The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

by Rebecca Solnit

  THE WORDS OF THE THIRD ENCOUNTER

  The encuentro was held in a big shed-like auditorium with a corrugated tin roof and crossbeams so long they could only have been hewn from local trees—they would never have made it around the bends in the local roads. The wooden walls were hung with banners and painted with murals. (One, of an armed Zapatista woman, said, “cellulite sí, anorexia, no.”) An unfinished mural showed a monumental ear of corn whose top half merged into the Zapatista ski mask, the eyes peering out of the kernels. Among the embroideries local artisans offered were depictions of cornstalks with Zapatista faces where the ears would be. All of this—snails and corn-become-Zapatistas alike—portrayed the rebels as natural, pervasive, and fruitful.

  Three or four times a day, a man on a high, roofed-over stage outside the hall would play a jaunty snippet of a tune on an organ and perhaps 250 of the colorfully dressed Zapatista women in balaclavas or bandannas would walk single file into the auditorium and seat themselves onstage on rows of backless benches. The women who had come from around the world to listen would gather on the remaining benches, and men would cluster around the back of the hall. Then, one caracol at a time, they would deliver short statements and take written questions. Over the course of four days, all five caracoles delivered reflections on practical and ideological aspects of their situation. Pithy and direct, they dealt with difficult (sometimes obnoxious) questions with deftness. They spoke of the challenge of living a revolution that meant autonomy from the Mexican government but also of learning how to govern themselves and determine for themselves what liberty and justice mean.

  The Zapatista rebellion has been feminist from its inception: many of the comandantes are women—this encuentro was dedicated to the memory of deceased Comandante Ramona, whose image was everywhere—and the liberation of the women of the Zapatista regions has been a core part of the struggle. The testimonies addressed what this meant—liberation from forced marriages, illiteracy, domestic violence, and other forms of subjugation. The women read aloud, some of them nervous, their voices strained—and this reading and writing was itself testimony to the spread both of literacy and of Spanish as part of the revolution. The first language of many Zapatistas is an indigenous one, and so they spoke their Spanish with formal, declarative clarity. They often began with a formal address to the audience that spiraled outward: “Hermanos y hermanas, compañeras y compañeros de la selva, pueblos del Mexico, pueblos del mundo, sociedad civil . . .” (Brothers and sisters, companions of the rainforest, people of Mexico, people of the world, civil society . . .) And then they would speak of what revolution had meant for them.

  “We had no rights,” one of them said about the era before the rebellion. Another added, “The saddest part is that we couldn’t understand our own difficulties, why we were being abused. No one had told us about our rights.”

  “The struggle is not just for ourselves, it’s for everyone,” said a third. Another spoke to us directly: “We invite you to organize as women of the world in order to get rid of neoliberalism, which has hurt all of us.”

  They spoke of how their lives had improved since 1994. On New Year’s Eve, one of the masked women declared:

  Who we think is responsible [for the oppressions] is the capitalist system, but now we no longer fear. They humiliated us for too long, but as Zapatistas no one will mistreat us. Even if our husbands still mistreat us, we know we are human beings. Now, women aren’t as mistreated by husbands and fathers. Now, some husbands support and help us and don’t make all the decisions—not in all households, but poco a poco. We invite all women to defend our rights and combat machismo.

  They spoke of the practical work of remaking the world and setting the future free, of implementing new possibilities for education, health care, and community organization, of the everyday workings of a new society. Some of them carried their babies—and their lives—onstage and, in one poignant moment, a little girl dashed across that stage to kiss and hug her masked mother. Sometimes the young daughters wore masks too.

  A Zapatista named Maribel spoke of how the rebellion started, of the secrecy in which they met and organized before the uprising:

  We learned to advance while still hiding until January 1. This is when the seed grew, when we brought ourselves into the light. On January 1, 1994, we brought our dreams and hopes throughout Mexico and the world—and we will continue to care for this seed. This seed of ours we are giving for our children. We hope you all will struggle even though it is in a different form. The struggle [is] for everybody.

  The Zapatistas have not won an easy or secure future, but what they have achieved is dignity, a word that cropped up constantly during the encuentro, as in all their earlier statements. And they have created hope. Hope (esperanza) was another inescapable word in Zapatista territory. There was la tienda de esperanza, the unpainted wooden store of hope, that sold tangerines and avocados. A few mornings, I had café con leche and sweet rice cooked with milk and cinnamon at a comedor whose hand-lettered sign read: “Canteen of autonomous communities in rebellion . . . dreams of hope.” The Zapatista minibus was crowned with the slogan “The collective [which also means bus in Spanish] makes hope.”

  After midnight, at the very dawn of the New Year, when men were invited to speak again, one mounted the platform from which the New Year’s dance music was blasting to say that he and the other men had listened and learned a lot.

  This revolution is neither perfect nor complete—mutterings about its various shortcomings weren’t hard to hear from elsewhere in Mexico or the internationals at the encuentro (who asked many testing questions about these campesinas’ positions on, say, transgendered identity and abortion)—but it is an astonishing and fruitful beginning.

  THE SPEED OF SNAILS AND DREAMS

  Many of their hopes have been realized. The testimony of the women dealt with this in specific terms: gains in land, rights, dignity, liberty, autonomy, literacy, and a good local government that obeys the people rather than a bad one that tramples them. Under siege, they have created community with each other and reached out to the world.

  Emerging from the jungles and from impoverishment, they were one of the first clear voices against corporate globalization—the neoliberal agenda that looked, in the 1990s, as though it might succeed in taking over the world. That was, of course, before the surprise shutdown of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 and other innovative, successful global acts of resistance against that agenda and its impact. The Zapatistas articulated just how audacious indigenous rebellion against invisibility, powerlessness, and marginalization could be—and this was before other indigenous movements from Bolivia to northern Canada took a share of real power in the Americas. Their image of “a world in which many worlds are possible” came to describe the emergence of broad coalitions spanning great differences, of alliances between hunter-gatherers, small-scale farmers, factory workers, human rights activists, and environmentalists in France, India, Korea, Mexico, Bolivia, Kenya, and elsewhere.

  Their vision represented the antithesis of the homogenous world envisioned both by the proponents of “globalism” and by the modernist revolutions of the twentieth century. They have gone a long way toward reinventing the language of politics. They have been a beacon for everyone who wants to make a world that is more inventive, more democratic, more decentralized, more grassroots, more playful. Now, they face a threat from the Mexican government that could savage the caracoles of resistance, crush the rights and dignity that the women of the encuentro embodied even as they spoke of them—and shed much blood.

  During the 1980s, when our government was sponsoring the dirty wars in Central America, two U.S. groups in particular countered those politics of repression, torture, and death. One was the Pledge of Resistance, which gathered the signatures of hundreds of thousands who promised to respond with civil disobedience if the United States invaded Sandinista-run Nicaragua or otherwise deepened its involvement with the dictatorships and death s
quads of Central America. Another was Witness for Peace, which placed gringos as observers and unarmed protectors in communities throughout Central America.

  While killing or disappearing campesinos could be carried out with ease in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, doing the same to U.S. citizens, or in front of them, was a riskier proposition. The Yankee witnesses used the privilege of their color and citizenship as a shield for others and then testified to what they saw. We have come to a moment when we need to strengthen the solidarity so many activists around the world have felt for the Zapatistas, strengthen it into something that can protect the sources of “the fire and the word”—the fire that has warmed so many who have a rebel heart, the word that has taught us to imagine the world anew.

  The United States and Mexico both have eagles as their emblems, predators which attack from above. The Zapatistas have chosen a snail in a spiral shell, a small creature, easy to overlook. It speaks of modesty, humility, closeness to the earth, and of the recognition that a revolution may start like lightning but is realized slowly, patiently, steadily. The old idea of revolution was that we would trade one government for another and somehow this new government would set us free and change everything. More and more of us now understand that change is a discipline lived every day, as those women standing before us testified; that revolution only secures the territory in which life can change. Launching a revolution is not easy, as the decade of planning before the 1994 Zapatista uprising demonstrated, and living one is hard too, a faith and discipline that must not falter until the threats and old habits are gone—if then. True revolution is slow.

  There’s a wonderful passage in Robert Richardson’s biography of Thoreau in which he speaks of the Europe-wide revolution of 1848 and says of the New England milieu and its proliferating cooperative communities at that time, “Most of the founders were more interested in building models, which would be emulated because they succeeded, than in the destruction of the existing order. Still American utopian socialism had much in common with the spirit of 1848.”

  This says very directly that you can reach out and change the state and its institutions, which we recognize as revolution, or you can make your own institutions beyond the reach of the state, which is also revolutionary. This creating—rather than simply rebelling—has been much of the nature of revolution in our time, as people reinvent family, gender, food systems, work, housing, education, economics, medicine and doctor-patient relations, the imagination of the environment, and the language to talk about it, not to speak of more and more of everyday life. The fantasy of a revolution is that it will make everything different, and regime revolutions generally make a difference, sometimes a significantly positive one, but the making of radical differences in everyday life is a more protracted, incremental process. It’s where leaders are irrelevant and every life matters.

  Give the Zapatistas time—the slow, unfolding time of the spiral and the journey of the snail—to keep making their world, the one that illuminates what else our lives and societies could be. Our revolution must be as different as our temperate-zone, post-industrial society is to their subtropical agrarianism, but it is also guided by the slow forces of dignity, imagination, and hope, as well as the playfulness they display in their imagery and language. The testimony in the auditorium ended late on December 31. At midnight, amid dancing, the revolution turned fourteen. May it long continue to spiral inward and outward.

  2008

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I hope that this book is, for the readers, an adventure. For its writer, it’s a travel journal, a list of experiments, a bouquet of theories and practices, and a few proposals about how things could be. Rereading its almost thirty pieces filled me with gratitude for the friends and companions on encounters around the world and for the editors I worked with on the resultant essays. People from four publications stand out: Tom Engelhardt, Nick Turse, and Andy Kroll of Tomdispatch.com, the little website with the huge global reach, where nearly a quarter of the pieces here originated; Luke Mitchell at Harper’s; Jennifer Sahn at Orion; and the editorial department at the London Review of Books. A significant percentage of the book first appeared in these four venues, though Richard Kim at The Nation, Yuka Igarashi at Granta, Jon Christensen at Boom, and many others at the Guardian, the Financial Times, and elsewhere facilitated the birth of other pieces. Lisa Gabrielle Mark, then of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, invited me to explore 1970s California, a fascinating, unsettling experience. Ann McDonald at Artspace Books commissioned what became “Inside Out,” one of the essays that was particularly a pleasure to write.

  Tyrone Martinnson invited me to Svalbard in 2011, one of the most enchanting passages of my life. In 2006, my magnificent friend Sam Green and I hatched a plan to go to Detroit that resulted in “Detroit Arcadia.” Trevor Paglen’s amazing work and warm friendship were the occasion for “The Visibility Wars,” and Bob Fulkerson and Grace Bukowski were the friends who’d taken me deep into Nevada in every sense beforehand. Many friends in San Francisco, Oakland, and New York, notably Sunaura Taylor, David Solnit, Marko Muir, Rupa Marya, Mona Caron, Adriana Camarena, and David Graeber joined me in the Occupy movement in 2011, which lit up several essays here. Astra Taylor was a great friend and traveling companion at both Occupy Wall Street and the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Marina Sitrin was a wonderful friend and a companion at the Zapatista encuentro, and her own brilliant work on civil society, popular power, and social change are a major influence on my political ideas. In New Orleans Rebecca Snedeker and A. C. Thompson were indispensable friends and collaborators. The people who came together as civil society and rewrote history again and again are at the heart of many of these pieces, and in my heart as well, and to them I owe another kind of thanks. Thanks as well to Barbara Ras for taking on this book, and to Sarah Nawrocki and BookMatters for seeing it through.

  The essays in this book were previously published in the following publications and are reprinted here with thanks (and, in some cases, minor revisions).

  “The Visibility Wars” was in Aperture’s book of Trevor Paglan’s visual investigations of surveillance and military infrastructure, Invisible.

  “Inside Out” was the text for an Artspace book also featuring the paintings of Stefan Kurten.

  “Concrete in Paradise” accompanied Alex Fradkin’s photographs of the Marin Headlands in Boom magazine.

  “Journey to the Center” was the text for a book documenting Elín Hansdóttir’s magnificent labyrinth Path, published by Crymogea.

  Harper’s originally published “Detroit Arcadia” and “Notes from Nowhere: Iceland’s Polite Dystopia.”

  The London Review of Books is where “Dry Lands,” “Oil and Water: The BP Spill in the Gulf,” “The Great Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami,” and the trilogy on Silicon Valley, “The Google Bus: Silicon Valley Invades,” “We’re Breaking Up: Noncommunications in the Silicon Age,” and “Pale Bus, Pale Rider” originally appeared.

  “Rattlesnake in Mailbox” was originally published in the 2011 exhibition catalogue Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981 by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and DelMonico Books • Prestel. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

  The two New Orleans pieces, “Reconstructing the Story of the Storm” and “We Won’t Bow Down,” were first published in The Nation.

  Orion was the original venue for “Cyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition,” “One Nation under Elvis,” “Winged Mercury and the Golden Calf,” the essay on Thoreau’s laundry, and “Revolutionary Plots: On Urban Gardening.”

  Tomdispatch.com was the place of origin for these seven essays: “The Butterfly and the Boiling Point,” “In Haiti, Words Can Kill,” “Icebergs and Shadows,” “The Volcano Erupts: Iceland in Upheaval,” “Letter to a Dead Man on the Occupation of Hope,” “Apologies to Mexico,” and “Revolution of the Snails: Encounters with the Zapatistas.”

  INDEX

  Abalone Alliance (ant
inuclear group), 45

  Abbey, Edward (writer), 66

  Aeneid, 11

  Afghanistan, 52, 300

  African Americans (see also slavery), 29, 37, 55, 68–83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 113, 120, 123, 225, 228, 231–239, 240–247, 282

  Akihito (Emperor of Japan), 188

  Alemany Farm, San Francisco, 286–288, 292, 293, 297

  Ali, Ben (dictator), 24, 214

  American Birding Association, 110

  American Islamic Council, 25

  anarchy, anarchism, anarchists, 28, 45, 167, 171, 218, 232, 238, 243, 286–287

  Andrée expedition, 7

  animals

  beavers, 68

  birds, 65, 110, 148, 172, 278

  arctic terns, 6

  geese, 163, 164, 165

  kittiwakes, 17

  ibises, 121

  pelicans, 50, 110, 116, 120

  pheasants, 82

  phoenix, 61

  royal terns, 122

  seabirds, 8, 20, 50

  bulls, 211

  butterflies, 26, 27, 31, 138, 140 (see also “The Butterfly and the Boiling Point,” essay)

  cats, 143, 148, 152, 157

  cows, 89, 166

  crabs, 121, 122

  dolphins, 17, 116

  fish, fisheries, fishing industries, 61, 96, 101, 103–104, 106, 115, 117, 121, 122–124, 144, 161, 162, 163, 169–171, 176, 179, 303

  foxes, 5, 13, 21, 68, 198, 202

  jellyfish, 19, 21

  killer whale, 20

  minotaur, 211–212

  oysters, oystermen, 59, 115, 123

  polar bears, 5–9, 12–14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21

  porpoises, 184

  reindeer, 5, 6, 7, 12, 16, 21, 163

  scallops, 59

  sea turtles, 115, 116, 120

  seals, 5, 6, 13, 20, 21

  shellfish, 20