually became a political party. The current president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, was affiliated with M-19.

The words on the black and white mural say, “I did not choose war, but I was born a warrior.” The wall of people’s faces refers to the scandal of the “false positives,” in which the Colombian army murdered ordinary people, dressed them up in guerrilla uniforms, and claimed they were guerrillas in order to receive a bounty. The wall of army officers standing in a row reads, “Who gave the order?” (to kill the civilians.). And of course Palestine is on everyone’s mind, and would appear on the walls of all the cities we would visit.

Of course we wanted to see Camilo’s street art! The picture on the left was commissioned by a bank. It was meant to be two women weaving, but it kept raining and turning the threads into a rainbow of water. Finally the bank said they like the way it looked. (By the way, I kept that wedding hair-do for more than a week.)

Camilo and his team of artists receive a commission from Bogota’s emerald traders to paint the above. Pablo Escobar and other drug lords had laundered their drug money through emerald traders, who didn’t really have the ability to refuse if they wanted to keep their families safe. As a consequence, the traders developed a reputation for being a part of the criminal class.

When Camilo’s team asked what they wanted on the wall, they assumed the traders would want something that showed their status as normal part of Colombian society. But what they wanted was the Indigenous legend of how emeralds came to be.

In the land of what is now called the Magdalena River (where Community Peacemaker Teams works, incidentally) the Muzo creator God, Are, swept over the area creating the mountains and valleys. On the shores of the sacred river, now called Minero, he formed two figures—one male (Tena) and one female (Fura)—and threw them into the river. There, they were brought to life. Once alive, Are taught Fura and Tena how to take care of the gardens that He had planted and make pottery. He gave them rules to follow including the requirement of fidelity in their husband and wife relationship. Are taught them that violating the laws he had established would lead to aging and eventual death. For a long time, Fura and Tena enjoyed their ageless lives in the beautiful land Are had prepared for them.

Then, one day, a young man appeared. His name was Zarbi. Zarbi was looking for a flower that could cure any illness and had crossed mountains and rivers, looking high and low for the flower without success. So, he asked Fura for help, and being a compassionate soul, she began to follow him throughout the forests looking for the flower. Soon Fura became aware of her attraction to Zarbi. She was unfaithful to Tena with Zarbi and as a result immediately began to age.

Realizing her error, she returned to Tena, who upon seeing her in her aged state realized that she had broken the law that Are had given them and would soon die. Not wanting to be left alone, Tena laid down on Fura’s knees and stabbed himself in the heart. For three days, Fura cried with the body of her husband on her lap, and her tears changed into emeralds.

Soon, Are returned to visit Fura and Tena and realized they had broken his laws. He changed the couple into large rocks. Angered, he also banished Zarbi, who in his own anger changed into a raging river in order to eternally separate Fura’s rock from Tena’s rock.

Furatena Strait on the Minero River

So sad. And given the horrors that drug cartels wreaked on Colombia, maybe that’s why the emerald traders chose this story.

The wedding!

And Raison Det’re of Our Trip

I’d say something about these crazy kids being so in love, but that would not reflect the meticulous planning they put into this wedding for a year. They succeeded, and they’re still so in love.

The flowers were lovely.

An assortment of multicolored flowers beside chairs at wedding

Flowers beside chairs and a Jewish wedding Chuppah constructed on flowers

The friend who introduced them performed the ceremony and described their almost love at first sight meet-up in a way that made every one laugh.

What more shall I say? Should I mention that music after the wedding dinner was at a decibel level that made the furniture vibrate in the next room? And that I lay on a vibrating couch with my head turned away from the banquet hall because the flashing lights would. have triggered a migraine?

Nah.

Days in Medellin before the wedding

February 21, 2024

Mural in restaurant with Black woman in foregrounds wearing

Have I mentioned yet that Michael’s daughter Beth got married on February 24 in Medellin and that was the whole reason for our South America trip? Well, now you know.

Michael and I left for Medellin on the morning of February 21. For lunch, we ate at Champi, a few blocks from the hotel, which was our first exposure to traditional Colombian food. Michael is a fan. It’s bland, has at least two, usually three starches in the meal and generous servings of meat (beans in less privileged areas.) The coconut lemonade was superb. Cuban coffee was the most expensive coffee on the menu, more expensive than cappuccino. But I noted with appreciation its use as a remedy for headaches.

In the evening, we had dinner with the Taberlys, the family of Eric, whom Beth is marrying. The guy in front is a cousin of some sort and owns the restaurant, Bárbaro, which is famous in Medellin for its steak.Clockwise: Eric’s younger niece, Eric’s sister Simone, Beth, with Eric’s older niece on her lap, Marta, Eric’s mother, Rubens, Eric’s father, Michael, me, Juan, Simone’s husband, and the aforementioned cousin. They may be the nicest family I have ever met, and we are beyond thrilled that Beth is now a part of the

After lunch, Michael and I were passing by a pharmacy and encountered three Venezuelan women. They had laminated papers with pictures of themselves and their children. In English, the papers explained that they were not asking for money, but needed baby formula and diapers. Colombia took in more than a million Venezuelan refugees, but they are not as welcome as they used to be. Michael bought the diapers and formula.

Our first disaster of the trip happened the next morning when we were going out for breakfast. as I stepped off the curb, my ankle collapsed, and I fell. In the course of the fall, I twisted my left knee and landed hard on my left thigh. The three pictures show my thigh and knee on the day of the fall, February 23, and my thigh on February 27. Fortunately, I had brought some walking sticks in case we would be hiking on rough terrain, so I began using one as a cane.

Friday afternoon before the wedding, we went on a tour of that Eric and Beth arranged of Medellin’s city center. However we first wrote on the metro, which, as our guy, Juliana, told us, is the only subway system in all of Columbia. Paises, as people in Medellin call themselves, are very proud of it.

The visit to Botero Square was memorable. Perhaps our favorite part of the visit was a Venezuelan rapper who created memorable lyrics at the top of his head. I have finally gotten a video clip of him loaded, which appears at the bottom of the post.I have always thought that Botero was a one trick pony. People refer to his “gordos,” or “fat people,”or “gorditos,” roughly “charming little fat people.” But he never liked this designation. For him, his art was about playing with proportion, according to a Julianna (with the gray backpack). She pointed out that the horses in his paintings have thick legs and tiny heads. If you look up his paintings that show houses, they often show people who are far too big to live in those houses.

https://youtube.com/shorts/Q7oHARdVdtc?si=UnV28561oR4NlhUG

I was in too much pain to finish the tour, so Juliana called me an Uber, and I went back to eat lunch at the hotel. Michael and I had been enjoying mora juice, which is blackberry juice, and I ordered it at the hotel restaurant for the first time. The waitress asked if I wanted it with sugar or without, I ordered without and learned that the blackberry juice we had been drinking, and probably all the juices we have been drinking have been full of sugar.

That night we attended a party for which the requisite attire was “cocktail dress.” I hope I passed. Every thing advertised as a cocktail dress looks itchy to me. I found a second-hand silk dress that felt great, except for the itchy tag. Although, it may look like I’m drunk in the picture, I drank only water. The decorations were real fruit and quite lovely, although David’s mother-in-law hinted that maybe I shouldn’t eat the centerpiece. David wrote a beautiful tribute to Beth, and Eric’s mom and sister did the same for him.

The event was really for the young people though, who apparently enjoyed shouting at each other over over the extraordinarily loud music.

Treasure in Ferguson, Colombia, Palestine, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Turtle Island

Note: I originally wrote this reflection for my blog, then adapted it for my organization’s CPTnet. I’m adapting it back again a little.

Since a St. Louis, Missouri prosecutor and Grand Jury have determined that Police Officer Darren Wilson killing unarmed teenager Michael Brown did not merit a trial, I have been busy tweeting #Ferguson on the Christian Peacemaker Team Twitter account. Those tweets have been getting a lot of retweets. We have no people working in Ferguson and I have asked myself why I am inundating the account.

I think it has to do with the disposability of human life, with the contempt shown to Michael Brown when the authorities left his body in the street for four and a half hours and did not bother interviewing key witnesses to the shooting for weeks (until there was a public outcry.) That contempt connected directly with our work in Colombia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Palestine, with indigenous communities in North America, and with migrants in Europe. In all these cases, people in power have deemed the people we work with disposable.

If you want to drive Colombian farmers off their land so that you can make big profits with palm oil plantations, it’s okay to assault them, to threaten to rape their nine-year old daughters, to kill their animals, to burn their homes, to use the instruments of the Colombian state illegally to evict their communities’ teachers. And of course, you can do much worse. The types of violent harassment cited above are just some issues the communities we work with have been dealing with recently.

In Iraqi-Kurdistan, our civil society partners have had to drop most of their work to focus on the some most disposable people in the world: refugees. And these refugees have included those from the Ezidi/Yazidi community, whose wives, sisters, and daughters are now in ISIS/DAESH brothels, women considered worthless except for sexual gratification.

And then there is the project CPT Europe participated in this summer, welcoming the refugees that Europe wishes would just disappear, and who, because of European policies, have drowned by the thousands in the Mediterranean, fleeing the violence in countries such as Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

In Palestine, for nineteen long years, we have watched the forces of military occupation say it is acceptable to arrest, jail and torture Palestinian men, women and children without due process, and destroy their homes if Israel wants their land for settlement expansion. It is acceptable for soldiers to shoot teargas at Palestinian children on their way to school and look on as settlers attack them.

In our work with Indigenous partners, we have watched again and again naked racism strip them of their sovereignty, strip their lands of their resources, and leave behind the toxic poisons of their industries. We have watched the Canadian government shrug as 1800 Indigenous women are reported murdered and missing.

So I think it’s all related—Mike Brown, VonDerrit Myers, Tamir Rice, Tina Fontaine, Loretta Saunders, Bella Laboucan-McLean, Marissa Alexander, Jalil Muntaqim, Leonard Peltier…People of color who lost their lives, livelihoods, and freedom because here in North America they were considered just as disposable as the people we work with in Colombia, Palestine, Lesvos, Turtle Island and Kurdistan.

The good news, of course, is that our Colombian, Indigenous, Palestinian, Kurdish, and refugee partners are revealing to the world that they are a treasure—as are the people of Ferguson. The season of Advent is upon us. Let us listen.

Good hashtags to follow #BlackLivesMatter #TheologyofFerguson #StayWokeAdvent. Good accounts: @FaithinFerguson, @BroderickGreer @MikeBrownCover. The #Ferguson hashtag has a lot of good information, but you will also find really racist tweets there.

There are some forms of sadness more worth having than some forms of happiness.

A young mother shared in church on Sunday the pain her family was going through with their foster child at the moment: a pain coming from loneliness, frustration, anger and yes, love for this child that they welcomed into their home last year, and whom we have welcomed into our church.

It made me think of something I have found to be true in my life—that there are some forms of sadness more worth having than some forms of happiness.

Some people, Christians in particular, find this statement bizarre, or even a little offensive—as though I am romanticizing depression. And I truly don’t mean that. There was a time in my life when I did think depression was an essential part of my personality, because I had no memory of a time when I was not depressed. Then I went to college, and found out what it was like to be happy. I learned that much of my depression had its roots in external sources like family dynamics and the Findlay, OH public school system, and that I was more myself when I was not depressed.

Usually, I tell people who are alarmed by statement about sadnesses worth having that everyone who has had children has experienced pain they would never have experienced, had they not had children. Some parents, in particular have had children who experienced illnesses or other hardships they never anticipated when they felt the drive to become parents, but the vast majority of people think that having their children were worth that pain.

But I am usually thinking about the pain absorbed by people who have chosen to take risks, for the sake of love, that most people choose not to. Like the people at my church who chose to become foster parents (and before that, worked as volunteers with undocumented migrants), I have chosen to take risks in my life that took me to sad places. I have worked for a human rights organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, since 1993, that currently has projects in Palestine, Iraqi-Kurdistan, Colombia and with Indigenous communities in North America. Often it seems that every small triumph our partner communities experience arises out innumerable setbacks, failures, and humiliations.

By choosing to write novels, I also essentially chose a life of rejection. I think my current depression is partially rooted in the fact that all three of my previous novels came from a very deep place of inspiration, were enthusiastically received by beta readers and then…the end. So I am struggling with the question of why I was handed these novels—almost compelled to write them—so that maybe 20 people could appreciate them. (I’m exaggerating a little, but am at a low place.)

Women and children of At-Tuwani in the South Hebron Hills, Palestine, remove roadblock to their village

So why live this sort of life? Why put myself by choice among people who did not have the choice to live the life they did? Because when ordinary people choose to struggle together to change their worlds, and when the world takes notice, and begins to reach out to them and stand with them and tell other people about what they are doing to claim their human rights and their dignity; and when the systems and powers that are oppressing and robbing those people finally have to stop telling their lies about them and back off; and when you have been a small part of standing with them and telling their story…there’s a deep, tired joy in all that makes you extraordinarily glad you got involved.

And once I get to a certain point in my novel where it stops becoming work, and characters take on a life of their own, and it’s hard to stop writing—that’s an adrenaline rush like no other.

So at times like these, when I feel everyone of my fifty-two years, and all the young writers on Twitter seem to understand how to navigate the publication and agenting system so much better than I do, and the war in Gaza and the ongoing depredations of ISIS, and tawdry reality of Ferguson, MO and the LAPD and Prime Minister Harper make me dread approaching the CPT Twitter account every morning, I remember and believe:

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On Gaza, Twitter, and Despair

Note: The following post originally appeared on the Jewish Pluralist website. I have adapted it slightly to avoid confusion.

I manage the Twitter account for my human rights organization, and lately, I find I have to take a deep breath every time I check it. Since we have a project in Palestine, our Twitter feed follows other accounts concerned with peace and human rights in Palestine/Israel and now, it’s all about the bombing in Gaza. We also have a project in Iraqi Kurdistan; the team there is dealing with land confiscation by oil corporations and Syrian refugees. (Remember them?) In Colombia, corrupt authorities have used riot police to evict a community we accompany. The Supreme Court of Canada has just ruled that Ontario could open the land of our Anishinaabe partners to industrial logging. But right now, Gaza trumps all on Twitter.

When a friend who runs The Jewish Pluralist website asked me if I had anything to contribute regarding the war in Gaza, I told her that I just could not find the words to write about the current situation. Part of that may be due to my having entered another cycle of depression this spring, but I think mostly, having worked in the region since 1995, I just see no light at the end of this tunnel, and no light back from where I started, and how can I write in the dark?

However an e-mail I read from Noa Baum—an Israeli woman who does a poignant and educational one-woman show about Jewish and Palestinian experiences of the 1948 and 1967 wars—got me thinking. She writes, “As despair sees it, anyone who still hopes, who still believes in the possibility of peace, is at best naïve, or a deluded dreamer…”

She made me realize my despair is formed from different stuff. It grows from love—love of Palestinians and Israelis I have worked with, celebrated with, grieved with. People who were dreamers at one time and who have for decades, under craven political leadership, seen their work treated like trash. My despair is based on the knowledge that I have almost no power to facilitate peace or human rights in the region. I can only witness, document, and at a micro-level, provide accompaniment for individuals, families, and small communities nonviolently resisting the occupation. Any real change is in the hands of Palestinians and Israelis working at a grassroots level, and people at the roots have been trampled until they are bloody.

I had chosen not to share graphic images of dead and mutilated children coming across the Twitter Feed. But one picture this week dug its claws into me and would not let go, so after some internal debate, I did post it on our account. It shows a little girl in profile, gray eye open in death, with a tear slipping from its corner. Jehan Alfarra (@palinoia), who tweeted the picture from Gaza wrote, “Shedding her final tear, she leaves us.”

And I think, that tear could drown the world.

But we’re still here.

The BDS Debate In Our House

This post first appeared on The Jewish Pluralist website.
My husband and I met because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A progressive Israeli-American, he came to hear me give a presentation called “Eye-witness to the Intifada” in November 2001 and asked good questions. A few months later, we met at another Middle East peace event, talked for hours afterwards and have been together ever since.

While some may view us as an odd couple—a secular Israeli Jew and a religious Mennonite who works with a human rights organization in Palestine—we agree on the most fundamental issues at work in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. We believe that Palestinians and Israelis are entitled to the same human rights; no exceptions. We agree that the Israeli military occupation must end. We agree that Israeli leaders, supported by the U.S. Congress, have been most responsible for scuttling effective peace negotiations, but that most official Palestinian leaders have not done well by their people either.

Our arguments over points of disagreement never reach satisfactory conclusions, I think, because we are arguing from two different platforms. Israel was Michael’s home for fifteen years and he would still live there if family circumstances had not compelled him to return to the U.S. I, on the other hand, in addition to working in Palestine have worked with my human rights organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), in Haiti, Chiapas, Mexico, Colombia, and with Indigenous communities in North America. So I view the situation in Palestine through the lens of a human rights observer, rather than as from the perspective of someone with ties to a homeland.

This reality colors our disagreement over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement. Although even in that area, we probably agree more than we disagree. Michael always boycotted items produced in settlements, and as someone who does socially responsible financial planning for a living, he would boycott the corporations that reinforce and profit from the military aspects of the Israeli occupation—e.g., Motorola, Raytheon, and Caterpillar—anyway. But when it comes to boycotting products made inside Israel proper, or boycotting Israeli cultural and academic enterprises, Michael is passionately opposed.

I do not match his passion in my disagreement. Those of us who work on the CPT’s Palestine team could not ourselves agree on an ardent support of the full spectrum of the BDS movement when we tried to write our own statement on the topic. But when Palestinian Christian partner organizations launched the Kairos document in 2009, asking the international community to support them by adopting BDS principles, we felt we had to stand with them. For decades, the international community has lectured Palestinians on using nonviolent resistance against the occupation. BDS is nonviolent resistance, and, as the document says, Palestinian Christians are not viewing it as an act of revenge, “but rather a serious action in order to reach a just and definitive peace.” Those are principles very much in keeping with the philosophy of CPT.

I have heard all the arguments against BDS. Why is Israel being singled out when human rights abuses are so much worse in [insert country]? Answer: Idi Amin’s regime killed exponentially more people in Uganda during the 1970s than the South African government killed in four decades of apartheid. Does that mean the international community should not have been in solidarity with South African anti-Apartheid activists?

BDS will only make Israelis more recalcitrant. Answer: How could Israel be more recalcitrant than it is now? The same argument was used for South Africa, and for a time the South African government did push back, but ultimately, practical people like DeKlerk recognized that Apartheid could not go on forever.

The academic cultural boycott alienates the very Israelis who are most supportive of ending the occupation. Answer: A. there is a distinction between boycotts of artists and academics who are officially representing the state of Israel, and academics and artists who happen to be Israeli. B. Presenting an attractive, cultured face helps mitigate the barbarity of the occupation. It was, in fact the boycott by sports teams and entertainers, that swung white public opinion against apartheid in South Africa more than the economic boycott.

Israel is nothing like South Africa. Answer: Every South African Israeli I know, every South African I have met who has come through Hebron has told me the checkpoints and treatment of Palestinians by soldiers and settlers eerily evoke to them the worst of Apartheid’s heyday.(1)

I can keep generating responses like these. I have used them in many conversations with Israeli and Jewish friends, and I see that I cause them pain when I do so, which I hate. But I have seen Palestinian friends brutalized by soldiers and settlers. I have seen them lose their land and their homes. I have seen Palestinians shot, spit on, and in general, treated worse than animals by the hideous tentacles of the Israeli military occupation. And since I began working in Hebron in 1995, the situation has only gotten worse; no amount of dialogue, solidarity outreach, or top level diplomacy has stopped the erosion of civil rights and human dignity for the people in the Hebron district and the rest of Palestine.

So ultimately, the decision for my colleagues and me to support the BDS movement is this: Palestinians have asked us to participate with them in this nonviolent struggle of last resort. Their lives and livelihoods are not worth more than Israeli or Jewish lives. But they ARE worth more than Israeli and Jewish feelings, even the feelings of those Israelis and Jews I love the most.

(1). Michael and I watched a PBS special on the 25th Anniversary of Paul Simon’s Graceland album. During its production, Simon went to South Africa at the time of the Cultural Boycott and used prominent black South African musicians in the recording of his album, which caused a huge debate. Some, including founder of Artists Against Apartheid, Dali Tambo, argued he should be boycotted, while others argued he was providing employment for and celebrating black musicians. The special included a segment with Simon and Tambo cordially discussing the boycott. Dali Tambo still believed Simon should have been boycotted, but they hugged at the end of the conversation. My takeaway? We won’t know ultimately about the effectiveness of BDS in Israel and Palestine until we have some hindsight. Michael’s takeaway? Boycotting Simon was a ridiculous idea then, and it’s still a ridiculous idea.

Murdered and Missing Women: Reflections on a Tumblr comment

[Warning: This release contains profanity and triggers about violence.]

The way these phrases and photos invade my life is a bit like grace, in that I do not anticipate their effect and I know they are spiritually important—but they do not feel like grace. They are always something dreadful and sad that spring out of the information gathering I do that is part of my work. Usually, they are not accounts of slaughters or grand tragedies, or pictures of carnage. When an Israeli military bulldozer driver ran over Rachel Corrie in March 2003 (can it really be eleven years now?) The photo of her corpse did not pierce me. It was the photo of her colleagues—calmly comforting her in previous photos—weeping and embracing each other in the final photo, after her death, that got its hooks into me, that still has its hooks in me for that matter.

Most recently, the item of hideous grace was this: “Fuck, they just found her body. Rest in peace, love.”

It was a comment by a young women going by the name “Willow Deplorable” on the Tumblr blog of our Aboriginal Justice Team. They had posted a notice about 26-year-old Loretta Saunders’ body turning up on the Trans-Canada highway in New Brunswick. An activist trying to publicize Canadian authorities’ lack of interest in more than 800 murdered and missing Indigenous women, Saunders had been writing her thesis on the topic when she disappeared on February 13. I clicked on a link that brought me to the article about her disappearance, and for some reason, among the 64 notes posted at the bottom of the article, Willow Deplorable’s jumped out at me:

“Fuck, they just found her body. Rest in peace, love.”

And then I read a piece by Saunders’ thesis advisor, Darryl Leroux, who wrote that the image of her final resting place by the highway “hurts beyond anything I could say in words…I simply cannot get this image out of my mind.” I read Tara Williamson’s piece, “Don’t be tricked,” in which she said she shared Leroux’s initial gut reaction, “she’ll show up in a ditch like so many indigenous women before her” but allowed herself “this glimmer of hope, this notion that, for some reason, maybe this time it would be different…because she was an urbanized grad student or because she could pass as white … Despite all my talk, all my activism, all my ‘decolonizing’ work, I swallowed the pill… I got tricked.”

Williamson goes on to say,

•   If you are an Indigenous woman, don’t be tricked into thinking you are any more safe than any of our other sisters out there. You’re not. The system and most Canadians don’t give a shit about you…

•   Don’t be tricked into thinking that wearing a ribbon for a day, or signing a petition, or composing a tweet, or writing an article is going to change anything on its own…

•   Finally, don’t be tricked into thinking someone else will do this work. You are that “someone else.” Loretta knew this. That’s why she was working so hard on uncovering the truth about murdered and missing women.

Honour Loretta. Don’t be tricked.

The thing is, I knew about murdered and missing indigenous women in Canada before Loretta Saunders’ death—women whose disappearances and deaths the authorities mostly could not be bothered to solve. I edit releases for the Aboriginal Justice team for CPTnet. If I were working with the team in Canada, I would have gladly joined demonstrations and put my skills to work on behalf of this issue. In fact, I have edited hundreds of releases describing many horrible things over the years, but for some reason, Willow Deplorable’s comment, “Fuck, they just found her body. Rest in peace, love” was like a raft that carried me past the word “issue,” and forced me to face the agony of the people who loved these women.

And then that raft left Canada. It was 1999; I was with Lakota friends in South Dakota who were telling me about their ancestors’ bodies displayed like animal specimens in museums and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers flooding their sacred burial grounds along the Missouri river. I was in college in the 1980s learning of other bodies tortured and dumped by the roadside in El Salvador and Guatemala, disposed of by men trained in the U.S. to terrorize civilian populations. It was 1998; I was viewing the photos of Mayans from Union Progreso in Chiapas who had been stripped naked and cut open by the Mexican military and returned to their families that way. I was reading the reports of how paramilitaries slaughtered and mutilated Las Abejas, our partners in Chiapas from 1998-2001. It was 2001-2003 and I was editing reports of my CPT colleagues and friends pulling bodies and parts of bodies out rivers in Colombia, bodies who had been teachers, and farmers, and labor organizers and some of whom would remain unidentified—all to teach the people in the Magadalena Medio Region that rightwing paramilitaries were in control.

“Fuck, they just found her body. Rest in peace, love”does not completely capture what I felt as I wept for these poor abused bodies, and the people who lived in them and their loved ones, but it echoes the sentiment. Willow Deplorable’s Tumblr comment begins with outrage, lays bare the awful truth, and then ends with compassion.
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And as I said earlier, the tenacity of its grip around my heart seems like something spiritual.

You won’t know where I’m going till I get there

I will soon be leaving for a field assignment with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT). For those of you who don’t know me well, I work most of the year for CPT from my home in Rochester, NY, editing releases from workers staffing our projects in Iraqi Kurdistan, Colombia, North American Indigenous communities, etc.

At least once a year, however, I spend some time in the field, so I am alerting my blog readers that I will soon be shifting my writing into a more political mode (maybe I should say “even more political.”)

Those of you who know me well know why I am not going to go into great detail here about the whens, wheres, whys and hows of my travel. I will post more of an explanation for those of you who don’t once I get to my destination. Those of you given to prayer—I would appreciate prayers for an open and loving heart should I encounter people on my journey who don’t want me to get to where I’m going.

I will have my traveling companion Markie with me, who will probably post some of his adventures on Facebook. He has encouraged to wear this lucky unicorn necklace. I am hoping it makes me look inoffensive.

SermonsColombia

Good-bye to Camila

And a graffiti tour

And Raison Det’re of Our Trip

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