1. Preamble
Hello and welcome to issue 03 of mine Oranges! I know it’s been a while since issue 02. Every week I’ve put “write issue 03” on my to-do list, but I haven’t been able to get myself to sit down and write. I think it’s a combination of stage fright, writer’s block, and my attention being pulled in other directions. But this newsletter is a project I want to stick with, especially when it involves pushing myself out of my comfort zone in order to write regularly, so right now I’m re-committing to writing and sending an issue every two weeks.
Just to give you an idea of where I am: seated on a rickety chair at a rickety desk in my bedroom in a small apartment in the Usera neighborhood of Madrid. It’s almost 7pm, the sun won’t set for another three hours, and it’s currently 99 degrees. It’s a dry heat here in Madrid, nothing like the drippy humidity I’m used to in Virginia summers. It’s a dry heat but there’s no AC, so I’m dripping with sweat 24/7, even when my beloved fan is going (which, at this point, is constantly). Here in Madrid we’ve been in la nueva normalidad since about mid-June: bars, restaurants, shopping, museums, it all feels somewhat bustling, although of course the number of cases in Spain is on the rise again and another lockdown is surely on the horizon. I’m trying to enjoy this relative freedom while I can, sandwiched as it is between two and a half months of intense lockdown and my return to Virginia on September 1. I’ve decided that I can’t stay in Spain another year—I don’t want to do the teaching program again, job prospects are slim otherwise, and I don’t know how I’d be able to get a visa without the proper job requirements—but it’s difficult to feel hopeful about any prospects in the United States right now as well. I don’t have a clear idea of what job(s) I might be able to find or where I want to live, but I do have a clear idea of other things that I’m looking for.
2. Community, Mutual Aid, and Belonging
Recently, I’ve realized that for the past nine years I’ve moved at least once or twice a year. I moved four times in 2015, from Charlottesville to Boone to Greensboro and back to Charlottesville. I feel like moving frequently is a common phenomenon for people in their 20s, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s totally exhausting to deal with the upheaval of a move, especially when it happens multiple times a year. Aside from the stress of constantly packing and unpacking my bedroom (the only place in any shared house or apartment that I can make feel like home), there’s the stress of constantly leaving communities and entering new ones. So when I think about what I want and when I think about why I’m returning to the US, there’s one key word: longevity, applied to two interrelated things: home and community. I’m so tired of packing and leaving, packing and leaving, packing and leaving. I want to root into a place, a community. And while that’s technically not impossible to accomplish in Spain, and while I do really love Madrid, I don’t see this being the place I’ll be able to thrive long-term.
Community is something I’ve been thinking about in recent years and something I’ve tried to cultivate wherever I live, even if it is for a short while. In my experience it’s been possible to make close friends in a short period of time, and to create a little bit of a network that way, but at this point I believe that the community I’m seeking is more than a group of close friends, and I’m not sure that it’s something that can truly be created or cultivated over a few months or even a couple years. When I think about my ideal community, I think of it as a network that includes and extends far beyond my immediate circle of friends. I think of it as a group of people tied to a specific place over a significant period of time. And most importantly, I think of it as a source of mutual support, or mutual aid. Admittedly, the concept of mutual aid is relatively new for me, something I’ve only learned about this year in the context of covid and the Black Lives Matter uprisings. It’s new to me because I grew up abled in a white middle class family, and while in theory I was taught to help out my neighbors if they needed it, the reality is that a spirit of capitalist-driven independence permeated most areas of my life. It’s still hard for me to ask anyone for help, or to accept help if it’s offered.
Mutual aid is something that seems self-explanatory on the surface, but I wanted to do a little research in order to understand it better. Big Door Brigade and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief both have a ton of resources if you’re interested in learning more. Here’s an excerpt from a zine called Let’s Talk Mutual Aid, written by Regan de Loggans. If you, like me, are a white person new to mutual aid, this is important for us to understand:
“Many white organizers will have you believe that Mutual Aid is an anarchist-communist theory based in either autonomous independence from the state or workers rights. Though Mutual Aid does encompass those things, it is important that people understand that Mutual Aid has and always will be a non-western tradition. Mutual Aid is Indigenous lifeways and sovereignty; it is Black thrivance and power, which will outlive anarcho-communist theory. It is not a theory, it is a practice that most people of color have been practicing and predates colonialism and capitalism. This is important to note, because the co-option of Mutual Aid without accountability is racism. The co-option of Mutual Aid as an anarcho-communist theory participates in the erasure of systems and communities of color that are the authority in Mutual Aid practices. BIPOC mutual aid practices were purposefully destroyed by white settlers through genocide, assimilation, and a commitment to greed via capitalism. We cannot divorce the legacies of trauma that exist due to settler meddling. We will not allow white organizers and anarcho-communist folx to appropriate our teachings in a time of panic. By committing to Mutual Aid practices, you are demanding accountability for long-term commitment to the upheaval of white supremacy. Mutual aid demands settlers to relinquish control in order for them to contribute at all.
[Mutual aid] is a long-term commitment based in actionable results that removes community out of their dependency on the capitalist settler state.”
And what exactly is community? I’d say the longer-term communities I’ve been a part of have been academic communities existing in the small primary and secondary schools I attended. While I had a close group of friends at UVA, I never figured out how to become a member of the greater community and in retrospect, I probably wasn’t even thinking about these questions at the time. Since graduating, I’ve turned multiple times to a book of essays by bell hooks called Belonging: A Culture of Place in order to better understand what a community is. I first read it in the fall of 2015, then again in the summer of 2018, and I’ve been re-reading parts of it this summer as well. All of the essays in this book have inspired and influenced me, but one part I want to focus on is a quote that hooks includes in the essay “Kentucky Is My Fate”:
“In her book Rebalancing the World Carol Lee Flinders defines a culture of belonging as one in which there is ‘intimate connection with the land to which one belongs, empathic relationship to animals, self-restraint, custodial conservation, deliberateness, balance, expressiveness, generosity, egalitarianism, mutuality, affinity for alternative modes of knowing, playfulness, inclusiveness, nonviolent conflict resolution, and openness to spirit.’”
[Side note: Rebalancing the World is subtitled “Why Women Belong and Men Compete and How to Restore the Ancient Equilibrium,” so while the quote that hooks uses makes me want to read Rebalancing the World, the subtitle certainly does not.]
This definition of a “culture of belonging” is so significant to me, so inspiring, so perfect in many ways. The only thing I’d argue with is “self-restraint,” because how can you feel you belong if you have to restrain yourself? The remaining concepts listed all feel important, but here’s what excites me the most:
Deliberateness!
Expressiveness!
Playfulness!
Affinity for alternative modes of knowing!
Nonviolent conflict resolution! (Abolish the police!)
Mutuality! Here’s what hooks writes about mutuality in the essay “Again—Segregation Must End”:
“Those of us who truly believe racism can end, that white supremacist thought and action can be challenged and changed, understand that there is an element of risk as we work to build community across difference. The effort to build community in a social context of racial inequality (much of which is class based) requires an ethic of relational reciprocity, one that is anti-domination. With reciprocity all things do not need to be equal in order for acceptance and mutuality to thrive. If equality is evoked as the only standard by which it is deemed acceptable for people to meet across boundaries and create community, then there is little hope. Fortunately, mutuality is a more constructive and positive foundation for the building of ties that allow for differences in status, position, power, and privilege whether determined by race, class, sexuality, religion, or nationality.”
When I return to the United States, in all of its racist, capitalist violence and exploitation, this “culture of belonging” and idea of mutuality is what I want to seek out and cultivate. bell hooks left Kentucky and lived in different places for many years before realizing that “Kentucky is [her] fate.” There’s a part of me that believes that Virginia is my fate as well, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to return for the long haul right now. I’ve loved living in Madrid and I’m still romanced by the idea of living in a big city (although the romance has definitely been tempered by covid, the decimation of the economy and job market, and police brutality). I have many questions and very few answers and feel overwhelmed by uncertainty most days, but I’m happy to hold this idea of a culture of belonging as a compass.
3. Further Resources
I’ve created a list of resources on my website that lives in my Instagram bio.
Here are six recommendations:
Virginia: 75% or more of detainees at the Farmville Detention Center have coronavirus. Here’s more information and action items compiled by La ColectiVA and Sanctuary DMV.
Support queer Black love and joy: Donate to Rebecca and Jasmine’s Wedding Fund! Rebecca and Jasmine are incredible community organizers in Richmond who’ve been doing so much work for Justice and Reformation for Marcus-David Peters (among other things). Check out this recording of an organizing skill-up webinar here and listen to Rebecca speak on the sustainability of social movements here.
Read this Love Letter to the Future, on the power and beauty of mutual aid in practice. (The layout of this PDF is designed for printing and collating an actual zine, so you have to pay attention to the page numbers.)
If you’re at that point in the summer when all you want is a good novel, I just read Real Life by Brandon Taylor and highly recommend it. “Described as a campus novel and a coming of age novel, the partly autobiographical book tells of the experiences of a gay, Black doctoral student in a predominantly white, midwestern PhD program.”
Watch Breakwater / Quebramar, a Portuguese short film (27 min). Here’s the trailer; I watched it on Mubi. “In this collectively made short, Cris Lyra’s intimate gaze records, with minute attention, the bodies and voices of a group of friends as they talk about sexual identity and politics in today’s Brazil. This is affective lesbian cinema, in the vein of Barbara Hammer, where caring and community reign.”
Familiarize yourself with Sharona Franklin’s brochure on Disability Equality 101 and follow her on Instagram @star_seeded @hot.crip and @paid.technologies.
4. A Recent Phone Photo
Alright, that’s all for now. Thank you for reading :) I’d love to hear your definitions of community or thoughts on a culture of belonging—you can respond to this email if you want to share. Any other feedback is welcome as well. Be on the lookout for issue 04 in a couple of weeks!
❥ Ava
03. A Culture of Belonging
thinking about this: ‘intimate connection with the land to which one belongs, empathic relationship to animals, self-restraint, custodial conservation, deliberateness, balance, expressiveness, generosity, egalitarianism, mutuality, affinity for alternative modes of knowing, playfulness, inclusiveness, nonviolent conflict resolution, and openness to spirit.’”
having lots of ambivalence about having come back (the us response to coronovirus and the prioritizing of capital over people are two "drawbacks") but happy to be building a foundation of community here in NYC--your network extends to us!
I like the photo feature!
xx emr