berlin

I’m sitting in my friend J’s bedroom in an ex-squatted house project in Mitte. Looking out the window, currently decorated by raindrops, are the other wings of the house. J’s floor and the floor above in this wing are a frauen/lesben/trans project (there are many such self-organized spaces and projects in general here). The two floors below are inhabited by Polish folks. The three floors in this wing share a doorbell, which visitors ring once, twice, three, or four times to let folks know who’s being called. In other wings include a Latina project and a gay project.

This is one of the projects in the house struggle where residents negotiated contracts with returning owners and obtained rent control for 10 years out (there should be five years remaining). One of the other house projects J is connected with is currently going through more interactions with the house managers…

J, her housemate C, and I just shared breakfast in the kitchen, talking more about politics within the radical/left scene, and about anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in particular here. How most folks who are anti-Zionist here are in fact anti-Semitic — something that’s hard for those of us from the U.S. to grasp (while riding the U-ban last night on the way to another house project/bar, J explained she didn’t sit down because the guy where she’d been thinking to sit was a neo-Nazi). I ask them if they think these will ever be able to be separated here in Germany, and they respond in the negative. When I ask J if there are Palestinians in the radical/left scene, she explains that most of these discourses are taking place amongst non-Jewish and non-Arab white folks; that there is an anti-Zionist Palestinian and Arab community, or scene, but disconnected from the radical/left scene, and small. Sounds like Friday there will be an anti-Fascist demonstration, that we may be going to, in commemoration of Kristallnacht.

Like my housing situation at home in Oakland, J lives with five other people. When I first arrived in town yesterday afternoon, and after we got home, ate, I took a two hour nap here in this room. My dreams were vivid and very much present here in Berlin. There was a distinct sense of intentional, collective living, in these WGs (”living communities”). On the one hand, there are similarities. My block/corner in Oakland is also about building community, at least overall, with the other “wings” or units. We invite one another over to eat, we garden together, we share space in the patio and make music. We share events and projects.

But on the spectrum of intentional/unintentional, we are definitely not as intentional. This feels more common here: the self-organized, collective living, not only within a house project or unit, but across projects and units in the same buildings and blocks. At least in my networks in the Bay; there’s more of a similar feeling and practices amongst people I’m connected to in Providence.

It’s remarkable the difference in organizing within and outside of the nonprofit industrial complex. Most of the queer women and trans only spaces I participate in back home operate within nonprofit/institutional support and structure, outside of social networks and my gender/queer writing group. Here, as I alluded to earlier, claiming women/lesben/trans spaces is the norm within the radical/left scene. Another difference is the QTPOC specific resources and support I’ve been able to tap into in the Bay Area; here, there are few if any women/lesben/trans people of color specific projects or spaces (J tells me a queer Arab event she went to the other day was the first time she was in a space that was majority POC).

More reflection to come; I’m off to send some poems to an upcoming KSW Press chapbook.

nobody passes

Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, a new anthology edited by Mattilda, is out from Seal Press. The project includes “Who’s Wavin’ That Flag?” a chapter based on a roundtable with immigrant rights organizers convened by Jessica Hoffmann, which I participated in.

we got issues

My contributor copy must have gotten lost in the mail, so I haven’t seen it, but the word on the streets is that We Got Issues is out.

There’s a book release event here in Oakland next Friday:

DATE: November 3, 2006

TIME: 6:30 pm

WHERE: C Marcus Books, 3900 MLK Jr Way

“A beautiful, proud, lyrical, loving, defiant, truth-witnessing, joyful chorus of voices, some louder than a bomb, some rarely heard, all wanting a better world–We Got Issues! is what democracy sounds like.”–Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

“From Sara Littlecrow Russell’s spellcasting Incantation poem to Hilda Herrera’s Transmogrified Visions dream, We Got Issues! is a mosaic of brilliant voices, bound together with intention and power.”–Inga Muscio, author of Cunt and Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil