Neta Golan, one of the founders of the International Solidarity Movement, which supports nonviolent resistance in Palestine, is a dear friend whom I no longer get to see, since the Israeli government has barred me from entry. Fortunately, technology is not constrained by borders, and a few nights ago, while I’m noodling around Facebook I notice that she’s online. Instantly, we’re chatting and then Skyping.
“What do we talk about first,” Neta asks. “Gaza? The movement? You? Me?”
I want to tell her about the idyllic last few days I spent up at the ranch in the Cazadero hills. The sun has come out after the rains, at least for a brief moment. The hydro is running happily. The sky is marbled with clouds, with rays of sunlight peeking through and illuminating golden meadows on the hills far away.
And I’ve been planting lavender. Over a hundred starts of Provence and Super—varieties that are especially high in oil. Last summer, my neighbor Angie and I distilled some hydrosol from our Spanish lavender, which self-seeds here and grows in abundance. Eventually, we hope to make essential oils.
There are few things more pleasant to plant than lavender. The day was perfect—cool and moist, and your hands smell so good afterwards. Lavender is not a needy plant—it likes dry and rocky soils just fine, needs minimal water. Deer don’t graze it. The only plant tougher out here is rosemary, which I have hedges of—big, upright Tuscan rosemary with its deep blue flowers just now beginning to bloom, sprawling prostrate rosemary with its paler blooms. Most of them I started from cuttings that I took from Jim and Dave years ago, and now they are huge, fragrant bushes, topping the berms on my swales and spreading exuberantly.
Meanwhile, back in Gaza, the Israeli blockade has now stopped fuel from coming in to keep their power plants running, and one of the two has shut down. Electricity has been cut to about half the population, and since cooking and heating gas is also in short supply, along with food, people are hungry, cold, and in the dark. Yeah—Gaza is cold in the winter, damp and chill and most people live in concrete-block tenements that suck heat from your bones.
The problem with being a conscious person in this world of huge inequities is that you can never quite shut Gaza, or Haiti, or Darfur out of your awareness. They cast a shadow over the brightest day. How do I let myself truly experience the joy of planting lavender on my own land when I know how many homes have been bulldozed, how many lands destroyed?
And yet if I don’t let myself have these moments of joy, I’ll go mad. I’ll become an obsessed, insufferable burned-out person, utterly ineffective in the struggle. Well, I suppose there are those who would say I’m already obsessed and insufferable—but at least I’m not burned out!
We start to talk about strategies. The nonviolent resistance in the West Bank is strong and alive—but how do we make it more visible to the rest of the world?
In Bil’in, where villagers and supporters mount a weekly demonstration against the wall, the protestors have decided to dress up as the Na’vi—the blue people from the movie Avatar. You can see a video of the protest, and the barrage of tear gas that the Israeli soldiers fire back at the villagers, at:
http://palsolidarity.org/2010/02/11363
I’m amazed at the resilience and creativity of the protesters. After five years of continuous protests against the wall, the villagers of Bil’in, Nil’in and all the sister villages of the West Bank would certainly have reason to give up in despair. But they remain both steadfast and imaginative. This is a quality I’ve noticed among activists everywhere: no matter how grim the situation, as long as there is something you can do, you stay optimistic and cheerful, at least sometimes.
And after five years, Bil’in has something to celebrate: the Israeli military is finally moving the wall, which confiscated sixty per cent of the villages farmland. Ordered years ago to move the route of the wall by the Israeli courts, the government has been slow in complying. But at last the village will get back thirty per cent of its land. In Palestine, that’s a victory.
James Cameron doesn’t know it, but he and I have a relationship. Back when his last blockbuster movie, The Titanic, came out, I was in Israel (this was before I became an activist for Palestinian justice, so I could still go there) and I dragged a couple of reluctant friends out to see it with me. I wanted to see it on the big screen, and I was afraid it would be gone by the time I got back home from a long trip. It colored the visit for me. I was doing workshops on the Goddess and earth based spirituality, and I began to feel like one of those musicians on the deck, fiddling away while the lifeboats are lowered and the ship sinks. When the trip was done, I said, “I can’t do this any more. If I come back, I need to face the real issues going on here. I need to see what’s happening in Palestine.” And I didn’t return until I came back in 2002 to work with the International Solidarity Movement—and that’s another story. (Which you can find archived at http://www.starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/israel_palestine/israel_palestine.html)
Avatar has been criticized both by the right and the left—the right don’t like its anti-corporate politics and the left find it a too-simplistic story about white guilt.
http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar
While white guilt is certainly a step beyond white callousness and greed, it still keeps the focus, the locus of Self, on the white character, while the indigenous folks remain the Other.
The fact that you can make that criticism of Avatar is a kind of back-handed tribute to how vividly Cameron created his imaginary indigenous culture. And yeah, the white guy—albeit a disabled, wounded hero white guy—does end up riding the biggest bird in the sky and leading the charge—although in the end, it’s the blue-skinned woman who kills the enemy and saves the day. But I think Avatar is a good thing. Not just because it’s one of the most powerful, beautiful, evocations of the Goddess ever shown on the silver screen, but, like, politically a Good Thing. Here’s why:
Fast forward a week or so (oh how hard it is to keep up with this blog!) I’m sitting in an old church school in Chimayo, New Mexico, at a training/planning session for a group called Think Outside the Bomb, http://www.thinkoutsidethebomb.org/, a youth-based, antinuclear network of amazingly smart young people who are planning an encampment and action at Los Alamos, where Obama is supporting the construction of a new plutonium pit and a major expansion of nuclear research capabilities. We listen to Gilbert Sanchez, former governor of the Tewa tribe and director of the Tribal Environmental Watch Alliance describe how the bomb tests at Los Alamos have contaminated the sacred sites of his people.
Kathy Sanchez, head of Tewa Women United, gives a presentation on working cross-culturally. As she describes the cancers, the poisoned wells, the levels of historical trauma her people carry, suddenly she turns and smiles.
“Have you seen Avatar?” she says.
George Lakoff, in his book The Political Mind, makes the case that metaphors create actual neural links in our minds, and those links frame the way we see events. We build a Los Alamos, bomb Hiroshima, contaminate groundwater with tritium, bulldoze a Palestinian neighborhood because we’ve framed reality in such a way that we think we’re doing something necessary and good. We literally don’t have the links to grasp the level of damage and unspeakable pain.
What makes those links? Sensory images, joined to strong emotion. Every Witch knows that’s how we cast a spell. Every activist knows that’s one reason why we create a dramatic crisis of action to shine a spotlight on a wrong. “A week ago, no one knew what the WTO was,” Tom Hayden said in the midst of the blockade in Seattle in 1999 that shut the meeting down. “Now, they still don’t know what it is, but they know it means tear gas.”
A movie can do that, too. Movies, it is said, are collective dreams.
“The first thing people usually ask me,” Gilbert says to us, “is ‘Why don’t you just move?’”
I don’t think people who’ve seen Avatar will be quite so quick to ask that question. Avatar is a kind of remedial white mind repair, making the necessary links—home, tree, connection, mother, ancestors, souls, color, beauty, soaring flight—poised against the bulldozers, the hard-edged military man/machine, the gray, dead destruction. Which side are you on?
Can a movie change the world? Those of us who make movies, or art, or write believe that we can—on odd-numbered days. On even-numbered days we acknowledge that we’re probably delusional. Sometimes I don’t write, because it’s an activity that seems so self-reflective, self-indulgent, narcissistic. I can only write from myself, my own dreams. On those odd days when I do, I write in the simple faith that if I am honest about myself, my own dreams may twine themselves around yours and link us in a truth that goes deeper than skin.
But this post isn’t really about art, or writing, or Avatar. It’s about what Avatar is about: what’s happening not on Pandora but here on earth, every day. How do we live in a world of such horrific injustice? What do we do with white guilt, or lavender guilt, or blue/brown/black guilt for that matter, the survivor guilt of merely being alive when so many are dead?
We can say, “I didn’t sign on for this,” and join the struggle for justice.
Avatar promises that when we join that struggle, we become linked to something much greater than ourselves, a web of love and common purpose that can help us withstand hardship and find great courage.
As Abdallah Abu Rahmeh, Palestinian human rights activist jailed for his beliefs by the Israelis, writes from prison:
“It is the support that I receive from my family and friends that helps me go on. I am grateful to the Palestinian leaders who have contacted my family, the diplomats from the European Union and to the Israeli activists who have expressed their support by attending my hearings. The relationship we have built together with the activists has gone beyond the definition of colleague or friend, we are brothers and sisters in this struggle. You are an unrelenting source of inspiration and solidarity. You have stood with us during demonstrations and court hearings, and during our happiest and most painful occasions. Being in prison has shown me how many true friends I have, I am so grateful to all of you.”
http://www.bilin-village.org/english/articles/testimonies/Letter-from-Abdallah-Abu-Rahmah-Missing-the-five-year-anniversary-of-our-struggle-in-Bilin-will-be-like-missing-the-birthday-of-one-of-my-children
I’m told that there are online support groups for those who can’t bear the thought that Avatar’s mythical planet Pandora doesn’t exist. But Pandora is real. Pandora is here on earth, in Bil’in, in Los Alamos, in a thousand places and struggles. Link in, and open your eyes. You’ll see a new world—or better yet, help to make one.
