Dear women,
I am using this occasion to first thank all for their political courage, consistency, perseverance and integrity, as well as for all the endless hours of organisation, coordination and last but not least – cooking. I am back home after a record of 32 hours of road traffic. There is something – à propos “European ideals” – that I perversely love in the incidental, visually completely random, police harassment that we rarely have the occasion to enjoy, except in coaches.
Together with the usual suspects, such as Roma people, darker Israelis, Arabs or Africans, they pester me as well, usually carrying out their official duty, which I guess proves that racism produces races, and not the other way around. When I am in a good mood – which was the case this time, thanks to the amazing jubilee – I use such occasions for agitation, that is, to discuss meaningfully social justice with the Šešeljism-imbued Serbian working class, as well as to clarify Germany’s renewed unity / Anschluss or even the phenomenon of migration with representatives of West Germans, who are informed about the existence (and criminal disposition) of Gastarbeiter, as well as about East Germans’ great anguish for blue jeans at the time of totalitarianism by the yellow press and state television only.
I would not like to fall into sentimentalism, but I have to recognise that meeting again the whole multitude of the living and dead, after all these years in peronospora, kept me on the edge of crying for the whole time. I extremely rarely feel the need to photograph something – indeed, it seems to me that recording images and postponing impressions for some subsequent perception is essentially self-deprivation of sensation at that moment – but I grabbed my mobile phone when the concert started. Not because I am terribly keen on hardcore or because I think that this particular band would express the essence of feminism and antimilitarism, but because quite an unexpected interaction happened: namely, all activists, not prompted by anything, just stood up to dance with their mini-skirts and perms, moderation took up backing vocals, while the ceiling of the Centre for Cultural Decontamination threatened to collapse. As people’s summed-up impressions later showed, this moment was not only etched into my memory, so I would be inclined to claim that in some way it summarised 20 years of past work as well as one idea of politics. Whenever I have been forced in the West to determine the group’s profile in classical ideological terms, total incomprehension appeared on my interlocutors’ faces: anarcho-feminism and Marxism, but also prevailing belief in open society, liberalism and some enthusiasm towards the EU, piety towards the national liberation struggle and anti-militarism, global perspective and insistence on local responsibility, simultaneous thematisation of women’s experience and deconstruction of being a woman, conciliation of tactical separatism and openness of the group to friends conscientious objectors, etc. However, who spent time in the office and at the vigils during all these years knows that activist affinities were not distributed according to these criteria and that Women in Black’s politics was never a politics of identity: not because we would not be aware of differences, but that incommensurability was never inferred from them: on the contrary, what was inferred from them the possibility of relations – in terms of exchange, solidarity and learning.
Rather than dealing with the patriarchy as abstract transitional order or with the war that always takes place “somewhere else,” feminism interested us as emancipating intervention in a concrete political space. If the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia in the “developed world” seemed to be an impossible excess at times, it is clearer and clearer that “peripheries” in fact much more clearly show the truth of the global, and that, the experience of the region we had a privileged position to understand both the fascistoidness of each nation, and in old Europe, of the normalised structural racism, masked by hygienic considerations and bourgeois culture, as well as the inseparability of vulgar capitalist exploitation by a state controlling semi-permeability of its own borders. Resisting all forms of institutionalised violence, solidarity with those exposed to it, looking for inconspicuous political alliances with those erased from public space and organising a parallel society, along representative politics, remain all the more universally applicable – and even, I would way, are becoming fashionable again. Indeed, I believe that there is no contradiction between anti-racist, anti-colonial, feminist, queer or anarchist politics on the one hand and class struggle on the other. The real conflict about redistribution of power and values (or the idea of justice) is on the contrary staged again within all the above-mentioned and time and again draws the line of conflict between the paranoid-conservative pole – of the objective minority which, by spreading panic about diversity and the reason of the conceited deficit, successfully protects privileges – and the revolutionary potential of the virtual majority, which invents the new world by recognising spaces of overlap. As we see everywhere (and especially a bit further away from Belgrade’s mire), women and men and all those who are differently oriented never had problems to intuitively recognise temporary and lasting allies, and that, across the borders of self-comprehensibility and familiar things of all kinds, this different world think and live. A state, an army or a church that could prevent their gradual appearance does not exist.
The omnipresent production of conformism and cynicism simply proves the fragility of the global movement in literally every point and every interaction.
I am afraid that photographs from my mobile phone rather poorly illustrate the tectonic change in (social) space from which the political subjectivity of that Deleuze’s “nation that does not exist” appears, but I nonetheless send them to you in the attachment, together with a decoration from my and Dragan’s kitchen – so that it does not look that Women in Black in Berlin are Staša’s pure fabrication.
Lots of love, and see you soon,
Imbacil
