Track: ‘What Now? Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan of Arc’, Loraine James
Misty, popping with yellow birches, en route back from BER. First Palestinian flag spotted on Sonnenallee, sprayed on then ex-ed out; the writing on the walls in Arabic they can’t decipher, so it stays.
New boldness afforded to the white German who shouts something about ‘immer Deutsche’ down our street as the Turkish business owners come out into their doorways; his friends hang their heads and say nothing.
//
At the start of the Oranienplatz demo people’s faces are drawn out, on the verge. We have in common the consumption of abyssal-scale horrors on small screens for the past weeks, and in difference, the degree of familial relation to, closeness of communications with, this violence. In assembly, the accumulation of emotion that is batted back into our bodies by social media platforms finds release, carried out over the crowd. I swear to myself no white-girl tears but I swear too they are for the collective mourning.
A boy of 8 or 9 with his Mum and sister in the pram, all in kuffiyehs, leads the chant tirelessly until his voice becomes raspy.
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Amid the alienation brought by _ermany’s* adherence to a genocidal Staatsraison –
Hard to say if my loss of connection to the city is also related to the loss of the room, the therapist’s room, in one of the ‘two Kreuzbergs’ (in a previous municipal delineation, that room and this room would have shared a postcode). Once, when I corrected myself away from saying, ‘my city’, he smiled and said: It can be yours too.
And at the next demo, I don’t know why, but I look out for him there. Perhaps so that he could be an exception to the fact of there being so few Berliners of the Mauerfall generation present, an exception belonging to this still-to-me reassuring category of father figures, ‘protectors’ … , or so that we could recognise each other at a shared group event. No recourse to comfort in the paternal, or even the parental – as if that wasn’t, through the course of this life, already obvious.
Discussion of establishment _ermany’s repression of Palestinian expression (Palestinian anything), outsized police raids, and veil-off racism is left for the imagined balcony, where I might be disillusioned, outside the room.
//
The mostly inaccessible history of my Berlin father.
Thinking about other fractious, oppressive years in the city’s past lets me locate myself vaguely as a historical subject, and existing within a wider arc of where daily life meets political struggles fortifies against the bleak, and against feelings for leaving – for where to.
In a Thresholds letter from January 2019, ‘What remains?’, I turned to Etel Adnan’s writing** for a sense of such an arc; for her, plotted towards the South and the East, or from the ‘violent joke’ of the past to ‘the warm mists of the future’: ‘besides the churn of political regimes and beyond the slip of old economies into their correct fate of decline, longer cosmologies and collectivities can and do exist.’
I make the crossing over Monumentenbrücke, from Kreuzberg to the Rote Insel, to try to reconnect with my self in place. The view beyond the railway tracks that make the historically socialist Kiez into an ‘island’ is one of my favourite Berlin-banal panoramas: I walk or cycle glancing over my shoulder to the TV tower, shrouded or not in fog, the open wind freeing or punishing, Die Welt’s balloon hovering as an underwhelming icon while we shun the racist lies of the newspaper’s pages.*** On the south side, the long red housing complex that catches the low sun, and the absurd weight of the Schwerbelastungskörper (Heavy Load-Bearing Body – an evocative name for a Nazi-constructed cylinder full of concrete). Too often crossing this bridge I have been carrying a load, literal or metaphorical, ‘the heavy-body vehicle of grief’, as I noted it, accentuated by the incline that coincides with the turn in the road.
Such an unwieldy vehicle has also manifested, in various forms, in dreams, where it imposes itself on the scene as soon as I ease into relaxing. For example, it once appeared as a turbulent bee slash militaristic plane, whose vibrations disturbed the tranquil bay I was about to swim in just as I dipped my toes in the water. The vigilante psyche, and the difficulties of reality, interrupt smooth pleasure.
Still, I make this bridge crossing as an inverse to Lizzie Homersham’s idea of selves dispersed through teleportation: movement to find coherency, to gather self together.
(Also, walking on the path by the side of these rail tracks last January, I left a voice note to LH while wondering: ‘Have I missed my exit?’)
From a distance, the small, local demo seems buoyant – liberation songs recognised from the sound systems of other protests, these release days – but approaching, I see the single road lane is lined on either side by Polizei. And then the few black, white, green and red flags flying in the winter wind meet the remembered image of those many blue-starred ones planted in mounds of bulldozed rubble on Gazan land, and by the time I’ve crossed the ’damm for the pharmacy – to buy a pregnancy test (I’m not, and not ‘trying’) – I’m welling up: bath salts?!
The tears are for the children – the children, the elders, among tens of thousands of people – yet the children are singing.
//
Kālī, goddess of death, frequenting the funeral grounds, the marginal places, from where to destroy or create. The embodied astrology podcast, which I have more-or-less replaced in terms of kitchen listening with Al-Jazeera, advocates for our joy practices to be folded with grief, our grief practices enfolded with joy. In that disruptive vehicle dream, the crime was simple enjoyment.
In a more recent dream, the apparition of northern lights above the buildings of the european city street signalled civil war, our initial reaction of wonder overtaken by a sense of danger as the riot police arrived. This would be the energy of the fireworks on new year’s eve.