Testimony and Truth Commissions

One of the main goals of the global human rights agenda has been multiculturalism, the notion of inclusion, and thus democratic ideals. In the past several decades, these ideals have manifested in what Bain Attwood calls “the age of testimony” (2008). The rise of memory and recording of experience as a form of truth has emerged prominently in the legal realm of truth commissions and the official documents they produce. While the human rights community has proclaimed these institutionalized official sites of memory to restore marginalized voices, redeem the violent past, and bring transitioning nation states into democracy, scholars have begun to question the limitations of testimony’s authority and the process by which it becomes an official history of and heals the new nation. Bain Attwood, Deborah Posel, Julie Taylor, and Lessie Jo Frazier explain the use and shortfalls of memory’s redemptive and healing function in the cases of South Africa, Argentina, and Chile. They ask what the limitations and possible harms are of testimony’s presumed ability to heal and the way it bring haunted pasts into present human rights discourse.

In “In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, “Distance,” and Public History”, Bain Attwood explains the rupture between traditional historicism and the new role given to testimony and experience. As he puts it, “history making has been democratized” (Attwood 2008, 75). Traditional history and historicism have centered on the notion of distantiation, “the process of putting the past at a distance from the present” (2008, 76). The distance of the historian also implies his or her separation from the object of study, between objective knower and the knowable subject; however, a series of radical social movements following the rise of the global human rights agenda in the 1960s and 1970s began to challenge this divide. These movements—involved in issues of race, gender, and class— advocated for history from below, the recovery of the marginalized and hidden pasts of “the poor, migrants, slaves and indigenous peoples, gay men, and lesbian women” (2008, 79). The status of history thus began to shift from studying what happened in the past to studying how its participants experienced the past, therefore calling for oral history. As Attwood explains, the most important element of this change was the “shift in the location of historical power and authority from the professional historian, the elite, and the oppressors to the oral interviewee or witness” (2008, 79). History became a democratic endeavor as the site of history and historical knowledge moved to the site of the witness.

Through bringing marginalized voices of the past to light, oral history and narrative entail a different relationship of past to present. Whereas historicism creates distance between the two, testimony and the rise of memory create “a connecting of past and present; “then” and “now” become entangled with one another,” bringing the historian and observer into “closer proximity with the past” (2008, 80). Nowhere has this been more evident than in the connections between traumatic memory, the public realm, and the legal sphere. Memories of trauma “resists historicism’s organization of time into a chronologically linear schema of before-and-after”. Attwood quotes Dominick LaCapra on the notion that “in traumatic memory the past is not simply history as over and done with. It lives on experientially and haunts and possesses the self of the community” (2008, 81). This haunting destroys the notion that past and present are separate entities, resisting closure and a clean break from the past. As these “histories of below” have centered on voices of suffering, the witness and the ever-present past has become a dominant way people experience the past in the public sphere. The traditional public task of history to explain the past has given way to make the viewer and citizen “experience the past” (2008, 84). Witnessing, testimony, and experience have become “much more that of the transmission of pasts to future generations…a link between the faces and voices of witness and those who listen to them” (2008, 86). This concept—the relation of witness, experience, and listening—is central to the role of testimony and its affiliation to healing.

The authority of experience, testimony, and its perceived ability to heal is most evident in the legal sphere of public life. Attwood points to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in Australia and its reliance on oral testimony by Aboriginals. The commission “encouraged those who had been removed to testify to their suffering…it was a way of obtaining knowledge about the past, but in addition, and most of all, it was a means of transmitting the past in such a way as to enable those who bore its burdens to be both heard and healed” (2008 87). As it becomes a dominant force in public life, testimony receives the authority of both obtaining and transmitting knowledge. As an act of hearing and healing, testimony performs what Attwood notes as the “politics of sentimental feeling”, the triggering of an emotional response to action by the audience (2008, 88). Deborah Posel and Julie Taylor elaborate on the redemptive function of testimony and the truth it seeks to capture and produce in their respective articles, “History as Confession: The Case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission” and “Body Memories: Aide-Memories and Collective Amnesia in the Wake of the Argentine Terror”.

The entity of the truth commission emerged into the human rights movements in 1973 as Argentina sought to transition from its violent military regime into a democratic nation, and has since been followed by 36 similar commissions, with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) being the most well known and prominent model. Utilized in stages of transition from chaos to order, truth commissions work to “unify and reconcile by exposing the horrors that past oppressors had denied or hidden and by then passing resolute and robust judgment on what had gone wrong” (Posel 2008, 121). Following the idea of “history from below”, truth commissions attempt to rebuild the new nation from its dark past by including the voices that the previous regime had silenced, oppressed, violated, and excluded. By exposing the past horrors of a military regime or apartheid through the testimonies and traumatic memory, truth commissions work to simultaneously “commission and commemorate the past” (2008 122). These testimonies of trauma become a form of truth and are “documented as the core of an official record of a troubled past” (2008 121). As Attwood earlier explains, the individual and his or her testimony has become a direct site of “the truth,” and therefore truth commissions assign a prominent place to victimhood and memories of trauma.

Truth, in this context, carries the potential and the function to heal, attending to “the damage done to individuals, interpersonal relationships, and the nation as a whole” (2008, 129). A period such as apartheid damaged all members of South African society, and thus the truth commission of the TRC, for example, was based on the premise that “Healing is speaking” (2008, 138). While the act of recognizing the humanity of the other, both victim and perpetrator, ubuntu, was central to the truth and healing project, the TRC struggled with the dilemma of how to produce an authoritative account of “the truth” when so many perspectives and voices were at stake. Moving away from a period of incredible exclusion, the TRC and the legal reports it produced grappled with how to include while creating a definite legal documentation and official memory record of apartheid:

…it has become impossible not to acknowledge a multiplicity of perspectives—as personal truths—which coexist with the official, impersonal, and authoritative truth produced by the commission’s rigorous investigations. (2008, 127)

Claims to an authoritative truth must be demonstrated while, as Posel states, “the idea of truth has never before been as widely and intensely discredited as it has been since the late 1970s” (2008, 124), due to the above recognition of the multiplicity of perspectives at stake. Here is the central paradox of the idea of the truth commission: it must restore truth as a possible and desired endeavor while facing the fact that the same claims to truth became the tools to the violent eras and suppression from which they seek to escape.

The act of writing testimonies into an official document of the past is central to this project of truth construction, inclusion, and the creation of an official memory of the new imagined community (Posel 2008, 121). In the documents produced by the truth commissions, there is the notion that truth itself is a means to an end, that by working the narrative truths of different subjunctives into legal documentation, the nation can be healed, a catharsis can take place, and the nation can move on. In the Argentina case of 1973, the National Commission on Disappeared People sought to record and remember the terror from the country’s military period in the form of the Never Again documents. These documents, Julie Taylor notes, “were one solution to remembering terror…to create an official memory of events that were never to be forgotten…for which no history yet existed” (1994, 194). Its purpose was, as would be the case of the future TRC, to diagnose and prevent future instances of human rights violation. Taylor quotes Lawrence Wescher on the notion that the establishment of an official truth is “a powerful, almost magical notion, because often everyone already knows the truth…Why, then, this need to risk everything to render that knowledge explicit?” (1994, 195). The official sanctioning of knowledge, of the past through testimony, is central here; however, it poses the notion that the desire of truth possibly is more pressing than the desire for justice, which Taylor finds so problematic. As she notes, despite the celebration of these documents as the answer to violence, in Brazil and Uruguay “not one torturer has gone to jail, nor even to court, on the basis of the Never Again documents” (1994, 193).

Taylor posits whether the “valorization of previously marginal voices” (Posel 2008, 123) and the legal mode of their obtainment and sanctioning is enough: “We might discover something profoundly important about the problem of memory and the perpetuation of terror by examining the notion that meticulous recording is a solution to violence” (1994, 193). Central to this dilemma is the fact that the members of the military period in Argentina have been returning to political life at the will of democracy. Taylor observes the 1973 tribunal and the Never Again documents it produced resorted “to forms…that impede dealing with the exclusionary political nature of the violence and even participates in it” (1994, 196). In the trials of the coup d’etat and the oral narratives that they obtained, the actors within this political event were stripped of their political affiliations and “collective political motivations were thus not recognized” (1994, 197). While law was used to bring about truth, the law itself acted as an exclusionary force, perpetuating the “atomization of collective identities into rights and motivations of the individuals whose testimony the court admitted” (1994, 197). Taylor points to this kind of inherent “violence” in official memory projects aimed at the truth. The project of the truth commission also employs hierarchy, ordering what is necessary to include in the documentation and what is not, forcing some voices or central information out of the image, out of the imagined community of the new nation.

These removed voices become forgotten as remembering becomes “a process of forgetting…a process of simultaneously constructing some subjective and doing violence to others” (1994, 200). Although the TRC came long after the Argentina case and therefore could improve upon its predecessor, Posel notes its capacity too to exclude in its attempt to heal the nation’s: “…the cases heard in these hearings had to function as an appropriately representative sample of the whole—but only symbolically, not statistically” (2008, 138). This symbolic representation fit into the new mix of race, gender, and political affiliation that comprised its new “rainbow nation” and thus followed its own hierarchy and exclusions of potential reality of apartheid (2008, 139). Therefore, as Taylor aptly states, “memory does not only salvage, construct, and invent. Memory as constituted is exclusionary: it omits what hierarchy does not recognize,” and as such might contain “capacities to trivialize and exclude experience” (1994, 202). The construction of the truth for legal ends, even for truth itself, is political in nature, and thus, enacts a violence of its own, demonstrating the exclusionary nature of any universal claim (Taylor 1994, 199).

By distorting reality through documentation, whether through Never Again or the TRC’s symbolic rather than statistical representation of the nation, we may allow these violations to reoccur. Lessie Jo Frazier’s study, ““Subverted Memories”: Countermourning as Political Action in Chile”, explores how this process of exclusion and forgetting can be fought in what she explains as countermourning, the refusal to “relinquish the past and grope[s] toward a politics that might allow their memories integrity with a vision for the future” (1999, 105). The Chilean case too demonstrates the story of moving the nation out of a violent and painful past into the neoliberal state and economy. As the military sought to implement its own official memory by banning civil society actions, veterans fought in public spaces in what Jo Frazier terms the subversion of memory (1999, 106). Crypts and funerals, as sites of traumatic memory, provided a space of not only commemoration and remembrance, but also the enabling of but also political action (1999, 110). While she notes the homogenizing nature of the law and the truth commissions for healing, she comments that the work of mourning itself may not be sufficient to heal a damaged society: “Memory raised in elegy cannot transform the conditions of life. Without plot there may be ethics but there can be not politics, no hope of bliss” (1999, 111).

Instead, Jo Frazier advocates to look at memory as “praxis rather than text” (1999, 116). In Chile, the regime transition occurred without any major restructuring of the state or military order. In Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, the Never Again documents did not bring torturers to justice nor did it prevent dictators from being reelected to office. To the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Posel comments that the “process of truth telling, in turn, forms a mode of justice which is more reconciliatory than punitive, based on the admissions of wrongdoing and the moral catharsis this affords” (2008, 126). While the rise of testimony and the use of memory have worked to reclaim the identity of minority groups, helped to transmit the past, and sought to repair the exclusions of the past, it has obtained an authority that promises redemption, promises a healing truth (Attwood 2008, 90). Testimony may offer catharsis and a release from the burdens of the past, but as Taylor and Jo Frazier note, this does not assure a politics or even justice as the cases show. While searching for the truth that will heal the damaged nation, the truth commission and its written productions may in fact exclude subjects as it brings the past into the present through trauma. Furthermore, the desiring of closure through this truth might only add to the difficulty in challenging this exclusion in the new “transitioned” nation.


Works Cited
1. Attwood, Bain, "In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, 'Distance' and Public History" Public Culture: Transnational Cultural Studies 20, 2008 : 75-96.

2. Frazier, Lessie Jo, "Subverted memories: Countermourning as Political Action in Chile [8pgs]" in , Acts of Memory U. Press of New England, 1999: 105-119.

3. Posel, Deborah, "History as Confession: The Case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission" Public Culture: Transnational Cultural Studies 20, 2008 : 119-141.

4. Taylor, Julie, "Body Memories: Aide-Memoires and Collective Amnesia in the Wake of Argentine Terror [6 pgs]" in , Body Politics: Disease, Desire, and the Family West View Press, 1994: pp. 192-203.

something more, something to push

its not that im not working hard...

i just would like something more. something that makes me better. i miss places, things, people, and ideas that make me want to be better, that push me to truly and really rethink myself and whats around me. to challenge me, my ideals, my theories, my thoughts. to question what i hold dear. im some ways, i want someone or something or someplace that respectfully and admirably questions the world we live in, rips it apart, but only enough so to see the glue and webs that hold the whole thing together. i miss and want that again here.

there was a game we would play on the van rides to the south of Para. you think of a person in the van, or the other van-you dont say their name. people ask questions: if they were a disney character, what would they be? if they were a natural disaster, what would they be? eventually, people guess who the person is. it was interesting, seeing what you embodied in characters, places, ideas. here its all more of a vacuum.

what im trying to say is, the title of this blog: people and places take you in, absorb you, make you relinquish control. its that letting go, that submission, that sets you free. it takes you apart and repieces you, you the way you feel it to be. it challenges you to see flaws, fix them, become better. thats what a vortex is to me. the kind of transformation that tears you apart but keeps you completely together. because when you become ripped apart, you see all the connections between the parts. finally visible, you can embrace them.

its not that im not looking-there just isnt quite that here. in the end, you cant throw yourself into classes. they arent the totalizing experience im looking for. i want something new everyday. when you walk into a classroom and everybody sits in the same seats, that isnt absorptive, its the grind. i suppose its more of a wake up call to mix things up, but mixing them up isnt enough. i want crazy, illogical, unknowable, weird, fucked up, messy. chaos, isnt that the word? i want chaos in people, in time, in books, in places. i dont want things to make sense, i dont want things to be clear to me. i dont even want to be in control. i just want to let go, relax, and take myself along and learn. along that path id like to be challenged by those im close to. id like to open up and talk, by doing so learning more about who i am, who others are. its hard here and i keep trying and keep feeling that it doesnt go anywhere. no progress, just a circle. at least vortexes get somewhere: the bottom of things. the core, the origin, call it what you like. life, the spark. what did the ancients think of the soul? a spark, the life force. i just want to know it.

here i am. i have a beta fish in my room. a box of oat cereal on the floor. its 2:02 am, i feel like a lost character in a book, not the positive learning kind of lost. not hero-wandering-in-the-desert-lost. not edmond dantes locked in prison for 13 years lost. its not quite a confront yourself lost. well, thats not true. its about confronting yourself, but not about testing those limitations, learning painfully what they are. maybe overcoming them here and there. but the failures push forward. i know this is all so abstract and thats fine. in some sense i want to be like eisely-i havent even finished his book-and reflect on the history of life. in the end isnt it all chaos? isnt that what every scientific discipline tells us in the end? social, humanities, natural-boom here we go.

some of me knows after college it would be best to work and then grad school it up. but thats too safe. brazil taught me the safe way is the useless way (its easy to say "the easy way"). i dont want safe, i dont want comfort. we dont really learn in college because its all so safe. and when its safe theres no need to test yourself and escape. theres no need not just to think outside but also to go outside. see it for yourself, you know? say no to comfort and dreams of a safe cozy future-i want to explore and get lost again. adventure. i want to sail on a boat and learn at the docks, at the ports, at the bars. have the most absurd, and therefore wonderful, of conversations. get lost in a language barrier. get lost in facing my limitations. man i harp on this. but its true, can't you see? then its not nostalgia, because its possible to feel this everywhere-just not here. im not yearning for brazil at all really, im yearning for that experience. experIEnce. into earth? reality? i want dirty hands, callused hands, rope burn, finger cuts, insomnia. i want nights listening to music far away, not from an iPod or stereo but from hands. something that reminds me of intimacy, existence?

http://microscopyu.com/moviegallery/pondscum/metopus/

if i can find it in a single cell, cant it be anywhere? there has to be some sort of philosophical treatise on this. theres absolute and sheet chaos in a drop of pond water.

oh yeah!

ive gotten so much work done over break so far. and i enjoy the alone time. ive read Body Toxic, Advocacy After Bhopal, and Love Canal: The Story Continues. not to mention ~ 10 news articles. ive got it down. im also reading T-Zero by Calvino, Parasite by Serres, and want to start Animal's People by Sinha. pandora radio is playing, i have time to go to the gym, and it feels more than decent. is it weird that the last thing i really want is have everyone come back from break? all the space and emptiness here is nice.

places and experiences dont die and end, they live on forever in us. with every moment and experience we change somewhat. the atoms of our bodies change through time. we are never fixed, never static. always in flux, always carrying particles from places, times, people.

right now i cant help but live in the past. mentally, i am still in brazil. i am still lying in a hammock on our boat, reading a copy of Citizens, Experts, and the Environment. i am still excited about capacity building, about popular epidemiology, about analogies of the social world to biological terms, about social movements and cultural autonomy, about participatory research, about the city as an ecosystem, about public health, about powerful writing that moves, about ghosh/calvino/murakami, about jujitsu, about friends who understand me. i am still alone in my host family house in paruapebas, palmares II, feeling uncomfortable, playing soduko. i am still standing at 3 am on the balcony of the apartment in Belem, breathing in the fresh air, listening to the music of far away clubs ringing through the soundscape. i am still catching tucunare with Leo.

i do need to move on and away, and when i get to a place where that passion and excitement can manifest itself again, i will. easily. when i went to powershift i felt teleported back to it all, or forward, or who i want to be, or whatever you might call it. i have total confidence that being at CHEJ this summer will afford me the same chance. it just so happens that i dont have that atmosphere here at bard. where time is randomly split between class and the world. between theory and practice. between active discussion and engagement to everything else. to where new york city attitude transports to a small rural middle of nowhere. and people say that places dont move...

right now, i am waiting. i find books here and there, moments in class that grab me. in ecology & evolution we get to go outside, collect data, find some meaningful or useless statistical analysis. in GIS we use real data from projects to make maps and find patterns, clusters. maybe im finding out that in reality, i am more of a go out and do it kind of guy, and all this theory and abstraction of reality is getting to me. im glad i was on the geography search comittee. the guy we picked was all about hands on stuff, community projects in NYC with urban ecology. im sure ill have a great time if i take one of his classes next year. it makes me wonder if i picked the wrong major, which is ironic, because in practice anthropology is so incredibly hands on. but of course, at bard, we dont do hands on. we do theoretics, with hands on sprinkled in.

in the end of the day, the best thing to do is just let your thoughts go on paper. ive been trying to write more in my free time. by no means am i happy here, but thats a product of where i am right now. if i hadnt gone to brazil, im sure id be having a great semester right now. id be very excited about the material. so in a way, not being happy shows me that i still care about the things that make me come alive. it comes in fragments, but it is there. and as soon as i start doing hands on things again, it will be there. passion doesnt leave, doesnt remove itself.

the hard part is come the end of the day, and who do you talk about it all to? i end up talking to my professors, knowing that they might actually get it, but more so, want to listen. in the end we just all want somebody to listen, but more importantly, to acknowledge that we are there and alive. some call it respect, curiosity for others, and interest in engagement.

and thats whats missing here at bard, what i know i need the most.

what is there to say?

being here for break is boring and lonely, but maybe its constructive. the past few weeks have been so conflated, drama, pain, papers, mid terms. nows a good time to be able to just sit by the waterfall and figure things out. that sounds like a bad fortune cookie.

but sitting alone in the woods, writing, having my space, perhaps is all good. ive been able to be happy on my own this semester. its the work, lack of motivation, and lack of anyone i feel a truly strong connection with here at bard. sometimes it all just feels so meaningless, the things we do. i miss having people i care about to talk to, really talk to. beyond the nuts and bolts of the day, people to share thoughts with. to philosophize, theorize, speculate, observe, examine, explore, find everything beautiful. why do i feel so alone at wanting to have that connection? my therapist once told me a year and a half ago that i have high standards for people. that i so desire intimate and deep connections with people, that i just assume everyone else wants the same thing. that apparently that makes me ahead of my time/age. but in the end of the day, id rather have a small handful of good friends i can share the universe of my thoughts with than a million everyday friendships. not that i dont value those either, and theres a time and a place for all, but, if it came to push to shove...

i think the smiths's lyrics sum it up for me, or, something not quite like it, but good enough. ive forgotten how much a good book or two and good music can feed a starved soul. ive been consuming the worlds/words of italo calvino and murakami, how interesting that they write the way i think.

"Shyness is nice, and
Shyness can stop you
From doing all the things in life
You'd like to

Shyness is nice, and
Shyness can stop you
From doing all the things in life
You'd like to

So, if there's something you'd like to try
If there's something you'd like to try
ASK ME - I WON'T SAY "NO" - HOW COULD I ?

Coyness is nice, and
Coyness can stop you
From saying all the things in
Life you'd like to

So, if there's something you'd like to try
If there's something you'd like to try
ASK ME - I WON'T SAY "NO" - HOW COULD I ?

Spending warm Summer days indoors
Writing frightening verse
To a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg

ASK ME, ASK ME, ASK ME
ASK ME, ASK ME, ASK ME

Because if it's not Love
Then it's the Bomb, the Bomb, the Bomb
the Bomb, the Bomb, the Bomb, the Bomb
That will bring us together

Nature is a language - can't you read ?
Nature is a language - can't you read ?

SO ... ASK ME, ASK ME, ASK ME
ASK ME, ASK ME, ASK ME

Because if it's not Love
Then it's the Bomb, the Bomb, the Bomb
the Bomb, the Bomb, the Bomb, the Bomb
That will bring us together

If it's not Love
Then it's the Bomb
Then it's the Bomb
That will bring us together

SO ... ASK ME, ASK ME, ASK ME
ASK ME, ASK ME, ASK ME
Oh, la ... "

warm summer days indeed. the other day i saw a few deer in the woods. i decided to follow them.

i found a giant book in the library about protists and the 17th century.

yes, i miss it. all. im reading "Love Canal: The Story Continues" by Lois Gibbs. Its her powerful recollection of how a normally shy woman, with no experience organizing or in health, when pressed with the harm of her children, started an enormous grassroots effort. the moral of her book, she more or less says, is the story of how, when pushed and faced with the harm of the things they care about, the small can rise and do anything.

times like these, i feel i can do anything too. i am working at CHEJ this summer. i have earned the respect of my professors. i did my own research in brazil. i can speak portugues pretty well. i am an incredibly chill guy. i am patient, and willing to see the best in people, sometimes too much. ive learned the dangers of giving people the benefit of the doubt all the time, but deep down hold that people will be good. i tend to believe things will work out, even though i have a hard time seeing this at first. i am getting good at jujitsu. i am willing to work incredibly hard for things and people if need be. i work hard and throw myself into everything i do, knowing that i will stumble across something sooner than later that i become passionate and interested in. it always happens. i am organized and know what i want. vamos agora.

i learned and gained and grew so much over my time in brazil; maybe it was all for nothing if i lose her in the process.

i am not the same person i was last semester. i am not excited, i am not carefree and independent. i want that feeling of power in myself again. that feeling of pride. that feeling of knowing what i want. or maybe i do, but ive just screwed things up enough that it is too late right now, or just not the right time.

i guess all that can happen right now is wait. i dont like the feeling of just going with the grind. its not the same as when i felt like going with the flow; they are completely different. where did it all go? why? why am i such a fuck up?

i want everything to be better. its too much and i cant take it anymore. i cant take feelings dwelling up. i wish there was a way to release it all and become who i want to be/know to be again. i cant take all the loss, loss of self, loss of people i care about, loss of motivation.

what happened? wake up.

yesterday i spent the day with me, and walked down to the waterfall with some juice and a notebook at sat and wrote for a while. then walked some more. i found some deer, and followed them into the woods. sat down near a creek and read a few of the new calvino stories i bought.

some people say that instead of just ignoring one's brokenheartedness, one should incorporate it into their life, make it a part of them, or something. i struggle with this and what to do with it all.

theres so much to ponder this break. but going off on walks again, something i miss, did it in brazil a lot, was so nice. ive forgotten the feeling of clearing my head and just listening to the world around me.

listening to the smiths, i always get thinking. its the melancholy waving throughout the air, that kind of dark damp musty mood that i seem to come most alive at. im always looking for more, aren't i? something to push me further, never quite content in the current situation, simply because theres always so much more to see and do and feel and explore and find and embrace. i find myself constantly buying new books just to learn more and open the doors further. one day im sure ill push on through.

its funny, because sometimes as a person i feel i make no sense. but then every once in a while ill find somebody who also makes no sense and can be completely illogical and rational at the same time; its those contradictions that i think i strive to find most in people. not to open them up and expose them, but just to relish how fucked up we all are. im here at bard for the week, mostly alone, and i enjoy just accepting the loneliness and going with it.

this semester has felt like a feeble attempt to hold on and control life. attempting to hold on to the things i felt in brazil, only to realize that the circumstances and context at bard is completely different, and like all organisms, i need to adapt.

adapt. im my microscope history class, which im starting to love for no practical reason whatsoever, we've been talking about how, due to the complexity of the natural world when scientists (that word didnt exist until the mid 1800s!)began looking at it through the microscope, people turned to analogies of the human-built world to describe nature. even though to most of them, the human world was a flawed one that depended on sensory data, and of course, there is so much of the world that our senses cant show us. microorganisms are so fascinating. ive been trying to explore the opposite side of the coin. not so much how we relate nature back to our sensory world, which often translates into describing nature as a machine, but instead relating the obscure complexity of our world back to the microscopic world. ive begun to read Michel Serres' The Parasite. in French "parasite" means biological parasite, guest, and noise. hmm. Serres relates the way humans operate with one another, and with the rest of life on earth, as the relationship of parasite to host. how culture has seeped into the language of parasitology, how the parasite can really be nothing more than a predator, or an unwanted guest in hospitality.

"what does man give to the cow, to the tree, to the steer, who give him milk, warmth, shelter, work, and food? what does he give? death"

"the same one is the host; the same one takes and eats; there is no change of direction. this is true of all beings. of lice and men"

"let's retrace our steps for a moment, going from these habits back to those manners, reversing anthropomorphism. we have made the louse in our image; let us see ourselves in his"

always looking for something more. someone to talk to. something to light me up. something to do.

next week i get to talk with my advisor about epidemiology and public health graduate school.

March 17th 2009

Thirty-one years ago, community members of Niagara, NY discovered that their schools and homes rested upon a dumping site for the chemicals of industry. That is to say, they had a feeling of its presence all along; it wasn’t until enough public pressure coerced the New York State Department of Health into performing and publishing a health study of the region. Several decades past, Hooker Chemical Co. had used the canal connecting the upper and lower Niagara river-Love Canal-for its waste. After the canal was filled, the Board of Education bought the land for one dollar and constructed an elementary school nearby. Neighborhoods grew around the school zone, and decades later residents began to speculate as to what caused the odors and surfacing liquids around their homes.

When the New York State Department of Health published its study in 1978, it found patterns of reproductive problems in women, toxic contamination in the air and water, PCBs, birth defects in children, all in proximity to the canal. With enough community pressure, the state evacuated and relocated the nearby 239 families. It built a fence around the region and marked the outside territory as hospitable. The community had done its own research, lived and empirical, and knew otherwise. Volunteer scientists helped the community assemble and present data and health survey results; the state government rejected it as “useless housewife data” (CHEJ). Discarding the information meant discarding the acknowledgement of common miscarriages, birth defects, urinary tract disorders, epilepsy. The disease clusters made sense, so much so that the public outside of Love Canal began to acknowledge the patterns too. Two years later, President Carter had to react, and the entire community was evacuated and relocated.

Love Canal became one of those images of environmental activism. Last year marked its thirtieth anniversary, the celebrated subject of many a magazine and newspaper. Many saw the disaster at Love Canal as the beginning of grassroots activism, America’s exposure to and fight against toxic contamination. This year marks its thirty-first anniversary; with another year past, what has the nation learned? In another nine years from now, newspapers will celebrate “40 years after Love Canal”-another decade, another lesson. But really, what was Love Canal? What did we gain?

The technical term today is community-based participatory research, heralded as the solution to environmental and health dilemmas. Involve the community in the process, they say, and the result is empowerment and democratic solutions. Teach a man to fish and he will eat forever. I find it hard to resist too. But Love Canal isn’t some artifact in the past, despite what authorities say. People continue to ask why their children are suspiciously getting cancer. Low-income neighborhoods are still predominantly located near industrial sites. Native communities in the American West still fight for basic control over water and resources.

Just because we mark an anniversary doesn’t mean we’ve actually learned a lesson.

At Love Canal, the community knew there was something wrong in their neighborhood. They didn’t have the official statistics, just the lived experience and concern for their families. Only once the state was pushed enough did they send in for a certified study. Today, thirty-one years later, the work and concerns of these communities continues to be rejected at the high levels of research and policy. Just “useless housewife data”, they reply.

i dont understand why the outlets in the library on the second floor dont work. my computer battery is dying, and i could be working on my writing the world piece, but instead im procrastinating.

im very ready for spring break. i need to get away from everything and just be alone for a week. i have lots of work to do, lots of pleasure reading, and a few friends will be around. which is good, because i could use the social support but also know i could make good use of just time to be by myself without copious amounts of work to do. ive come to realize i havent had much time for myself lately, my homework takes up most of it. ive also found i dont really use this thing for my opinions anymore, i usually just rant, which says something. i look back to my entries from brazil or winter break to now and its a 180.

i feel lots of anger at small things and look forward to getting the time off to work on it. i got an A on my anthropology short paper which is a slight upper. meh, this is all silly.

what's there to write about in this thing anymore?

wouldnt life be nice if it was like one of those tv shows? where the character just releases all of their anger, sadness, emotion, and it becomes some form of strength they can muster to overcome their odds?

but no, this is life. and instead they are just here, building up daily, with no way out. and i wish i knew what to say, what to think, what to know. and i feel ripped in half constantly, and i wish it would stop. and then when it does, i wish it kept tearing away.

maybe itl get better. but i doubt it. because all i find myself with is me, being frustrated at an inability to come to a decision and stable state of mind. maybe all i do want is to just read, and write here and there, do a little bit of good in the meantime. maybe id just like something meaningful, and its not here, no. i look at my bookshelf. maybe i just want go on and get an MPH and do something. maybe i just want to lie in my hammock and read novels. i dont know, how do you know what would really make you happy? i know its the little things at the end. comfort. but also change and constant excitement.

all i know is i need to get through this one week, get my shit together, get my shit together, start exercising daily, and read.

Life

the annals of the laboratory state
"Leviathan" by thomas hobbes
microscopes and protozoa
love canal and lois gibbs
remembrance and activism
darwin's finches
rebelais
cartography
sweeps

i am dan.

i am to write about what drives me. not the fish in my room, not peeling clementines, not rolling beer cans down a roof. gifts water activism epidemiology community democracy autonomy. i long to be lost in something. being lost means you struggle to find something, anything, and you learn to go with your lead. im tired of confusing myself and being overwhelmed by life. im not looking for an answer, or direction, or purpose. not at all, just the sense of knowing that this kind of chaos is what id like. theres nothing at all wrong with disorder and mayhem, one just needs the right kind.

i wonder what the toxins are that i unknowingly have in my body. science tells us that our body is actually composed of billions of bacteria swarming around. our body is a symbiotic organism. bodies, are symbiotic organisms. bodies are composed of interweaving parts, different species, working together in one way or another. that way may be mutualism or competition, but it is a relationship, and thats what counts. so what if we take that idea and spread it further, beyond our body to the social body? what would we find? would we find pockets of collaboration? would we find fruitful exchange? would be find, in little corners and fragments, people who at the depths of their hearts are just trying to be good people to one another? would it even be that difficult of a search? or maybe, our assumption that the world is one competitive mess (no, Hobbes)tells us more than we might like about who we are as a culture. perhaps theres still some truth to marcel mauss. truth has a history too.

what did yahweh think when he killed leviathan and brought order? smugness, or just the work of the day?

this week. arg. confusing. every day. im sitting reading through Hooke's Micrographia. i emailed CHEJ back about the internship and they haven't gotten back to me, and that makes me nervous. i have two lab reports due wednesday for my core biology class. i have a GIS mid term next week. anthro...is anthro.

all in all, school is school. im bored. somewhat lonely. the space is nice. the winter cold isnt. i keep telling myself to go to the gym and i make up excuses in my head. snap out of it. my fish is great, i need to clean its tank. i was actually happy with my writing piece this week, to be honest. a first. im excited for jujitsu and boxing this weekend. maybe even squash. hell, whatever gets my mind away. seriously, bard, what is it. too much to handle at times. i cant focus on my work, im having just the hardest time being motivated. its different than the past. i want to go do something. meaningful. i joined the environmental collective. ill do boxing and jujitsu. im on the geography search committee. im somewhat involved. i might start volunteering at the root cellar, who knows. like i said, the writing is alright. nice at times. this week has felt so heavy, so unsure, so pale in comparison. ive been listening to the oddest mix of music: demos of strawberry fields by the beatles, an acoustic version of rape me by nirvana, shine by alexi murdoch, the pixies.

im ready for spring break, but in reality i know im just ready to be doing my own thing and getting on with life. my classes are fine. but theyre not really what i want to do. im working hard to start putting together a tutorial next semester. i know that a prof is teaching a class called plague on history of public health epidemic interventions. biostatistics. cultural theory. maybe environmental chemistry, or subcellular biology. who knows. i just want to start working. im working on my senior project idea, since the paper i write for anthro this sem...

this is a rant. an unnecessary rant. i need to get out more. edit: i need to sleep more. less caffine. not going to happen

liberation.

im looking for it, and now i know its here, somewhere. at first i thought maybe it was just left behind in the dust of brazil, in the dust of Paras dirt roads. over break it was somewhere inside me, or at least thats what i felt, and something began to sap it away. and it wasnt until this weekend, seeing people again from that time, seeing the same issues i cared so much about, and seeing a horde of people who care just as much, that i know i need to look harder here. or go to the place where it is. ive been fairly passive. reaching slightly out of reach, but not far enough. who was it, vonnegut? that we write so that we dont feel alone. i feel alone. and im writing to reach it all. this weekend i wandered on subways around DC, did cartwheels on the dirt, listened to testimonies from impacted community members. i cant think of anything i want more than this summer's opportunity. right now it seems an endeavor of a to b. it wasnt much, but it was invigorating. refreshing. rejuvinating. refinding it all. what was it exactly? the people, the company, my handy friend nostalgia. theres so much nostalgia.

there shouldnt be. it shouldnt get in the way, but it is omnnipresent. classes? in the end thats all they are. i was more excited in 24 hours than i have been all month. for multiple reasons. but whatever they are, thanks. i wish it wasnt a waiting game, on so many levels. who knows, maybe things will all work out.

i made a playlist last night. i need to feed my soul. i need to be myself, ive been finding that becoming harder and harder here. i find myself about people i dont quite care for, shrinking away, rather not dealing with it all. but that isnt the answer. do people understand me here? no, simply. maybe a small handful. this weekend i start boxing and get back to jujitsu. going to the gym on a regular basis is imperative. reading for pleasure is imperative. and back to the point of this all, getting more involved. she was right, i cant just sit and expect things like motivation and passion to fall in my lap, not here. i felt something again this weekend, a few things.

i need more liberation

Dan Becker
March 2nd 2009

Dreadlocks follow corduroy following beanies. The streets fill around Chinatown as the morning session ends, as the crowds of thousands spill out of the convention center. Outside, it’s brisker than the night before. Spring teases us, licking its lips. People cluster at the nearest restaurants, green identification tags slung around their necks. Like swarms of locusts, they move from place to place, finding whatever they can take, taking whatever they can find. We veer off the main path, my friends and I. My friend Dana goes to American University; she knows her way around. Together we find chili, falafel, and cappuccinos.

The night before I did cartwheels in front of the Washington Monument. Our jackets, sweaters, cell phones, wallets, and keys laid in a pile on the patchy grass of the National Mall. The air was refreshingly warm, the wind mellow. The area was empty, spare a few other wanderers. The carousel near the Smithsonians had been locked. The atmosphere was calm, the vibe nice.

The energy is different, overwhelming, inside the conference center as the crowds return for the afternoon panels. Volunteers carry clipboards with petitions to sign, buttons to pass out. Old acquaintances bump into each other, awkwardly hugging. A drum circle begins in the corner. Vendors sell posters, shirts, “start a revolution” bumper stickers. One can sit against the pillars and breath it all in as the ten thousand people hustle by.

Upstairs and in the adjacent building, signs at the hundreds of doors to conference rooms title workshops and lectures. Some of the panelists discuss energy policy, biofuel, the history and use of direct action, indigenous peoples and climate change, and creative activism, to name few. The festering of ideas is active and alive. You see it, feel it, and hear it as students pass between rooms, talk over paninis and bowls of soup, and overhear each other as they brush shoulders in the halls.

The convention center brims with life-it is a Petri dish, a colony of bacteria. With proper nourishment the few multiply and expand until they reach carrying capacity. Scientists say a bacteria population can double in less than ten minutes. Politicians and activists speak, the Roots play a concert, and the thousands explode into the main lobby. The escalators and stairs pack with individuals-hippies, hipsters, activists. They all release chants, yells, hollers. The body of the building pulses. The energy is bursting through in its excess.

Finally it breaks. People flow into the streets. A man knocks into a trashcan out the corner of my eye; we disperse. Lines of people slow the traffic in the streets. The thousands part their ways, some to the capital building, some to the Mall, and others to the metro. The subway slows the chaos, dilutes it. But in a way, the disorder is refreshing, the energy and passion invigorating. The metro leaves you with your thoughts, to circulate once more with those nearby.