Our Love Bus ~ Our Home. Click on the image to enlarge.
"When the oppressors give me two choices, I always take the third."
— Meir Berliner, a Polish Jew and citizen of Argentina who died resisting his Nazi captors at Treblinka Concentration Camp.
I want to go home. With my son, Zazu. The problem is, our “alternative” tiny home is apparently positioned in diametric opposition to US mainstream society's definition of a “real” home.
In February's Mother Pelican essay, I included Zazu's drawing and story[1] of his struggle between two worlds. He writes of a potential third world, a third space somewhere between the “modern-convenience world” and “barefoot world.” He dreams of a world where he can live without being pulled apart; and, where “belonging” doesn't manifest as erasure of difference, where “belonging” doesn't mean he becomes invisible—as “equality-as-assimilation” and as self-perpetuating status-quo “toxic mimicry.”
It is within this interstitial realm that we collectively overcome binaries. We uproot homogenizing standardization, the “monoculture of the mind” (Vandana Shiva). As an ongoing Apocalyptic Parenting practice, I foment the possibility to conspire[2] the in-between—a third space between constructed reality and our moral imagination. Such phantasmagoric epiphanies elicit infinite weavings-wanderings of creativity and chance, the pulsive, liminal, and formless in which the “boundaries between self and world are porous.”[3] Such attunement to our interconnectedness—a shared divinity—helps us wear down biocidal structures of domination that are such an integral part of our cells and psyches. We are often not cognizant of the constitutive and formative mechanisms of such domination. Attunement to this divine includes an eco-social justice revolution founded in interstitiality and spiritual intelligence. Blessings (“magical transactions”), b'rachot, such as those I shared in my February essay, are bridges between the private and public. For example as I discussed, the blessing of thanksgiving for our bodies, berakhot of Asher Yatzar that many Jews recite after leaving the bathroom demonstrates (remember that the verb “demonstrate” derives from the Latin monstrare, monstrous) the intersection between gratitude and awareness.
Like the metabolism of the human body and the earth’s tendency towards homeostasis, the metabolism of our culture must be scrutinized as a relational organism. Similarly, J. Krishnamurti’s warning, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” characterizes both our climate crisis and our potential for collective change as citizen-activists. When we commit to embodying and employing our epigenetic potential, we disrupt social inertia. Engaging “life-enhancing epigenetic plasticity of human development”[4] guides us to make positive biocultural transformations that can lead to intergenerational, interspecies, and transcultural emancipation. As we take collective action rooted in epigenetic mechanisms, we can radically alter our individual bodies, social bodies, and the body of our planet. Vandana Shiva quotes me in her Foreword to the updated edition of my art, climate justice book, Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era: “Zazu’s dreams take us beyond separation and apartheid. They allow us to see that everything is interconnected ...As Alhadeff writes: only by understanding how all forms of oppression are interconnected can we understand that all forms of emancipation are equally interconnected.'[5] Through the tapestry of dreams, the perennial principles of life come alive.” Zazu dreaming guides us to inhabit the intermedial.
The intermedial dislodges prescribed categories of what is socially acceptable. Maria Popova describes how Rachel Carson embedded poetry in her scientific writing: “It was a radical idea—that truth and beauty are not in rivarlry but in reciprocity, that to write about science with feeling is not to diminish its authority but to deepen it.” [6] Carson boldly defied categories. She modeled what polymaths for centuries have lived (like ibn Sina pictured above)—layered perspectives that transcend binaries and embody intimacies, reminding us that ambiguity is not a lack of clarity, but a multiplicity of clarities.
Matter Adheres to Matter. Cara Judea Alhareff's Art Gallery.
Click on the image to enlarge.
The intermedial condition ruptures the order of official norms of representation. It evokes the dynamism of nature and its continuous transformation that undermines deadly social and spiritual inertia embedded in settler capitalist norms. I intend for my large-format color photographs to remind the viewer of shifting positions that require continual negotiations among anthropocentric expectations. It is the possibility of viewers’ visceral relationship to their interpretations of the images that ignites our moral imagination. Art and parenting practices mutually nourish one another—if we can collectively eclipse the norm.
Similarly, I intend for my parenting to criss-cross personal-political permeable borders of somatic, scientific, and philosophical intersections; to challenge human exceptionalism and white modernity (both rooted in concepts of property and mind-body schisms); to disentangle the interrelational roots of geopolitical, ecological, spiritual, and health crises; to always question what is taken for granted as the ostensibly inevitable; to challenge cultural complicity that sustains the status quo of petroleum parenting. Living my parental environmental ethics as an antidote to petroleum parenting involves not only my practice of decolonizing economies, it is at the core of the private-public, personal-political interface. Our repurposed home is indeed a “real” home—made with love—meaning it embodies political-spiritual values.
Balancing beauty and anguish, celebration and persecution, we live the Jewish tenets bal taschit (do not destroy or waste) and tikkun olam (repair of the world) as a form of compassion, empathy, and collective action. How we live our home is a direct commitment to local and global nonviolent environmental justice. It allows us to straddle the complexities of living in the modern world while maintaining our ecological and humanitarian ethics. Our home echoes co-constitutive relationality of the Mayan en lak ech, “you are the other me,” and ubuntu, the Xhosa people[7] of South Africa’s word meaning, “I am because you are.” Luis Gutiérrez, my Mother Pelican editor prods me: Can you say to your son, "I am because you are"?
Raising a preteen who is straddling the pressures of conforming to US mainstream standards of living that strip the legitimacy of ecosocial-justice values, we as parents must eclipse equality-as-assimilation, we must “leave” toxic mimicry. Zazu will become (see Footnote 8) a teenager as of this April 8—our mutual birthday. April 8, 2024 is a third interval version of eclipsing the matrix. Last month we explored leaving modernity refering to On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson. Arsić describes Emerson's leaving as nonconformity transformed into a larger art of living (the quintessential personal-as-political becoming—about which many of us have written extensively.)[8] This interstitial thinking—theory as action reflects “relocating the ordinary, taking it out of the deadly safety of the suburban mainstream and moving it into...zones of questioning and experimenting...a practice for cracking the husks of habit...”[9] The in-between erodes habituated obedience.
My tendency to push boundaries in any context, let alone that of parenting, makes me ripe for criticism. I experience the act of floundering as an ethical, political, and aesthetic social challenge. Echoing the Nigerian proverb: “In order to find your way you must become lost,” Judith Lasaster, my phenomenal yoga teacher used to teach: “confusion is a state of grace.” However, I must highlight the ever-looming question: What are the costs of committing to this practice alone? The cost of living in perpetual conflict with dominant societal norms can be devastating to one's own psyche, let alone one's relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. The isolating mother/teacher-child/student dynamic amplifies those tensions even more. Again, the collective is the key for sustainable transformation (Antonio Negri's revolution). Without a community, the contradictions became unbearable, and home becomes elusive.
Join me in community for my Mother Pelican essay next month as we continue our investigation of Apocalyptic Parenting—this time crossing the ever-trickster threshold into Object-Oriented Ontologies.
Notes
[1] Here is the extended version of Zazu's “A Foot in Both Worlds:”
I am Zazu Shock Alhadeff-Racker. I am Black and Jewish and I am twelve-years old. My birthday is April 8th and I grew up living in a school bus. I was born on my mother’s 40th birthday, and that was when two worlds collided: the modern-convenience world and the barefoot world. But, they soon quickly separated again, with me stuck on both of them—at the same time. Because I no longer wanted to live in our family tiny home converted school bus, I used to stay in a cabin, next door; only for me and I helped pay the cabin's rent.
To pay my rent, I worked (and still do) for an 81-year-old breadmaker who uses ancient grains to make sourdough bread in a three-day fermentation process. It's similar to my apprenticeship with a 75-year-old man who taught me many things in one of the ecovillages where we lived. Weekly I would build kitchen utensils and rustic furniture. In the process, I learned about how his house was built into the hill for insulation. He taught me how to graft fruit trees. I still have a fig grafting that is now huge! It felt satisfying because I was making things that our whole family could and does use everyday. It feels good to make things from local trees (like the spatula we still use) instead of buying mass produced cheap plastic made by children younger than me in China. I could see where the trees had grown near own home. It feels good to be part of the whole process instead of just going to a store—not knowing anything about the origins of the item or product. I like learning and living supply-chain awareness.
I only played and slept in my cabin. To heat it, I used a small-ish woodstove. I wish the heat from the previous night would have lasted until morning, because it was always very cold before the sun rose—even though the wood-burning stove keeps our bus home warm most of the night and usually all morning long. But, that doesn't mean I want to live in a bus with 39 drafty windows. I helped build my own room, the “Zus” (Zazu's Bus). We reused insulation, but my Zus is still not winterized. My dad, Wild, built me a bed frame out of mountain laurel and rododendrum from North Carolina, in an ecovillage called Earthaven. We lived in Earthaven for two years running around barefoot in the incredibly wet forest.
When I was six and we lived at Ecovillage Ithaca in NY, I went to an outdoor camp called Primitive Pursuits. Even though the required age group for it was 12-18, they still let me in. I am used to being with a lot younger and older people, too. I miss reading “Who Was?” biographies with my grandmother. I have an old golden doodle, Mac, who is like a brother and is very cuteness and two stepsisters who are 22 and 24. The younger is Madison and the older is Georgia. Madison used to live in Paonia, where I live, but now lives with Georgia in Philadelphia. When I was seven-years old, I performed in Philadelphia at the National Liberty Museum. I was performing Emma Lazarus—a real life character from Zazu Dreams—the climate justice book my mom wrote and my grandmother illustrated. It is about me riding a humpback whale (that was a dream I actually had) with a husky and going back in time, talking with ancient philosophers, and struggling against climate change and trash politics.
My mom and I argue a lot about me not having a smart/flip phone. She doesn't want the EMFs on my body constantly. It makes it very difficult to fit in with my classmates and communicate with my friends. This is one reason my mom took us to a Vodun community in Benin, West Africa. That didn't work out. Even though my Uncle Greg (aka Shock G) would probably have loved that I visited some of my heritage. Right now I live back on the top of Pitkin mesa with beautiful views of the Rocky Mountains. The road makes it challenging to go up and down the mesa in the winter because it is so muddy and icy—and my mom and I usually ride our bikes and we often get stuck. In the winter, dad has to give us a ride up the hill in his second-hand fully-electric, small car. He used to read Don Quixote and Animal Farm to me before bed every night. These kinds of books educated me about different kinds of extreme worlds.
Despite learning chess with my grandfather, Papa Don, when I was five, and solving rubik's cubes in 43 seconds when I was ten, I haven't discovered a solution for how to make an in-between world. To deal with living in two different world at once, I normally use humor—I write and rhyme funny rap songs that make fun of my mom's ecological, social justice values. I used to play the violin, saxophone, drums, harmonica, and ukelele for several years. Now, I play the saxophone to get out my emotions for these two worlds. I'm hopeful to create a world in between the extremes. My favorite part of the barefoot world is fire, animals, and the natural world. My favorite parts of the modern convenience world are simple luxuries (AC, electric heat, light switches, running water, septic systems, etc.), and the connection to distant worlds through Wi-Fi. How I want the world in between would combine my favorite parts of both worlds. To conclude, I think I prefer leaning more to the modern-convenience world.
[2] See Endnote 138 from the Arcades Project of Zazu Dreams: Conspire means to breathe together. We seek the possibility of breathing together as a form of Convivencia. Adrienne Rich reminds us: “The breath is also Ruach, the spirit, the human connection to the universe” (Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, 82). Zazu Dreams is an intergenerational practice of embodied ecoliteracy, reveals (via apocalypse) the radical potential of liminality, confusion-as-a-state of grace (referring to my mentor, Judith Lasater's teachings).
[5] Congruently, in Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write that empire not only establishes the structural foundation for capitalist oppressions, empire can generate unanticipated forms of resistance.
[6] Maria Popova, “She Looked at Clouds This Way,” New York Times, Feb. 11, 2024: 18.
[7] Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela was of the Xhosa people.
[9] Paul Grimstad's review in BOOKFORUM, Feb. 2010: 35.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Updated edition, 2024, with Foreword by Vandana Shiva
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
