Comunicados EZLN
Ellos y Nosotros. VI.- Miradas. Parte 2: Mirar y escuchar desde/hacia abajo.
THEM AND US.
VI.- The Gaze 2.2.- To look and to listen from/toward below.
Can we still choose toward where and from where we look?
We could, for example, look at those who work in supermarket chains, scolding them for their complicity in the electoral fraud[i] and ridiculing them for the orange uniforms they must wear, or, we could look at the employee who, after cashing out…
The cashier takes off her orange apron, grumbling her rage at being accused of complicity in the fraud that brought ignorance and frivolity into Power. A woman, young or old, single or divorced, a widower, a mother, a single mother, an expecting mother, a woman without children, or whatever the case may be. She starts work at 7 in the morning and is let out at 4 in the afternoon, if there are no overtime hours, that is. That’s without counting the time it takes for her to get from home to work and back, and the time she spends afterward on school work or housework, that “women’s-labor-that-one-can-do-with-a-bit-of-flair.” She read this accusation of complicity in one of the magazines beside the cash register. They blame her, who supposedly they are going to save, it’s just a question of a vote and ta-da, happiness. “What, do they think the owners wear the orange apron?” she murmurs, irritated. She fixes herself up a bit from the purposeful disheveledness with which she arrives to work so that the manager doesn’t hit on her. She leaves. Her partner is waiting for her outside. They hug, kiss, touch each other with a gaze, walk together. They enter an internet café or cybercafé or whatever you call it. 10 pesos per hour, 5 for a half hour…
“Half hour,” they say, mentally calculating their budget-transit-time-metro-bus-walk.
“Cover me Roco, don’t be a jerk,” he says.
“Okay, but come mid-month you’d better come by and pay up or the owner will be all over me and it will be you covering me.”
“Fine, I’ll cover you, but it will be when you have a car, man, because I’m working at the car wash.”
“Well wash it then man,” Roco says.
The three of them laugh.
“Number 7,” Roco says.
“Go ahead, look for it,” she says.
He starts to put in a number.
“No,” she says, “look for when this all started.”
They search. They get to where there were just a few more than 131.[ii] They play the video.
“They’re bourgeois” he says.
“Calm yourself, revolutionary vanguard. You’re wrong in the head if you judge people on their appearance, look at how they call me white girl and bourgeois for having light skin, and don’t see that I live paycheck to paycheck. You have to look at what each person does and where they come from, dummy,” she says, giving him a smack upside the head.
They keep watching.
They watch, fall silent, listening.
“Well the fact that they went at him right to his face, to that Peña Nieto… they’re brave, that’s for sure, you can see they’ve got balls.”
“Or ovaries, idiot,” she gives him another smack.
“Keep that up princess, and I’m going to accuse you of interfamilial violence.”
“It would be gender violence, idiot,” and another smack.
They finish watching the video.
Him: “So that’s where things started, with a handful of people who weren’t scared.”
Her: “Or they were scared, but they controlled it.”
“Half hour!” Roco yells.
“Yeah, let’s go.”
She walks out smiling.
“Now what are you laughing at?” he asks.
“Nothing, I was just remembering,” she walks closer to him, “that thing you said about ‘interfamilial.’ Does that mean you want us to be, like they say, a family?”
He doesn’t even skip a beat.
“That’s right my princess, I mean we’re already headed there, that’s what we’re already doing, but without so many smacks on the head, make them kisses instead, lower and to the left.”
“Hey don’t mess with me man!” Another smack. “And enough of this “princess” stuff, aren’t we against the fucking monarchy?”
Expecting an even bigger smack, he says: “Okay then, my… plebian.”
She laughs, and he does too. After a few more steps, she says:
“So you think the Zapatistas will invite us?”
“Definitely, my buddy Vins said he’s buddies with the sockface[iii] because he let him win at Mortal Combat, at the arcades, so we’ll just say we’re Vins’ people and we’re in,” he explains enthusiastically.
“You think I’d be able to take my mother? She’s getting pretty old…”
“Of course, with any luck my future mother-in-law will get stuck in the mud,” he ducks the smack he expects but that doesn’t come.
She’s angry now:
“And what the hell are the Zapatistas going to give us if they’re so far away? What, they’re going to give me a better salary? Make people respect me? Make those fucking men stop looking at my ass in the street? Make the fucking boss stop using any pretext to touch me? Are they going to help me pay my rent? Buy my daughter or my son clothes? Are they going to bring the price down for sugar, beans, rice, oil? Are they going to make sure I have enough to eat? Are they going to confront the police that come every day to the barrio to harass and extort the vendors that sell pirated DVDs telling them that it’s so they don’t have to denounce them to Mr. or Mrs. Sony…?”
“It’s not called ‘piracy,’ it’s ‘alternative production’ my princ… plebian. Don’t get all bent out of shape with me, we’re on the same side.”
But she’s on a roll now and there’s no stopping her:
“And for you, are they going to give your job back at the factory, where you were already certified as whatever-the-hell-it-was? Are they going to make your studies, all your training courses, worth something so that in the end that jackass of a boss takes the business who the hell knows where, along with the union and the strike and everything you did, so that you end up washing cars?” Or what about your buddy El Chompis, they took his job away and disappeared the official employment records so he can’t even defend himself? And the government with its same story about how it’s going to improve service and be world class and all that nonsense, and what about that stuff about lowering rates, now they’re more expensive! And the electricity goes out all the time[iv] and fucking Calderón is going to go give classes on shamelessness to the gringos,[v] who are the real mothers of this mess. And my father, god bless his soul, who went to work on the other side [in the US], not as a tourist but in order to get some bread, some dough, some pay to maintain us when we were still real little, and when he was just crossing the border la migra [immigration agents] grabbed him like he was a terrorist rather than an honest worker and they never even gave us his body back and that fucking Obama whose heart appears to be the color of the dollar.
“Whoa, cool your jets, my plebian,” he says.
“It’s just that every time I even think about it I get angry, so much work and effort so that in the end those above end up with everything, the only thing left is for them to privatize laughter, although that’s not probable because there is so little of it, but maybe they’ll privatize tears, those are abundant, and they’ll get rich… richer. And then you come with this stuff about the Zapatistas this and the Zapatistas that and that below and to the left and that the eighth…”
“The Sixth, not the eighth,” he interrupts her.
“Whatever, if those guys are so far away and speak worse Spanish than you.”
“Hey now, don’t be mean.”
She wipes away her tears and mutters: “Damned rain, it’s ruined my Este Lauder and I had fixed myself up to please you.”
“Ahhh but you please me without anything… especially clothes.”
They laugh.
She says, very serious: “Well, then, tell me, are these Zapatistas going to save us?”
“No my plebian, they’re not going to save us. That, among other things, we’re going to have to do ourselves.”
“So what then?”
“Well, they’re going to teach us.”
“And what are they going to teach us?”
“That’s we’re not alone [solos].”[vi]
She is quiet a moment. Then suddenly:
“Nor alone [solas],[vii] dummy,” another smack.
The minibus is packed. They wait to see if the next one has room.
It is cold, rainy. They hug each other tighter, not to keep from getting wet, but rather to get wet together.
Far away someone waits, there is always someone waiting. And that someone waits, with an old pen and an old tattered notebook, keeping count of the gazes below that see themselves in a window.
(To be continued…)
From whatever corner, of whichever world.
SupMarcos.
Planet Earth.
January of 2013.
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“Los Nadies,” [the Nobody’s] based on the text by the same name by Eduardo Galeano. Performed by La Gran Orquesta Republicana, ska-fusión band, Mallorca, Spain. Band members include: Javier Vegas, Nacho Vegas: saxophone. Nestor Casas: trumpet. Didac Buscató: trombone. Juan Antonio Molina: electric guitar. Xema Bestard: bass. José Luis García: drums.
Liliana Daunes narrates a very other story called “Always and Never Against Sometimes.” Greetings to the Network of Solidarity with Chiapas that struggles and resists here just a little ways away, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Latin America, Planet Earth.
“Salario Mínimo” (Minimum Wage) Oscar Chávez and Los Morales.
[i] The PRI was accused of buying votes during the presidential campaigns in 2012 with gift cards to the popular chain store Soriana. Many on the institutional left blamed the working class people who used the gift cards for “complicity” with the PRI’s electoral fraud.
[ii] During a speech at the Universidad Iberoamericana during the presidential campaigns, then presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI) was confronted by students protesting events that occurred during his tenure as governor of Mexico State. Peña Nieto hid and eventually fled the University, but party affiliates later dismissed the protesters in the media as a handful of non-student opposition supporters that were sent to disturb the event. Iberoamericana students then made a youtube video in which 131 of them held up their university ID’s and testified to their participation in the protest, sparking the name for a wider student movement “Yosoy#132,” “Iam#132.”
[iii] Sockface is a reference to the ski-mask worn by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos.
[iv] This is a reference to Calderón shutting down the public electric company Luz y Fuerza del Centro and union-busting the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME). The official reason for the shut-down was inefficiency, but people complain that under the private company that took over the service area rates are higher and service worse. The implication is that El Chompis was an electrical worker with Luz y Fuerza.
[v] Ex-president of Mexico Felipe Calderón is slated for a teaching position at Harvard University in the United States.
[vi] The masculine form of “alone.”
[vii] The feminine form of “alone.”
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Traducción del Kilombo Intergaláctico.
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“Los Nadies”, basada en el texto homónimo de Eduardo Galeano. Interpreta La Gran Orquesta Republicana, banda de ska-fusión, Mallorca, Estado Español. Formada por: Javier Vegas, Nacho Vegas: saxo. Nestor Casas: trompeta. Didac Buscató: trombón. Juan Antonio Molina: guitarra eléctrica. Xema Bestard: bajo. José Luis García: batería.
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Liliana Daunes narra un cuento muy otro llamado “Siempre y Nunca contra A Veces”. Saludos a la Red de Solidaridad con Chiapas, que lucha y resiste aquí nomacito, en Buenos Aires, Argentina, Latinoamérica, Planeta Tierra.
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“Salario Mínimo” Oscar Chávez y Los Morales.
ELLOS Y NOSOTROS. VI. – Las Miradas 1. Mirar para imponer o mirar para escuchar
“For once I could say
Without anyone contradicting me
That he who desires something
Is not the same as he who covets it
Just like words said to be heard
Are not the same
As words said to be obeyed
Just as he who speaks to me in order to tell me something
Is not the same as
He who speaks in order to make me be quiet.”
Tomás Segovia.
“Fourth Search” in “Searches and Other Poems”
from the press that has the good taste to call itself “Nameless.”
Thanks and an embrace to María Luísa Capella, to Inés and Francisco
(how good that dignified blood beats in their hearts)
for the books and lyrics guide
To gaze is a form of asking, we say, we the Zapatistas.
Or to search…
When gazing into the calendar and into the geography, however far one may be from the other, one asks, one interrogates.
And it is in this gaze where the other (el otro, la otra lo otro) appears. And it is in this gaze where the other exists, where they draw their profile as strange, as foreign, as enigma, as victim, as judge and executioner, as enemy…or as compañer@.
The gaze is where fear dwells, but it is also where respect can be born.
If we don’t learn to see with the other’s eyes, what sense can our own gaze have? Our questions?
Who are you?
What is your story?
Where is your pain?
When are your hopes?
But it doesn’t only matter at whom or at what you gaze. Also, and above all, it matters from where.
And choosing where to look is also choosing from where one is looking.
Or is it the same to see from above the pain of those who have lost those whom they love and need to senseless, inexplicable, and definitive death, as it is to see all this from below?
When someone from above looks at those below and asks, “how many?” what they are really asking is “how much are they worth?”
And if they aren’t worth anything, what does it matter how many there are? To obscure this inconvenient number, we have the commercial media, the armies, the police, the judges, the prisons, the cemeteries.
And from our gaze, the answers are never simple.
To look at ourselves looking at what we look at gives us an identity that has to do with suffering and struggle, with our calendar and our geography.
Our strength, if we have one, is in this recognition: we are who we are, and there are others who are who they are, and others who we still don’t have the words to name, and are nevertheless who they are. When we say “we” we are not absorbing and, in doing so, subordinating identities, but rather emphasizing the bridges that exist between different sufferings and different rebellions. We are equal because we are different.
In the Sixth, the Zapatistas, reiterate our rejection of any attempt at hegemony, that is, to say, any vanguardism, whether it places us at the forefront or alongside or, as over the course of these long centuries, at the rearguard.
If with the Sixth we search for our kin in sorrows and struggles, regardless of the calendars and geographies that distance us, it is because we know well that that the Ruler cannot be defeated with only one way of thinking, one force, one leadership (however revolutionary, consequential, radical, clever, numerous, powerful, daring, etc. it may be).
We have learned from our dead that diversity and difference are not a weakness for those below, but rather a strength from which to birth, from the ashes of the old, the new world that we want, that we need, that we deserve.
We know well that we are not the only ones who imagine this world. But in our dream, this world is not one, but many different, diverse worlds. And in their diversity lies their strength.
It is the repeated attempts to impose unanimity that have caused the machine to go mad and move closer, by the minute, to the final moment of this civilization as we have known it.
In the current phase of neoliberal globalization, homogeneity is nothing other than mediocrity imposed as universal standard. And if it differs in any way from a Hitlerish madness, it is not in its objective but in the modernized means to achieve it.
-*-
And yes, we are not the only ones who look for the how, the when, the where, the what.
You all, for example, are not Them. Well, although you don’t seem to have any problem allying yourselves with Them in order to…deceive and defeat them from within? To be like Them but not as much as Them? To slow the speed of the machine, to file down the fangs of the beast, to humanize the savage?
Yes, we know. There are many arguments to sustain this line of thinking. In fact, you could even force a few examples.
But…
You tell us that we are equal, that we are trying to do the same thing, that we are in the same struggle, the same enemy… Hmm…no, actually you don’t say “enemy,” you say “adversary.” Agreed, that also depends on the current context.
You say that we must all unite because there is no other path forward: it is either elections or arms. And you, who sustain your project through this false argument to invalidate anything that does not submit to the repeated spectacle of the politics of above, summon us: die or surrender. And you even offer us an pretext, arguing that, since this is about taking Power, there are only these two paths.
Ah! but we are so disobedient: we don’t die, nor do we surrender. And, as was demonstrated on that day of the end of the world: neither electoral struggle nor armed struggle.
And what if it is not about taking Power? Or better: what if Power no longer resides in the Nation-State, that Zombie State populated by a parasitic political class that preys on the remains of the nations?
And if those voters that you are so obsessed with (and hence your fascination with the multitudes), do nothing other than vote for someone who others have already chosen, as has been demonstrated time and time again by They who amuse themselves with each new trick they invent?
Yes, of course, you hide behind your prejudices: those who don’t vote? “it is because they are apathetic, disinterested, uneducated, or because they’re playing to the right”…your ally if found in the many geographies, in more than a few calendars. Those who vote, but not for you? “it is because they are rightwing, ignorant, sell-outs, traitors, lowlifes, because they are zombis!”
Note from Marquitos Spoiler: Yes, we sympathize with the zombies, not only because of our physical resemblance, (even without makeup we would take every spot in the casting of “the Walking Dead”). Also, and above all, because we think, like George A. Romero, that, in a zombie apocalypse, the craziest brutality would be the work of the surviving civilization, not of the walking dead. And if some vestige of humanity survives, it will glow within the pariahs of always, the walking dead for whom the apocalypse begins at birth and never ends. As now occurs in any corner of any of the existing worlds. And there is no film, nor comic, nor television series that acknowledges this.
Your gaze is full of contempt when you look below (even if that is in the mirror), and full of envy when you look above.
You can’t even imagine that someone would have no other interest in looking “above” except to figure out how to get them off our back.
-*-
The gaze. Toward where and from where. That is what separates us.
You believe that you are the only ones, we know that we are just one of many.
You look above, we look below.
You look for ways to make yourselves comfortable; we look for ways to serve.
You look for ways to lead, we look for ways to accompany.
You look at how much you earn, we at how much is lost.
You look for what is, we, for what could be.
You see numbers, we see people.
You calculate statistics, we, histories.
You speak, we listen.
You look at how you look, we look at the gaze.
You look at us and demand to know where we were when your calendar marked your “historic” urgency. We look at you and don’t ask where you’ve been during these more than 500 years of history.
You look to see how you can take advantage of the current conjuncture, we look to see how we can create it.
You concern yourselves with the broken windows, we concern ourselves with the rage that broke it.
You look at the many, we at the few.
You see impassable walls, we see the cracks.
You look at possibilities, we look at what was impossible until the eve of its possibility.
You search for mirrors, we for windows.
You and us are not the same.
-*-
You look at the calendar of above and subordinate to it the spring of mobilizations, the masses, the parties, the multitudinous rebellion, the streets overflowing with songs and colors, slogans, challenges, those who are now many more than one hundred and thirty- some,[i] the packed plazas, the ballot boxes anxious to be filled with votes, and you hurry because it-is-clear that – they lack a – leadership – revolutionary-party-a-politics-of-ample-flexible-alliances-because-the-electoral-is-their-natural-destiny-but-they-are-very-young-bourgeouis-petit-bourgeois-spoiled kids- / -and then – lumpen – barrio – hood – prole – voting-numbers – potentials-ignorant-naïve – clumsy – stubborn, above all, stubborn. And in each mass action you see the culmination of the historic moment. And afterward, when there are no masses clamoring for a leader, nor ballot boxes, nor parties, you decide that it’s over, no more, that maybe on another occasion, that we have to wait six years, six centuries, that we have to look elsewhere, but always to the calendar of above: party registration, political alliances, official posts.
And we, always with our crooked gaze, go back to the calendar, look for winter, swim upstream, passing the creek, arriving at the source. There we see those who begin, the few, the least. We don’t speak to them, we don’t greet them, we don’t tell them what to do, we don’t tell them what not to do. Instead, we listen, we look at them with respect, with admiration. And they, perhaps never notice this little red flower, so similar to a star, so tiny that it is only a pebble, which our hand leaves below, near their left foot. Not because we want to say to them that that flower-stone belonged to us, the (las/los) Zapatistas. Not so that they can take this pebble and throw it against something or someone, although there is not lack of desire or motive for that. But rather because maybe it is our way of telling them and all of our compas of the Sixth, that houses and worlds are built with tiny pebbles, and later they grow and almost no one remembers that what are now boulders began so tiny, as such small things, so useless, so alone. Along comes a (un/una) Zapatista, and sees the pebble, and greets it, and sits by its side, but they don’t talk, because the little stones, like the Zapatistas, don’t speak…until they speak, and then, as the case may be, become quiet. And no, they are never quiet, what happens is that sometimes there is no one to listen. Or perhaps it is because we looked far ahead in the calendar and we knew, before, that this night was coming. Or perhaps because in this way we tell them, although they don’t know it, but we know, that they are not alone. Because it is with the few that everything starts and restarts.
-*-
You did not see us before…and you continue not seeing us.
And above all, you don’t see us watching you.
You don’t see us looking at you in your arrogance, stupidly destroying bridges, digging up the paths, allying yourselves with our persecutors, scorning us. Convincing yourselves that that which does not exist in the media, simply does not exist.
You didn’t see us watching you tell others and yourselves that that was how to remain on firm ground, that the possible is solid ground, telling them that you cut the oars of that absurd boat full of those absurd and impossible people, those crazy people (*us) who remained adrift, isolated, alone, without direction, paying with our lives for sticking to our principles.
You could have seen the resurgence as part of your victories, and now you consider it as another one of your defeats.
Go, follow your path.
Don’t listen to us, don’t look at us.
Because with the Sixth and with the Zapatistas, you can’t look or listen with impunity.
And this is either our virtue or our curse, depending on where you look, and, above all, from where your look arises.
(to be continued…)
From whatever corner, in whichever world.
SupMarcos.
Planet Earth.
February 2013.
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Reincidentes. Rock Group, Sevilla, Spain. Manuel J. Pizarro Fernández: Drums. Fernando Madina Pepper: Base and vocals. Juan M. Rodríguez Barea: Guitar and vocals. Finito de Badajoz “Candy”: Guitar and vocals. Carlos Domínguez Reinhardt: sound tech. Rock version of “I Name You Freedom” in video dedicated to the heroic struggle of the Mapuche People.
Eduardo Galeano narrates a story of Old Antonio: “The History of the Gazes.”
Joan Manuel Serrat singing “El Sur También Existe,” (The South Also Exists) by Mario Benedetti, at a concert in Argentina, Latin America. Upon finishing singing, Serrat goes backstage and brings out Mario Benedetti, so dear to us (from minute 3:01 forward).
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[i] During a speech at the Universidad Iberoamericana during the presidential campaigns, then presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI) was confronted by students protesting events that occurred during his tenure as governor of Mexico State. Peña Nieto hid and eventually fled the University, but party affiliates later dismissed the protesters in the media as a handful of non-student opposition supporters that were sent to disturb the event. Iberoamericana students then made a youtube video in which 131 of them held up their university ID’s and testified to their participation in the protest, sparking the name for a wider student movement “Yosoy#132,” “Iam#132.”
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Traducción del Kilombo Intergaláctico.
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