My special someone and I went to the opening film in a Lili Taylor festival at the art museum just down the street from my great new apartment. Tonight was Girls Town, directed by Jim McKay.
Now, I should say, my opinions on film are not sophisticated nor well-informed, nor do they move much beyond the culinary (thumbs up or thumbs down). That said, this is great fucking movie. The opening sequence builds using music to portray intense internal turmoil as a result of some fucked up experiences a la what I’ve written just a bit about here. I was initially sitting there thinking “I don’t want to sit through this tonight…” but I’m glad I did.
There’s very powerful scene where one protagonist tells the others she was raped. One of the others responds “if you didn’t want to fuck him why’d you get in the car?” then adds that “if that’s rape then every guy I’ve ever dated did that.” It’s powerful stuff. And yet, given the subject matter, it’s not a super big downer.
The women deal with the shit they’ve been through, and it’s hard. Very hard. But they deal, and - this is the key - they do so collectively. They confront the abusive boyfriend of one of them. They vandalize the car of one of the rapists, and spraypaint “rapist” on the hood. They confront the rapist of another of their friends and end up knocking him down and kicking him. Throughout the film the women are not victims, but survivors (or they move rapidly from one to the other). Refreshingly, there’s no over the top shoot’em up Hollywood violence, nor is there any cautionary moral lesson about how this is a bad idea. There actions don’t end rape or rape culture. But they do give some men who deserve it a bit of punishment, and the women become stronger and more confident by their actions. It’s pretty good stuff. (Now we need a Lesbian Avengers movie.)
In one sequence, one of the characters draws a picture on the stall of a bathroom in their highschool, showing what they did to the car of one of the rapists. Then she writes underneath it “these guys will fuck with you” and a list of numbers. She writes the name the man who raped her first and leaves the rest blank. By the end of the film the door is full of names and comments on what the men did. It could (and should) be read as a distressing comment on the prevalence of the shit women have to deal with, but it’s not just that. It’s also an important type of self-organization to start to erode a bit of the power that keeps shit like that going.
It reminds me of what I know about the activities of the group H.I.J.O.S., a group of people in Argentina whose parents were victims of the genocide committed by the military dictatorship. H.I.J.O.S. practice what they call ‘escraches’ against perpetrators of and collaborators with the genocide. (I’m pasting below four short texts by the Colectivo Situaciones about this, Sebastian Touza and I translated them. The CS wrote them for an art exhibit in Austria or Germany. There’s some good stuff there in English, including another great text by the CS, the prologue to the book they wrote with the MTD-Solano, in the section ‘Congress’ subsection ‘militant investigation’.)
There is a long-running genocide being conducted against women under patriarchy and capitalism (this has even begun to be recognized in law, as rape is now considered an act of torture, at least under certain circumstances). Silvia Federici’s excellent Caliban and the Witch recognizes this in a sense, detailing one set of important episodes of attacks and resistance. Mariarosa Dallacosta’s work on economic so-called development and women is another important source for this, from what (little) I’ve read of her work.
The scene in the movie where the women vandalize the car is an escrache against a torturer. In the movie the woman’s boyfriend expresses the typical liberal response to this practice (”it’s kind of … violent”), which is of course only the polite face of the official opposition to this kind of practice, which is, in turn, support for the continuation of the genocide and impunity for those who participate in it.
The movie also has great music with some powerful female artists, including this which I can’t believe I’ve never heard before. Probably because it doesn’t have guitars. But damn. It reminds me of when I first got really into Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney and Team Dresch and announced to my friends that I was going to start a riot grrrl band. (It’s not a totally dumb idea, I think there was a dude in Bikini Kill, and Huggy Bear’s loosely in that camp depending on whose writing the cultural categories…)
* * *
Colectivo Situaciones texts:
LIVING MAP
The escrache makes possible the creation of a living map.
A living map of the modes of existence of memory in the neighbourhoods
that the escrache goes through and a perception of its different
degrees of power.
A living map distinguishes itself from the graphic cartography we
sometimes use, for instance the one we present here, in one specific
aspect: more than representing what is done by an activity and its
effects, it activates a capacity of experience, at the very moment in
which it unfolds.
The purpose of a living map is not so much to reveal images as it is
to produce them.
Rather than diffusing information, it is anxious to lean from the
encounters it suffers, about creating new names for the intensities it
discovers. And in addition to detecting the relations
that–already–exist between facts, it seeks to outline
other–unsuspected–links, which modify and remake those facts.
Even though the goal of making living maps is not the production of
plans, it never ceases to render plain the places it passes through.
It builds spaces where memory stops being a distant and transcendent
past, to show its present meaning. The living map is a form of
register that claims as a condition an audience implicated in the
experience of a disjointed present, from which the ground has been
removed.
To make living maps is not to register the (geographically) existing
neighbourhood, but the neighbourhood that appears when certain images,
linked to the memory of power and resistance, are activated. A map
does not arise from the gaze that flies over the region (in a
helicopter): it outlines segments as the escrache organizes its
journey.
The procedures of making living maps look like those of an
investigation, those that are brought into play in a learning process:
chance, the search without a clear goal, but organized by will, by
desire, by surprise… and by the fight against the intolerable.
Living map-making is a combat. But not one organized by the rules of
war. The neighbourhood does not become a battlefield where two sides
come face to face for the control of a territory. It is, indeed, about
the construction of a typology, about an inquiry into the existing
modes of memory, and about the capacity of the escrache to value these
modes: to form compositions with the images of the past that make it
powerful and to decompose those that hurt it. The escrache does not
confront the hidden perpetrator of genocide: it fights against
impunity.
As an experience of making living maps, the escrache is not reduced to
a group of activsts that drop by a neighbourhood to denounce
injustice. Rather, it is experienced as a singular mode–among
others–of taking up the memory that strives to persist, know its
possibilities, and build what comes ahead.
***
YELLING AT NOTHING
As soon as the demonstration arrives at the hideout of a perpetrator
of the genocide, something happens that surprises us again. In a
second all the members of the escrache are shouting insults and
slogans, screaming wildly, their gaze directed toward the house where,
they know, nobody is around to listen. It does not matter if, until
that point, the journey has been festive or silent, whether it turned
out to be massive or was limited to friends and acquaintances: the
same ceremony always takes place.
The action we are talking about is different from the previous chants,
those which are cried out during the last meters of the walk, which
are clearly addressed to the neighbours: “Alert, alert, neighbours
alert, a murderer lives right by your house.”
How to undesrtand this desperate cry at nothing? Where the forces come
from, for an action that has all the appearance of being futile?
The day we could formulate that strange question was also the day when
the analogy with the indigenous dances that summon the rain in times
of drought sprang up. And it is not a coincidence: this is a true
contemporary rite.
Beyond the dumb instrumental gaze, what is activated in rites? Here,
as we were able to glimpse, is where we make the experience of
summoning the forces that transcend us. We build spaces where we seek
to grasp, experiment, and think those powers that run through us but
overwhelm us, that belong to us but always go further.
Hence the rarity of the feeling we are left with at that moment,
perhaps the point of highest intensity in the escrache: at the very
instant it confirms to us that we are being part of an act of justice,
it–the empty house–reminds us that justice is inexhaustible.
Therefore it is not so much about what is being demanded by those
shouts as it is about what is being affirmed in the fact of crying
itself: that our only revenge will be to be happy.
***
LA BOMBITA
The most striking element of the escrache is “la bombita”: a small
balloon filled with red paint that is smashed against the house of the
participant in the genocide. In some way it attests to the culmination
of the activity: the killer has been identified and the operation has
left its mark. On top of that, as the house of the repressor is always
protected by a variable number of police agents, some drops of paint
usually fall on their uniforms, unwittingly tracing the line of
continuity between repressive forces.
But this is not a merely aesthetic or spectacular act: la bombita has
its own story, one of the toughest and most significant of the
escrache.
It appeared as a way of expressing the rage and impotence that invaded
us, as a “clandestine” and spontaneous action: someone who remained
hidden in the crowd used to throw it. But also, it was enough motive
to unleash the repressive violence of the police, by that time eager
to find the smallest signal that would allow them to stop a street
practice they felt as a real threat.
This explains why the first adjective to accompany la bombita was
“provocation.” It was targetted by all sorts of critics in the name of
political correctness, democratic values, and the most elementary
codes of respect. In this way, the children of the disappeared were
even accused of being neonazis, because they allegedly replicated
their intolerant methods.
Was it necessary to put up with so much discomfort because of such a
small detail? The question was intensely debated in innumerable
assemblies and informal discussions. La bombita was almost reduced to
a momentary and unfortunate occurrence.
However, something told us that this action carried a good part of the
power of the escrache. “There is no escrache without la bombita,” we
whispered even without good reasons, convinced that such a clear
reference to the blood of the dissappeared was not a simple
triviality.
Today, la bombita is a privileged component of the ritual of summoning
popular justice that every escrache produces. A mark that has become a
trace capable of turning the escrache into something more than a
simple demonstration. With la bombita the escrache emancipates and
remains in the neighbourhood as a question to its inhabitants: What
will happen to us now that we know that “They live here”?
***
CONTINUITY
Escraches are done to those who were active in the murderous
repression that took place in Argentina during the second half of the
1970s. “It’s been almost 30 years,” we hear once an again in the
neighbourhoods where we intervene. Most of the people to whom we do
escraches no longer appear on the payroll of state security agencies.
However, the escrache is not concerned about the past. One of its main
goals is to spot continuities. “The past is already here”: it is in
the different forms in which we have to take it up.
In fact, the images that the escrache produces are distinguished from
those that usually circulate among human rights organizations, the
courts, and academia. It neither reconstructs history nor organizes
tributes, although some of this happens as a secondary outcome of its
action.
What the escrache effects is an inversion of priorities in the
territory of memory: more than the remains and vestiges of history,
the escrache concerns what we do with history today.
That is why it is keen to point out the current forms of repression,
the fascist tonalities with which our present is drawn.
The continuity denounced by the escrache does not simply consist in
making the criminal records of the perpetrators of genocide visible.
Its meaning is much more disturbing, because it reminds us that when
“Never again” becomes the empty slogan of an unjust and cynical
democracy, it is redued to a simple paralyzing illusion.
That may be why no government, either right-wing or progressive,
savage or respectful of institutions, looks with sympathy at this
singular street practice: because if there is something contradicted
by the escrache it is the existance of guarantees that the mechanisms
of terror can be conjured away.
The continuity that the escrache talks about is that of a memory that
refered to a before that we cannot say “is over.” A before that is
always here, at the bottom of every collective experience, outlining
alternatives: as the mask of a new possibility of repression, or as
the living impulse of a desire for justice.