Em Up - Reflections

Transcription

Em Up - Reflections

Reflections
Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning
Volume 12, Issue 1, Fall 2012
Special Issue Editors: Diana George, Virginia Tech
Diane Shoos, Michigan Technological University
Editors:
Diana George, Virginia Tech
Cristina Kirklighter, Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi
Paula Mathieu, Boston College
Associate Editors: Libby Anthony, Virginia Tech
Leonard Grant, Virginia Tech
Kathleen Kerr, Virginia Tech
Molly Scanlon, Virginia Tech
Wendy Strain, Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi
Book Review Editor: Tobi Jacobi, Colorado State University
Editorial Assistant: Tana M. Schiewer, Virginia Tech
Editorial Board:
Hannah Ashley, West Chester University
Nora Bacon, University of Nebraska-Omaha
Adam Banks, University of Kentucky
Melody Bowdon, University of Central Florida
Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America/Syracuse University
Ellen Cushman, Michigan State University
Linda Flower, Carnegie Mellon University
Eli Goldblatt, Temple University
H. Brooke Hessler, Oklahoma City University
David Jolliffe, University of Arkansas
Linda Adler-Kassner, University of California, Santa
Barbara
Joyce Magnotto Neff, Old Dominion University
Kristiina Montero, Syracuse University
Patricia O’Connor, Georgetown University
Nick Pollard, Sheffield Hallam University
Luisa Connal Rodriguez, South Mountain Community
College
Barbara Roswell, Goucher College
Lori Shorr, Office of the Mayor, Philadelphia
Amy Rupiper Taggart, North Dakota State Unviersity
Adrian Wurr, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Copyright © 2012 New City Community Press
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any
means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or
by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission
from the publisher.
Member CELJ
Council of Editors of Learned Journals
http://reflectionsjournal.net
ISBN: 978-0-9840429-8-1
Cover Image by Jennifer Hitchcock
Design by Elizabeth Parks
Reflections, a peer reviewed journal, provides a forum for scholarship on
public rhetoric, civic writing, service learning, and community literacy.
Originally founded as a venue for teachers, researchers, students, and
community partners to share research and discuss the theoretical,
political and ethical implications of community-based writing and writing
instruction, Reflections publishes a lively collection of scholarship on public
rhetoric and civic writing, occasional essays and stories both from and about
community writing and literacy projects, interviews with leading workers
in the field, and reviews of current scholarship touching on these issues and
topics.
We welcome materials that emerge from research; showcase communitybased and/or student writing; investigate and represent literacy practices
in diverse community settings; discuss theoretical, political and ethical
implications of community-based rhetorical practices; or explore
connections among public rhetoric, civic engagement, service learning, and
current scholarship in composition studies and related fields.
Submissions: Electronic submissions are preferred. Manuscripts (10–25
double-spaced pages) should conform to current MLA guidelines for format
and documentation and should include an abstract (about 100 words). Attach
the manuscript as a Word or Word-compatible file to an email message
addressed to Cristina Kirklighter at Texas A&M University – Corpus
Christi ([email protected]). Your email message will serve
as a cover letter and should include your name(s) and contact information,
the title of the manuscript, and a brief biographical statement. Your name
or other identifying information should not appear in the manuscript itself
or in accompanying materials.
All submissions deemed appropriate for Reflections are sent to external
reviewers for blind review. You should receive prompt acknowledgement
of receipt followed, within six to eight weeks, by a report on its status.
Contributors interested in submitting a book review (about 1000 words) or
recommending a book for review are encouraged to contact Tobi Jacobi at
Colorado State University ([email protected]).
Articles published in Reflections are indexed in ERIC and in the MLA
Bibliography.
Contents
Reflections: Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing and Service Learning
Volume 12, Issue 1, Fall 2012
1
Editors’ Introduction:
Public Rhetoric & Activist Documentary
Diana George and Diane Shoos
9
54
Alternative Feminist Stories Cross the
Colombian-U.S. Border
with a preface by Paula Mathieu
Tamera Marko, Emerson College
When the Rhetorical Situation Calls Us Out:
Documenting Voices of Resistance and the
Making of Dreams Deferred— with a
preface by Kathleen Kerr
Jennifer Hitchcock, Northern Virginia Community
College
82
Dreams Deferred:
An Interview with the Filmmaker
111
Small Stories, Public Impact:
Archives, Film, and Collaboration
134
Kathleen Kerr, Virginia Tech
Katrina M. Powell, Virginia Tech
The Goals of Grassroots Publishing in
the Aftermath of the Arab Spring:
Updates on a Work in Progress
Stephen J. Parks, Syracuse Univerity
152
Community Future Casting:
Digital Storytelling to Inspire Urban
Solutions
Catherine Girves, Ohio State University Area
Enrichment Association
Lorrie McCallister, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Dickie Selfe, Ohio State University
& Amy Youngs, Ohio State University
160
Review of Stick ‘Em Up
164
Review of Exit Through the Gift Shop
Jennifer Wingard, University of Houston
Lauren Goldstein, New Mexio State Univerity
Editors’ Introduction:
Public Rhetoric and Activist
Documentary
Diana George
& Diane Shoos,
Editors
Public writing is a constant battle to make one view seem
inevitable in hopes that the audience will set aside the other
possibilities.
—Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Rhetorics for Community
Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics
Attention is being directed toward reality-driven
representations from an ever-wider array of sources:
journalistic, literary, anthropological.
—Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary
Watch the movie. Show it to others. Inform yourself. Get
active on the issue.
—from the “Dreams Deferred” DVD sleeve
T
he idea of public rhetoric, the first
term in this journal’s new subtitle,
might seem self-evident. The
language of political campaigning and party
platforms, the arguments that formulate (or
justify) policies and institutional practices,
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Reflections | Volume 12.1, Fall 2012
the calls for voter participation — all of this surely is what we might
think of as public rhetoric writ large. It involves masses of people,
national and international media, and well-known—or soon-to-beforgotten—public figures. It is, as Phyllis Ryder so deftly puts it, a
“battle to make one view seem inevitable.” Citizens all over the world
encounter that level of public rhetoric almost daily. It claims a special
importance — a right to dominate the press coverage — that, say,
a small neighborhood organization or local women’s interest group
could never hope to claim.
This issue of Reflections is dedicated to ways of thinking about public
rhetoric beyond those powerful special interest groups, government
policy wonks, or mainstream newsmakers because, of course, public
rhetoric cannot be isolated in the words of the powerful. As theorists
like Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (Public Sphere and Experience),
Michael Warner (Publics and Counterpublics), and Nancy Fraser
(“Rethinking the Public Sphere”) remind us, publics come together
around large and small needs. They are constituted by those outside
the power structure as well as within. Public rhetoric, then, is not
limited to political addresses, op-ed columns, or the like. It emerges
any time people push to have their voices (and their stories) heard —
any time they seek to set the record straight, change minds, or move
readers (or listeners, or viewers) to action.
What the articles in this issue of Reflections suggest is that
documentary broadly defined — especially as that form seeks to
disseminate marginalized voices or get out local, national, and
international stories too often muffled by the din of the powerful —
is a distinct and important kind of public rhetoric.
Michael Renov’s observation of almost 30 years ago on the expansion
of and interest in “reality-driven representations” (Theorizing
Documentary) continues today to be borne out by documentary’s
increasingly widespread commercial availability, which has made films
like An Inconvenient Truth and documentarians like Ken Burns familiar
household names. Television outlets like PBS, HBO, and Showtime
currently back documentary production and feature documentaries
in primetime schedules. Popular streaming sources like Netflix and
Amazon make documentaries that were once accessible only in
2
Editors’ Introduction
film studies libraries available to anyone with a subscription and a
streaming device or a DVD player.
Renov’s observations hold true, however, far beyond those mainstream
venues. With the exponential growth of multi-, digital, and mobile
media, documentary has assumed new, hybrid forms and sought
out new avenues of distribution, expanding its potential to reach
a wide variety of audiences in local, regional, national, and global
communities. Student and amateur filmmakers might not have access
to more traditional channels of production and distribution, but they
can make (and are making) documentary films that reach audiences
across the globe and in venues as varied as YouTube, Facebook,
personal blogs, classrooms, and community meeting spaces. Even
without the high production value studios offer, rapidly changing
digital technologies and access to increasingly user-friendly, midcost, high quality camera and recording equipment have the potential
to put documentary reporting into a community’s hands—whether
that is a local activist group, a town council, or an individual simply
wanting to get a different side of the story out, one that has its source
in voices too often left out of the conversation.
That is certainly the case with the documentaries featured in this issue
of Reflections. They serve different purposes—activism, education,
historical preservation, a retelling of political events—but they share
a common concern. That is, they seek to bring the least-heard voices
to the public. Moreover, they do that with seat-of-the-pants funding,
volunteer efforts, and the knowledge that distribution and circulation
will be a tough go.
The documentary projects that these contributors write of –whether
film, video, audio, or (in Steve Parks’ case) print—all grow out of a
desire to claim the rhetorical moment. Some, like Katrina Powell’s
backstory of the consequences for poor families of the creation of
the Shenandoah National Park, seek to recapture a hidden history.
Others, like Tamera Marko’s interviews with women from Medellín,
Colombia, or Jennifer Hitchcock’s interviews with Palestinian and
Israeli peace workers, argue for political awareness and, ultimately,
3
action. Still others, like the archival project Dickie Selfe and his
collaborative team present, seek to preserve stories threatening to
disappear as small neighborhoods change or disappear entirely. In his
discussion of the role community presses can (or, should) play in this
larger project, Steve Parks tells his readers, “I have come to believe
that long-standing community publication projects, like NCCP, need
to directly join their resources to the rhetorical and material work
of local and global activists, embedding democratic dialogue within
a call for progressive structural change.” His is a hard challenge but
one these contributors have taken up.
The documentary projects here are not products or artifacts in the
sense of fixed entities frozen in time as much as they are ongoing,
interactive forums for exchange (community screenings and question
and answer sessions, online blogs, community publications, and the
like). Moreover, of critical importance to many of the authors and the
projects with which they are associated is the documentary process,
which involves collaboration and dialogue among documentary
subjects, creators, and audiences. In the history of documentary,
this process has more typically been a one-way, linear path with little
or no interaction between, especially, documentary subjects and the
documentary audience, who are for the most part isolated points
at either end of the line. By contrast, the documentary projects
here trace complex circuits through subject, documentarian, and
audience that cross — in some cases multiple times (Marko) — and
where these figures also trade roles. In other words, there is a way
in which these types of documentaries undermine the sense of an
authoritative voice that controls the discourse of the documentary
— what film critics have called “the voice of God,” that narrator
familiar in much mainstream documentary who tells the audience
what they are seeing, why, and how to see it. In these projects there
is no naïve claim to “objectivity” but, rather, the open assertion that
all documentaries have a source and a perspective and that what
these projects contribute are perspectives that are often silenced or
disregarded, with consequences that are both personal and political.
New documentary forms bring with them issues that are in some
cases inherent in and in others intensified by the technologies that
make them possible. Primary among these issues is the question of
4
access or circulation, both in the sense of availability of the means to
tell and circulate stories, and in the sense of the opportunity to see,
hear, and respond to those stories. As our contributors remind us,
however, the very question of access is directly linked to questions
of power, politics, and social justice. Referring to the physical
displacement of the citizens of Medellin, Colombia, Tamera Marko
writes,
In a competition of who gets to tell the past, present and future
story of Medellín, desplazadas have the least access to circulating
their perspectives in citywide, national and global arenas. So
the desplazadas are displaced again, this time from their own
stories of displacement. This I call doble desplazamiento, double
displacement.
Haunted by this scarce circulation of desplazadas’ perspectives,
we began our archive project with a question: What happens
when the “official” and “popular” stories about your neighborhood
do not match what you archive in your family album?
Not only physical displacement but what Marko terms “double
displacement,” the separation of stories from their subjects and/
or their creators, is equally relevant to many of the documentary
projects here. The physical destruction of Palestinian homes and
the consequent displacement of the Palestinian people in Jenny
Hitchcock’s film lead to dilemmas that, while not identical to those
encountered by the displaced Colombians, are similar in their
consequences — the loss of an identity and a voice.
We conclude this issue with reviews of two documentaries that
comment on the role of street art as art or as activism. Jennifer
Wingard’s look at Stick ‘Em Up, a documentary on what has come
to be known as the wheatpaste street art movement, charges those
filmmakers with ignoring issues of “commerce, politics, or the larger
global street art movement” in favor of local aesthetics and single
artists – divorcing the action of street art from its potential (and
historical) revolutionary power. Wingard contrasts the insular vision
of Stick ‘Em Up with the much more self-conscious and politically
smart vision of Exit Through the Gift Shop, the subject of Lauren
5
Goldstein’s review. For both reviewers the question is less about the
artists themselves or even the art they produce than it is about the
documentarian’s vision – the importance of moving outside the self;
the understanding that activist documentary must be about more
than the individual or the single action.
Guest co-editor Diane Shoos is an Associate Professor of Visual
Studies and French in the Humanities Department at Michigan
Technological University where she teaches and publishes on film
and gender and visual representation. She recently completed
a monograph on domestic violence in Hollywood cinema and is
working on an anthology on adoption in the media. Her collaborative
work with Diana George has been published in a number of book
collections and journals, including College English, JAC, PostScript,
and Reader. This issue of Reflections is, in fact, their second co-edited
issue of a journal. More than thirty years ago, they began their work
together as guest editors for a 1990 edition of the journal Reader.
6
Works Cited
Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the
Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26
(1990): 56-80. Print. Negt, Oskar and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience :
Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Print.
Renov, Michael, ed. Theorizing Documentary. New York: Routledge,
1993. Print.
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books,
2002. Print.
The People Who Make Our Work Possible
If you are a subscriber, your issue will come to you with a DVD
of either Dreams Deferred: The Struggle for Peace and Justice in Israel
and Palestine by Jennifer Hitchcock or Medellín Mi Hogar by Tamera
Marko. We are privileged to make it possible for so many more people
to see these fine films. Of course, the addition of the DVDs meant
additional production and mailing costs, so we do have many people
to thank for helping us make that possible.
Jenny Hitchcock and her partner and collaborator Vernon Hall
provided the documentary and contributed directly to production
and mailings. Their film and companion website, in fact, planted the
first seeds of an idea for a special issue on activist and grassroots
documentary.
Filmmaker, teacher, scholar, and activist Tamera Marko contributed
a portion of her professional development funds from the Emerson
College-Boston First-Year Writing Program in the Department of
Writing, Literature, and Publishing to pay for producing copies of
Medellín mi Hogar.
7
Virginia Tech’s First-Year Writing Program provided a generous
grant to offset mailing costs for this issue. We particularly want to
thank Director of Composition Sheila Carter-Tod for representing
our cause and the English Department’s Composition Committee for
seeing this as a worthwhile project for a writing program to fund.
Reflections continues to be published through New City Community
Press, and so we owe a debt of gratitude to Steve Parks and the
people at NCCP for their ongoing support and hard work.
As well, the journal could not continue without support from our
subscribers and others who simply visit the website and purchase
whole issues or individual articles. If you are not currently a
subscriber, or if it’s time to renew your subscription, visit www.
reflectionsjournal.net or use the subscription form reproduced in the
back of this issue to keep the journal coming to your door.
Finally, the editors of Reflections welcome the fine work and insight
Diane Shoos of Michigan Technological University brought with
her when she agreed to co-edit this issue.
Watching and Sharing the Productions in this Issue
We don’t want to leave the rest of our audience behind. If you are
reading this issue in a library or your copy doesn’t include either
of the DVDs, you can still watch them by going to the Reflections
website where you will find links to Dreams Deferred http://
www.supportisraelfreepalestine.org, to Medellín mi Hogar http://
medellinmihogar.blogspot.com/ as well as to Community Future
Casting http://go.osu.edu/cfc-reflections, the community archive
project Dickie Selfe and his co-authors describe.
8
Disrupting Doble
Desplazamiento in
Conflict Zones:
Alternative Feminist Stories Cross the
Colombian-U.S. Border
Tamera Marko,
Emerson College
Preface
D
ocumentary film has the power to
carry the stories and ideas of an
individual or group of people to
others who are separated by space, economics,
national boundaries, cultural differences, life
circumstances and/or time. Such a power—to
speak and be heard by others—is often exactly
what is missing for people living in poverty,
with little or no access to the technologies
or networks necessary to circulate stories
beyond their local communities. But bound up
in that power is also a terrible responsibility
and danger: how does the documentarian
avoid becoming the story (or determining the
story) instead of acting as the vehicle to share
the story? How does she avoid becoming a
self-appointed spokesperson for the poor or
marginalized? Or how does he not leverage the
story of others’ suffering for one’s own gain
or acknowledgment? These questions become
even thornier when intersected with issues of
race, cultural capital, and national identity. One
9
might ask all of these questions to our next author, Tamera Marko,
a U.S. native, white academic who collects video stories of displaced
poor residents of Medellin, Colombia. How does she do this ethically,
in a way that performs a desired service within the communities that
she works, without speaking for them or defining their needs? Her
article, which follows, is a testament to that commitment.
Marko’s life’s work (to call it scholarship seems too small a word)
resides within a complex politics of representation, and she directly
takes on issues that others might shy away from. She provides a
stunning example of the tightrope academics can—and perhaps
should—walk, by leveraging the academic privilege she has to
provide international access to the stories of displaced residents of
Colombia, while working very hard to allow the residents to shape
and respond to the stories they tell and to control with whom they
are shared. There is probably no other working academic whose
work I admire more.
In her writing or talks, Tamera rarely says much about herself,
because, I suspect, she believes that the stories she helps circulate are
more important than are her personal stories. Not discussing herself,
however, does not mean that Tamera lacks a critical self-awareness
about the privileges that she has that the Colombian storytellers
do not. Yes, Tamera is white, blonde even. She has a Ph.D. in Latin
American History from University of California at San Diego. She
has taught at Duke University and is now the Assistant Director of
the First-Year Writing Program at Emerson College. Yet Tamera
herself is most aware of her vexed position. She has written a poetry
collection that explores the power and pitfalls of white privilege,
gender, and interracial relations. Before academia, she worked as a
journalist covering human rights in Africa, Asia, Latin America and
the United States.
Most significant, Tamera’s commitment to Medellin is deep and
continues to grow with each next trip she and her family take to
Colombia. Her husband and collaborator is Colombian; their
daughter is Colombian-American; more Spanish is spoken in their
home than English. And when Marko takes college students from
Duke and Emerson to Colombia to collect video stories of displaced
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Marko | Disrupting Doble Desplazamiento in Conflict Zones
women and families in Medellin, she takes the utmost care to gather
the stories with reverence, and circulate them without shaping or
claiming them. That reverence and care is imprinted on the pages of
the following article, which I am proud to see published in Reflections.
Marko sets the bar high for those academics in rhetoric and writing
studies who care about issues of economic justice and the power of
words to make meaningful social change. I am proud to call her a
colleague and friend.
—Paula Mathieu, Boston College
Introduction1
My name is Farconely Torres Usuga. [Our] neighborhood was
started by an elderly man, a friend. We were tired of paying
for rent because if we paid the rent, we could not feed the baby,
and if we fed the baby, we could not pay the rent and so…he
invited us to come with him to the top of this hill where he had
got a piece of land for him. … So we started collecting sticks
and materials and began building our new homes…The owners
denounced us [meaning the police came]. First, they knocked
down our houses, then, the second time, they burned them down
with the flag and everything.2 I sat to the side of the burning flag,
watching my house and everything I had burning, and I began
to cry. Because I knew they were never going to leave us alone.
Later when more people had settled, we were already 12 families
and we decided to get everyone together… and we all got on
a bus and went down to the government building to protest.
All of us women had our pillows perfectly in place [to appear
heavily pregnant] and we had given the children banana water
that they say makes them have to go to the bathroom. All of us
stood with our kids outside the building pooping and peeing all
over the place. We were demonstrating our need. And so finally,
they said yes, that we could live in our houses, and that nothing
would happen to them. … Then we looked at the paper they
gave us and realized there were no signatures. So, we stopped
11
the bus, turned it around, and went back to the city government
building, demanding that someone officially sign the paper. So
then they gave us a paper that said they would stop knocking
down our houses and burning them. … And when we got home,
everyone started singing “We have triumphed!” And every one
was shouting, “We have triumphed!” So we decided that since we
had triumphed, we would call the neighborhood El Triunfo.3
What I want to spotlight about Farconely’s story is not the story
itself—though her story and thousands of stories like it in Colombia
are important. I want to illuminate a different question. How did the
story move from her family album in Medellín, Colombia to publication
in this journal? Why and for whom is it important that this story has
crossed the U.S.-Colombian border? These questions, I argue, must
be considered in terms of the unequal power relations within which
transnational circulation of desplazadas’ stories happens. In Colombia,
people who are forced to flee their homes due to violence are called
desplazados.4 When desplazados self-settle in another region of the
same country, they are called “internally displaced.”5 This armed
conflict began during the period called La Violencia between 1948 and
1958 when the country erupted in war among guerrilla, military, and
paramilitary groups. In the last decade, the conflict’s intensification
has caused an estimated 4 million people to be internally displaced in
Colombia,6 making it the country with the world’s most internally
displaced people. Since the late 1970s, another dimension intertwined
in the conflict has caused massive displacement: narcotraffic.7 This
led to Medellín being declared the world’s most violent city in late
1991 and early 1992.8 Medellín is now home to Colombia’s second
largest population of internally displaced people.9 This represents
8% of the city’s 2.7 million people, not counting the metropolitan
area. At least half of these displaced are women. More than 40%
of Medellín residents live below the poverty line.10 As Farconely’s
narrative illustrates, however, displaced women’s stories are more
than their displacement. Over the past six decades desplazados have
built 15 sprawling neighborhoods in Medellín. Until the past decade
they have done so on their own, with little to no official state support.11
Since 2004, through three mayorships, desplazados have collaborated
with the City of Medellín in government urban interventions and
socio-political inclusion of stunning scope.
12
In a tragic irony, while they are the most “mobile” people in
Medellín—having moved from their hometowns to another one
foreign to them—desplazadas have the least mobility to circulate
their stories. Colombians of all socioeconomic standing are among
the most denied international travel visa applicants in the world.
In a competition of who gets to tell the past, present, and future
story of Medellín, desplazadas have the least access to circulating
their perspectives in citywide, national, and global arenas. So the
desplazadas are displaced again, this time from their own stories of
displacement. This I call doble desplazamiento, double displacement.
Haunted by the scarce circulation of desplazadas’ perspectives,
Jota Samper12 and I began our archive project with a question:
What happens when the “official” and “popular” stories about your
neighborhood do not match what you archive in your family album?
Our response in 2008 was to begin a transnational community literacy
story archive. We work with U.S. and Colombian university students
to craft documentary videos from our first-person interviews with
desplazados and the stories they narrate from their family albums. We
especially focus on the stories of displaced campesinos, subsistence
farmers who have fled violence in the countryside to build their
homes and communities in urban areas. Our documentaries put
their stories into conversation with research in archives, human
rights and government publications, media coverage, and academic
literature. We build this archive with U.S. and Colombian university
students and faculty, Medellín Solidaria13 social workers from the
City of Medellín’s Department of Social Welfare,14 and desplazados
and neighborhood founders in Medellín. Mobility in and out of the
neighborhoods where the storytellers live also requires that Medellín
Solidaria social workers vouch for the integrity of our university
students and faculty so that people in power there allow us, and the
stories we carry, to pass. Those with power include gang leaders,
church leaders, NGO workers, activists, and police who have come
to trust the social workers and the City of Medellín they represent.
Over the past five years, our project has organically evolved into
an ongoing alternative feminist archive of how women have built
the city of Medellín. Called medellín, mi hogar/my home medellín,15
it includes 2,300 hours of stories from 650 people. People choose
14
the stories they tell in their own images, written word, and artistic
performances. They tell their stories in their homes, where we
record them in photograph and video. We have edited 50 stories into
videos of ten minutes or less, which we circulate online and in film
festivals, exhibitions, and K-12 classrooms and beyond throughout
the Americas.
The desplazada-neighborhood founders’ stories contradict a
bifurcated, one-dimensional image of the state as overarching savior
or evil invader of their neighborhoods. Instead, the women’s stories
complicate the state’s public rhetoric of rescuing their neighborhoods
with another interpretation. Many of the desplazadas view what the
city government terms “the transformation of Medellín” as one
of the most recent (and largely welcome) state interventions in a
series of ongoing community collaborations that these same women,
their families, and neighbors have been directing for decades. These
stories highlight the feminist dimension to their roles in founding
their neighborhoods. That is, ways that women strategically wield
the power that Colombian culture grants mothers and grandmothers
to convince state leaders and male neighbors to improve quality of
life in their neighborhoods.
The strategic agency hundreds of desplazadas employ in building
their neighborhoods, however, must also be understood in the
context of two additional intertwining injustices. Both injustices
reinforce the unequal power relations involved in how women’s
stories move from their family albums to here on this page. First,
there is a direct relationship between the risks the storyteller makes
in telling her story and her relationship to the conflict in Colombia.16
Circulating their stories as video documentaries increases this
risk because the storytellers choose to be identified by face, name,
and neighborhood. Many of the storytellers in the archive openly
discuss armed actors17 who burned down their homes or murdered
their loved ones. Generally, the women do not frame this violence
in terms of support of these armed actors’ actions. Furthermore,
many women can identify these actors by face and name. This
unsupportive stance and ability to name names could inspire armed
actors or those who support them to commit more violence against
the women storytellers. Secondly, the storyteller’s risk is inextricably
15
intertwined with her ability to circulate her stories about it. Among
all of our archive’s collaborating participants, the desplazadas have
the most intimate and violent relationship to the conflict in Colombia,
take the most risk in telling their stories about it, and receive the
least rewards for doing so. Desplazadas also have the least access to
controlling their stories’ circulation. This is especially true when
circulating their stories across the Colombia-U.S. border.
In this context of unequal risk and circulation access, the storyteller’s
displacement from her own story of displacement poses the
greatest challenge to grounding our project in research as academic
contribution and activist social justice. This article discusses four
ways we experiment with our archive’s knowledge production and
circulation process to disrupt this doble desplazamiento and ways
that key community literacy projects and scholarship have inspired
and informed our experiments. First, we seek to disrupt traditional
research methods about desplazadas in Colombia by not separating
their first-person stories from the visual and aural frame of their
homes, neighborhoods, and family albums. This requires us to move
from written-word academic articles and human rights reports to
the genre of documentary video. Second, we expand the academic
revision process(es) between editor, writer, and peer reviewers
to include the storytellers in these roles. That is, we first listen
and respond to the critiques of the storytellers at our DVD debut
in a theater in Medellín. Third, we expand our target audience
by asking the storytellers whom they would like to receive their
stories and why. Throughout these three disruptions, we integrate
desplazados’-turned-neighborhood-founders’ perspectives on the
City of Medellín’s interventions in their communities since 2004
that include official access to the city’s water, electricity, and public
transportation. Fourth, when we return to Medellín, we bring
the storytellers photographs, videos, and written comments from
audiences where their stories have traveled. Running through the
marrow of our archive is a relentless question. How might we and
our audiences more justly wrestle with an ongoing contradiction: the
distance between the storyteller and her story that begins the minute
we academics and desplazadas part ways?
16
The Political Economy of Doble Desplazamiento
No one is quite sure anymore of how to reconcile feminist politics
of social transformation and international sisterhood with a
research practice in which relatively privileged academic women
seek out, record, and publish the edited voices of relatively
underprivileged women from somewhere else in the name of a
feminism to be borne across the border. (Behar 297)
What would a desplazada in Medellín have to do for her story,
and herself as its storyteller, to cross the U.S.-Colombian border?
Farconely would have to find access to a computer and someone
to help her read the U.S. visa application form online.18 For the
questions asking her if she has ever been engaged in illegal activities
in her country, she might pause, perplexed at how to answer.19 She
lives in a country in conflict that forced her to flee her home with
only the clothes on her back and her children in her arms. As a
displaced person she illegally “invaded” land owned by someone else
in Medellín to build her home and community. Is that illegal? She
must also apply for a passport, which many people can receive in one
day in Medellín. For this, however, she will have to get her cédula, her
national identity card, which she had lost on her journey to Medellín
or never needed in her rural pueblo where everyone knew everyone.
At the Municipal Office, social workers will ask her questions about
the town she fled, and they will try to contact her town’s surviving
residents and research media coverage of massacres there to prove
her identity and story. This could take months. She then must go to
a bank. On this day she hopes it does not rain because armed security
guards might not let her in with mud-splattered clothes. With a code
she buys at the bank, she must call a U.S. Embassy official who will
ask more questions before granting her an appointment in Bogotá.
If this official speaks English to her, Farconely will not understand.
If the 5-minute code she can barely afford is not enough to complete
the transaction, she must buy another code at the bank. If she is
granted an appointment she must ask for a letter of invitation from
someone in the United States who promises to provide food and
housing during Farconely’s stay there. It costs $70 to send this letter
to Farconely, who does not have a mailbox. Alternatively, Farconely
can find a place to print out the letter sent via email, which means she
17
must learn how to use email. Farconely must then make the 12-hour
bus ride through winding mountain roads between Medellín and
Bogotá. Bogotá, for residents of tropical Medellín, can feel bitterly
cold.
In Bogotá, a city of 9 million people with some of the world’s worst
traffic, Farconely must overcome her confusion over which three
bus changes she must make to arrive at the Embassy. There she will
wait outside in the courtyard open to the sky. She is afraid, as are
many others waiting, to go to the bathroom, for fear they will call
her name and she misses her appointment. For six hours she waits.
They call her name, and she stands tiptoe at the window to speak
through the holes drilled into bulletproof glass that separates her
from the Embassy official. The official speaks in English, “Why do
you want to go the United States?” “Are you planning on working
there?” The questions come in rapid fire. The official might not
look up from paperwork. When Farconely cannot respond out of
exhaustion or fear, the official will likely deny her application. She
cannot reapply for two years. The application form asks: “Have you
ever been denied a visa for travel to the United States? Explain.”
Often, when people answer yes, they are denied a visa again. Unless
she is applying for political asylum, she must hide her experience as
neighborhood founder and thus desplazada from U.S. embassy officials
18
because it reveals her poverty and direct connection with violence via
armed actors in direct contestation with the state. Poverty implies to
many Embassy officials that Farconely is going to the United States
to work, which is forbidden by a tourist visa. Her displacement at
the hands of armed actors implies to some Embassy officials that
Farconely herself might be a violent actor in the United States. The
entire visa application process, including her plane ticket, would cost
Farconely two years of income and more than one week off work. At
no point during this process is Farconely’s story part of the story.
What is the process for me, a white, native English-speaking U.S.
citizen and academic, to go to Colombia, document Farconely’s story,
and return to the United States to circulate it? Ten minutes booking
my plane ticket online in my home, 60 seconds at the immigration
booth in Medellín, and about one-quarter of one month of my family
income, an expense fully reimbursed by a university research grant. I
can conduct all these transactions in my native language. I do not ask
time off work because this is my work. At the airport in Medellín, I
am greeted with photographs of flowers on signs that say in English:
“Welcome to Medellín!” At the immigration booth, the official and
I speak eye-to-eye, with no bulletproof glass between us. No visa
application required. Farconely’s story as “my” research is central to
every juncture of my journey’s story.
19
Producing Knowledge About Displaced Women in Colombia
Hollywood movies, the media, and academic publications focus
largely on stories about Colombia in terms of violence, narcotraffic,
and poverty. Women as key actors in general are largely absent
from national histories of Colombia. Scholarship about women in
Colombia tends to position women within the frame of national or
local histories of violence: as warriors, narcotraffic dealers, or victims
of the conflict. This is similar for national (Colombian) and local
(Medellín) production.20 An exception to this is the groundbreaking
Colombia: Building Peace in a Time of War, a multi-authored book of
articles about international, national, state, and local peace initiatives,
edited by Virginia Bouvier. It is one of the first major publications to
focus on peace in the context of war.21 If you Google “woman” and
“Medellín,” you will find 15 pages dedicated to prostitutes, female
drug mules and assassins, sex tours, and mail order brides. If you
Google “displaced women in Medellín,” you will find links to blogs,
scholarly articles, and news reports about displaced women. The
pages, however, are often headed by a large ad that reads: “Lovely
Medellín Ladies – Connect With Medellín Women.” Below the title
reads: “View 1000s Verified Profiles. Safe site.” 22 The link routes you to
“AmoLatina.com,” which describes itself as “A Premium International
Dating Service.” A tourist’s monthly rent for a penthouse featured on
the website could pay to build more than 200 ranchitos23 desplazados.
In the virtual space of this Google page’s design, the image of
women as transnational sexual commodities who are “safe” and
“verified” for English speaking wealthy male tourists takes priority
over the perspectives and accomplishments of all Colombian women,
especially desplazadas.
In Medellín, there is a dizzying amount of careful and steadily
growing historical and cultural production about women’s rights,
many with a feminist approach. These projects produce a prolific
number of multi-media publications created by and about women,
including desplazadas.24 In 2002, the Municipality of Medellín
created the Metrowoman Undersecretariat,25 as in “women from the
city’s Metropolitan area.” It was linked to the Department of Citizen
Culture. In 2007, the Municipality created the Department of Women
whose mission is “to contribute to the equal rights and opportunities
between women and men and the reduction of discriminatory practices
20
that hinder the political, social, economic, and cultural development
of women in the Municipality of Medellín.”26 The Department
of Women especially focuses on addressing two discriminatory
practices against women. One is the violence and discrimination that
desplazadas in Medellín have to negotiate every day. The other one
is the violence that women experience in their homes at the hands
of their fathers, brothers, grandfathers, boyfriends, and husbands.
Throughout this famously literary city, people are sharing stories
about women’s experiences with violence and resilience. Women
share these stories around kitchen tables, on blogs, and in exhibitions,
posters, music, literature, and theater. Intertwined in these stories
are women’s efforts to grapple with the contradictory and painful
contexts of Roman Catholicism, machismo, narcotraffic, hunger,
gangs, and single motherhood. Women also talk about leaving their
role in the conflict.27 Women in their teens and early twenties who
were born into displaced families are now producing their own
cultural critique to counter sexual objectification of women and the
social stigma against girls who come from impoverished and violent
neighborhoods.28 Through this literature, it is clear that women
have been, and continue to be, courageous and effective actors in
negotiating truces, kidnapped hostage releases, and peace alliances
between warring groups.
Woven throughout these publications and conversations are also
two intertwining tensions. The first is a tension regarding women
breaking their silence about their experiences with the conflict in
Colombia and domestic violence in their homes. The second tension
focuses on gender norms that have five centuries of colonial roots
in Colombia: women’s place “at home” or “in the street.” Women are
pressured to “be good” by staying home or negotiate the negative
consequences of operating outside of it. Our archive’s stories
complicate this dichotomy of “house vs. street” because being displaced
means building your home in the unprotected space of the street and
protesting in the street29 to protect your home. Displaced women also
publish literature that critiques the ideal that city life is better than a
rural one.30 Many displaced women’s stories frame their negotiation
of these cross-class, house/street struggles as fundamental to their
identity and dignity as desplazadas and neighborhood founders.
21
A side effect of academic literature’s focus on the trauma of women’s
displacement is that it gives an impression of women as having a
precarious, illegal, and temporary position in Medellín. Everyday
rhetoric reinforces this impression. Land that people occupy without
purchase or title in Colombia is called un invasión. To represent
community founders’ agency, creativity, and strategy, Marlin Fianco
Aguime, Promoter of Cultural Development for the Cultural Center in
Moravia, explains, “I don’t like to use the word ‘invaders.’” Regarding
people who have built their own neighborhoods like Moravia, where
10,000 people built communities on and around the city’s trash dump,
she argues, “[i]t is better to use the term ‘colonizers’ because in history
when you talk about colonizers, you say that they founded a church,
built the houses, etc.”31 There is little scholarly work on how women
founded—post displacement—their homes and neighborhoods. Also
largely absent from scholarship about displacement, are women’s
perspectives on their place in Medellín as not just refuge, but home.
There is another powerful source of knowledge production about
displaced people in Colombia: The City of Medellín’s international
and national public relations campaign about what it calls “the
transformation of Medellín.”32 This campaign is tricky to disentangle
into a dichotomy of “good” or “bad” state power structures versus
an impoverished community. On one hand, publicity about a city
government that invests 60% over 10 years of its city budget on
“education,” that includes building 300 points of infrastructure with
state-of-the-art materials and design in the poorest, most violent,
and most isolated parts of the city deserves to be known. It is these
award-winning buildings, public spaces, and transportation between
them that have allowed us to do this story telling project. Medellín’s
Metrocable (gondola), built in 2006, moves between one metro station
in the city’s valley and some of Medellín’s poorest neighborhoods,
located 1,300 feet up the Andes mountains. This is the journey many
impoverished residents make between work and home to feed their
families that week or that day. The trip used to take 2.5 hours each
way. With the metrocable, the same trip now takes as little as 10
minutes, and the ticket includes access to the metro, which runs from
one end of the city to the other.
22
On the other hand, the city’s campaign about the transformation
of Medellín often positions itself in terms of “heroic rescue” of
the communities.33 This city-as-hero framing is targeted for city,
national, and international audiences outside of the neighborhoods
they help. Slick YouTube videos entice tourists to come to Colombia.
The tourism campaign slogan is, “Colombia: The Only Danger Is
Wanting To Stay.”34 The Medellín campaign is problematic not just
because of its myth of “rescue,” but also because it makes invisible
the labor, artistry, and expertise of thousands of community
members who had built dozens of neighborhoods five decades before
state support. This transformation is ongoing and being modeled in
other Latin American cities.35 The women neighborhood founders’
stories are crucial to understanding the impacts of interventions in
self-settled communities.
Why are desplazadas’ stories in sparse circulation by those who have
privileged mobility? Historian David Bushnell attributes limited
scholarship about Colombia to “faint-hearted” scholars’ decision to
study elsewhere based on fear of violence portrayed in the media.36
Virginia Bouvier credits “the drug-and-violence prism through
which the world tends to view Colombia” to news stories’ “policy
hooks.”37 She argues that “[s]ince most U.S. foreign aid thus far has
been earmarked” for the war, “other agendas—regional stability;
democracy, human rights, and the rule of law; socioeconomic
development and humanitarian needs; and peace initiatives—make
headlines only occasionally.”38
To these arguments regarding the sparse circulation of stories about
women’s self-settlement in Medellín, I would add another reason.
Usually, the only record of a desplazada’s life in her original hometown
before her displacement exists in personal photos she saves in her
family albums. These albums are also usually the only photographic
record of how they built their communities in Medellín and of
60 years of everyday life in them. Access to these albums requires
being invited into community founders’ homes. Most scholars
depend on university, media, and state archives for knowledge
about these communities. In these archives, information about
these neighborhoods mainly comes from military and paramilitary
incursions, police invasions, narcotraffic raids, and deadly floods and
23
fires. These are second- or third-person sources created by people
from outside these neighborhoods who usually have no personal
experience with being displaced.
Family Albums As Alternative Narrative Force: 4 Experimental
Disruptions
This archive’s circulation process is inspired by ways that Steve Parks’
New City Community Press39 and Diana George and Paula Mathieu’s
work on Hobo News seeks to circulate stories told in the words and
images of under-represented socio-economically oppressed groups.40
Our archive has been especially informed by Paula Mathieu’s “Not
Your Mama’s Bus Tour,” in which she held writing workshops
with unhoused adults in Chicago. This tour’s audience engagement
involves the mobility we imagine for our archive process in Medellín.
The Chicago group wrote scripts and choreographed a bus tour to
show residents and tourists their city. This city is a stark alternative
to the official Chicago bus tours, which focuses on wealthy areas,
monuments, parks and gleaming architecture in the image of “The
American Dream.” This alternative bus tour revealed the city living
in poverty, crime, racism and political abandonment. In addition to
the performative textual nature of this project, what strikes me about
“Not Your Mama’s Bus Tour” is that the storytellers were not only
accompanying their own stories as they told them to an audience.
These storytellers were moving their audience to the spaces and
contexts where their stories happen. This reverses the circulation
flow of stories traveling to the audience. In this traditional flow,
the stories become a sanitized version of words on paper abstracted
from the flesh-and-blood storyteller: a text (without context). Unless
readers can connect their own lived experiences to this text, they
can only read this story with one out of their five senses. They never
have to smell, taste, hear, or feel the story. Scholars have proven that
the more we engage information with all of our senses, the more we
retain what we learn. Thus, the more it can mean to us. This kind
of approach to a pedagogy of experiential learning created through
community-university collaboration inspired and sustains the archive
medellín mi hogar.
24
This section outlines the genealogy of this story archive. This
genealogy begins with the City of Medellín’s radical changes in
how it engages with displaced communities in Medellín. It was
these changes that make documenting these stories in the archive
possible. In 2008, the City of Medellín’s Secretaría de Bienestar Social41
founded Medellín Solidaria in a painstaking process of official statecommunity encounters throughout Medellín. These encounters took
place in neighborhoods that displaced people had self-settled over the
previous 50 years, with little official state support. The process began
with hundreds of social workers who, wearing blue vests with the
Medellín Solidaria logo, began walking into neighborhoods that had
been ignored by city public transportation due to fear of entering
the city’s most violent streets. They walked into communities where
for years narcotraffic and other armed leaders had blocked outsiders
from entering without their permission. The community residents
also had reason to fear and resent representatives from the city
government, who over the past few decades had ordered military
and police incursions into their neighborhoods and also looked the
other way when armed groups burned down their houses. House to
house, the social workers walked, asking if families wanted to speak
with them about their rights as Colombian citizens and Medellín
residents. Many people slammed doors in the social workers’ faces.
Some residents pulled guns. Some people invited the social workers
into their homes and offered them café con leche. Over the course of a
year, the social workers walked hundreds of miles. They risked their
lives crossing fronteras invisibles, invisible borders marking gang,
guerrilla, and paramilitary turf. City government vans transported
Medellín Solidaria participants to and from their homes to government
buildings downtown. The social workers would point to the Mayor’s
Building and say, “This is your building.”42 They showed community
members how to process paperwork. The city government began
fulfilling its promises to provide cement floors to cover dirt ones
and access to potable water and other basic services, usually free of
charge. News spread among residents that they might be able to trust
this government program. These social workers could actually be
a viable non-violent move toward connecting displaced residents in
Medellín with city resources.
This social welfare office cannot be easily critiqued into a scholarly
activist box and tied up with a state-as-panopticon theoretical bow. In
25
the context of Medellín, with ongoing violence and more displaced
people arriving every day, being a state social worker means being
a communications bridge between community members—the same
members the state previously abandoned—and armed actors who
are in direct contest with the state and the military. Social workers
also represent the front lines of communication between community
residents and the last three mayorships in Medellín. Former mayor
Sergio Fajardo (2004-2007) and subsequent mayor Alonso Salazar
J. (2007-2011) were the first Medellín mayors in 100 years not to
come from the two-political parties (Liberal and Conservador) whose
war with each other had prompted La Violencia. The current mayor
Aníbal Gaviria (2012-1015) is affiliated with the Partido Liberal but
he came into power through an alliance between his party and the
Independent Party led by Sergio Fajardo.
In 2008, a year before the Medellín Solidaria social workers began
walking into displaced people’s neighborhoods, Jota Samper and
I founded a study abroad civic engagement project with Duke
University’s DukeEngage pilot initiative. DukeEngage funds Duke
undergraduate students to participate in one of 42 civic engagement
projects worldwide. Called DukeEngage Colombia, the project which
Jota and I still direct brings U.S. university students to live and work
26
in Medellín for eight weeks in the summer. This project’s purpose
is dedicated to human rights, not through social work but through
social consciousness. We focus on ways students’ lived experience in
Medellín can help dismantle local and global stereotypes that reduce
Colombia to nothing more than violence, drugs, and poverty.43
In 2008, we brought DukeEngage Colombia’s first five U.S.
students into self-settled neighborhoods, but under heightened
safety conditions. Students ran free art and sports workshops with
children and adults inside the Parques Bibliotecas, or Library Parks,
which the City of Medellín had just built in what had been the most
isolated neighborhoods throughout Medellín. Like all government
and many cultural centers in Medellín, these Library Parks are
patrolled by armed security guards. Our students were among the
first foreigners to give workshops in these Library Parks, which had
just opened their doors to 1,500 visitors a day. We quickly realized
that our greatest privilege as U.S. students and faculty from an elite
university in the United States was our mobility, our time, and the
way Medellín residents from various neighborhoods welcomed our
presence. Medellín residents wanted to share their stories with us
simply because we had come to their city despite the city’s reputation
for violence that for two decades had scared tourists and foreign
residents away. Jota and I worked with the students to develop what
we saw as our responsibility among community members: to listen.
When these Duke students graduate, they will likely become people
with power: doctors, journalists, public policy analysts, professors,
lawyers, and scientists. A core intention of DukeEngage Colombia
is that the students’ experience in Medellín will instill an ongoing
questioning of their responsibility to human rights and an awareness
of how they move through the world impacts people’s rights.
The following year’s DukeEngage Colombia students worked with
the Library Parks staff in Medellín to make video documentaries
about some of the city’s new urban infrastructure and cultural
programming. This time Jota and I gave the students more freedom
to move around the city and neighborhoods. We worked with the
historical memory project Sala Mi Barrio, located in the city’s five
Library Parks.44 At each park, we circulated by flyer and word of
mouth an invitation for people to share any story they wanted. To our
27
surprise, within three days, more than 1,000 people signed up. When
we realized that more than 90% of the 250 people we interviewed
were campesina desplazadas who had founded their neighborhood in
Medellín, the idea for our alternative feminist archive was born.
After debuting our archive’s first DVD to the storytellers in the
videos in August 2009, the City of Medellín’s Department of Social
Welfare45 invited us to make documentaries with families who were
collaborating with Medellín Solidaria. For the last three summers,
DukeEngage Colombia has worked with Medellín Solidaria on the
archive. Every summer, each of our eight students spends four days
a week, waking up at dawn, to walk with a Medellín Solidaria social
worker on her route visiting families’ homes. This collaboration with
the social workers has moved our students out of the Library Parks
and deep inside the neighborhoods and people’s homes. The students
accompany the social workers via metro, bus, metrocable, and on
foot up into neighborhoods 1,300 feet into the Andes Mountains.
Other students travel by horse, taxi, and motorcycle forty minutes
into Medellín’s rural municipalities, where they then walk another
hour on unpaved paths to people’s homes. The families are supposed
to be informed that the students are coming and are invited to tell
any story they like. The family members receive the student and
social worker in their home. There the student photographs and
video records women and their families telling a story in their own
words and images. We specifically ask how they built their home
and neighborhood and their perspectives on the City of Medellín’s
recent socio-urban interventions.
DukeEngage has played a fundamental role in not just funding
student researchers to work on this archive, but also in negotiating
the bureaucratic and legal structures to facilitate students to come
to Colombia as part of an official university initiative. This allows
students to become co-writers and co-caretakers of first-person
stories they otherwise would encounter in a more abstract form, like
in a book about a country they have never been in and about people
they have never met. This first-person connection with the stories and
the storytellers often heightens the students’ sense of responsibility
to them. Many universities in the United States will not allow official
student programs in Colombia for fear of the State Department’s
28
travel warning for this country.46 Throughout our process with the
students in Medellín, Jota and I run multi-media research writing
workshops. To edit the video stories for an audience not familiar with
Colombia, we guide students’ further research in newspapers, oral
interviews, books and archives. The students’ research moves first to
the women’s photo albums and then to the city’s official archives. This
methodology is significant because it reverses the traditional archivecentric research flow by placing desplazadas as first-person narrators
at the core of each story. The move from written-word articles to
the multi-modal genre of documentary video further contextualizes
this focus on the first-person desplazada narrator by including
the storyteller’s home and neighborhood in the story’s visual and
aural frame. Amidst widespread images of women as sexualized
commodities and warriors or victims, our videos fight (genre) fire
with (genre) fire. Documentary video is also an attempt to disrupt
doble desplazamiento and move closer to keeping the storyteller with
her story as it moves. I argue that channeling university resources
to keep the storyteller with her story as it moves across borders,
is fundamental to John Trimbur’s framing of circulation as part of
“the unfinished work of the democratic revolutions to expand public
forums and the popular participation in civic life.”47
Then we attempt to disrupt doble desplazamiento a second way.
We expand the academic revision process(es) between editor,
writer, and peer reviewers by listening first to the critiques of the
storytellers. At our DVD debut in a theater in Medellín, hundreds of
storytellers—as protagonists, audience, critics, and respondents—
are the largest presence in the room. In a temporary inversion of
power, the community members have more prestige and voice than
the politicians, social workers, media, and university people also
present. The community members’ stories move across the massive
film screen and boom through the speakers. The storytellers fill the
majority of the 400 theater seats. After each video, the storyteller and
audience members critique the student and the archive director. This
face-to-face critique immediately after we experience their stories on
“the big screen” is nerve wracking for all of us. More than one student
has burst into tears before the debut out of fear that she did not get
a woman’s story “right,” thus dishonoring the storyteller. Here the
desplazadas-neighborhood founders hold us responsible for the way we
tell and circulate their stories. This sense of responsibility between
29
story documenter (student) and storyteller (desplazada) is crucial
because it is nearly always the last time the students will be face-toface with the storytellers. It is this intensity of personal interaction
that we hope will continue to inspire the students to circulate the
stories when they leave Colombia. When the storytellers decide the
edited version reflects what they want communicate, we circulate the
stories throughout the Americas and online.
There is a third way we seek to expand the storyteller’s ability to
influence circulation of her own stories. We ask the storytellers
whom they would like to receive their story and why. Women have
asked that their stories circulate to state representatives, community
members, hospitals, human rights groups, youth, employers, armed
group leaders, warriors who wish to leave the conflict, and universities.
Some women ask that their stories circulate to neighborhoods from
which they are isolated by geography or invisible borders controlled
by armed groups. Many women, such as Farconely, want their stories
included in the official physical maps of Medellín. Luz Amparo
Duque Garcés, who in 2010 had lived in neighborhood of Blanquizal
for 9 years with her 5 children, wanted to record a public-service
announcement to sustain her community garden.48 While touring the
garden with 12-foot tall trees lush with sweet-smelling tropical fruit
and flowers, Luz explains to a student, “We brought the trees and
fruits that grew on the street, and we began planting them. Mango,
lime, orange, lulo … the banana tree.”49 In this area that used to be
a trash dump, people from outside the neighborhood still illegally
deposit trash, including medical waste, which contaminates the
community well.
Marta Libia Velez Yepes, wants people to take care of “her stairs,”
in the neighborhood she co-founded.50 When she arrived 30 years
ago there were none of the drainage channels, which she and her
neighbors built. “There was absolutely nowhere to walk,” she says.
“And the houses would flood from the water that came down the
mountain. Everything would get ruined.” Every 8 days they sold
empanadas to raise money for supplies. She explains:
I would go house to house and the wives would tell me, “Look,
he doesn’t want to wake up.” So [with the wive’s permission], “I
30
would enter the house and pull them [the men] outside and say,
“Do you want to keep living in the mud?” That’s how I would get
them to come outside and help.
Looking at her stairs out her livingroom window in the house she and
her family built, she adds with a grandmotherly smile, “the person
who throws trash out here has to reckon with me.”
Many women want to tell why they are willing to work with a state
government that has in the past burned down their homes or done
nothing about it. A young university student narrates with pride
how much she loves her home in the neighborhood of Moravia and
is grateful for her state-funded education grant.51 This home is on
the same plot of land where the state had burned down her home
12 times in her lifetime. Marta Nelly Villada Bedoya said when she
was first displaced she relocated herself and her family to Pereira,
where she built a ranchito. “I had been living there for 15 days when
Control Físico came and knocked it down and burned it.”52 As Marta
Nelly speaks, she holds up newspaper clippings showing her and her
family sitting outside in the dirt next to where their home had just
been destroyed. “They burned my roof, all the walls. Everything. I
31
just took out my beds, my storage closet and my clothes. And since I
had a newborn baby, I laid her in the crib outside in broad daylight.”
She was one of 40 families who, as one newspaper reports, “woke
up yesterday to the sound of machines destroying their homes.”53
The next day “government employees from Control Físico, Public
Works, and more than 200 policemen began evacuating families out
of the invasion settlement.”54 A day later, a different government
commission brought humanitarian aid.55 A few years later, Marta
Nelly received visits from Medellín Solidaria, which she says have
“given me inspiration to keep going.” Like many women, she archived
these newspaper clippings in her family album.
The women’s desire to communicate their stories also risks
damaging their amicable relationship with the city government and
their reputation in their community. One woman asked us to make
two versions of her video about her love for her children. One that
revealed she sold her body at night to feed her children. The other
obscured how she earned money. This was so her young children
could attend the theater debut and not learn that about their mother
yet.56 Several stories are from Moravia, the city’s trash dump from
1973-1983, where more than 10,000 people had made their homes on
the dump’s morro, the mound of trash covering 18.7 acres of land.
Many Moravia founders want to communicate to politicians, urban
planners, and social workers that while they are grateful for the
City of Medellín moving them off “the hill” to new public housing
apartment buildings, this move also cost them painful sacrifices.57
Maria Consuelo Soto Gomez arrived with her family in 1980. On
The Hill, she says, “the people were united,” and there was a women’s
cooperative where she and her mother worked.58 “You saw everyone
everyday with their baskets, with their sacks, and with their hoes and
their shovels, rummaging there in the trash.” She adds:
It was the life, because most people found new things; I can say
from experience that [we found] curtains, little packages of
things; new shoes, everything new. It was a success because no
one recycled. Many people lived off that and it was very good.
To me it seemed like a beautiful hill, like a market. But then, we
were removed because they said we couldn’t live there anymore.
The people were sad, because many of them lived off what they
found.”
32
Also complicating circulation of the desplazadas’ stories is the
women’s fear that telling their stories will risk their lives. Sometimes
women regret details they revealed in their stories and ask us to
burn the footage. We do. Other times, we wrestle with a tension
between destroying record of a woman’s “story truth” and risking
the storyteller’s life. One woman named the people who had caused
a fire that had obliterated a neighborhood where she lived. Later, she
asked us to remove these names. We researched newspaper archives
for evidence to cite the same information. This research proved
inconclusive, but word of mouth in the neighborhood was consistent
with her story. In the end, we did not name who caused the fire in
the video version. With her permission, we kept the written-word
transcript with the names for future record. Another woman Sobeida
Tinoco was born in the rural town Cudinamarca in Bogotá.59 She is a
descendant of one of Colombia’s oldest indigenous tribes, the Muisca
de Indios. Sobeida explains how she became displaced from Urubá in
1995. “There were paras [paramilitaries] there and after the paras
came the army, followed by the guerrillas. So one was stuck in the
middle of this conflict between three armed gangs.” She continues,
I went to protest in the marches, because they [members of
all three groups] came into the field and didn’t let us work.
They were fighting for territories and also for [power over]
organizations. The guerrillas arrived at my house. I couldn’t tell
them, ‘No, I won’t do this favor for you.’ I had to give them a tax
[food and other supplies in return for sparing her life.] Finally,
came the day when they [the paramilitaries] arrived at my house
at six in the morning.
This raid was one of the dozens of massacres in Urubá between
the 1980s and the early 2000s. These massacres in the banana zone
killed hundreds and displaced thousands. The paramilitaries had
come accusing Sobeida and other campesinos of collaborating with the
guerrillas. For six years after the raid, Sobeida fled her attackers from
city to city with her three children. She never saw her husband again.
When her daughter was 9, the paramilitary members kidnapped her
daughter. A U.S. nun from the International Red Cross in Colombia
eventually found her daughter hidden in a convent in Medellín and
returned the little girl to Sobeida. Sobeida eventually decided to
33
settle with her children in Medellín on a plot of land that belonged
to her uncle’s wife. This neighborhood had been one of Medellín’s
most dangerous neighborhoods in the 1990s and early 2000s due
to violence, especially daily shootouts. With help she sought from
the government, NGOs and international agencies, Sobeida has
since remodeled her house that now has running water, electricity,
a kitchen, gleaming tile floors and framed pictures of her family
adorning the freshly painted walls.
The week before the archive’s August 2012 DVD debut, a Medellín
Solidaria social worker went to Sobeida’s home to explain that the
city government would provide transportation to and from the
theater where the video version of her story would show. Sobeida
told the social worker she had changed her mind and did not want her
story shown in the debut. She wanted the video to be edited so her
face was covered and so she was not identified by name. Jota Samper,
the archive’s co-director and Medellín native, called Sobeida to ask
what had happened. Sobeida informed him that she had gone “to
declare” details of her displacement in Bogotá for a housing grant,
which she received. She had to again name names of those who had
burned down her house and kidnapped her daughter. Sobeida says
that after she had gone to Bogotá this time, she heard someone was
murdered in her neighborhood. This murder could have been a totally
34
unrelated event. Scared, however, that this murder could somehow be
related to her “naming names,” Sobeida said she no longer felt safe
enough to circulate her story. Jota asked her if she would like to come
to the debut for a private showing of her video. She agreed. That
morning she called to say that she could not come. Without Sobeida’s
permission, we would not distribute the DVDs with her story on it.
We debuted the other stories with the storytellers present, but made
arrangements to destroy all 500 DVDs and republish them without
Sobeida’s story.
Alexa Barrett, the student who had interviewed Sobeida, and Jota
still wanted to fulfill their promise to show Sobeida the final version.
They also wanted to give Sobeida a copy of the entire uncut interview
and accompanying photographs as well as a DVD with the 14 other
edited stories. Story documenters do this for every one of the 650
people interviewed for the archive. Jota called Sobeida and asked if
he and Alexa could show her the edited version of her story in the
privacy of her home. Sobeida agreed. At dawn the next day, Jota and
Alexa traveled to Sobeida’s home. Alexa says, “When we walked into
her home, Sobeida gave me a big hug and was so happy to see us.” 60
She first watched the video story of a woman whose husband had
also been murdered by paramilitaries, forcing her to flee her beloved
rural town with her son. This woman lives with her now grown
son in another neighborhood she helped found in Medellín. Sobeida
murmured, “Oh, I know someone who would really be interested in
seeing this.”61 She said she felt connected to the woman because of
their similar experiences as campesinas and desplazadas and urban
neighborhood founders. Then she watched the video of her own
story. In the end, Sobeida said she wanted to circulate the video story,
emphasized how much it meant to her that Jota and Alexa made the
effort to come show the story to her in her home, and asked to be
invited to future public showings of her story.
There is a fourth way we attempt to expand women’s access to
circulation of their own stories. When we return to Medellín, we
bring the storytellers photographs, video, and written comments
from audience members where their stories have traveled. This is our
most difficult promise to fulfill, especially when a woman chooses to
35
tell a story that might put her life at risk. An indigenous community
leader in Medellín, Morelia, had worked for decades with children,
combating racism and trauma in contexts of war and poverty.62 As
part of her after-school programs, she rewrote lyrics to popular
Colombian children’s songs. In a song similar to “Simon Says,”
but where “The King” gives orders, Morelia adds a character: an
indigenous female folk healer called La Chamana. The children are to
disobey the King and obey La Chamana. The first thing La Chamana
asks is for the children to hug each other. When we returned to bring
Morelia news of where her story had traveled this year, we learned
she had fled her home because paramilitary members had threatened
to kill her because she refused to support them.63
Inflection Points & Ongoing Contradictions
This article discusses four ways we experiment with our archive’s
knowledge production and circulation process to disrupt doble
desplazamiento, a woman’s displacement from her own story of
displacement. (1) We choose the genre of documentary video to keep
a woman’s first-person story within the visual and aural frame of
her home and community. (2) We include the storytellers as active
members of the revision process in a theater debut of their edited
video stories. (3) We ask the storytellers whom they wish to read
their story and why. (4) We bring to the desplazada storytellers in
Medellín feedback from audiences where the women’s stories have
traveled. My experience with this kind of literacy project in which
story, storyteller and audience interact has always made it harder
for me to abstract the story and storyteller as existing outside of
her relationship with me. Jota and I created this archive medellín
mi hogar because we believe this relationship means that we are
responsible to the storyteller and her story. Our sense of relationship
and responsibility is deepened by the direct relationship between the
risks the storyteller makes in telling her story and her relationship
to the conflict in Colombia.64 Making stories as videos increases this
risk because the storytellers choose to be identified by face, name
and neighborhood. Women with the most intimate and violent
relationship to the conflict take the most risks in telling their stories
and have the least access to controlling circulation of them. Scholars
often have the most indirect relationship to the conflict in Colombia
and thus risk the least.
36
Jota and I are now working with storytellers, students, faculty, and
social workers who want to circulate the archive’s stories. I ask
each person to identify her privileged access to sites of knowledge
production: neighborhoods, cities, the media, human rights groups,
film festivals, and universities. We seek to locate inflection points
among these sites where dominant knowledge production about
Colombia circulates. Over the past three years, the time and energy of
people working on this archive has been absorbed with documenting
the stories. The archive’s stories have circulated to hundreds of
people worldwide. But this has happened in a rather haphazard and
spontaneous manner that depends largely on people finding our
website, or teachers and film festival directors requesting a showing.
Our archive’s goal is for women, especially desplazadas, to insert
themselves into the dominant circulation of stories about who built
the city of Medellín. With this in mind, we are mapping what we
call “rhetorical inflection points”—film festivals, media outlets, blogs,
scholarly forums and educational curriculums—where circulating our
archive might be effective as an alternative transnational narrative
force. Our map is concerned with two questions. How might we
exponentially repeat our DVD debut theater moment inversion of
power? And what happens when the (re)presentational context is
abstracted from the flesh and blood woman who tells the story and is
reduced to a documentary of it—from person to object?
Our first inflection point is at meetings with the City of Medellín
officials who are working on current urban interventions in
the desplazadas’ neighborhoods. We are especially dedicated to
circulating the desplazadas’ stories to city officials who are creating
a new City Plan. This plan will project how the population of
the city will grow in the next 20 years and ways the government
will allocate infrastructural and socio-economic resources to city
residents. As noted above, the desplazada-neighborhood founders’
stories contradict a bifurcated one-dimensional image of the state as
overarching savior or evil invader of their neighborhoods. Instead,
the women’s stories complicate the state’s public rhetoric of rescue
with another interpretation: they view what the city government
terms “the transformation of Medellín” as one of the most recent
(and largely welcome) state interventions in a series of ongoing
37
community collaborations that these same women, their families,
and neighbors have been directing for decades. Their stories could
contribute a feminist dimension to the City Plan. The plan could be
informed by the desplazadas’ experiences founding and sustaining
their own neighborhoods by strategically wielding the power that
Colombian culture grants mothers to convince people to improve
quality of life there. This year, Jota and I are circulating the stories to
those creating the City Plan for Medellín and to audiences throughout
the Americas and online. Inspired as much by the storytellers and
their stories as I am haunted by our archive’s contradictory unequal
distribution of power, I hope the circulation of our archive’s stories
can sustain a more inclusive and thus more accurate narrative force
that represents women’s roles as desplazadas and neighborhood
builders in the last sixty years of conflict and resilience in Colombia.
Tamera Marko specializes in multi-lingual, multi-media,
transnational community literacy projects in the Americas. She
founded an alternative feminist documentary video archive of
desplazadas’ stories in Medellín, Colombia, with Emerson College,
Duke University, and MIT. Marko has worked as a human rights
journalist in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the U.S. She is Assistant
Director of the First Year Writing Program at Emerson College.
Tamera earned her Ph.D. in Latin American history at the University
of California at San Diego in 2001.
38
Notes
1 I wish to thank the many people in Colombia and the United
States, who over the last five years have generously given their
time to this archive project. This article is dedicated to the 650
women and their families who shared their stories for this archive.
I also thank Eric Mlyn for taking the chance to include my
DukeEngage Colombia project among the first DukeEngage pilot
programs, when most universities in the United States would not
officially endorse bringing students to Colombia. I wish I could
individually name here the many people from Duke University;
Emerson College; the Alcaldia de Medellín; the Secretaria de
Bienestar Social and its Programa Medellín Solidaria; Agencia
de Cooperación e Inversión de Medellín y el Área Metropolitana;
the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín; SosPaisa;
AULA Internacional; and the families of Carlos E. Restrepo. I
thank Ryan Catalani who came to Medellín and helped video edit
and created a documentary about this archive as well as a website
that houses all of medellín mi hogar’s edited videos. I especially
thank those who generously critiqued my writing about this
archive: Jota Samper, John Trimbur, Anupama Taranath,
Suzanne Hinton, Clara Elena Mojíca Vélez, Estephanie Vásquez
Gutiérrez, Alexander Silva Carmona, Natalia Isabel Pérez
Villegas, Fabian Adolfo Beethoven Zuleta Ruiz, Hugo Rafael
Avendaño Ramírez, and Diana George. I especially thank Diane
Shoos for her multiple critiques on this article, which have had a
profoundly meaningful impact on this final version. I also thank
Gloria for keeping our Medellín home in order and my family on
both sides of the border whose care for our daughter and other
domestic love and labor makes it possible for Jota and me to do
this project.
2 At this time in Medellín, there was an unspoken understanding
between the state armed forces and the communities (a loophole
in the Colombian constitution) in which any homes with a
Colombian flag raised would not be torn down when the army or
police was sent to “clear out” the settlements.
39
3 José Samper et al. Because the stories told in this article are
meant to be read in their multimedia format, the storytellers and
I invite you to read the written word text and watch the videos as
you move along or watch the videos after you finish reading the
written word text. The internet links to each video story appear
in the text or endnote the first time a woman’s story is mentioned.
For Farconely’s story see http://youtu.be/ljD9w6PuSGw.
4 In Spanish, women who are displaced are called desplazadas.
5 See Yacoub and Bouvier 2009.
6 The 1948-1958 period in Colombia known as La Violencia was
sparked by the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a populist
Liberal Party leader. The Partido Conservador (Conservative
Party) had just been elected into national office, evicting the
Liberal Party that had been in office for the past 16 years. See
Bushnell and Unidad de Atención a la Población Desplazada.
7 For a detailed account of drug wars in Colombia and the U.S.
involvement in it, see Kirk 2003
8 In 1992, Medellín was known as the most dangerous city in the
world, due to the number of homicides per month in that city.
See Ceballos.
9 According to data from the Personería, la Unidad de Atención a
los Desplazados (perteneciente al Municipio de Medellín), y Acción
Social, antigua Red de Solidaridad Social, 21,596 displaced people
were registered in 2000; 20,469 in 2002, and 7,536 in 2005. As
of August 31, 2011, there were 216,288 people registered as
displaced in Medellín, living in 52,769 homes. This represents
8% of the city’s population of 2.7 million people, not counting
the metropolitan area. This makes Medellín home to the second
largest population of internally displaced people in Colombia,
a country with the largest number of displaced people in the
world. See Unidad de atención a la población desplazada 2011.
40
10See Encuesta de calidad de vida 2004. http://www.medellin.gov.
co/irj/portal/ciudadanos?NavigationTarget=navurl://6d39e61
8cf27dc5d27abf891c0a35b4a
11 In a complex legal argument used to justify what some criticize as
the city government’s socio-economic abandonment of displaced
people for six decades, the desplazados were squatting on land in
Medellín, and thus by law the city government could not officially
provide them with city resources. Instead of evicting people,
which they state could have legally done, the state just looked the
other way. This was partly because many assumed “the squatters”
were a temporary consequence of war. See Samper “Granting of
Land Tenure” 2012.
12 Jota Samper was born and raised in Medellín, and his teenage
and early university years were in the 1990s when bombs
were exploding daily throughout his city. He has worked as an
architect for the last 16 years and has done projects in informal
settlements (what some call self-settled or slum communities) in
seven countries. He has a master’s degree in urban planning from
the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where
he is now a Ph.D. candidate. For his professional biography
and articles informed by this archive, see his blog http://
informalsettlements.blogspot.com/p/medellin.html.
13 Medellín Solidaria literally translates as Solidarity Medellín.
14 Departamento de Bienestar Social.
15 See our edited video stories on mobility17.com.
16 For a more extensive argument regarding these risks that all
actors in our archive, see my forthcoming chapter “We Also Built
the City of Medellín: Deplazadas’ Family Albums as Feminist
Archival Activism” in Taking Risks: Feminist Stories of Social
Justice Research in the Americas.
41
17 In Colombia, ongoing conflict happens between groups that can
be understood in terms of those who are officially from the state
and those who are not. There are at least eight distinct state and
nonstate groups all in conflict with each other. Those from the
state include the military and the police. Those not from the
state include paramilitary, narcotrafficers, gangs and three active
guerrilla groups (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia —
Ejército del Pueblo—FARC–EP; Ejército de Liberación Nacional—
ELN (National Liberation Army); ELN and Movimiento 19 de
Abril – M-19. The English translations of the guerrilla groups
respectively are the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
– People’s Army; the National Liberation Army; and the 19th of
April Movement. The latter group “demobilized” by giving up
its weapons to the government, received pardons, and became
a political party in the late 1980s and is now called the Alianza
Democrática M-19, or AD/M-19 (the Democratic Alliance).
Complicating the understanding and experience of this conflict
is that members of one group often switch sides to another
group. This switching happens because for many impoverished
people, being part of an armed group is not based on a political
ideology but instead on the fact that it is a job, a way to support
their family. Or, they are forced to join one group and/or the
other by the group’s leaders who threaten to harm or kill them
and their family if they do not. Also, (the nonstate) paramilitary,
were originally founded by the Colombian military based on
advice from U.S. counterinsurgency advisors during the Cold
War. These U.S. advisors were contracted to combat leftist and
narcotraffic groups in Colombia. Campesinos, or subsistence
farmers in the countryside, since the 1960s have often been
caught in the middle of these warring groups and forced to join
or assist one side or the other or flee, making them displaced,
desplazados.
18In 2009, the U.S. Department of State introduced a new
global online application form for Nonimmigrant Travel Visas
to the United States. This form is called the DS-160. See U.S.
Department of State “Worldwide Deployment of the DS-160.”
All visa application questions referenced in this article come
from the online DS-160 Nonimmigrant Travel Visa Application
required of all Colombians applying to travel to the United
42
States. See https://ceac.state.gov/GENNIV/default.aspx. The
narrative account of what Farconely would have to do to apply
for a Nonimmigrant Travel Visa from Colombia to the United
States is based on my past ten years of working with dozens of
Colombians as they apply for these visas. These visa applications
have been for my family members, university students and faculty,
and artists. The latter is for a transnational youth art and human
rights project I co-founded and direct called Proyecto Boston
Medellín. See http://mobility17.com. The first visa application
for my mother-in-law to attend my wedding to her son was
denied. The second application was accepted but required me to
send proof that I was indeed inviting her to the United States to
help care for her newborn granddaughter. This proof required an
inch-thick packet of legal documents, including notarized letters
from friends accounting for the “goodness” of “my character,”
ultrasound images of my womb and a notarized letter signed by
my doctor that the unborn baby in the ultrasound images was
indeed inside my body. As of the publication of this article, we
have not yet applied for a travel visa to bring a desplazada to
accompany her story across the border to the United States. We
are strategizing with the City of Medellín officials who work
with women on how to apply for U.S. travel visas for some of the
storytellers in our archive to come present their documentary
videos in the United States.
19See U.S. Department of State DS-160 application form for
Nonimmigrant Travel Visas from Colombia to the United States.
https://ceac.state.gov/GENNIV/default.aspx
20 The most widely circulating national history of Colombia in
English and also in Spanish translation is David Bushnell’s The
Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. It was
published in 1993, about two years after Medellín, based on the
number of homicides in the city per year, was labeled the most
dangerous city in the world. Unlike Bushnell’s observation in
1993 that Colombia in scholarly meetings and academic journals,
“is featured far less frequently” than many other South American
countries or Mexico, each of the previous three Latin American
Studies Association conference program lists more than 40
43
presentations on Colombia. The telenovela running since June
2012 in Colombia is about Pablo Escobar and another recent
popular telenovela in this country featured 60 episodes of Rosario
Tijeras, a television series about the real-life woman assassin by
the same name.
21 Scholarly literature about displaced women’s peace movements
tend to focus on high profile national and regional women’s
movements for peace and conflict resolution. These tend to be
historiographies, ethnographies, or public policy analyses. There
are also psychology models for working through displacement
trauma. See for example, Bouvier; Rojas; Roldán; Alzate”containertitle”:”Disasters”,”page”:”131-148”,”volume”:”32”,”issue”:”1”,”abs
tract”:”As of 30 June 2006, more than 3.5 million Colombians are
internally displaced persons (IDPs; Vågen; Unidad de atención a
la población desplazada; Iáñez Domínguez and Pareja Amador;
and Murdock. Other scholarship focuses on women working in
factories (see Farnsworth-Alvear) and NGOs or women’s rights
organizations (see Murdock).
22 Accessed July 6, 2012 at 10:39am. http://www.amolatina.com/?
gclid=CKOG9eKwhbECFQoFnQodeAY85Q
23A ranchito is a home people build by hand with found planks of
wood. When desplazados arrive to self-settle in Medellín, they
build a ranchito.
24 See for example, Vamos Mujer; “Asociación nacional de usuarios
campesinos”; “Corporación para la vida: Mujeres Que Crean”; de
Medellín; and “Centro de Desarrollo Cultural de Moravia.”
25 Subsecretaria de Metromujer.
26“En el año 2002 se creó la Subsecretaría de Metromujer,
adscrita a la Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana y luego, mediante
el Acuerdo Municipal 01 de 2007 se crea la Secretaría de las
Mujeres, la cual trabaja por contribuir con la igualdad de
derechos y oportunidades entre hombres y mujeres de la ciudad
44
de Medellín y sus corregimientos, promoviendo la participación
y el empoderamiento de las mujeres en los escenarios políticos,
culturales, sociales, económicos, entre otros.” See Municipio de
Medellín.
27 An equally popular theme is a media-perpetuated conception of
feminine beauty that is as narrow as it is voluptuous. Complicating
matters is that this “beauty” is achievable with extensive plastic
surgery, which is easily attainable in Medellín if someone can pay
for it. Hundreds of women every year in Medellín go under the
plastic surgery knife. Many impoverished young women see this
as their best way to marry into money and out of poverty.
28See Rap musician Soria Shorai’s song “More than an Image,”
which she released in 2008 on open-access subterraneos.net and
posted her video for it on YouTube in 2009. The song encourages
women to rip up fashion magazines, not sell themselves to men,
and instead develop their mind and heart. In her song another
woman also appears: “the destitute barefoot mother,” who the
media “clouds over” while lying “at their own convenience of
course, yeah, only speaking of celebrity and expensive clothes.”
This mother is the woman who arrives to Medellín as a desplazada
and builds a wooden plank house like the one in the music video
where Shorai sings (Municipio de Medellín). For the full lyrics
in Spanish and a book written by and about youth rappers from
Medellín’s poor neighborhoods, see Programa Planeación Local
y Presupesto Participativo 2008. In this book rappers and graffiti
artists position their work in the context of U.S. hip-hop as antiracist social justice movements.
29 Here I consider “the street” to include other public spaces outside
the home, including the internet.
30 María Elena Giraldo González’s story “Little Red Riding Hood
In Search of The Wolf,” describes a young girls’ decision to leave
her grandmother’s house in her rural pueblo in search of a better
life in the city of Medellín.
45
I left my Sunday dress on my bed, got
dressed in red jeans, started up my
motorcycle, which is red of course, and
arrived to the wolf ’s apartment, who
waited impatiently.
Dejó el vestido dominguero sobre la cama,
vistió jean rojo, encendió la mota roja por
supuesto y llegó hasta el apartamento del
lobo, quien esperaba impaciente.”
This is one of 9 story contests published by Medellin’s Metro
Company with the slogan “One city, one METRO, 15 years of
stories, and 100 words to tell one.” This story was selected among
1,000 submissions for publication in the 2010 story contest called
“A Story For Your City in 100 Words.” Judges for this contest
have received more than 6,000 stories with similarly gendered
and feminist themes from women and men who live in the city’s
most impoverished neighborhoods. Each book, which publishes
a pocket-size paperback selection of the story submissions, is
distributed for free in the metro stations’ Bibliometro offices that
are open to anyone.
31In Spanish, Promotora Cultural de Desarrollo de Centro
Cultural de Moravia. For the interview with her and residents of
Moravia, see Marko, Jota Samper, and Murphy. http://youtu.be/
FaP-OlBlU40
32 See Samper Escobar and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning and Martin and
Inter-American Development Bank. The urban and social
interventions in Medellín since 2004 are routinely referred to
as “the transformation of the City of Medellín” in publications
produced by the Medellín City Mayor’s office, Colombian tourist
ads, and local, national and international media. For those who
live in Medellín or study it, “the transformation of Medellín,” has
become a household phrase.
33 See de Medellín, La Transformación de Medellín desde la Cultura;
Samper Escobar and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning; and de Medellín, La
Transformación de Medellín desde la Cultura.
46
34See Proexport Colombia http://www.colombia.travel/en/
international-tourist/colombia/tourism-campaign and http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzZe0gcc0eY.
35The Favela Bairro project and the Morar Carioca project in Rio
de Janeiro, the largest urban upgrading project in the world, is
modeled after the urban intervention projects in Medellín. See
Samper “The Granting of Land Tenure” 2012.
36 Bushnell’s own research on Colombia began when he went
there as a doctoral student in 1948, and was there when La
Violencia began. He also cites how complicated it is to synthesize
Colombia’s idiosyncratic localisms throughout the country’s
cities and regions. Colombia has three major Andes mountain
ranges, Amazon jungle, desert, ranch-filled plains, two (Pacific
and Atlantic) coasts, and five border regions with Brazil,
Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama and Peru. Colombia is also culturally
and ethnically diverse with Spanish, indigenous, Afro-Colombian
and European roots. For another national history of Colombia
published in English see Safford and Palacios.
37 She continues, “In the United States, policymakers have promoted
three sometimes overlapping paradigms that have shaped U.S.
relations with Colombia”: (1) counterinsurgency concerns that
since the 1950s “governed U.S. foreign policy toward Latin
America”; (2) the U.S. war on drugs that “dominated U.S. policy
directives in the Andean producer countries; and (3) and U.S.
government war on terror which since the 9/11 attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon Building, “has driven
U.S. foreign-policy concerns around the globe.” Within this
frame, Bouvier also cites Plan Colombia. Launched in 2000,
this multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia’s goal was to strengthen
the Colombian state’s, especially its military and police, fight
against leftwing groups and narcotraffic leaders and to protect
oil pipelines. Plan Colombia made Colombia one of the leading
recipients of U.S. aid, “surpassed at the time only by Egypt and
Israel” (Bouvier 5-6).
47
38 Bouvier 5-6. Finally, she argues that human rights practitioners’
“most pressing task is to respond to human rights violations”
and to violations of international humanitarian law” (7). In
the conflict-resolution field, she cites an “ironic” and “inherent
bias” against “actors who have eschewed violence in the pursuit
of peace. Conflict analysis generally is performed with ‘conflict
actors’ in mind.”
39 See Parks.
40 See George.
41 The City of Medellín’s Department of Social Welfare.
42 See Barriga Personal Interview.
43 DukeEngage is a civic engagement program with the motto
“Change yourself, change your world.” DukeEngage has funded
2,000 students to participate in more than 42 projects worldwide.
See http://dukeengage.duke.edu/ and our students’ Colombia
program blog http://dukeengageinmedellín.blogspot.com. For
a discussion of a pedagogical theory and practice emerging
from the work my students and I do on this archive, see my
forthcoming article “Proyecto Boston Medellín: Toward A 21stcentury feminist pedagogscape.” Proyecto Boston Medellín 2011 &
2012. Medellín, Colombia: Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
44 Sala Mi Barrio translates as “My Neighborhood Livingroom,”
which references the intimate home spaces where family members
and friends spend hours, often daily, chatting about their lives.
For more about Sala Mi Barrio and the Parques Bibliotecas,
see
http://www.reddebibliotecas.org.co/sistemabibliotecas/
Paginas/parque_biblioteca_espana.aspx.
45 In Spanish this state entity is called Secretaria de Bienestar Social
de la Alcaldia de Medellín.
48
46 See http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1090.html.
47 See Trimbur 191.
48See Marko, Jota Samper, and Robelo. http://youtu.be/
YzwSqFzARWQ
49Ibid.
50 See Jota Samper, Marko, and de Armas “Escaleras a La Cima.”
http://youtu.be/ZmX0P2knkBw All discussion and quotation
regarding this story come from this video.
51 See Jota Samper, Marko, and Murphy “La Necesidad.” http://www.
youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IuRPeeailZ0
52 See Marko, Jota Samper, and de Armas “Al Aire Libre” http://
youtu.be/pV5dzKT_nG0. All subsequent quotes about this story
come from this video.
53“Zona de Despeje.” Diario del Otún. 23 de enero, 2004.
54“El pulmón en la calle.” La Tarde. 23 de enero, 2004.
55“Colaboración con los desplazados.” El Diario del Otún. 25 de enero,
2004.
56 See Marko, Jota Samper, and de Armas, Un techo que brindarles
http://youtu.be/lSPxR19CMVk
57See Marko, Jota Samper, and Rosenthal http://youtu.be/
Tj75ukawRQU
58 See Marko, Jota Samper, and Murphy “Los Colonizadores”
http://youtu.be/FaP-OlBlU40. All subsequent information and
quotes regarding this story come from this video.
49
59 See Marko, Jota Samper, and Barrett. http://mobility 17.com
60 See Zuckerbrod, Jota Samper, and Marko. http://mobility17.
com. All subsequent information and quotes regarding this story
come from this video.
61 See Barrett and Jota Samper “Personal Interview.”
62See Mojica Vélez
cj6sWc2RQuM
and
Soto
Posada
http://youtu.be/
63 Morelia’s need to flee is not necessarily directly related to her
rewriting the children’s lyrics or even her anti-racist work per
se. Her position as a community activist with decades in her
community does mean she holds a position of power among
her neighborhood residents. It is this power position that armed
actors consider a threat, unless people like Morelia agree to
support them.
64 For a more extensive argument regarding these risks that all
actors in our archive, see my forthcoming article “We Also Built
the City of Medellín: deplazadas’ family albums as feminist
archival activism” in Taking Risks: Feminist Stories of Social Justice
Research in the Americas.
50
Works Cited
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Internally Displaced Women: The Embodiment of Colombia’s
Crisis.” Disasters 32.1 (2008): 131–148. Print.
“Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos.” Web. 19 July 2012.
Barrett, Alexa, and Jota Samper. Personal Interview. 13 Aug. 2012.
Barriga, Carmenza. Personal Interview. 15 June 2010.
Behar, Ruth. Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s
Story. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Print.
Bouvier, Virginia Marie, ed. Colombia : Building Peace in a Time of
War. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2009.
Print.
Bushnell, David. The Making of Modern Colombia : a Nation in Spite
of Itself. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Print.
Ceballos, Meguizo. “The Evolution of Armed Conflict in Medellin:
An Analysis of the Major Actors.” Peace Research Abstracts 41.1
(2004): n.p. Print.
“Centro de Desarrollo Cultural de Moravia.” Centro de Desarrollo
Cultural de Moravia. Web. 20 July 2012.
“Corporación para la vida: Mujeres Que Crean.” Corporación para la
vida: Mujeres Que Crean.
Farnsworth-Alvear, Ann. Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals,
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Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Print.
George, Diana. “Riding the Rails/Following the Harvest: Voices of
Dissent and Tactics for Circulation.” Two-Way Street: Mobility
and the Economy of Writing. St. Louis, Missouri, 2012. Print.
Iáñez Domínguez, Antonio, and Antonio J Pareja Amador. Mujeres y
Desplazamiento Forzado: Estrategias De Vida De Jefas De Hogar En
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Kirk, Robin. More Terrible Than Death : Massacres, Drugs, and America’s
War in Colombia. New York: Public Affairs, 2003. Print.
Marko, Tamera, Jota Samper, and Carolina de Armas. Al Aire Libre.
Vol. 1. 3 vols. Medellin, Colombia, 2010. Film. medellin mi hogar
/ my home medellín.
---. Un techo que brindarles. Vol. 1. 3 vols. Medellin, Colombia, 2010.
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Marko, Tamera, Jota Samper, and Alexa Barrett. Su Baile de
Desplazamiento. Vol. 3. 3 vols. Medellin, Colombia, 2012. Film.
medellin mi hogar / my home medellín.
51
Marko, Tamera, Jota Samper, and Kendall K. Murphy. Los
Colonizadores. 2011. DVD. medellín mi hogar / my home medellín.
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Jardín. Vol. 1. 3 vols. Medellin, Colombia, 2010. Film. medellin
mi hogar / my home medellín.
Marko, Tamera, Jota Samper, and Gideon Rosenthal. Mis derechos
como persona / My Rights As A Person. Vol. 2. 3 vols. Medellin,
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Martin, Gérard, and Inter-American Development Bank. Medellín:
Transformación De Una Ciudad. Medellín; Washington D.C.:
Alcaldía de Medellín, 2009. Print.
de Medellín, Alcaldia. La Transformación de Medellín desde la Cultura.
Medellin, Colombia, 2008. Print.
---. “Museu Casa de la Memoria.” Museu Casa de la Memoria. Web. 19
July 2012.
Mojica Vélez, Clara Elena, and Juan Pablo Soto Posada. arrozconleche.
Vol. 1. 2 vols. Medellin, Colombia and Boston, 2010. Film.
Proyecto Boston Medellín.
Municipio de Medellín. “Equidad de Género: Secretaría de las
mujeres.” Web. 10 Aug. 2012.
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Development in Medellín, Colombia. Ann Arbor, Michigan:
University of Michigan Press, 2008. Print.
Parks, Stephen. Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City
of Brotherly Love. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2010.
Print.
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Tourism, Foreign Investment and Export Promotion. Official
Travel Guide.” Tourism, Foreign Investment and Export Promotion.
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Hop: Una experiencia de resistencia cultural en Medellín. Medellín:
Alcaldia de Medellín, 2008. Print.
Rojas, Catalina. “Women and Peace Building in Colombia: Resistance
to War, Creativity for Peace.” Colombia: Making Peace in a Time
of War. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace,
2009. 207–224. Print.
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Violence in the Oriente Antioqueño.” Colombia: Making Peace
in a Time of War. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute for
Peace, 2009. 277–294. Print.
52
Safford, Frank, and Marco. Palacios. Colombia : Fragmented Land,
Divided Society. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Print.
Samper Escobar, Jose Jaime, and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. “The Politics
of Peace Process in Cities in Conflict: the Medellin Case as a Best
Practice.” 2010: n.p. Print.
Samper, José et al. El Triunfo. medellín mi hogar, my home medellín.
medellin mi hogar / my home medellín, 2010. DVD.
Samper, Jota. “Granting of land tenure in Medellín, Colombia’s
informal settlements: Is legalization the best alternative in a
landscape of violence?” Informal Settlements Research ISR. Web.
10 June 2012.
Samper, Jota, Tamera Marko, and Carolina de Armas. Escaleras a La
Cima. Vol. 1. 3 vols. Medellin, Colombia, 2010. Film. medellin mi
hogar / my home medellín.
Samper, Jota, Tamera Marko, and Kendall K. Murphy. La Necesidad
de Tener un Hogar. Vol. 2. 3 vols. Medellin, Colombia, 2011. Film.
medellin mi hogar / my home medellín.
Trimbur, John. “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.” College
Composition and Communication 52.2 (2000): 188–219. Print.
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Travel.State.Gov: A Service of the Bureau of Consular Affairs. Nov.
2009. Web. 7 Sept. 2012.
Unidad de Atención a la Población Desplazada, Secretaria de Bienestar
Social. Unidad de Análisis y Evaluación de Política Pública: Análisis
descriptivo asentamiento y movilidad de población desplazada en
Medellín. Medellín, 2011. Print.
Vågen, Kristin Tynes, and Noragric Universitetet for miljøog biovitenskap Institutt for internasjonale miljø- og
utviklingsstudier. Experiences of Reconstructing Life After Forced
Displacement : Internally Displaced Women’s Challenges in Medellín,
Colombia. Ås: [K.T. Vågen], 2011. Print.
Vamos Mujer. “Vamos Mujer.” Vamos Mujer. Web. 25 June 2012.
Yacoub, Natasha. “Number of Internally Displaced People Remains
Stable at 26 Million.” (2009): n.p. Web. 7 Dec. 2010.
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dignidad. Vol. 3. 3 vols. Medellin, Colombia, 2012. Film. medellín
mi hogar / my home medellín.
53
When the Rhetorical
Situation Calls Us Out:
Documenting Voices of Resistance
and the Making of Dreams Deferred
Jennifer Hitchcock,
Northern Virginia Community
College
Preface
I
n 2009, Jennifer Hitchcock and her
husband, Vernon Hall, traveled to Israel
and the West Bank with a $600 Canon
camera to find and capture the voices of
Israeli and Palestinian nonviolence advocates
and activists. Their objective was to challenge
the dominant narratives of violence,
terrorism, and oppression perpetuated by the
mainstream U.S. media, and Dreams Deferred:
The Struggle for Peace and Justice in Israel and
Palestine documents voices of nonviolence
activism as an alternative to such narratives.
In the following article, Jennifer takes us
behind the camera to explain what compelled
her and Vernon to make their documentary,
why they made the choices they did, and how
they went about making their first featurelength documentary. Theirs is a story that
illustrates the rhetorical power of do-ityourself activism in response to a deeply felt
call to action.
—Kathleen Kerr, Virginia Tech
54
Hitchcock | When the Rhetorical Situation Calls Us Out
Introduction
To slip through the razor wire is to challenge the system. To slip
through the razor wire is risky, whether you are trying to slip
contraband in—or make it visible to the rest of the world. And
to slip through, under, or around razor wire with language—
written or verbal—I suggest, is the work of social justice and
a growing number of scholars in composition and rhetoric who
are motivated by such issues and the possibility of change.
—Tobi Jacobi “Slipping Pages Through Razor Wire:
Literacy Action Projects in Jail”
After a long and confusing ordeal getting on and off different buses
and figuring out which line we belonged in, we finally approached our
last point of contact with Israeli border control before entering Jordan
via the Allenby Bridge. As I approached the young female Israeli officer,
I was still practicing my Christian-pilgrim cover story in my head. But
she didn’t ask me to explain the 30+ mini DV tapes or ask why we
needed the tripod and wireless lapel mics if we were only tourists. She
didn’t even look in the camera bag. I had been careful to keep record
of what was on each tape in a separate location so no evidence of
our time in the occupied West Bank would be obvious unless someone
actually watched one of the tapes. Once we passed through security,
we boarded our last bus across the Jordan Valley no-man’s land. When
we stepped off the bus on the other side in Jordan, I breathed a sigh
of relief. We were lucky. After spending over a month in Israel and
the West Bank making a documentary about peace and justice activism,
we had gotten out of Israel without any of our tapes or equipment
getting confiscated—a regular occurrence for many peace activists. I
was relieved to finish the first part of the project, but now I was faced
with the daunting rhetorical task of figuring out how to edit my 30+
hours of footage.
Tobi Jacobi’s words about the difficulties of literacy work with prison
populations reminds me of some of the problems my husband and I
faced making a documentary about peace and justice activism in Israel
and Palestine. Jacobi faced obstacles like risky border crossings, the
lack of safe space, and the unstable prison environment, all of which
can complicate efforts to publish and circulate underrepresented
55
voices. While producing and directing Dreams Deferred: The Struggle
for Peace and Justice in Israel and Palestine, we had to overcome similar
obstacles—both material and rhetorical—in order to bring activist
voices of resistance to a wider public. Our primary objective was
disseminating the voices of Israeli and Palestinian peace and
justice activists, but explaining how and why we decided to make
a documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict1 gets more
complicated.
While my husband’s background in architecture helped prepare him
for the more artistic and technical aspects of making a documentary,
my master’s study in Rhetoric and Composition was often on my
mind as I planned interview questions, selected which clips to keep or
discard while editing, and composed informative pages about Israel/
Palestine for our website. It wasn’t until Kathy Kerr interviewed
me about our intentions for this project that I was motivated to
intellectualize our reasons and goals more fully. To analyze our
rhetorical goals and address why we chose to make this documentary,
I must first discuss the nature of the rhetorical situation as I see it. To
what were we compelled to respond in the form of a documentary?
As Lloyd Bitzer says, “rhetorical discourse comes into existence as
a response to a situation, in the same sense that an answer comes
into existence in response to a question, or a solution in response
to a problem” (5). And in making this documentary as discourse in
response to something, what were we hoping to achieve rhetorically?
To flesh out our answers to these questions, I will describe both the
internal and external rhetorical situations to which I felt obliged to
respond. I will also explain our rhetorical intentions, how we tried
to achieve these goals through the content of the documentary and
its companion website, how successful I believe our attempt has been
so far, including our do-it-yourself (DIY) distribution efforts, and
why we remain hopeful for a future resolution to the situation despite
the political complexities that serve as major obstacles to peace and
justice in the region. Ultimately, even though much of this article
will discuss our motivations and intentions for the project, the point
is really not about us at all. It’s about bringing the voices of Israeli
and Palestinian activists who struggle every day for peace and justice
to a wider American audience so these voices can finally become part
of the discourse.
56
Background, Myths, and My Rhetorical Situation
Indecipherable commands emanate from a Border Police jeep’s
loudspeaker to reinforce what Noor had already told us: it was now
curfew—AGAIN. We would have to stay put until curfew was lifted,
which could be anywhere from a few hours to the whole day and
following night. So until then we were stuck inside Noor’s uncle’s
home in the northern West Bank village of Jayyous. We had come to
attend the weekly Friday demonstration against the Israeli separation
barrier that had annexed most of the village’s farmlands in 2002,
and we wanted to get some footage of the popular protest here for our
documentary. But there would be no demonstration that day because the
Israelis had decided to impose curfew during the Friday prayers and
before the nonviolent march and demonstration were to begin. We had
experienced our first curfew the night before, so we were getting a small
taste of what life must be like for residents of Jayyous and many other
villages in the West Bank, where curfews often shut everything down
without warning.
57
My husband was the other half of our two-person crew, but the
project was initially my idea and stemmed from a personal interest in
the subject, on which I had done extensive research. Thus, much of
the original motivation for the project came from me and was based
on my evolving understanding of the situation. I was raised in a
Christian Zionist home by a father who taught me that God gave the
land of Israel to the Jews, who also happened to be the protagonists
of the Bible. I believed then, as many Americans do, that the Jews
deserved their own state in their historic homeland because of the
traumas they suffered at the hands of the Nazis in Europe. And I
didn’t understand why those Palestinian terrorists hated the Jews so
much. This last belief wasn’t a result of my father’s teachings but,
rather, was inculcated in me as I consumed many years of mainstream
U.S. news and entertainment media. The U.S. media is biased on
many issues, and this is certainly one of them.2
It wasn’t until a few years after finishing my bachelor’s degree that
I first had an inkling there was more complexity to the situation.
I saw a documentary about the history of Israel that was partially
funded by the Israeli government. Even though the film had a strong
Zionist bias, a few factual details surprised me and challenged some
of my views of the issue: Jews began immigrating to Palestine
decades before WWII, Palestinians lived on most of the land back
then, and, most surprising of all, Jewish terrorists blew up the King
David Hotel during the British Mandate period, killing scores of
British officials. In my very limited understanding of the situation
up until that point, I had always believed that only Palestinians used
terrorism and that the Israeli Jews, like the moral United States,
always reacted in self-defense and only waged wars with the best
moral intentions. Up until these realizations, I had believed the same
myths about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that continue to dominate
most mainstream American media sources.
Edward Said suggests that the U.S. media perpetuates myths about
Palestinian violence and Israeli victimization. To illustrate this
situation, he describes the results of a poll on Americans’ views of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from watching U.S. news coverage,
especially in the years after 9-11 and during the Second Intifada.
Said notes, “so successful has Israeli propaganda been that it would
58
seem that Palestinians really have few, if any, positive connotations.
They are almost completely dehumanized,” and “with neither history
nor humanity, media representations of Palestinians show them only
as aggressive rock-throwing people of violence” (101, 103). These
mythical representations of Palestinians described by Said dominated
my views of Israel/Palestine for many years.
Some of the common myths about Israel/Palestine, including that
Palestinians are terrorists and their resistance to Israeli policy
and the occupation is simply a manifestation of anti-Semitism,
are especially difficult to dispel because they have been created
and naturalized by decades of biased media coverage and public
relations rhetoric on behalf of Israeli policy. One common myth
about the founding of Israel mentioned by two Israeli activists in
our documentary—Ruth Hiller and Maya Wind—is that the land
of Palestine was largely unpopulated prior to the arrival of Jewish
immigrants, whose hard work “made the desert bloom.” In The Holy
Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan, Steven Salaita
argues that some of Israel’s founding mythology was even borrowed
directly from American mythology, including mythologies related
to dispossessing the native inhabitants (3). As Roland Barthes says,
when myth represents events and objects it “purifies them, it makes
them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it
gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of
a statement of fact” (143). It is these types of myths that I began
to question for myself and that I sought to dispel through our
documentary. Of course, Palestinian terrorists do exist, and Zionist
immigrants did accomplish some pretty amazing things in Palestine,
but for the media to deny Palestinian humanity and gloss over the
historical and continuing Israeli dispossession of Palestinians does
not serve to bring Israelis and Palestinians any closer to peace and
reconciliation.
During my Master’s of English program at Virginia Tech from
2005-2007, I became acquainted with Palestinian-American and
Jewish-American students, several of whom were willing to share
their stories and views with me. One of my Jewish friends was a
rabbi’s son and had a brother who had chosen to become an Israeli
citizen. My friend had traveled to Israel a few times and seemed
59
to be torn between Zionism and his liberal criticisms of Israeli
policy toward the Palestinians, which he saw as clearly wrong. A
Palestinian friend’s parents had immigrated to the U.S. after the 1967
war and the beginning of the Israel occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza. I was shocked by her descriptions of how Israeli policy made
it impossible for her American family to visit their land in the West
Bank.
Talking with these friends and watching a few compelling films
and documentaries about the issue, including Paradise Now and the
Academy-Award nominated documentary, Promises, inspired me to
read more about the history and current status of the issue. Through
my own research, which included regularly reading the Israeli and
Palestinian press in English—especially Haaretz and Ma’an—I
discovered that Israeli and Palestinian nonviolent resistance to the
occupation had been going on for years in different forms but had
been largely ignored by the U.S. press. I had heard people ask why
Palestinians didn’t follow the example of Martin Luther King Jr. or
Gandhi, and yet I was reading about many Palestinian activists who
had been struggling for years using the model of nonviolence. I was
surprised to read about the creative acts of nonviolence that took
place during the First Intifada in the late 1980’s, including nonviolent
protests, marches, boycotts, tax refusals, and many other inventive
methods. When Israel closed the Palestinian schools in the West
Bank during the uprising, Palestinian teachers volunteered to teach
groups of students in Palestinian homes, and when the markets were
closed, they started community gardens and distributed vegetables to
local residents. It was true that violent attacks on the Israeli military
and even suicide bombings became more frequent during the Second
Intifada after 2000, but why did we only ever hear about Palestinian
terrorism on the news?
I also learned about the many Israeli activists who were fighting
back against their government’s policies and working in solidarity
with Palestinians to end the occupation. Young Israelis were serving
prison time for refusing to fulfill their compulsory military service
in the occupied territories. And Israelis from the Israeli Committee
Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) were standing in front of
60
Israeli government bulldozers to prevent them from demolishing
Palestinian homes that were built without the required permits—
because Israeli bureaucracy refused to give them in the first place.
Then these Israelis worked together to rebuild demolished Palestinian
homes. I wanted to meet some of these people for myself and hear
what they had to say since I saw their actions and beliefs as the best
hope for future peace and reconciliation.
This was all part of the rhetorical situation for me: I felt compelled to
do something—to help bring the voices of these activists to a wider
American public in order to raise awareness about the existence
of Palestinian and Israeli acts of nonviolent resistance, to expose
viewers to some of the on-the-ground realities of the occupation,
and, hopefully to dispel some of the myths about the conflict that
I believe serve as obstacles to peace and justice in the region. As
many of the activist writers say in Diana George’s “The Word on
the Street: Public Discourse in a Culture of Disconnect,” I also was
seeking to “set the record straight” and present some alternative
voices that had been largely silenced by the mainstream corporate
media (10). And as an American, I felt compelled to try to push the
U.S. government to use its leverage with Israel to promote a just
resolution to the conflict and end the occupation—or at least stop
subsidizing it with over $3 billion American tax dollars per year.
My desire to effect social change outside of the composition
classroom also connects with discussion in the community literacy
movement about the role of public rhetoric, scholar activism, and
the extracurriculum of composition. I agree with Susan Wells’
description of how many compositionists feel about public rhetoric
outside the classroom: “we feel guilty for our absence from the public;
we suspect that it has been usurped by political functionaries and spin
doctors” (152). This is especially true of the debate around Israel/
Palestine. In “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change,” Ellen
Cushman calls for scholars to be agents of social change through
activism and participation in public discourse (7). My desire to take
action outside of my role as a teacher also echoes Anne Ruggles Gere’s
call for social agency through cultural work—the extracurriculum of
composition. While I may not have decided to embark on this project
61
because of these entreaties from community literacy composition
scholars, I feel validated that they argue in support of such work.
But why me? Why do I have a right to enter this conversation?
Why was this my rhetorical situation and not someone else’s? I
am neither Jewish nor Palestinian. Agreeing with Donna Haraway
and Higgins et al., I “dismiss claims that the identity of the speaker
confers a special access to truth” (Higgins et al. 30). In fact, being an
outsider and not having a personal ethnic connection to the people
or the land could even give me some beneficial emotional distance.
As an American, my tax money and elected political leaders continue
to support Israel’s occupation, and the U.S. remains Israel’s number
one sponsor—reasons which some would argue obligate me to do
something. I also did my homework to analyze the history, context,
and issues involved in this conflict and rhetorical situation. As
Higgins et al. describe, I conducted my own “discourse analysis of
key texts and discourses in play,” which helped me to “identify key
problems and stakeholders, challenges to their deliberating together,
and potential sites and strategies for intervention” (15). In addition
to my knowledge of the situation, I also had the ability and privilege
to take several months off from teaching to travel there and actually
make a documentary. While several documentaries on the conflict
already existed, including a few on nonviolent resistance, I believed
that I could make a documentary that presented the situation in a
unique way. This part of the rhetorical situation, for me, was an
internal pressure to follow my thoughts and beliefs with actions.
And how could I expect to prepare my composition students to be
active participants in our democracy, as many in Rhet/Comp argue
we should do (George 6), if I wasn’t an active participant myself ?
Thus, part of the rhetorical situation was internal. If I didn’t do it
after devoting significant mental energy to thinking about the project,
then I knew I would regret it. As Bitzer explains, one way someone
can recognize a rhetorical situation is by recalling “a specific time and
place when there was an opportunity to speak on some urgent matter,
and after the opportunity was gone he created in private thought the
speech he should have uttered earlier in the situation” (2). He goes on
to describe how “many questions go unanswered and many problems
remain unsolved; similarly, many rhetorical situations mature and
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decay without giving birth to rhetorical utterance” (6). If I decided
not to make the documentary, I knew that the missed opportunity
would bother me for years to come.
In addition to my own personal experience with documentary work,
I was aware that documentaries have great rhetorical potential to
help effect social change. In their discussion of the rhetorical
function of documentary photographs, Lucaites and Hariman argue
that documentary photography can “reflect social knowledge and
dominant ideologies, shape and mediate understanding of specific
events and periods (both at the time of their initial enactment and
subsequently as they are recollected within a tableau of public
memory), influence political behavior and identity” (38). Gregory
Starrett also discusses how visual documentary photographs “can
be used to mobilize collectivities...images became the medium for
transnational political contests in which opposing groups mobilized
by projecting onto those images fundamental values: purity versus
idolatry, heritage versus fanaticism, injustice versus innocence,
cynicism versus responsibility” (399). There are many examples of
documentary films that have ignited discussion of important but
previously overlooked issues, including An Inconvenient Truth and
Super Size Me, just to name a few.
So for me, the exigency of the rhetorical situation was the festering
and, I believe, perpetually misunderstood Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and ongoing Israeli occupation supported by my U.S. tax dollars.
It is a discourse that supports the status quo and drowns out the
many voices of peace and justice. The exigency was also my own
internal calling to take action and support social change. My
challenge, however, was figuring out how to tackle this daunting task
rhetorically.
The Problem of Objectivity
After meeting with our Palestinian contact in the West Bank village of
Beit Sahour near Bethlehem, we had to return to East Jerusalem via
the nearest Israeli checkpoint. It was almost 10 pm, and after our taxi
dropped us off, we were left alone outside of a warehouse-sized building.
Upon entering, we found ourselves in a narrow circuitous metal corral,
much like those at an amusement park or what I imagine one would
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find in a slaughterhouse. These metal corrals got even narrower as
we approached the steel door with a red light above it. We couldn’t see
anyone, but we could hear disembodied female voices echoing from an
unseen part of the building. We shouted “Shalom! Shalom!” to try to
get someone’s attention until, finally, the red light above one of the doors
lit up, and a female voice instructed us to enter Door 3. Once inside the
small metal room, the same invisible female Israeli soldier instructed us
to place our backpack on the x-ray conveyer belt, at which point I saw
her through a window into an adjoining security room. She told us to
show our passports, and we were able to exit. When we turned to look
back at the checkpoint and Separation Barrier through which we had
just passed, we saw the giant poster hanging on the wall, welcoming us
into Jerusalem: “Peace and Love,” it proclaimed.
With such a complex, contentious, and polarizing issue as the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how could we possibly be objective? I
knew that being “objective” was impossible because, by their nature,
documentaries are always rhetorical. Certainly a documentary on
this heavily debated subject, where even the basic historical facts are
in dispute, could not achieve objectivity in the eyes of all parties.
I also had no desire to impose a false objectivity or balance that
sought to represent both sides equally because much of this type of
pretense would include views that have already been well represented
in mainstream U.S. media. Trying to show “both sides” in this way
could give the false impression that it is a conflict of two equal sides,
when, in fact, Israel holds almost all of the power and control.
Even if, as a director, I want to strive for objectivity, I have to
select what to include and what to leave out—and for a 68-minute
documentary about a situation as complex as the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, I had to leave out a lot, boiling over 30 hours of footage
down to just over an hour. Regarding the filmmaker’s responsibility
to tell the truth, James Linton observes, “this question inevitably
leads us into the objectivity-subjectivity controversy: can and should
documentary filmmakers make films that are impartial, balanced
and unbiased?” (18). Linton outlines this debate, beginning with a
description of the journalistic model of documentary filmmaking:
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It is incumbent upon the documentary filmmaker to present
‘both sides of an issue’...given the nature of the filmic medium
as highly selective, the argument runs that the filmmaker
displays bias whether he is aware of it or not, and he abrogates
his responsibility if he fails to recognize that fact and deceives
himself and the viewing public...As a result, the filmmaker is
required to recognize his biases and make them known to the
audience. Finally, others would take the argument further still,
and claim that, given the fact of bias and the relative merits of
the positions with regard to any particular issue, the filmmaker
has a responsibility to advocate particular positions or points
of view—in effect to take a stand...If one chooses to work with
subjects of greater social significance, for example, the question
of giving emphasis to particular perspectives (as opposed to
equal treatment to “both sides”) may become more crucial...
the responsibility to take a stand may vary directly with the
significance of the subject involved. (18)
Paula Rabinowitz argues that documentary is necessarily political
because “the connection between the rhetoric of documentary film
and historical truth pushes the documentary into overtly political
alignments which influence its audience” (119).
Rather than trying to present a false objectivity, our choices of
interview subjects reveal both our bias and our one attempt to present
multiple perspectives on the issues: we only interviewed peace and
justice activists, and we interviewed a roughly equal number of
Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Our focus on the nonviolent peace
and justice movement, which is obvious from both the title and the
first few minutes of footage, makes it clear that we were not trying
to present a wide range of perspectives about many aspects of the
situation. I wanted to highlight the voices and actions of this activist
community, but I also saw no reason to rehash some of the arguments
and perspectives that would already be familiar to American viewers
from mainstream media coverage of the issue and that might simply
reinforce the standard myths. While the activists we interviewed
represent a small segment of the Israeli and Palestinian publics, I
believe they are a very important and too-often overlooked segment,
especially in U.S. discourse on the issue.
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To get a full picture of the many complex issues that underlie the
conflict and function as obstacles to peace and justice, audiences
would need either a Shoah-length film or series of films, or they
would need to undertake additional study on their own after seeing
our documentary. Through the selected questions I asked interview
subjects, I was able to insert discussion of some of the broader
issues that underlie the conflict—fear, terrorism/resistance, control,
nonviolence, etc.—as told with the voices of Israeli and Palestinian
activists. The documentary only briefly introduces audiences to
some of the bigger issues involved so that, hopefully, people might be
interested and motivated enough to learn more. Rather than getting
bogged down in potentially polarizing details such as the status of
refugees, Jerusalem, future borders, etc., and risk the documentary
becoming too long to be watchable or useful in classrooms, we decided
to stick to peace and justice activism with some brief discussion of
important broader issues, leaving the details for the website.
One place where I did make a genuine effort to achieve objectivity
was in crafting the informational titles found throughout the film
that explain the historical context and background of some issues.
I hadn’t originally intended to include these explanations, just as I
hadn’t intended to include any subtitles. But when people who viewed
early rough cuts of the documentary said they couldn’t understand
what some interview subjects were saying or were confused about
some aspect of the historical background or context, we decided
it was most important for audiences to be able to understand and
contextualize the information, even if it slightly infringed on our
artistic intentions. When I wrote the explanatory titles, I strived
for very precise and objective language that would be difficult
for reasonable people on either side to dispute and that provided
some minimal but necessary context for people who don’t already
know much about the situation—our primary intended audience
represented by most Americans.
Letting our Subjects Speak for Themselves
Issa the B’Tselem field researcher from Hebron gave us a very eyeopening tour of his city. Home to the burial site of Abraham and
holy to both Jews and Muslims, this contentious city has seen violent
clashes between Palestinians and Jews since the British Mandate
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period. After Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 War, radical
Israeli settlers began illegally taking over buildings in the Hebron’s Old
City, and about 500 reside there today. In the 1990’s as part of the
Oslo Accords, the city was divided and remains one of the most salient
examples of the occupation, frequently invoking the Apartheid analogy
from many foreign visitors. After passing many Palestinian shops and
homes welded shut by the Israeli military for nebulous “security reasons”
and going through several checkpoints within the Old City, we walked
through the cemetery above Shuhada Street, at which point Issa had to
leave us to meet someone else. “As a Palestinian I am not allowed to
walk on Shuhada Street, but you can walk back that way to the Old
City,” Issa informed us. Despite my anxiety that Israeli police might
confiscate our footage if they suspected why we were there, we decided
to try Shuhada Street anyway. After only a few minutes of walking
along the street that otherwise only Jewish settlers and other nonPalestinians were allowed to travel, an Israeli Jeep approached us and
stopped abruptly next to us. A uniformed Israeli curtly asked, “What
religion are you?” Caught off guard by the question and assuming that
“Muslim” was the wrong answer, I hesitantly replied: “Christian?”
One reason that Dreams Deferred avoids the heavy-handedness of
some other documentaries on the subject is that we tried to keep
ourselves and our personal opinions out of view as much as possible
and instead let interview subjects present their own ideas. As
Linton argues, “some sort of trade-off has to be effected between
presenting a point of view, and allowing one’s subjects to ‘speak for
themselves’ and one’s audience the freedom to come to their own
conclusions” (19). This idea of letting subjects tell their own stories
rather than appropriating their experiences or focusing primarily
on critical-rational discourse also comes up in community literacy
scholarship. Higgins et al. discuss the importance of accessing the
experiential “situated knowledge” and eliciting “critical incidents” or
“carefully contextualized accounts of how people actually experience
problems” from different stakeholders (19, 21). This discourse
mirrors our decision to include personal stories of several Israelis
and Palestinians in which they describe life under occupation and
formative life experiences that helped spur them to become activists.
One memorable example from our documentary that viewers often
mention is Ali Abu Awwad’s compelling story of becoming a
nonviolence activist after his brother’s death at the hands of Israeli
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soldiers. Through shared grieving with Israelis who also lost loved
ones to Palestinian militants, he overcame his anger and was able to
see the shared humanity and loss of both peoples. In their discussion
of situated knowledge, Higgins et al. also help articulate some of
the reasons we wanted to interview grassroots activists rather
than experts who have studied the conflict. They describe situated
knowledge as “a rich experientially-based resource for interpreting
and problematizing familiar abstractions and stock solutions to
problems that have not yet been fully understood” (19). By revealing
situated knowledge and describing formative personal experiences,
our interview subjects help audiences understand the conflict in a
way that reveals the complexity of the situation and humanizes both
peoples.
One recent example of a documentary project that suffered rhetorical
weakness and charges of appropriation because of its strong visible
presence of the director and its tendency to come off as too heavyhanded was the KONY 2012 short by the advocacy non-profit
Invisible Children (IC). While in graduate school in 2006, I saw the
first film about child soldiers from IC, Invisible Children: The Rough
Cut, and it made me consider making my own documentary because
the filmmakers appeared to be novice idealists with little filmmaking
experience who were able to go to Uganda with only determination
and relatively inexpensive equipment and create a low-budget
documentary—that had inspired college students across the country
to become actively engaged in stopping the Lord’s Resistance Army’s
abduction of children. I had similar critiques of their first film as
those frequently cited in response to KONY 2012—especially that
the director(s) were too much a part of the film and that the issue was
presented as an oversimplified version of the white-savior theme,
especially in KONY as the director explains to his blond four-yearold son why Joseph Kony is such a “bad” man. Despite its weaknesses,
IC’s earlier documentary project helped me see the potential for
amateur documentaries to inspire action, which became especially
clear as I witnessed Invisible Children student groups spring up on
many college campuses in 2006 and 2007.
IC’s documentary work also enabled me to envision some of the
things I didn’t want to do with my documentary, which is one reason
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why my husband and I chose to stay mostly out of the edited project
and leave the focus on local activists instead. Had IC’s work been
presented in a less personal, more complex and realistic way, it may
not have been as popular with young people, but it may have been
more rhetorically effective in the long run, inspired more long-term
productive action, and avoided some of the critical backlash KONY
2012 received. Aside from a few instances when our voices can be
heard asking a question or we briefly pass in front of the camera,
the only time that one of us appears on camera in Dreams Deferred
is toward the end of the feature-length version in the last section of
Bil’in footage when my husband crouches down and fearfully exclaims
that a bullet had “whizzed right by us.” In this moment, the fear in
his voice is indistinguishable from that of the other activists present
at the protest that day. We later learned that one week after we
attended that protest in Bi’lin, American activist Tristan Anderson
was critically wounded when an Israeli soldier shot a high-velocity
tear gas canister at his head at a similar protest against the separation
barrier in the nearby West Bank village of Nai’lin. In the past few
years, several Palestinians have been killed at popular protests by
Israeli tear-gas canisters, rubber bullets, or live fire.
Restraining the Use of Emotional Appeal
When we went to the bus station in Tel Aviv to meet an activist with
Anarchists Against the Wall who would give us a ride to the weekly
protest against the Separation Barrier in Bi’lin, we expected a crusty
young anarchist, but instead, we were greeted by a man nearing 70 and
wearing a fanny pack. Ilan was kind enough to share his personal story
with us for the documentary. He had been active against the Occupation
since the 1967 war and had attended the weekly demonstrations in Bi’lin
for four years, only missing a couple of Fridays for medical reasons.
We had been warned by other more seasoned activists that the Israeli
Border Police would start firing tear gas and rubber-coated bullets
when the marchers reached the Separation Barrier fence, but we weren’t
prepared for the barrage that met us. Ilan, however, was prepared. We
had made the mistake of putting on sunscreen that apparently reacts
badly with the tear gas and causes additional burning around the eyes,
while Ilan was wearing protective plastic goggles. When we got close
the fence, the projectiles met us as predicted. These popular protests
had been going on every Friday for about four years, so by this time,
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it almost seemed like a pageant in which each side knew their cues and
what to do when—except that the tear gas and rubber bullets were real.
Even though I wanted to avoid the overly emotional rhetoric of IC’s
work and that of many social and political documentaries, I knew that
without some emotional connection with audiences, a documentary
will almost always fail rhetorically. One reason I had chosen to
undertake this project in the first place was because I wanted to visit
the place I had only read about to see for myself how the Israeli
occupation manifests in the daily lives of Palestinians. As soon as
we crossed the invisible Green Line3 and the very visible Separation
Barrier and began meeting Palestinians living under occupation, I
experienced for myself the persuasive power and pathos of personal
experience. While reading about the facts of the situation affected
me on the level of logos, it wasn’t until I actually met and got to know
Israelis and Palestinians personally and shared tea in their homes
that I became more emotionally invested in the issue. This is part of
the reason that I returned to the U.S. feeling compelled to not only
complete the documentary but also to get more involved and active
by working with local Middle East peace groups and spending time
lobbying my members of Congress.
One example of a potentially heavy-handed and emotional scene
we decided to cut out of the final edit was footage from Jayyous
of an Israeli soldier taking deliberate aim and shooting at a young
Palestinian man who was suspected of throwing rocks at an armored
Border Police Jeep—the only crime for which all of the curfews and
harassment seemed to be justified. Even though the soldier was
likely using rubber-coated bullets, this incident horrified us when we
filmed it from a roof during curfew in Jayyous. But we ultimately felt
that we couldn’t include such footage if we were to avoid demonizing
Israelis. Plus, we felt that young Israeli soldiers acted this way for
similar reasons that American soldiers have behaved in disturbing
ways and not because Israelis have a unique hatred for Palestinians.
One of our Refusenik interview subjects, Peretz Kidron, describes
how soldiers must dehumanize their enemies and those they are
occupying in order to justify their orders and actions. This is a
universal facet of war rather than something intrinsic to Israelis and
Palestinians.
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We also sought to connect with American audiences in a way that
would humanize Israelis and Palestinians so they are no longer
perceived as the “Other” by jaded and uninformed Americans. One
way we tried to do this was by interviewing only English-speaking
subjects. Even though I ended up resorting to subtitles for a couple
of Israelis and Palestinians whose accents were more difficult to
understand, all of our interview subjects speak English. This not
only helps English-speaking audiences relate to them better, but it
also gives our project the potential to reach Americans who don’t
wish to put forth the effort to read subtitles. It was also a necessity
for us since we didn’t have a budget for translating over 30 hours of
footage from Hebrew and Arabic into English.
Though the documentary cannot replace a first-hand visit to the
region, we wanted to give audiences the closest thing to their own
tour of the West Bank and encounters with peace activists. Seeing
the occupation and those who live under its dehumanizing shadow
as they struggle against its injustice has significant potential to
emotionally affect American audiences, even though we tried to
avoid gratuitous use of emotional appeals. These first-hand on-theground interviews also elicit activists’ local situated knowledge and
descriptions of critical incidents that Higgins et al. discuss. Higgins
et al. also explain the rhetorical reasoning for including some activists’
personal narratives: “narrative also has a persuasive power that can
help unfamiliar audiences identify with the teller’s perspective in a
way that abstract and generalized positions or claims do not” (21). We
also tried to select West Bank locations that would best demonstrate
different realities of how the Occupation affects daily Palestinian
life—from checkpoints to the Separation Barrier and curfews. And
we interviewed a cross-section of Israeli and Palestinian peace and
justice activists—from well-funded human rights organizations like
B’Tselem to the more grassroots group Anarchists Against the Wall.
Audiences and Distribution
My husband and I looked at each other and then at Noor, a young
college student and our unofficial tour guide for our weekend stay in
Jayyous. “We can go to the roof and maybe see the soldiers from there
if you want,” Noor informed us. We had considered disobeying curfew
and venturing out anyway, but a volunteer human rights monitor in the
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village urged us to obey the curfew and not leave the house because she
witnessed Israeli soldiers preemptively firing tear gas into a group of
young men gathered in front of the local mosque after Friday prayers
ended. Without any other options left, we took our equipment up to the
roof from where we could see most of the village and surrounding
hills. From there, we not only had a good view of the armed soldiers
patrolling the village, but we could also see the Separation Barrier,
the village lands on the other side, and even Tel Aviv high-rises in the
distance—a stark reminder of just how small this contested land really
is. While we didn’t get to attend a demonstration as we had planned,
what we witnessed from the roof that day strengthened our resolve to
complete our documentary and present it to American audiences.
Aside from my motivations and intentions, a carefully crafted
response to a rhetorical situation only has the potential to effect
change if it reaches an audience, however small. One of our primary
goals was to make our finished feature-length documentary useful
for educational purposes so that teachers and religious, civic, and
human rights organizations would be able to show it to introduce
American audiences to the issue. Our intended audience is at least
vaguely liberal leaning but not very informed about the situation, and
we are not trying to reach people with a very strong, predetermined
ideological commitment to the issue. Because we want Dreams
Deferred to be useful in classrooms and for speaking engagements,
we kept the finished product within 70 minutes, but we also edited
a 35-minute version without some of the interviews of activists for
educators who need something shorter.
We also recognize, however, that a 68-minute documentary can only
hope to offer a brief introduction to the issue and to peace and justice
activism in Israel and Palestine. In order to supplement the limited
information contained in Dreams Deferred, we set up a website at www.
supportisraelfreepalestine.org where viewers can find additional
information about various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
through our Frequently Asked Questions. Visitors to the website can
also find links not only to the organizations whose members were
interviewed in our documentary but also to other credible sources
of information and organizations working to end the occupation and
address human rights issues in Israel and Palestine.
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While we offer audiences a way to find more information, we do not
offer any easy or oversimplified solutions to what is a very complex
political situation that includes many stakeholders and obstacles to
peace. Through our website, we try to take a heuristic approach and
direct visitors to what we see as some of the most important issues
to consider if people are to understand the conflict and preconditions
for peace. We want audiences to inform themselves after seeing our
documentary about the complex issues involved, but without access
to further information from reliable sources, they may reach for the
first oversimplified solutions they encounter on the Internet. Higgins
et al. articulate this problem in the context of community literacy
projects, but their discussion applies to viewers of our documentary
as well:
Ultimately, a rhetorical model of inquiry will create the potential
for informed and just action in the future. Yet participants find
it challenging to move from expression and analysis to action.
One obstacle is that when people think of taking action, they
often think of single or simplistic solutions and feel compelled
to argue for them as positions. In this move toward action—even
after having acknowledged multiple perspectives and having
recognized the complexity of the problem and involvement of
others at the table in these projects—participants often first
reach for default, prepackaged, or stock solutions that already
circulate in the dominant discourse. (20)
We haven’t completely figured out how to prevent audiences from
turning to stock solutions for Israel/Palestine, but at least the Dreams
Deferred website will offer a fuller picture and some good sources
of information for them to begin to think more critically about the
issues.
We have chosen to distribute the film ourselves, primarily online and
for free, in order to reach our intended audiences most effectively.
To ensure that people who want to use it for educational purposes
can access our documentary, we decided to make it available for free
viewing and downloading from our website. We also mail free DVD
copies to anyone who contacts us through the website and wants
to show it. Because we used a small amount of our own money as
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the only budget for the project, our distribution is completely DIY
(mostly online combined with some face-to-face networking). We
have other full-time jobs that pay our bills, so we do not need or want
to make any money from the project. This will, hopefully, enable us
to get the movie out to more people who may not see it if they have
to pay, and some of them may also pass it along to others, thus aiding
our distribution efforts.
According to the statistical tracking from Vimeo (the host for our
embedded video clips in high definition and standard definition),
Google Analytics (our website tracking), and YouTube, over one
thousand people from all over the world, but mostly Americans, have
seen at least part of our documentary and visited more than one page
on our website since we launched it in the fall of 2011. This is still a
relatively small number of people, however, so for our documentary
to have a significant rhetorical impact on the discussion of this issue,
it would be useful for many more people to see it.
While our online DIY distribution method has many benefits, it
also depends on people somehow locating our website, meeting us
in person, or speaking with someone else who has seen the film or
visited the website. Even though we are not seeking commercial
distribution or any profit from the project, we submitted Dreams
Deferred to several film festivals as a way to get attention so that
more people would ultimately see the film. We haven’t yet received
responses from several festivals, but it has already been screened in
the Awareness Festival, accepted into the Long Island Film Festival,
and won “Best Documentary” at the DIY Film Festival in Los
Angeles. These festivals are smaller venues, but at least they afford
us some recognition and accompanying audiences. While commercial
or educational distribution through a company or organization could
help us reach more people in some ways, it would also negate our
ability to offer the documentary for free, which interferes with our
intentions.
Even if only a few people ultimately see our documentary or visit
our website, it could still have a small but positive rhetorical impact.
It wouldn’t have to be viewed by tens of millions of people in less
than a week, as was the case for KONY 2012, to have some effect on
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the discourse, though. But as with IC’s KONY, if people in positions
of influence see it, for example, they could either pass it on to many
others through one Tweet or Facebook post. If one member of
Congress were affected, he or she could introduce or oppose some
key legislation related to the issue. Or maybe some students who
see it in a class will be inspired to become more active and informed
about the issue. Similarly to how I see my impact as a teacher,
even if our documentary only inspires a few people who see it to
promote the cause of peace and justice, then our efforts are worth it.
As Higgins et al. point out, “the impractically broad result of clear
social change” is “more likely to come from tightly focused advocacy,”
but “the indicators of impact can be seen in personal understandings
and deliberative performance, and in the more public, multi-faceted
evidence of circulation” (30).
Maintaining Hope
“But the guidebook says Salon Mazaal should be right here,
and it’s not,” I complained to my husband. We had come across
town to find a leftist-activist bookstore/café mentioned in our
guidebook so we could, hopefully, get some tips on possible
interview subjects. Before leaving, I had tried to set up as many
interviews via email as I could through activist organizations
in Israel, but I had only been able to arrange three interviews.
My contact in the West Bank was helping us set up most of our
interviews and home stays there for us, but I was on my own in
Israel. A helpful woman who worked at the café that had replaced
Salon Mazaal in its former location directed us to a street across
town where it had relocated. So we found it on our map and
set off in that direction on foot, only to end up on the wrong
street with a similar name in the one part of town near the old
bus station that our guidebook had warned readers to avoid after
dark. We passed a couple of prostitutes and were on the verge of
giving up when I decided to ask one more person for directions.
A helpful Israeli set us in the right direction, and we finally made
it to the elusive Salon Mazaal by city bus at about 9 pm. Our very
long and unplanned tour of several less-visited neighborhoods
in Tel Aviv finally paid off when we met Netta there, a young
refuser who was happy to talk to us and help us set up interviews
with some other refusers and activists.
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Like teaching first-year composition, it is easy to get burned
out by activism and dedication to a cause when the impact of
our actions isn’t always obvious or the problems seem too big or
intractable. It is in those frustrated moments we have to hold on
to a little optimism and hope. As Paula Mathieu asserts in Tactics
of Hope, “hope, defined in critical terms, requires the ability to
recognize the radical insufficiency of any actions, be honest in
assessing their limitations, imagine better ways to act and learn,
and despite the real limitations, engage creative acts of work
and play with an eye toward a better not-yet future” (134). Like
Mathieu, I acknowledge the importance of organized, systemic
change while also recognizing the benefits of tactical projects
“grounded in timeliness and hope and as such seek not measurable
outcomes but completed projects” (114). I see Dreams Deferred as
a tactical documentary project that is radically insufficient to end
the Israeli Occupation and bring peace and justice to the region,
but I believe that it has a strong potential for creating intangible
changes in a few people who see it. It is also a small piece of a
growing international movement for peace and justice that, when
examined as a whole, has a real and growing potential to bring
change. Paulo Freire also relates the idea of hope to activism in
Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “the dehumanization resulting from
an unjust order is not a cause for despair but for hope, leading to
the incessant pursuit of the humanity denied by injustice. Hope,
however, does not consist in crossing one’s arms and waiting. As
long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then
I can wait” (73).
Along with some patience and perseverance, hope has already paid
off for the Palestinians in at least some small ways, even though
the Occupation remains in place and Israeli settlements continue
to expand. After undergoing several years of frequent curfews and
night raids in response to their weekly popular protests against the
Separation Barrier, the residents of Jayyous scored a major victory
recently: the Israeli military finally conceded to reroute the Separation
Barrier and return the majority of confiscated Palestinian farmlands.
And the same thing happened in Bil’in; years after the Israeli High
Court had ruled that the route of the barrier was unjust and most of
the lands should be returned, the military finally implemented the
court’s decision. Nonviolent popular protest worked again, which
76
only reinforces the lessons of the Arab Spring. Now even Hamas
supports nonviolent protest as a primary means of struggle.
One activist and author who presents a more hopeful view of the
prospects for peace in the region is Rabbi Michael Lerner, also the
editor of Tikkun magazine. In his recent book, Embracing Israel/
Palestine, Lerner argues for a more deliberate and thoughtful approach
to rhetoric about the situation that he hopes will help people talk
about the issue more effectively: “the first step in the process of
healing is to tell the story of how we got where we are in a way that
avoids demonization. We need to learn how two groups of human
beings, each containing the usual range of people—from loving to
hateful, rational to demented, idealistic to self-centered—could end
up feeling so angry at each other” (2). Lerner makes his case clear
when he argues,
There is a great temptation, then, to rant and rave at the sins
being committed by either or both sides. I think that articulating
righteous indignation and confronting those who support
oppressive or violent policies has a real and valuable place...Yet, I
also believe that there is a temptation that must be avoided. We
get mired in our own righteousness and avoid the more difficult
question: how are we going to change things...And this next
step sometimes requires us to modulate our cries of righteous
indignation and to focus more on how we can change things. (9)
Lerner’s ideas about the discourse of Israel/Palestine also touches on
our rationale for how and why we chose to approach this documentary:
to publicly circulate these important Israeli and Palestinian voices of
peace and resistance in American discourse, while avoiding overly
emotional or heavy-handed rhetoric. Dreams Deferred introduces
American audiences to the peace and justice movement in the region,
some of the realities of the occupation, and a few of the larger issues
involved by focusing on the voices of peace and justice activists
themselves—to ultimately help dispel myths and inspire change in
some small way. You are welcome to watch our documentary and
decide for yourself. And then pass it on.
77
Jennifer Hitchcock and her husband, Vernon Hall, have been doing
documentary work together as a hobby for over ten years, but Dreams
Deferred is their first feature-length documentary. Jennifer received
her Master’s in English from Virginia Tech in 2007 and has been
teaching composition full-time at Northern Virginia Community
College’s Manassas campus since 2009. She is currently enrolled in
Old Dominion University’s distance PhD program in Rhetoric and
Textual Studies.
78
Endnotes
1 Even using the term “conflict” is rhetorically loaded because it can
suggest an equivalence of two powers fighting each other when
the terms “occupation” and “resistance” may be more appropriate
and accurate (unless one is also referring to the earlier history of
Israel and Palestine before the 1967 war which officially began
the Israeli military Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza). In
this essay, I will use the terms “occupation,” “situation,” “issue,”
“conflict,” and as suggested by Michael Lerner, “Israel/Palestine,”
but the most appropriate term often depends on whom you are
talking to.
2 Even though the U.S. media continues to have a pro-Israel bias,
many critics and activists have noticed the mainstream news
media becoming less one-sidedly pro-Israel since the 2008-2009
Gaza War.
3 The Green Line refers to the 1949 armistice line that was
the functioning border between Israel and the Jordanianadministered West Bank and Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip.
From the end of the Israeli-Arab war of 1948-1949, this line
served as the unofficial border until Israel captured the West
Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war and began militarily occupying
the Palestinians living in those territories. This line is recognized
by the international community as the most legitimate border on
which to base future peace negotiations. It allots 78% of the land
of Palestine under the British Mandate (including the Negev
Desert) to Israel, with 22% for a future Palestinian state. The
Separation Barrier is controversially not built on the Green Line
but rather it extends deep into the West Bank in several places to
incorporate Israeli settlements built on Palestinian land.
79
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Cushman, Ellen. “The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change.”
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Web. 16 July 2012.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman
Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1997. Print.
Gere, Anne Ruggles. “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The
Extracurriculum of Composition.” College Composition and
Communication 45.1 (1994): 75-92. JSTOR. Web. 16 July 2012.
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Sourcebook. Eds. Thomas Deans, Barbara Roswell, and Adrian J.
Wurr. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010: 485-501. Print.
Lerner, Michael. Embracing Israel/Palestine. Berkeley, CA: Tikkun
Books, 2012. Print.
Linton, James M. “The Moral Dimension in Documentary.” Journal
of the University Film Association 28.2 (1976): 17-22. JSTOR.
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Review 20.1/2 (2001): 37-42. JSTOR. Web. 30 June 2012.
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Said, Edward. From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map. New York: Vintage
Books, 2005. Print.
Salaita, Steven. Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for
Canaan. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2006. Print.
Starrett, Gregory. “Violence and the Rhetoric of Images” Cultural
Anthropology 18.3 (2003): 398-428. JSTOR. Web. 30 June 2012.
Wells, Susan. “Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from
Public Writing?” Writing and Community Engagement: A Critical
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Wurr. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010: 151-166. Print.
81
Dreams Deferred:
An Alternative Narrative of
Nonviolence Activism and Advocacy
Kathleen Kerr,
Virginia Tech
D
uring a December 2011 interview
with the Jewish Channel, then
Republican presidential candidate
Newt Gingrich said, “I think we have an
invented Palestinian people who are, in fact,
Arabs and historically part of the Arab
community, and they had the chance to
go many places.” Gingrich then defended
this statement during the December 10
Republican debate, arguing, “Somebody
ought to have the courage to tell the
truth. These people are terrorists.” While
Gingrich’s comments were met with
audience applause during the debate and
later praised by some in right-wing circles,
they also drew plenty of negative criticism—
and not just from Palestinians. The outcry
came from both conservative and liberal
Americans, while many in the international
community, including Jews and Arabs, also
took umbrage at Gingrich’s statements.
Despite the outrage generated by Gingrich’s
take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
82
Kerr | Dreams Deferred
it is, nonetheless, a re-presentation of a familiar narrative: the
Palestinians as terrorists and the Israelis as victims. This narrative
has long played itself out in America’s public eye, resulting in largely
unwavering support for Israel’s defense and security priorities. From
the 1948 Arab-Israeli War to the Munich Massacre during the 1972
Olympics to the First (1987-1993) and Second (2000-2005) Intifadas,
the world has witnessed Israel’s ongoing struggle to live in peace
with its Palestinian neighbors.
There is, however, another narrative—a narrative of oppression,
displacement, violence, and occupation. This is the story of the
Palestinians as told in Joe Sacco’s Palestine, for example, and in the
documentary Budrus. In this representation of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, Palestinians are the victims and the Israelis, the aggressors.
From “The Catastrophe,” as the Arab-Israeli war is often termed
by Arabs, to the November 12, 1956, massacre in Rafah to Israel’s
construction of the wall, this is a narrative of Palestinians’ ongoing
struggle to live in peace with their Israeli neighbors.
Both narratives collided when Hamas, which the U.S. Government
considers a terrorist organization, won legislative elections in
2006. Despite their being democratically elected by the Palestinian
people, Hamas as part of the political process was not acceptable to
either Israel or the Quartet (U.S., United Nations, Russia, and the
European Union), and economic sanctions ensued. These narratives
again collided in 2011, when Palestinian Authority (PA) President
Mahmoud Abbas petitioned the United Nations for Palestinian
statehood. Leading the opposition to the PA’s request were Israel and
the United States, and at issue were land, sovereignty, jurisdiction,
and violence.
Yet there are other voices: voices of nonviolence advocacy and
activism, voices of both Palestinians and Israelis who look beyond
the violence and fear, voices of those who look toward peace. They
are the voices that “get lost in the shuffle” (Encounter Point). In 2009,
Jennifer Hitchcock and her husband, Vernon Hall, traveled to Israel
and the West Bank with a $600 Canon camera in an attempt to find
and capture those voices, to seek out and show the stories they knew
were there, the voices that are overshadowed in the mainstream
83
media by narratives of violence, terrorism, and demonization. Their
findings are documented in Dreams Deferred: The Struggle for Peace and
Justice in Israel and Palestine, a compelling feature-length documentary
that questions dominant representations of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, challenges stereotypes of both Palestinians and Israelis, and
brings to light the assumptions that reinforce these stereotypes and
representations.
I recently had the opportunity to talk with Jennifer about Dreams
Deferred. Having taught the documentary in a composition course this
past spring, I wanted to hear more about how Jennifer and Vernon
had conceived of the project, what their research entailed, and what
their goals are for the film. I also wanted to know why a composition
instructor from Northern Virginia and her architect husband would
take on a project like Dreams Deferred and how they went about it.
Q: So I have to ask: How did you get from composition and rhetoric
to documentary making?
Jennifer: I was a communications and mass media major at Virginia
Tech, where I took one film production class. I left that and went into
education, but I always had an interest in film. Then the technology
changed so you could edit video with a computer. When we made our
film production movies in college, it was in the 90s. They didn’t have
this technology yet, so we used SVHS. We had these $20K machines
that could only do three different types of editing. It was all very
clunky, and you couldn’t do much. Suddenly, here’s this free software
that’s 20 times as good. I think it was 2002 when a friend of mine
first showed my husband and me how to use I-Movie with a Mac.
Once we had the ability to edit movies very inexpensively with this
free software, we started making little short videos for fun: our road
trips, or travels, or experiences in different places—scenic pieces with
music.
It was fun making those videos as a hobby. We made some wedding
videos for people, and in 2003, we made a short piece just for fun—20
84
minutes long—about hiking the Appalachian Trail. A year after we’d
finished hiking the trail ourselves, we interviewed some friends of
ours who’d also hiked it and got some footage together. It was the
first real documentary we made, a little piece, but it was the biggest
project we’d done at that point. It wasn’t high quality, but it was fun,
and people we showed it to liked it. I also did a short piece in 2007
about an exhibition that my husband’s architecture studio did in grad
school, and I interviewed people as part of the documentary. I was
getting into this documentary thing, although it was just a hobby at
the time, and I enjoyed it.
When I was adjuncting up here after grad school, I realized—I guess
I was about 31 at the time—that at some point in the next few years,
we’d probably want to settle down and have a family. If I was ever
going to make a real documentary, I needed to do it before settling
down to see if it was something I wanted to do or whether it was
enough just to have the experience. So I told my husband that this
was a subject I’d been interested in for a few years, something I’d
been reading about.
I’d studied the Holocaust in a class in undergrad, which is what got
me interested in human rights, so I started to learn more about the
history of Israel and the situation there. My research opened my
eyes to the complexity of the situation beyond what I’d thought,
beyond common thinking on the subject. My father is a Christian
fundamentalist, so I was raised with a strong Christian Zionist
background, which, in addition to the mainstream view of the situation
between the Israelis and Palestinians, colored my perspective. So
there I was, thinking how I’d love to travel to the Middle East and
try to make a documentary while we were there. At first, Vernon
said, “Are you serious, Honey? This is a little crazy!” But he’s such an
awesome guy, and he goes along with all these adventures. He said,
“All right, I’ll do it, but I don’t want to go just there. Let’s also go to
North Africa, to Morocco and Egypt.”
I agreed, so he took off work, and we made a big trip out of it. We had
this great romantic idea to go across North Africa. We went across
Europe, and you go across South America—we did a trip there, too.
But when I looked into it, I realized that you can’t actually go across
85
North Africa; the borders aren’t open. We wanted to go to Tunisia,
Libya, and Algeria, to all the countries there, but there’s no train
to take you. Instead, we decided to go to Morocco and Egypt, then
to Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan. We spent over two months in
North Africa and the Middle East, including two weeks in Israel and
two weeks in the West Bank.
We spent maybe $2,500 in total on the equipment, and we purposely
got equipment that was small. We got HDV, high-definition video,
and paid about $600 for the camera. We toyed with the idea of buying
a more expensive professional camera that was used, but we decided
in the end not to do that because it looked like a professional camera,
whereas the other camera, a Canon, looked like a tourist camera. If
we were going to be traveling around with our equipment and trying
to film, it was better to look inconspicuous. So we chose the cheaper,
inconspicuous camera that still recorded in HD. Because I’d heard
so many stories about activists and people getting their equipment
confiscated by the Israelis, I had a back-up story that I was a Christian
pilgrim tourist—in case we got busted. I also purposely didn’t label
any of my tapes with what they actually were.
We just decided to do it, and I only had a few contacts ahead of time.
I tried to set up interviews via email, which isn’t always easy to do,
and we made the rest of them when we got there. In most places,
once you got hooked up to the activist community, it was easy to
meet other people. One person told us about someone else; then the
next person told us about someone else, so we had tons of people to
interview.
Q: Can you talk just a little bit about the planning process for the
trip? How did you decide how much time you’d spend where? Did
you spend a lot of time actually researching where you were going
to go inside?
Jennifer: We planned this trip similarly to how we’d planned other
trips in the past. One thing that was different and very helpful for
the West Bank, though, was that a Palestinian-American friend of
mine gave us the contact information for a man my friend had met
when he had traveled to the West Bank a few years before. This man
86
used to run alternative tours, so I had this contact who basically
helped me to set up home stays in different West Bank towns. That
was good because if it hadn’t been for him, I probably would have
gone through an organization since I wouldn’t have felt comfortable
winging it myself.
As for the West Bank, I had ideas based on the reading I’d done about
the situation. I read a lot of books. I followed the Israeli news, and I
read Haaretz, an Israeli paper, on most days, so I had an idea of what
was going on and where. I told my contact that I wanted to go here,
here, and here, but I also figured he knew better than I did and asked
where he thought I should go. There were some lesser-known villages
that I really hadn’t known about, villages where things were going
on that were worth raising awareness about. So part of the list of
places in the West Bank was from this contact and part of it was from
me. The contact is also a nonviolence activist. He studied at James
Madison University, I think—non-violent conflict resolution. He had
a Fulbright here in the U.S., so I trusted his judgment.
For Israel, I’d heard about different organizations, and I tried emailing
them. That’s how I set up a few of my contacts ahead of time. But as
I said, I had a short list, and we wanted to get more people. The first
woman we interviewed was Ruth Hiller, an American Israeli with
New Profile [Movement for the Civil-ization of Israeli Society], and
she gave us the names of other people to talk to. But since I could
only set up so much before the trip, there was a bit of stress because
we weren’t exactly sure beforehand who we were going to talk to.
We had this Lonely Planet guidebook that mentions a bookstore
and coffee shop, an anarchist activist coffee shop called Salon Mazal.
When we got there, we spent an entire day—they had moved their
location—wandering around half of Tel Aviv on foot trying to find
this bookstore/coffee shop. We finally found it, and that’s where
we found the Young Refusers, specifically, Netta Mishly of The
Shministim [high-school Refusers]. In fact, a lot of the Refuser
interviews were through people we met at this coffee shop. So some
of the trip was planned out ahead of time, but the rest of it was
on the ground. Often, we would meet someone on the ground who
would tell us who we should we talk to, and they gave us names and
phone numbers.
87
Q: If you had to guess, how much would you say was planned and
how much was spontaneous?
Jennifer: I’d say 30 percent was planned and 70 percent was
spontaneous. It was mostly spontaneous, especially in Israel because
we didn’t always know what the situation would be. In the West Bank,
though, it was a little more planned. For example, we went to Jayyous
expecting to go to a demonstration like we had gone to in Bil’in. Our
thinking was to have one day of demonstrations in each village, but
there was no demonstration in Jayyous because there was curfew all
day. Instead of filming a demonstration, we ended up filming while
we were locked in this person’s house all day, filming from the roof,
which was, in some ways, more compelling footage. A lot of what
happened there was unexpected. For example, Issa from Hebron was
amazing. He was one of the interviews we’d set up ahead of time. We
weren’t necessarily expecting that much from him, but he gave us a
very extensive tour and an explanation of the issues.
Q: Obviously, the people you had on camera were willing participants.
Did they express concern about being part of this project, about being
interviewed? Did you have people who simply refused to participate?
Jennifer: There were a few activists who said they didn’t want to
be interviewed but gave the names of people who would. When I
talked with Ilan—the elderly anarchist from Bil’in—on the phone,
he asked me to explain what we were doing before he would agree to
talk to us. I said something in my explanation about wanting to go to
a demonstration with an Israeli and mentioned the phrase both sides.
He said, “Both sides? What do you mean, both sides?” He bristled. I
think he thought this project was going to be one of those artificially
balanced projects where I would arbitrarily decide both sides of the
story.
I also thought about trying to interview some settlers in Hebron,
but people told me it would be hard. If you tell them what you’re
doing, they’re not going to talk to you. You’d have to lie to them, and
that made me uncomfortable, so I decided not to try interviewing
settlers. One day in Jerusalem, we decided to get some man-on-thestreet interviews. That was a fiasco! If you’re honest about what
88
you’re doing, people don’t want to talk to you. If you lie, then you’re
misleading them. It was very awkward. We filmed one person who
tried awkwardly to answer our questions, but we decided in the end
that we didn’t need any man-on-the-street interviews.
Q: You had an idea of what you were trying to accomplish: you
felt like there needed to be more awareness about these issues. Did
you have any goals beyond raising awareness? You know how it is.
Sometimes you write because you have a specific goal, but sometimes
you write and something just comes out. I’m making assumptions
that documentary making is very similar.
Jennifer: Part of my intention was to see for myself what was on
the ground, what was going on, and to try to show that situation.
But I primarily wanted to raise awareness, specifically about Israeli
and Palestine activism against the occupation and about nonviolence
activism. I knew it was there, but I’d never seen it in any mainstream
American media form. I wanted to interview those activists so they
could talk about their view of things, which you just never hear. You
always hear how the Israelis are gung-ho and hawkish or, obviously,
how the Palestinians are terrorists. There’s a very limited scope to the
dialogue. I knew there were Israelis who were against the occupation,
but I never heard of them in the mainstream media. I wanted to
show their perspectives, let their voices be heard. I wanted to show
some of the things they’re doing as well as show some of their daily
realities—what it’s like, what it means to live under occupation.
I wanted this to be for an American audience that is, in a way, on
the fence about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. I’m
not trying to reach Christian fundamentalists or hardcore Zionists.
There are certain people you can’t really reach, people who aren’t
going to be open to the message. I thought liberal American Jews
would be a good example of a target audience or somewhat liberal,
young Americans who don’t know much about the issue. I had
questions prepared, and I had talked to some friends here to get ideas
for questions. I have a really good friend whose father is a Rabbi, and
he’s a very liberal American as well as a Zionist Jew. He talks about
the issue a lot, so I wanted to know what he would ask if he were
going and included several of the questions he gave me. I didn’t ask
89
everyone all the questions, but I treated them almost like targeted
research questions.
Q: How easy was it for you to find any type of balanced information
when you were doing your research for this project?
Jennifer: It was hard. There were times during filming, during
editing, and afterward that my husband said, “You would pick this
issue!” But I would say that there’s no such thing as balanced. What
is balanced? What is objectivity? What is an objective source? An
unbiased source? I explain to my students that it’s like a sliding scale:
the one side is extremely biased and not very credible, especially to
some audiences. The other side approaches objectivity. But I would
argue that there’s no such thing as objectivity.
To present all sides of this Israeli-Palestinian issue would take a
documentary series. It would be 20 hours long and such a complex
project. People have already heard so much about so many of the
angles that there was no point in going back over the staid, alreadytalked-about, well-worn, stereotypical arguments—except when
I asked people questions to refute some of those things without
saying, “Here’s the stereotype.” Otherwise, I didn’t see a point in representing what had already been done. I just wanted to show a slice
of what I knew was there, especially if the goal was somehow peace
and reconciliation, equality and justice. These are the voices that have
the most benefit of being heard.
I briefly considered whether I needed to put a disclaimer at the
beginning of the film to say that I’m not trying to present a balanced
view. But my liberal American Zionist friend loved it and thought
we did a great job. I also had pro-Palestinian people say that the film
might be too pro-Palestinian, which I thought was a little strange.
Granted, it’s hard with family or friends because they’re a little
biased, but even people who are hardcore Zionists liked it. My mom
told me that my stepfather, who’s a strong Christian, really liked it
and actually started to think about the issue. She said if it weren’t for
the fact that he already believes the Bible gave that land to the Jews,
he might have changed his mind. He wasn’t offended by the film, but
he can’t get over that the Bible says it’s their land.
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Q: Of course your voice is there in the film simply because of the
choices you made, who you met with, and how you decided to edit
the footage. But your voice isn’t overtly there; there’s no narrator, no
“voice of God.” The voices of the people you interviewed carry the
weight. Why did you opt not to have a narrator?
Jennifer: Before I answer that, I want to mention that the problem
with a lot of the material out there is that it’s significantly biased
one way or the other. You have either this pro-Israel view that’s very
stereotypical, focuses on terrorism, and tries to downplay Israel’s role
in the violence or pro-Palestinian material that’s too heavy-handed
and too prone to demonizing Israel and Israelis. Rhetorically, that’s
a problem because these approaches push people away. Certainly, I
think that’s what pushes away and turns off the people I’m trying to
reach, such as liberal American Zionists and liberal American Zionist
Jews, especially given the history of anti-Semitism.
The occupation isn’t the worst human rights violation in the world.
America’s done equally terrible things in many places. In a lot of
places, far more people have been killed than in the Palestinian
territories. The Israelis aren’t the worst human rights abusers in the
world, but it’s bad. And because we’re such a close ally of Israel’s,
in a way, we’re on the hook for what the Israelis do, while we’re not
for things that occur in other places. I really did try to make a point
of not demonizing Israel and Israelis. I wanted to show that not all
Israelis support the occupation.
I also tried to show that the fear is understandable and how fear
motivates and explains why Israelis feel victimized. One thing
motivating Israel to continue this occupation and not resolve it is
that the Israelis just don’t trust that the Palestinians really want
peace. They believe that the Palestinians want to kill all Israelis. I
don’t think that’s true; it’s part of the propaganda. But, in reality, it’s
how the average Israeli often feels, so I really wanted not to demonize
Israel.
Regarding your question about not having a narrator, it was partly
an artistic decision. I made a point of not having a narrator; I prefer
documentaries that don’t have a director narrating his or her views, so
91
I didn’t want to add my narration. We also hadn’t intended to include
as many informational or explanatory titles with written words—I
think it makes the film seem more opinionated, but it’s hard. I showed
a rough cut to friends and family who didn’t know very much about
the situation to see if it was confusing, and people wanted more
explanation. But because I didn’t want to do any narration, I was
very careful about the wording for all the explanatory titles. I tried
to make them as unbiased and objective as possible and edited them
many times. In those cases, I was trying to stay as close to the facts
as I could, but I thought explanations needed to be in the film to fill
in some of the background information. I just didn’t want those titles
to come across as my own opinion.
Q: Not having a narrator is particularly effective because it allows the
viewer to focus on the voices of the people you interviewed.
Jennifer: That’s a good way to put it because not having a narrator
lets the activists tell the story of what’s going on rather than my
telling their story. Plus, I’m an outsider. My point was to let their
voices be heard and not impose my views of the situation, but you’re
right. Obviously, documentary filmmakers are imposing their voices
in the choices that get made, who they talk to, and what they choose to
include. I just wanted to make it more subtle and less heavy-handed.
Q: When you see the finished product, do you see things you would
have done differently?
Jennifer: My husband and I feel pretty good about it when we watch
it. I did most of the editing and had a hard time with it. At one point,
it was almost three hours long. I was so attached to this material.
Everything was so important, and it’s such a complex issue. My
husband was half of the team, but he was supporting me—it was
more my project. I was better read about it, knew so much about the
complexities, that I thought I needed all the material. I didn’t know
what to cut. So he went through and cut it down to approximately
60 minutes, cut out what I couldn’t let go of. And he was very right.
He did an excellent job. He said, “This is the footage that’s the most
important, the clearest.”
92
Because there are so many side issues, we had a lot of decisions
to make about what to include: Do we include a part about home
demolition? We didn’t end up using the footage from one village
because we interviewed a man there who was in the local communist
housing party, but he didn’t speak English. That was one of the
things we wanted: to interview people who spoke English. Some
people just won’t read subtitles, but we also didn’t have the means
to get material translated. Also, if we went more than 80 minutes,
it would get boring and be less than useful for educational purposes.
We wanted it to be shorter than 75 minutes so it could be shown in
class.
There might be a few things here and there that maybe I should have
put back in—that one clip of that one guy saying that one thing. But
it somehow, miraculously, got finished. We both had day jobs. Other
than the summer before I got my job, it was something we did on the
side for almost two years. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out,
considering our purpose, intentions, and the fact that it’s our first
feature-length documentary and given that we winged a lot of the
interviews and didn’t know what would happen.
I think we would do better in film festivals if we had taken a more
traditional approach and had more in-depth personal stories of
Palestinians so you can really get to know them more, but that wasn’t
our intention. That’s not what we were trying to do. Instead of getting
to know just one or two individuals, I wanted a range of different
voices. I wanted the movie to be more for educational purposes, and
I think it turned out really well for that. And considering we were so
inexperienced, I’m very happy with it.
Q: Is there anything you’d like to do with this particular piece beyond
what you’ve done with it so far?
Jennifer: I should try to do a little more promotion. We have no
intention to make any money from it, but I would like people to see it,
if possible. I’m somewhat involved in the local DC area peace activist
circles and Middle-East peace advocacy. I’ve gone to some events,
talked to people, and given out copies of the movie. I have a few
people who teach and show it to their classes. I’m also trying to get
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other people to do public showings in the area, and we can speak
about it. A Canadian chapter of Amnesty International showed it
publicly, and I did a Skype Q&A session with them. We’d love to do
more events like that. We want to encourage people to see it and to
show it to other people.
We also just found out that we won best documentary feature at the
Los Angeles DIY Film Festival, although we haven’t gotten into any
other film festivals so far [In May 2012, Dreams Deferred was selected
for the Awareness Film Festival in Los Angeles.].
In a way, I think the movie is perfect for the DIY Film Festival since
it was very DIY—it was just my husband and I who, basically, did
everything. My husband even did all the music. He knows music from
playing the guitar, and, again, with the technology these days, there’s
software you can use to get the sounds of different instruments. He
recorded himself playing the guitar and played notes on the keyboard,
with different sounds generated by the software, then mixed it all on
the computer. We wanted background music that wouldn’t be too
distracting but would fill in different parts. In a way, I think that the
film’s being so DIY hurts us in other film festivals. The product is
very professional, but I think it looks less impressive to bigger film
festivals that only two people made it. It’s nice to get some type of
recognition, but that’s not why we did it.
The experience of making the documentary and seeing for ourselves
what was going on was worth it to us, but the reason we made the
movie is for educational purposes, so people can see it in college
classes, in community groups, in religious organizations, and in
activist groups. We also made a shorter version that’s only 35 minutes
long and doesn’t have all the interviews. It’s specifically for activists
and people who have gone to the Palestinian territories and want to
come back and talk about it. They can use the documentary for an
introduction about what’s going on there. I also point anyone who
is interested to our website [www.supportisraelfreepalestine.org], give
them copies of the documentary, and encourage them to show it to
other people and to make copies if they want to.
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Q: After watching Dreams Deferred, I was surprised to learn that the
film was your first foray into feature-length documentary making.
It’s really well done. You shot over 30 hours of footage? Do you have
any plans for the footage you don’t use in this film?
Jennifer: I do have plans to make several short segments of
interviews about specific subjects—the type of material that didn’t
make the final cut—for people who are interested in more, and I will
put it up on our website. I just haven’t gotten around to doing it. Now
that I have a baby, I’ve done a little bit here and there.
Q: Can you talk a bit about supportisraelfreepalestine.org? In addition
to links to the full-length and short versions of Dreams Deferred,
you have a lot of good information and links to other sources on the
website. How do you see the film and the website working together?
Jennifer: Most documentaries these days have websites to promote
the projects, solicit money for copies, or promote screenings, etc.,
but we wanted a place where people could watch and download the
movie for free. We also knew we wanted to provide links to further
information about the conflict and about Israeli and Palestinian
organizations that are doing good work. But as I was setting up the
website, I got a little carried away with trying to include a significant
amount of information, especially about different aspects of the
situation that we didn’t have time to cover in our documentary. As a
result, the FAQs are pretty extensive.
Our documentary only offers a brief introduction to nonviolence
activism and some of the larger issues involved in the conflict, so I
also wanted to include links to good sources of information that offer
a variety of perspectives so people can then go and inform themselves.
I also include suggestions for how people can get involved and active
because I’ve found that people, especially young people who don’t
have a history of activism, often ask, “What can I do?” I wanted to
provide useful links and information to help support viewers who
want to learn and do more.
I also tried to be careful how I explain the issues we address in the
FAQs so that, as in the documentary, the information doesn’t come
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off as too biased or opinionated. And I thought it was important to
address the roles of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia because
both these things can color the discourse in unhealthy and distracting
ways. I think sometimes people are ignorant of how things they say
are manifestations of these bigotries, or they may have a hard time
recognizing it when they see it—and so many Internet sources on
the topic display either one or the other!
I definitely see the website as a supplemental companion to the
documentary, and I encourage people to go to the site and check out
the information we have there.
Q: Have you considered doing a study guide for Dreams Deferred?
All the things we’ve talked about this afternoon are incredibly
nuanced points, but many students, and even a few instructors, won’t
necessarily know how to ask the questions that will help them to
understand this very complex web of narratives.
Jennifer: Yes, I have thought about it, and I’m currently working on
creating a page on our website that will include some suggestions
for lessons and questions for discussion and writing to be used by
educators. I haven’t finished it yet, but I hope to put it up soon. Some
of the useful content currently on the website that could be used in
classrooms includes links to Daily Show clips, for example, that point
out the hypocrisy of our positions. Our site also includes many links
to good articles and essays about various aspects of the conflict as
well as good brief histories.
Q: How do you see activism and advocacy linking up to our work in
the field, in the composition classroom?
Jennifer: You can definitely link activism and advocacy to the
classroom, and rhetoric connects them all together. I saw that when
I was making and editing the movie. Being very conscious of my
background in rhetoric, I would ask myself, “How do I present this
in a way that people will be open-minded enough to hear it, in a
way that isn’t heavy-handed or offensive to someone?” I also think
the film can be an object of study for visual rhetoric, which is an
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important element in a composition classroom. I personally haven’t
used it in my own classes at this point—partially because I haven’t
taught many classes since I finished it and also because the online
classes I’m teaching are somewhat structured. I can’t really add my
own material in there. But when I go back to campus, I might try to
develop a course in which I include it.
The film could definitely be useful for a composition classroom,
including in a course that is focused on documentaries, which is a
course I would love to develop. I have colleagues who have done that
at other campuses and might use this film in their classes as well.
Even taking other articles or documentaries that show the more
mainstream views of this issue and comparing the rhetoric and the
arguments they make—what people are saying and why one or the
other may be effective or not effective with certain audiences—would
be useful. For some people, how do you advocate for something,
especially in this case, something that’s controversial and that people
really feel very passionately about one way or another?
Then there’s this whole idea of bias and objectivity. Where does that
lie if such a thing does exist? What would be a bias? What would
actually be an unbiased view of this topic? You could easily tie it to
current events with all the things the candidates have been saying
about Palestinians’ being an invented people and try to figure out
why they say these things. What are the political ramifications?
Q: Your comments about bias and objectivity are interesting. Students
are always concerned about writing with an “objective” voice. It often
isn’t easy for them to understand that the framework within which
they define these values is different from my framework, which is
different from yours and that these differences make objectivity
elusive, at best. What, then, do you see as the role and the challenges
of your voice in Dreams Deferred?
Jennifer: As an American, I feel that the U.S. is the number-one
sponsor of Israel in so many ways and, by default, the occupation.
Because of that, I think I have more of an obligation, maybe a right,
to talk about the issue. I haven’t really gotten this question yet, but I
wonder if, because of the nature of this issue, people are going to say
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to me, “Who are you? You’re not Jewish; you’re not Palestinian. Do
you even have a right to even talk about the issue?” Some people have
a certain credibility just by virtue of who they are, especially on an
issue like this. People listen to them more than they listen to someone
else, and maybe that’s why I didn’t want to put myself in the movie
because I don’t have that automatic ethos that says, “Listen to me.”
I’m not an Israeli. That’s not my personal experience or my personal
heritage. I think, though, that people will perceive those who are in it
and do talk about it as having more of a right to talk about the issue,
and this is why I like to let the activists talk. I’m just someone who’s
interested in the issue, and some people are sensitive to that.
Q: If you had to defend your interest, if someone wanted to know
who you are to take this on, how would you answer? What would you
say besides, “I’m a human being who cares; I’m an American”?
Jennifer: Yes, because I’m an American, but also out of concern for
the well-being and long-term security of Israel and because I have
Israeli and Palestinian friends. I care about the well-being of both
peoples. Studying the Holocaust, I was interested in human rights
and then became interested in the history of the Jewish people.
That’s when I came to believe that this isn’t good for them. I don’t
necessarily like some of the advocacy groups that only focus on that
aspect of the problem and almost sideline Palestinians’ human rights
as if, for us to care about Israel, this will have to do. As if it’s bad,
but it’s only bad because it hurts Israel. That’s maybe going too far
because, obviously, Palestinians are human beings, and they have
their own legitimate claims to freedom and human rights. The more
I learned about it, especially going there and meeting Palestinians,
who are a very generous and kind people, the more I came to see
the effect of the occupation for its own sake. But I think people who
watch the movie can tell that I’m not demonizing Israel at all.
Q: Well, you have the Refusers speaking for themselves.
Jennifer: I do. I definitely have a strong understanding of the history
of the Jewish people and how fear plays into the situation and how
the fear is legitimate. I didn’t want to get into too much discussion of
Palestinian terrorism in the movie, in part because there wasn’t room
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but also because it’s been hashed over so many times. I recognize that
the violence of the Second Intifada certainly didn’t help to make the
Israelis feel that secure peace would happen. I could also point out
that AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] might seem
very influential with the American Government, but I don’t think
they represent most American Jews on this issue. A lot of young
American Jews are pretty critical.
Q: I saw a billboard at the end of the bus stop on Massachusetts
Avenue in DC the other day that, essentially, calls into question
President Obama’s sincerity that a nuclear weapons-capable Iran is
unacceptable. The Emergency Committee for Israel, which says on
its website that it “seeks to provide citizens with the facts they need
to be sure that their public officials are supporting a strong U.S.Israel relationship,” paid for the billboard. How do you view this
representation of an issue that’s so complex and nuanced and the
rhetoric surrounding Obama’s position on a nuclear Iran?
Jennifer: I would bring it back to fear. I didn’t see the billboard, but
I’m sure that’s what the billboard is getting at: fear. I teach in my
intro to composition class that one of the strongest emotions is fear,
and one of the most effective ways you can persuade people is to make
them afraid. If you can make them afraid, you can convince them of
many things. On the one hand, I think Israelis really are afraid. On
the other hand, they’re using propaganda to advocate a certain policy.
The people who are making these things are genuinely afraid too,
but I don’t think their fear has a completely legitimate basis. I don’t
think they have as many reasons to be afraid as they think they do.
Given the history of the Jewish people and the rhetoric coming from
Iran, for example, some Israeli politicians definitely play up fear for
political gain—just as politicians everywhere do. The Republicans do
it here. I think some of Israel’s politicians manipulate that fear, but
the fear is there, and it’s understandable why it’s there. That’s why
there are so many groups and why these people, including American
Jews who say they don’t want to live in Israel, want to know Israel’s
there in case they ever need it.
I would say that in a significant majority of Jews in the world,
American Jews included, there is a deep-seated fear that a second
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Holocaust could happen. There aren’t many groups of people who
have such a history, and that history was ultimately a primary
motivation for founding Israel. Even before the Holocaust, of course,
there was discussion about establishing an Israeli state. A lot of
Americans think Israel was founded because of the Holocaust, but
Zionism began well before the Holocaust because the persecution
of Jews was going on well before the Nazis, for hundreds of years.
The earliest immigrants, the early Zionists, were fleeing pogroms
in Russia, for example. Then there was the Dreyfus affair in France,
where the French Jews thought they had been assimilated and were
becoming equal. Because of this incident, which began in the 1890s
and continued into the early 1900s—a Jewish officer was framed
for something he didn’t do—people were suddenly shouting in the
streets, “Death to Jews!” The early Zionist immigration began during
this time, and the Dreyfus affair helped to motivate Herzl, one of the
fathers of Zionism, to write The Jewish State.
The fear goes way back and can still be seen in propaganda such as
this billboard, in the thinking and belief that, if the Israelis don’t
bomb Iran, the Iranians are going to get a nuclear weapon and blow
up Israel. It isn’t totally logical, but fear makes you not totally logical.
And enough has happened in the history of Israel that if you already
have that schema of fear, the perspective of seeing the world colored
through that lens, it just reinforces the fear.
Q: You don’t know another way.
Jennifer: Exactly. Even if you have to ignore other things:
the humanity of Palestinians, the overtures toward peace, the
denunciations of violence by certain Palestinian leaders. There are
enough examples of people wishing violence or ill will on Israel
that totally reinforce that view and make a person think this is the
way it is. Granted, that works for anything. Whatever your world
view is, whatever stereotype you hold, you select examples from the
world that support your schema and ignore any other examples. And
maybe, in a way, that’s what the movie does. It selects the examples
that people don’t usually see and might want to ignore and shows
another way of thinking about the issue.
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Q: Ali Abu Awwad, whose brother was killed by an Israeli soldier,
told a great story. Can you talk a little bit about your experience with
him?
Jennifer: Yes, he was very compelling. He was in another documentary.
In fact, he’s the main character in a documentary by Just Vision called
Encounter Point. That organization also made Budrus, which I think
is one of the best films about Israel and Palestine. Ali is very good
speaker. That was a funny story: the first time we interviewed him,
the lighting was too dark and the sound was not good, so we had to
call him up and interview him again because he was so good. But it
was fun. We hung out with him and drank coffee and smoked sheesha.
Q: Do you stay in touch with any of the people you interviewed?
Jennifer: One of the guys I stay in touch with the most isn’t in the
film because he didn’t want to be interviewed. He’s not so much of an
activist, but we stayed with him and his family in a refugee camp in a
village near Nablus. It was interesting to get to know him, and I’ve
stayed in touch with him and the former tour guide operator, Husam
Jubran, who set up our interviews in the West Bank. I’ve also been in
touch with Ali and Issa a few times. I sent them copies of the movie.
And I actually saw Ruth Hiller. She came to the U.S. to do a speaking
tour last year, and I talked to her then. I’ve been in contact mainly to
give out copies of the finished movie, but I haven’t been in touch as
much as I would like; it’s hard.
Q: You had a man in the movie, Sulaiman al Hamri, who had
participated in the First Intifada, but he decided not to participate
in the Second Intifada. He was very compelling given the fact that
he’d done what he did during the First Intifada and then decided
to move in a different direction. How representative is he of other
Palestinians based on what they told you during your trip, what you
know, and what you learned?
Jennifer: I don’t know if anyone has statistics on it, but in recent years,
a much larger number of Palestinians have turned to supporting
nonviolence and being against violence, so I think he’s not unique in
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that sense. Most Palestinians, like most Israelis, just want to live their
lives and want the occupation to end. But most aren’t activists one
way or another; they’re just normal people trying to do their thing.
One thing that makes Sulaiman very representative is that he
supports Palestinians’ right to resist, including fighting and using
weapons against the military. That’s a very common view, even among
Palestinians who would otherwise primarily advocate nonviolence.
There’s a strong belief that Palestinians have the right to resist
occupation. Their thinking is that since Israel is using the military
against them, killing them, and committing violence against them,
they have a right to take up arms against the military. Almost any
Palestinian will agree with that view. Like Sulaiman, most Palestinians
nowadays would say that violence shouldn’t be used against Israeli
civilians, but they see it as unfair that they can use only nonviolence
when the Israelis use military violence against them. Most people
would say if someone is oppressed anywhere else—whether it’s in
Libya or in Syria—those people have a right to defend themselves
if violence is being used against them. Palestinians see this right
of resistance elsewhere and think it is their right as well. Sulaiman
wanted to say that this is a common view but also that nonviolence at
this point is more effective.
Another thing that I didn’t get to in the movie is that Palestinians have
been using nonviolence since the beginning. It’s something that’s not
widely known. The First Intifada was 95 percent nonviolent. There
were strikes, marches, and boycotts. There was tax refusal. All these
different creative nonviolent resistance tactics were used in the late
80s, but the few examples of violent terror are what got all the
attention. In the Second Intifada, Hamas was more active—Hamas
was created during the First Intifada—and there were a higher
number of suicide bombings. Even though it was a small number of
Palestinians, a significant number of Israelis, hundreds of civilians,
died in the Second Intifada, and Israel cracked down really hard. I
think some Palestinians, aside from other ethical, philosophical,
or rhetorical reasons to support nonviolence, saw what happened
when there was more violence: they got violence in kind, so a lot of
Palestinians died.
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The measures were very harsh repression in the West Bank and Gaza
during and after the Second Intifada under Ariel Sharon. Palestinians
saw that response, and some said the violence wasn’t worth it. It didn’t
work, obviously. Violence was like sticking your hand in a hornet’s
nest. You could argue that the Israelis might think their violence
actually helped, in a way, to turn Palestinians toward nonviolence.
That’s not the only reason; I think rhetorical reasons played into it
too. With nonviolence, the Palestinians could get the international
community’s attention and more support. The Israeli activists have
helped too because now there are a lot of young Israelis who are in
solidarity with the Palestinians, joining in the demonstrations. They
wouldn’t be joining the Palestinians in violence. There are towns,
such as Bil’in and even Jayyous, where the Israelis actually did reroute
the fence, not completely giving the Palestinians their land back, but
you’re seeing some actions resulting from these demonstrations.
Nonviolence is working in a way violence never did.
Q: How do you view this success with nonviolence activism relative
to Hamas and Fatah and their involvement with the political system
and, particularly, with respect to the 2006 legislative elections in
which Hamas took the majority, a win that resulted in economic
sanctions and, ultimately, violence between Hamas and Fatah? Is
there a relationship?
Jennifer: I think Fatah and the PA have turned very strongly in recent
years, even before the elections, to supporting nonviolence. In a way,
going to the UN was a form of nonviolence, and it’s so sad to see
the U.S. so easily shoot down the Palestinians’ request to the UN for
statehood. It’s a nonviolent intent to say, “Look, we’re not bombing;
we’re going to the UN to make a case, to make a rational argument
nonviolently.” It’s scary when those attempts at nonviolence are shot
down by the U.S. and Israel. It increases the danger of turning people
toward Hamas, toward violence.
I think the flotilla incident1 opened Hamas’s eyes to nonviolence,
though. It hasn’t been publicized here, but the leader of Hamas
has said that they support these nonviolent actions as well and that
they’re willing to go along with a peace deal that is supported by the
Palestinian people. I think they’re realizing the power of nonviolence,
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even though they don’t believe certain things and haven’t changed
their charter. I don’t think they’re ever going to say they’re against
violence because, as I said, most Palestinians will say, “We have a
right to resist the military.” Only a handful of liberation movements
in the history of the world have been completely nonviolent. Even in
South Africa, the ANC [African National Conference] was a terrorist
group for years. It’s an unfair double standard to say the Palestinians
can only use nonviolence.
If elections happen again, a possible uniting figure—and he might
win, even though he supports violence—is Marwan Barghouti. He’s
one of the slightly younger generation of Fatah leaders who crafted
the Prisoners’ Document2 several years ago and who are trying to
unify Hamas and Fatah. Barghouti was on the last list prisoners to
get released, so even Hamas has a high esteem for him. Almost all
Palestinians have a high opinion of him. He put out an op-ed during
the Second Intifada that basically says Fatah supports Palestinians’
right to resist the Israeli military with violent means but that they
should not attack Israeli civilians. If the Israelis release Barghouti, he
could potentially unite the Palestinians and bring about some sort of
peace deal. He’s been in jail for conspiring on acts of terror, though,
so I don’t think they want to release him.
It’s hard: we can’t talk to Hamas; they’re a terrorist group. But they
tried to become part of the political process. They were elected, and
they were arrested. Yet we accept that the Muslim Brotherhood won
elections in Egypt, and Hamas is basically an offshoot of that group.
Hamas has been involved in terrorism. That’s true. But I like to use the
Northern Ireland analogy. Sinn Fein and the IRA [Irish Republican
Army] didn’t fully give up violence and all their weapons until 2005.
They were incorporated into the political process years before they
completely renounced all violence, and only by virtue of their being
incorporated into the political process did that violence stop. I don’t
think there are other cases of groups renouncing violence for another
reason; it’s just not how the world works.
You set up all these preconditions you know can never be met;
therefore, it’s an excuse never to have to give up the land. It’s sad
because the rest of the world can see quite clearly that our politics
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are geared toward supporting Israel, right or wrong, and most
Americans don’t know much about the situation, only what the news
chooses to show them. The rest of the world sees it as ridiculous.
How can Obama go to Cairo and say all these things, then turn around
and veto the one UN resolution that condemns settlements? Yet our
government policy before Obama for many administrations was that
settlements are bad. Even the liberal Zionist advocacy group J Street
says we shouldn’t have vetoed the resolution. It’s unfortunate because
it certainly doesn’t make us look good.
One of the things that worries me—because I am concerned about the
long-term security and well-being of the Jewish people and Israel—
is doing things on behalf of Israel that are clearly hypocritical and
don’t seem to be clearly in the interest of the U.S. It looks bad.
Thomas Friedman echoes this sentiment in a recent piece in the New
York Times, saying it’s in the United States’ interest not to let Iran get
a nuclear weapon. If people think Israel is pushing us to war, that’s
another anti-Semitic line of reasoning. We need to be conscious of
how these things appear.
Q: So what’s next? More documentaries?
Jennifer: I think so. I think someday. I don’t think my husband and
I plan to do other feature-length documentaries, and we don’t have
plans to do documentary filmmaking as a fulltime career. It entails
a lot of other things that I’m not particularly interested in doing.
More than half of it is trying to get funding, begging for money.
We have other careers. I think it’s nice if you can do it as a hobby.
Maybe some short pieces down the road, but not right now. I figure
if we ever make something else, considering the first thing we did
was a feature-length on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, anything else
will seem easy. And we learned so much from this project. We know
certain things to avoid and certain things to do to make it easier
down the road.
Q: I have one last question. If you have any parting words, what is
that “thing” you want to say? What do you want people to take away
from this project, your movie, if nothing else?
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Jennifer: Obviously, I would love it if people watched our movie and
passed it on to others, if they went out and learned more about this
issue. It not only has implications for the Israelis and the Palestinians;
obviously, I want both those peoples to enjoy peace and equality. But
the occupation and the conflict in general also reflect on the U.S.
because we are a sponsor, and it certainly doesn’t help our standing
in the world to continue supporting everything Israel does, especially
its oppression of the Palestinians. A lot of Israelis brought up the
drug addict or alcoholic analogy when talking about the occupation:
if you have a good friend who has a problem, addictions—in this case,
the addiction is to the occupation, to the land, to settlements, to this
aggressive posture, and, in a way, this addiction to fear—what do you
do? Do you continue to give them billions of dollars to feed these
addictions? That’s an unhealthy enabling relationship. A good friend,
a true friend, would try to help. There needs to be an intervention
instead of continued support for those habits. As Ali Abu Awwad
says in the film, “you can’t have security if you are occupying a nation
of people.” You’ll never have long-term security if you have a boot
on the Palestinians. They’ll resist one way or another; you can’t have
it both ways. If you want them to use nonviolence, you can’t cry that
every nonviolent method is delegitimizing.
It would be great if people got more informed on the issue, either
through watching our movie or through other means. Palestinians
said, “Come and see for yourself.” Go there so you can witness it.
Call your congressman. Get active in peace and justice movements.
It affects not only them. It also affects us because we are the numberone sponsor. Our tax dollars go to support the occupation in the long
run.
Q: Which brings us back to this idea of nonviolence activism and
advocacy as an alternative to the more mainstream narratives of
terror and violence or occupation and oppression—
Jennifer: Yes, I just wanted people to hear some other perspectives
on what I see as an important issue that needs to be resolved for the
sake of not only Israelis and Palestinians but also for us as American
sponsors. Right now, The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories
is the longest-running military occupation in the world, and it will
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eventually end, one way or another. Hopefully, it will end in a way
that leads to peace and reconciliation between the two peoples.
We tried to avoid being too heavy-handed so that the film will appeal
to a wider American audience. But people can ultimately see it for
themselves and decide if they think Dreams Deferred is useful and
effective.
Q: Thank you, Jennifer, for taking the time to talk about your work. I
always tell my students, “If nothing else, question your assumptions.
Search for what’s behind your beliefs; dig into what supports your
understanding of the world and what’s taking place in it.” Your film
and the companion website help us to do just that with respect to an
issue that has traditionally been as polarizing as it is complex. Dreams
Deferred not only challenges the dominant narratives that have been
associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for so long, but it also
provides an alternative: a narrative of nonviolence activism and
advocacy.
Kathy Kerr is a second-year PhD student in Rhetoric and Writing
at Virginia Tech, coming to the program after a career with the
federal government. Her research interests include the language of
government, the rhetorics of bureaucracy, and also the rhetorical
moves of governmental languages and how they interact across
cultures.
108
Endnotes
1 On May 31, 2010, Israeli forces boarded Gaza Freedom Flotilla
vessels that were planning to deliver humanitarian aid to
Gaza. The raid, in which nine Turkish activists were killed
and numerous others injured, was carried out in international
waters. Activists participating in the flotilla accused the Israeli
military of using excessive force against unarmed protestors,
and the incident sparked international outcry (Zacharia). Israel
subsequently eased its land blockade
2 Representatives of several Palestinian groups, including Fatah
and Hamas, wrote this document, which calls for Palestinians
to unite in their quest for statehood. It also calls for Israel to
withdraw to its 1967 borders, which some analysts suggest is an
implicit recognition of Israel’s right to exist (Hardy).on Gaza;
however, the international community continues to pressure
Israel to end the blockade.
109
Works Cited
Budrus. Dir. Julia Bacha. Just Vision. 2009. DVD.
Dreams Deferred:The Struggle for Peace and Justice in Israel and Palestine.
Dir. Jennifer Hitchcock and Vernon Hall. 2011. DVD.
Emergency Committee for Israel. www.committeeforisrael.com. N.d.
Web. 8 Jul. 2012.
Encounter Point. Dir. Ronit Avni and Julia Bacha. Just Vision. 2006.
DVD.
Friedman, Thomas. “Israel’s Best Friend.” New York Times. New
York Times, 6 Mar. 2012. Web. 15 Jul. 2012.
“Full Transcript: ABC News Iowa Republican Debate.” ABCnews.
go.com. ABC News, 11 Dec. 2011. Web. 8 Jul. 2012.
Hardy, Roger. “Abbas risks all with vote strategy.” BBC.co.uk. BBC
News, 6 Jun. 2006. Web. 15 Jul 2012.
Herzl, Theodor. The Jewish State. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York:
Herzel Press, 1970. Print.
“The Jewish Channel Exclusive Interview with Newt Gingrich
Excerpt: ‘Invented Palestinian People.’” http://tjctv.com/video/.
The Jewish Channel, n.d. Web. 8 Jul. 2012.
Sacco, Joe. Palestine. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphic Books, 2002. Print.
Zacharia, Janine. “Nations decry Israel’s blockade of Gaza.” The
Washington Post. The Washington Post, 2 Jun. 2010. Web. 15 Jul.
2012.
110
Small Stories, Public
Impact:
Archives, Film, & Collaboration
Katrina Powell,
Virginia Tech
O
n a cold night in December 2010,
the experimental documentary
Rothstein’s First Assignment was
screened at Virginia Tech. After the film, the
audience asked questions of the panelists,
who included Dr. Scott Whiddon, Associate
Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at
Transylvania University and composer
of the original music in the film; the film’s
director, Richard Knox Robinson, an award
winning photojournalist; and me, the film’s
assistant producer.1 That night was the
culmination of years of archival research,
interviews, long phone conversations,
planning missteps, rewrites, emotion,
and gratification. The film has since been
accepted to the Seattle International Film
Festival, the Appalachian Film Festival, the
Virginia Film Festival, and several other
smaller screenings.
In 1935, New Deal photographer Arthur
Rothstein was sent to the mountains of
Virginia to photograph the residents of the
111
Appalachian backwoods and hollows before they were displaced to
make room for Shenandoah National Park. Together with Walker
Evans and Dorothea Lange, Rothstein produced some of the most
important and moving images of America’s Great Depression. In
Rothstein’s First Assignment, Director Richard Robinson retraces
Rothstein’s steps by interviewing descendants of the mountain
people, interviews he beautifully weaves together with a 1964 audio
interview of Rothstein and an archival newsreel. During the course of
research for the film, Robinson discovered evidence that Rothstein’s
images were not pure documentation, but often staged for the camera.
Digging beneath the official story, the film unearths an unsettling
link between propaganda and documentary and raises troubling
questions about the photographer’s complicity in the displacement
of thousands of people for “progress.” Robinson’s most chilling
discovery, though, is the forced institutionalization and sterilization
of mountain residents as part of Virginia’s eugenics program,
which sterilized more than 8,000 individuals. This fascinating film
challenges the viewer to consider the complexity behind images that
are viewed as historical truth.
Richard Robinson is based in Orange, Virginia, near Charlottesville.
His photography has been published in numerous publications
including Time, Smithsonian, and National Geographic Traveler
magazines as well as in the photography annuals of Communication
Arts and American Photography. He has taught film and photography
at Randolph College, the University of Virginia, Virginia
Commonwealth University, and Washington and Lee University.
Rothstein’s First Assignment is Robinson’s second film—his first, “The
Beekeepers,” was an official selection of Sundance Film Festival. A
documentary photographer himself, Robinson is very interested in
the visual aspects of the landscapes, and both films contain beautiful
and patient images of the land and people. Watching Rothstein’s First
Assignment can be disconcerting. The linear progression of the history
is difficult to follow, and Robinson’s editing creates an uncomfortable
unfolding of events where particular people and events are hard to
keep track of. The content of the film, as well as its aesthetic choices,
raises questions about how to represent such a story and moment in
history.
112
Powell | Small Stories, Public Impact
The collaborative work done with Richard, Mary Bishop, and Scott
resulted not only in Rothstein’s First Assignment but also produced
an archive of oral history interviews, opportunities for additional
research, and moving music. Throughout the process of making this
film, there were several key moments of frustration, sadness, and
difficult decision-making. This essay examines the process of that
collaborative work and highlights the “twists and turns and startling
revelations” that made for work we are proud of but led us down
paths we had not planned. Additionally, this essay addresses the
ethics of documenting memory and the implications of those ethics
on public rhetorics.
Long before I met Richard, I visited the archives of the Shenandoah
National Park in Luray, Virginia. I had heard there was controversy
surrounding the archives: family historians wanted to examine
materials there, but much of it had not yet been catalogued. By the
time I went there, the land records, correspondence, and photographs
of families that had lived in the park were catalogued and available
for public research. While I found many interesting things—maps
from the 1930s, documentary photographs, land use records and
transfers, special use permits, and donation certificates—I was most
interested by the hand-written letters by families that were forced to
relocate so that the land could be donated by Virginia to become part
of the National Park Service. Those letters subsequently became
the subject of two book projects—one a rhetorical study and one an
edited collection of the letters.
In Virginia during the 1930s, 500 families were forcibly removed from
their homes through eminent domain law when Shenandoah National
Park was formed under Virginia’s Public Park Condemnation Act of
1928. When the state of Virginia invoked a blanket condemnation of
the property of these families in the late 1920s in order to “donate”
the land to form Shenandoah National Park, many moved on their
own to find housing elsewhere. Many families, however, were in need
of government assistance and applied for government loans in order
to be moved to resettlement housing. Those families went through
an eligibility process whereby their finances were examined and it
was determined whether they could repay a government loan for a
“homestead.” Families that were not able to qualify for the loans
113
One of the handwritten letters written in the 1930s by displaced families, used by
permissions of the author’s family and Shenandoah National Park Archives
114
were placed under the care of the newly formed Department of
Public Welfare.2 The focus of my research surrounding these letters
analyzes the ways that residents’ identities intersected with the
identities constructed for them by government officials. Through
historical, archival, and oral history research, I conducted rhetorical
analyses of the letters, government policies, commitment papers,
and historical film footage to understand the ways that displacement
identities are imagined and narrated.
After these archival studies had been published, Richard wrote me
an email asking if I would consult with him about his film project.
He’d read my first book and wanted to talk about the park’s history. I
couldn’t believe my luck. For over a year, I had been conducting oral
history interviews with families whose ancestors had been displaced
from Shenandoah National Park, and while working on the edited
collection of letters, I decided to pursue a more formal oral history
project with the hopes of producing a film that included those oral
histories. I had visions of a film that included an Appalachianaccented voice reading from the letters as images of the park moved
across the screen. I had no experience making a film, but I thought
the letters and the story warranted a film as a way to reach additional
audiences. When Richard and I met, it became clear that we each
had similar sensibilities about the history of the park and thought
it might be possible to collaborate on interviews with descendants.
We began conducting interviews together, sharing archival research,
and generally began a conversation about the park, filmmaking,
representing history and people’s stories, a conversation that has
taken hours and hours of phone calls between his home in Orange
and mine in Catawba.
As we prepared for interviews and found descendants willing to be
interviewed (including some I had interviewed before), I showed
Richard many of the letters from the collection. Most of the letters
focus on families’ requests as they were relocated, asking the park
service to assist them or allow them to take lumber or windows with
them as they moved. One of archived letters, dated February 5, 1937,
states,
115
Dear Mr. Hoskins, I heard that you are going to move Fennel
Corbin and Dicy Corbin to the Feble mind Colinly [sic] if you do
please move me in that house as Mr. Smith that live there is my
Brother and that house wold suit me I could get my mail every
day and I could my food Brought to me and I wold have some
Fruit and I wold Be on the road so a Dr could reach me whare I
live it is 3 miles to the nears narber no road up the mountin Just
a path and a Bad way I am 76 years old and if you can Please let
me have that house and move me as soon as you take thim a way
Please see Mrs Humrickhouse she was to see me some time a go
and said she wold try to get me a Place off of this mountin your
truly Mrs WA Nicholson.
When I first read this letter sitting in the park’s archives, I was more
interested in Barbara Nicholson’s relationship to the government and
her request to be closer to neighbors and the road. I did not pursue
the “febly mind colinly” because of my interest in the other themes
in the letters. However, when Richard and I began working together,
his discoveries about photographer Arthur Rothstein and some of
the families sent to the Colony compelled me to look deeper into
the archival documents I had already researched and to more fully
understand the history of some of the displaced families.
As he says in his blog about the project, Richard’s interest in making
the film began with retracing photographer Arthur Rothstein’s steps
as he photographed families in Shenandoah National Park for the
Farm Security Administration (FSA). In doing so, however, it became
increasingly clear that the project was going to take quite a different
turn than either of us had anticipated. While I was sending Richard
all the archival research I had from Shenandoah National Park and
the National Archives, Richard had also come across a 1930s film
made by the Department of Interior and near the same time, was
in touch with reporter Mary Bishop, the Pulitzer-Prize winning
journalist who had written about forced sterilizations in Virginia
during the 30s, 40s, and 50s. The vintage film A Trip to Shenandoah
contains images of some of the same families we were researching
and some of the same families that had written letters, together with
some troubling eugenics images.3 The three of us started putting the
pieces together, realizing that some of the families relocated from the
116
park were sent to state hospitals, where sterilization was common
practice. Some of these same families appear in Rothstein’s FSA
photographs, and some wrote the letters to the government that I
had researched.
At this point, I went back to Barbara Nicholson’s letter, discussing with
Richard the relationships among the Corbins and the Nicholsons, and
we both began filling in genealogical gaps, looking for descendants
to interview. As many of the letters in the collection reveal, some
families worked with the Department of Public Welfare during
their relocation. Social workers found alternative housing for a few
families, and several were sent to state hospitals after being labeled
“feebleminded.” Finnel Corbin and many of his family members were
labeled this way and sent to one of Virginia’s eight state hospitals.
“Feebleminded” was one of the categories used during the
Progressive Era of Social Reform to label people with a range of
mental disabilities. Commonly, the term was also used to judge those
whose behavior (like “fits” or “hysteria”) was considered outside social
norms. There were several hospitals across the country in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries where the “feebleminded” were committed.
One such hospital existed about 100 miles from Shenandoah Park:
The Lynchburg Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, also known
as “The Colony.”
According to Mary Bishop, who reported on several people who lived
in the Colony and the eugenics movement in Virginia, more than
60,000 Americans were
rounded up, judged genetically inferior, held in government
asylums, and sterilized against their wills. Some were mentally
retarded; many were not. Most were poor, uneducated country
people—orphans, petty criminals, juvenile delinquents, epileptics,
and sexually active single women. All were people that those
in power, from social workers to legislators and judges, saw as
threats to the nation’s gene supply. (13)
117
Rothstein’s First Assignment,
Official Selections of Seattle International Film Festival, Virginia Film Festival
118
After the infamous Carrie Buck case, in which Buck’s sterilization
was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927, Virginia eugenicists
sterilized about 8,000 people before Virginia’s Eugenical Sterilization
Act of 1924 was repealed in 1974.4 Mary Bishop had coincidentally
interviewed several people who had resided in Shenandoah National
Park and maintained quite close relationships with them, so she was
able to secure interviews with them for Richard and me.
In the 1930s, several of the families living within the Park’s
boundaries and facing the loss of their homes needed assistance
finding alternative housing. As the Skyline Drive was built and private
lands were transferred to the federal government, Virginia officials,
the National Park Service, the Resettlement Administration, and the
Department of Public Welfare tried to figure out what to do with
the families that did not qualify for homesteads. This predicament,
together with the growing eugenics movement, prompted officials
to send families, no matter the mental states of individual family
members, to the Colony.
Richard’s film is concerned with highlighting the staged nature of
documentary film, photography, and storytelling. Both of us were
aware of the implications of retelling portions of interviewees’
stories, and throughout the process have remained “mindful of
how rhetorical acts of witnessing may function as new forms of
international tourism and appropriation” (Hesford “Documenting
Violations” 121).5 With these tensions of witnessing and invention
in mind, the filmmaker and I moved forward in representing the
stories of families whose lives were impacted by the formation of
Shenandoah National Park.
Rothstein was tasked to document the Depression in the park, and
as Rothstein’s First Assignment highlights, he photographed many
members of the Corbin family, photographs that are available for
public viewing on http://memory.loc.gov. Robinson’s film revisits
that assignment and the implications of Rothstein’s photographs in
connection with eugenics field studies (see http://www.robinsonphoto.
com/film.html for further information about the filmmaker’s work).
119
Arthur Rothstein photograph
Finnell Corbin on his bed, 1935
Richard Robinson photograph
Finnell Corbin’s bed in
Shenandoah National Park, 2010
120
Mary Bishop had interviewed Mary Frances Corbin Donald in the
1980s for her work on eugenics in Virginia. With her help, we were
able to interview Mary Frances and asked her questions to help
us make connections and fill in gaps in the story. A child when her
family was displaced from her home in the park, Mary Frances was
Finnel Corbin’s granddaughter, a fact she helped establish and that
subsequently led to more questions about the purpose of Rothstein’s
project.
Finnell Corbin, who is mentioned in Barbara Nicholson’s letter,
owned 19 acres in the mountains of central Virginia. The Corbins
were a large family in the area and well known by the officials in
charge of the relocations. After being paid the “just compensation” of
$530 for his land (Lambert, Appendix 3 292), Finnell was labeled as
“feebleminded” and sent to a state hospital in Staunton, Virginia—a
common practice in Virginia as its newly formed Department of
Public Welfare struggled with providing services to families during
the Depression. Various members of his family were also sent away,
including his daughter-in-law, Sadie, and her five children, one of
whom was Mary Frances, who was seven at the time. Finnell’s son
and Mary’s father, Harrison, had died, and his widow and their
children were sent to the Colony in 1941, presumably because
the state did not know what else to do with them. From 1934 to
1941, more than 30 people who had been living within the park’s
boundaries, approximately 15 of whom were children, were sent to
either Lynchburg or Staunton.
As Richard points out in the film, most of Rothstein’s photographs
were of the extended Corbin family. Richard’s growing suspicions
about Rothstein’s decision to focus on this family prompted me to
reexamine archival material I had found years earlier but had not
focused on. A well-known doctor, Dr. Roy Sexton, was a medical
professional involved in the families’ medical care and a founding
member of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club (which today
maintains the Park’s hiking trails). In 1932, Dr. Sexton wrote to
National Park Service Director Horace Albright:
This is to illustrate the unusual reaction of these mountain people
and to bring out the fact that someone who has known them for
121
a long time will be needed in this work, as they immediately
resent the suggestions of the average person. The better class
of mountaineer will be easy to handle. The lower type will be
most difficult…After…arrangements [are] made for moving
out and colonizing the worst of these people, it is possible that a man,
with a general knowledge of the value of cabins, hogs, cows and
other equipment, together with a personal acquaintance with the
mountain families and a knowledge of their psychology would be
needed to complete the work. (1932 letter from Dr. Roy Sexton
to NPS Director Horace Albright, emphasis mine)
Medical professionals such as Sexton, state officials, and social
workers sanctioned the relocation of families to these hospitals, well
known for their eugenics practices.6 Sexton’s phrase, “colonizing
the worst of these people,” was not significant to me at the time I
first read his letter. It was only after Richard connected Shenandoah
families and the Colony that I returned to this letter found early in my
research process. Collaborating on interviews and sharing research
with the filmmaker led to a deeper understanding of Mary’s story in
particular and the history of displacement from Shenandoah National
Park more generally. This moment in the research process was
profound for us both: the film took a definite turn toward Rothstein’s
photographs as potentially eugenics field photography, and my
research has since focused on eminent domain law’s connections
to human rights law.7 After our interview with Mary Frances and
several other descendants, Richard and I both were having difficulty
moving forward. The material was difficult, the implications were
profound, and it required much emotional energy to continue the
project.
It was during the time that Richard was completing the rough cut of
the film that we were also discussing the type of music that might
be included. It occurred to me to ask my colleague Scott Whiddon,
a musician and rhetorician, if he would be interested in composing
music for the score. Subsequently, Richard and Scott worked together,
pulling together archival music and creating original music based on
the letters and a rough cut of Richard’s film. It is important to discuss
the role of the music in the film for me. Scott is very familiar with my
work and has spent long hours from the project’s earliest beginnings
122
listening to my struggle with how to write about the collection of
letters. When he sent me the music, I was stunned. I felt he had
captured the way I feel about the letters, the story generally, and the
tone of the film. Several times Scott told me about the process of
composing the music and its relation to his professional work as a
scholar and teacher. The following interview excerpts recount some
of that process:
KMP: How did reading the letters and watching the film inform
the music you wrote for the film?
SW: Because you and I worked together at LSU, and via our
conversations, I was pretty aware of the larger project—your
first book, the letters, and parts of the larger story—long before
we talked about working on a film. That helped a great deal, in
that it saved some time and allowed me to jump right in….In the
evenings, I’d read the letters offered in your second book. I can’t
really say “how” they affected the process, but I feel like living in
that space with the letters, while writing, allowed me to keep the
story present. They are powerful acts of literacy. I carried them
with me everywhere in this project – back and forth to the studio,
on my travels to Berea and elsewhere….Early in the process, I
spend a lot of time with two sets of materials outside of the
film itself: the music that’s cataloged on the Digital Library of
Appalachia (further proof that librarians are here to save the
world) and the music archives at Berea College. The former gave
me a great sense of what certain musicians in the Shenandoah
area were doing at the time of displacement—there’s not much
recorded, but some—including “Peg” Hatcher. I’d argue that
it wasn’t just the songs, but the manner in which they were
recorded at the time—the scratchy nature of field recording in
that era—was very crucial. The archives at Berea played a huge
role as well. This is fairly difficult to explain quickly, but I think
that there’s a fairly problematic monomyth about music from
that area at that time—that it was all traditional string band
music. But, as your work and others point out, these mountain
residents—while certainly remote—had some access to radios
and other forms of communication. They heard all kinds of
things via radio transmission, such as Texas swing music or
123
large-arrangement big band style material. While these sounds
don’t play into my own compositions, they “freed me up” in a
sense, giving me the space to choose music from a wider palate.
In the end, what I wanted was music that was both spacious—
think of the mountains themselves here, and some of the images
we see in the initial scenes—and yet claustrophobic and tense.
The images from Rothstein, as well as Richard’s images, and the
letters themselves all seem to exist within this tension and space.
KMP: What was the process of working with other musicians
and recording in the studio?
SW: Duane8 pushed me hard to improvise as well as compose
pieces to fit places in the film that might work well together,
even though we didn’t know, exactly, how it would all turn out.
Looking back, this was the most challenging yet most rewarding
part—stepping into that unknown space and being fully aware
that some things would be left on the cutting room floor. As a side
note here, I have to note that Richard was incredibly patient with
my phone calls and emails. He was wonderful to work with. One
moment I recall quite well: I had written a string of pieces, all
linked together, that I felt worked well for the film as a whole. We
uploaded tracks to the server and waited for Richard to respond.
While he liked the pieces, he kindly but clearly noted that they
were all too pretty, far too lush and major-key oriented. For a
few minutes, I was pretty distraught, and we decided to work on
some other parts for the rest of the day. The following morning, I
showed up to the studio, sat down on a couch, and simply started
playing a pizzicato figure in E minor; it had been in my head,
but I’d never really locked into it. Duane recorded it ten minutes
later, and then we tinkered with it all day—different microphone
techniques, different room sounds, etc. That ended up being the
fugue-like figure, “Answer at Once,” which appears about midway
through the film, running along with a lovely, grey-scale shot.
It’s my favorite memory of this whole experience—having to go
back, re-write, and re-think a major section.
KMP: How has composing the music and conducting archival
research for the film impacted your work as a teacher and scholar
of rhetoric?
124
SW: Often, [we] would prefer an uncomplicated narrative—
white hats, black hats, good guys, bad guys, etc. But when we
look at the narrative(s) about the park, it’s not that easy. I love
national and state parks, and I believe that these spaces serve
a public good. But getting the bigger picture—the removal of
residents, their rhetorical positioning by powerful forces, the way
that photography was part of this, etc.—makes things blurry
and difficult to unpack. I think that’s where our role as rhetorical
scholars and teachers of writing, of course blurs with the work
that good cultural historians do...to try and get a sense of an
artifact (like the letters) or an event (such as the displacement) and
see how it works within larger contexts. I think that the letters,
in the context of the story as a whole, and the film itself serve
as powerful reminders that literacy is not, in any way, politically
neutral….But a project like this, in which I was able to connect
my music life with my life in rhetorical studies, reminded me of
how academics need to develop projects that connect outside the
traditional (and, far-too-safe, in my opinion) walls of the academy.
I strongly believe in the importance of scholarly publication/
knowledge dissemination, but how many people—the ones who
need to know about the complicated issues that frame a story
such as this one—will read those texts? I’m not arguing that we
should all go out and make documentaries, but there is a strong
need for academics, and especially us in humanities-based work,
to find ways to make stronger connections between our research
lives and public service.
Before Scott and I talked much about his process of creating the
music, I had seen Richard’s rough-cut many times. When I watched
the film with Scott’s music, I was quite moved. The feeling of a
colleague and friend “getting” the work is happy and overwhelming.
The “Answer at Once” track in particular is one I love listening to. The
music, as well as the film itself, have reshaped how I thought about
the original archival research I’d previously done. Scott’s rendering
of the music, responded to by Richard, re-conceived and set to the
film, captured the tone of the way I had interacted with the material
for more than ten years. As I mentioned earlier, the emotion of the
story and, in particular, our interview with Mary Frances Corbin,
has impacted the film but has also impacted each of us individually.
The musician’s, filmmaker’s, reporter’s, and researcher’s interactions
125
with this material suggest an interesting way to examine implications
of processes of research on public memory. Creating a version of
the descendants’ stories through documentary film (and indeed this
paper) has several kinds of implications. The families’ narratives and
the film created around their narratives ask audiences to reconsider
the history of the park and eugenics practices in this country. Our
roles as creators of this new text (the film, this essay, our future
work) also implicate us as witnesses, where the
crisis of witnessing [refers] to the risks of representing trauma
and violence, ruptures in identification, and the impossibility of
empathetic merging between witness and testifier, listener and
speaker. A critical approach to the crisis of witnessing as it pertains
to the representation of human rights violations therefore
prompts us to question the presuppositions of both legal and
dramatic realism that urge rhetors (advocates) to stand in for the
‘other’ on the grounds that such identifications risk incorporation
of the ‘other’ within the self. (Hesford 107)
As the subtitle of his film suggests (“A Film about Documentary
Truth”), Richard was explicitly conscious of issues of form, of
the way that documentary is constructed, of the obtrusiveness of
the camera, and of the role of the filmmaker and the interviewer
in constructing a certain type of narrative. As Richard’s blog
postings and our countless hours of phone conversations suggest,
we constantly struggled with the form and act of creating testimony
through our continued critical attention to our motivations and
exposing the way the film was made and the research conducted. As
we imagine additional ways of representing families’ stories (such
as digital archives with public access on the web), we continually
work to “recognize their complex rhetorical dynamics” (Hesford
“Documenting” 124) and, in the process, have been profoundly changed
as people and scholars. As I have argued elsewhere, understanding
the complexities of displacement narratives as those that invite the
reader into particular understandings of displacement challenges us
to consider stories like Mary’s as offering counter narratives of the
displaced as passive agents contributing to their “out-of-placeness.”9
126
Rothstein’s First Assignment is an example of countering this type of
story. Robinson’s film examines the multiple rhetorical ways that
Rothstein’s photographs were used. While they were ostensibly to
document the poor in the rural South, to raise awareness of the
devastation of the Depression, and, hence, to convince legislators to
vote for social reform policies (which have problems but which also
were helpful), they were at the same time used against individuals
to prove their “unworthiness” as citizens and hide them away in
asylums. In the following interview I conducted with the filmmaker,
Richard’s struggle is clear as he pursued unanticipated documentary
truths and the ways they have impacted the film and his work since:
KMP: What was your original purpose for the film and how did
that change?
RKR: My original purpose was to look at the idea of documentary
truth. I had long wanted to do a project on Rothstein’s first
assignment in the mountains of Virginia and this seemed to be
the way to approach it. I felt our concepts of documentary truth
did not correspond with the truth of photographs. I wanted to
explore that in a film.
KMP: Was it difficult to pursue the direction the film seemed to
be taking you?
RKR: It was very difficult to follow where the film was taking
me. When the aspect of eugenics first emerged, I thought that
I could find an explanation, something to explain it away. As I
dug deeper into the material to find that explanation, it just got
worse. I never expected to take [the research] this far but I felt
as a photographer that I should. I somehow felt complicit.
KMP: What was the process like working with others (me, Mary
Bishop, Scott Whiddon, others?) in researching the film and how
it impacted the final product?
RKR: The process of working with others was new to me.
Photography is basically a solitary profession. Sometimes
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you work with a writer but mostly you are by yourself. As a
filmmaker, that’s been a bit of a stumbling block. For Rothstein’s
First Assignment, I soon realized that I could not do it alone. The
research aspect of the film was daunting. Much of the film brings
together the research of others. Virginia Tech Professor Katrina
Powell and Reporter Mary Bishop are a perfect example of that.
The narrative of Rothstein’s First Assignment brought Katrina and
Mary’s research together in a way I don’t think either of them
could have anticipated. There was also Carol Squiers from the
International Center of Photography in New York. She gave
me the confidence to push the project forward. Her research on
eugenics and photography helped me understand what I was
finding. As with any project of this magnitude, you’re dependent
on what others have done before you. It was also the first time
working with a musician. I got a beautiful piece of music from
Scott Whiddon.
KMP: How do you see your film as contributing to the public
memory of Shenandoah National Park or the eugenics history of
Virginia? What do you hope audiences take away after watching
your film?
RKR: Hopefully, my film will get people to question the generally
accepted narrative of the park and the narrative associated with
Rothstein’s photographs. When I talked to descendants of the
families Rothstein photographed, they were stunned that almost
no mention of their story is told at the park. For me, that is the
most troubling aspect of this story—that such information could
go hidden for so long. It would be another thing if they had
not been photographed and their photographs weren’t used to
promote the government’s objectives. It hard to reconcile the fact
they did not participate in the Resettlement Project for which
their images were produced, that instead of being resettled, they
were institutionalized and many of them forcibly sterilized. I
hope my film makes people think about the limits of photographs
as documentary truth. We know very little about a person from
a photograph. The troubling question is, “Are photographs
intentionally misused to promote agendas?”
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KMP: What have been the best responses to the film? What
have audiences at the Seattle International Film Festival or the
Virginia Film Festival said to you about the film? What have
family members said to you about the film?
RKR: There seems to be different audiences that come to see
my film that have distinctly different responses. The Seattle
Film Festival audience was much better than I thought they
would be. Though most of the Q and A seemed to be focused
on Rothstein’s complicity and not the fate of his subjects, many
were supportive, and a filmmaker actually asked me for my
autograph. At the Virginia Film Festival, response was a bit
muddled. Some audience members were offended, while others
came to my support. There seemed to be a number of agendas at
play in the audience. The most interesting audience was at one of
my first screenings in Madison County. At the screening, I had
arranged for descendants of Rothstein’s subjects to be the first
to see the film. I wanted to see what their response was to what
is essentially their story. Unknown to me, Rothstein’s daughter,
Annie Segan, was also in the audience. She had driven down from
New York with a friend to see the film. I’m still not sure how
she found out about it. During the Q and A, her friend Brodie
challenged me on the film. He was relentless. Eventually, the
audience came to my defense. They tired of Brodie’s challenges
and confirmed the sterilizations. I didn’t know it at the time but
the woman who stood up and said outright that it did happen had
married into the family at the center of Rothstein’s project. She
knew the story better than I did. Later I found out that Annie’s
friend Brodie himself works for HUD, the agency that came out
of the Resettlement Administration.
KMP: How has working on this film impacted your future work?
RKR: It has impacted me tremendously and created a bit of a
crisis. When I was in Spain this summer, at first I couldn’t take
any photographs. I didn’t know what to do. To a large degree, the
film has also broken down my own mythology. It took me a long
time to get my footing in Spain. Eventually, I realized I needed to
find a way to document how the process of how documentation
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works, what it does and how it’s used. My work has been heading
in this direction for a while, but now I’m acutely aware of its
importance. It’s no longer a post-modernist joke.
Richard, Mary Bishop, Scott, Florence (a descendant who has been
a panel member at screenings), and I have responded to questions
at various screenings of the film, and reaction to the film has been
mixed, as is consistent with the reaction to and discussion about
Shenandoah National Park generally. The 72-minute film represents
hundreds of hours of interviews, archival research, studio recordings,
and county records offices by several people, all which were then
mediated by the filmmaker. Mixed reaction highlights the complexity
of the process, and, indeed, the narrative of the film draws attention
to that complexity. The film is an experimental documentary, so the
aesthetics are not always well-received by mainstream audiences
who expect that the narrative will be tight, that questions will be
raised and answered. In its narrative form, the film represents, to me
at least, the chaos and often unanswerable questions raised during
archival research.
Like Richard and Scott, my work has been greatly impacted by the
process of working on this film. Perhaps that’s an obvious statement—
how could it not? But I think it is important to stress how it has
influenced not only the content of what I will work on in the future
but also the way I go about approaching a project. Examining human
rights discourses in relation to eminent domain law is an unplanned
direction for me. There are moments I wish to work on completely
different projects, but this one, and Mary Frances’s story, keeps
pulling me back.
So why recount this story of collaboration on an experimental
documentary seen by relatively few people? Since early in my career,
I’ve been interested in reflexivity in research (Powell and Takayoshi
2003 and 2012) and the ways that understanding researchers’
processes might lend insight into literacy and literate practice. I think
what writing this essay has done, besides attempting to recount the
complexity of the sequence of events that led to the production of
a film, is to highlight the ways that research can and often does take
turns we don’t expect, turns that can lead us down paths we don’t
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want to traverse, either ethically or emotionally. The decisions we
make either way, I think, need to be contextualized for readers. Until
very recently, my own work has quite avoided issues of eugenics
when—one might ask—it seems the next logical step to take. I may
very well do that, but very simply put, it’s emotionally difficult to
continue working in that direction. Richard and I, after spending
every week for a year talking about the project, spent quite a bit of
time disengaging from each other, and I moved to quite a different
project so that I could think about something else. And therein
lies another ethical dilemma. I had spent so much time coming to
understand the story, and there’s so much more work to be done and
more stories to be told. One might argue that it’s our responsibility
to do it (I certainly feel that way). On the other hand, I seem to have
a sense that I need more distance from this project in order to have a
better critical sense of it. I have appreciated the opportunity to write
this essay to move in that direction. I don’t know if reading this will
be helpful to others as they research—it’s specific and contextualized.
But I have found the reflexive work of Gesa Kirsch, Ellen Cushman,
Ruth Ray, and others extremely helpful to me as I’ve tried to do my
work and move forward despite the pitfalls.
What the work with Richard and Scott and Mary Bishop did for me
was help me understand the simultaneous contradictions not only in
public memory, tourism, and history, but also the ways an individual
can both love a place yet be critical of its existence. The work of
public rhetorics seems to help not only reveal those tensions and
contradictions but also to reconcile them in some way, even if not
completely satisfactorily. Furthermore, the work in public rhetorics
asks us to recognize the layered dimensions of storytelling and that
when we take on telling a story, even if we recognize these layered
dimensions, we remain immersed in those layers (and the power
relationships inherent in them). Richard, Mary Bishop, Scott, and I
were and are cognizant of these limitations, yet we moved forward,
telling our perspectives of what we found in the archives. There
remain many more to tell.
If we are persuaded that recounting memories is a way for people to
give meaning to and transform their past, then the work of the film
can be useful across several boundaries. What the film and its related
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research highlights is that when memory is shared, it is expressed
in various ways and continuously reworked, depending on changing
political and emotional needs. This recognition of the social nature
of remembering signals the simultaneously private and public
functions of memory and retelling. In working on this film, Richard
and I, together with Mary Bishop and Scott and others, participated
in making Mary Frances’s (and others’) private memories public and,
consequently, our story of process highlights the mediated nature
of making memory public. We see our work contributing to the
subversion of the public (or mainstream) memory about the park,
even as Rothstein’s First Assignment, my work, Mary Bishop’s reporting,
and Scott’s music are each mediated ways of re-remembering the
displacement of the park. We continue to ask questions about how
the material is archived and how we are implicated in the retelling of
the story of displacement.
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Endnotes
1 Roanoke Times and Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Mary Bishop
was also to be part of the panel but, at the last minute, was unable
to attend. Since that first screening, we have had similar panel
discussions at other screenings, such as the one at the Virginia
Film Festival in November, 2011. Funding for production of the
film included Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human
Sciences Jerry Niles Faculty Research Award, the South Atlantic
Humanities Research Award, and the David and Betty Jones
Faculty Development Grant from Transylvania University.
2 See Elna C. Green’s work on the history of public welfare and
Virginia’s in particular.
3 See Stephen Fender’s discussion of eugenics photography.
4 See also Paul Lombardo for a history of eugenics in Virginia, and
http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/eugenics/.
5 Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol also say in their introduction
to Just Advocacy, “This dialogic process [of witnessing] is also
a transnational and transcultural process whereby reading or
seeing human rights violations locates the viewer, the reader, and
the witness within local and global communities. Pedagogically
speaking, we might ask whether or how representations prompt
self-reflexivity about the politics of viewers’ historical, cultural,
and social locations?” (11).
6 See Paul Lombardo’s Three Generations for historical contexts of
eugenics practices in Virginia and Codgell and Currells’ Popular
Eugenics.
7 See Powell, “Rhetorics of Displacement.”
8 Contributing musician Duane Lundy, owner and producer of
Shangri-La studios in Lexington, Kentucky.
9 See cultural geographer Tim Cresswell’s essay on out-of-placeness.
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The Goals of Grassroots
Publishing In the Aftermath
of the Arab Spring:
Updates on a Work in Progress
Stephen J. Parks,
Syracuse University
Our mission is to provide opportunities
for local communities to represent
themselves by telling their stories in
their own words. We document stories
of local communities because we believe
their voices matter in addressing issues
of national and global significance.
We value these stories as a way for
communities to reflect upon and analyze
their own experience through literacy
and oral performance. We are committed
to working with communities, writers,
editors and translators to develop
strategies that assure these stories will
be heard in the larger world.
—New City Community Press, circa 2000
I was heading downtown and all I could
see are these big clouds of smoke coming
up from most of the regime’s buildings.
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Parks | The Goals of Grassroots Publishing In the Aftermath of the Arab Spring
The people of Benghazi were attacking unarmed. All they had
was gas, matches, rage and will.
—Ibrahim Shebani, “LIBYA: Four days of the Revolution,” circa
2012
O
ver a decade ago, Nick Pollard told me of a local poet in
London, Vivian Underwood, who as a teenager had written
a small book of poetry. Published in 1972, Poems, available at
the local Centerprise bookshop, sold over 15,000 copies. The point of
this story, Pollard told me, is that the total number of sales exceeded
those of the then national poet laureate, but did so in a small
geographical area, a sub-section of the city of London. This was
the power of community publishing. When done well, it could reach
deep into a neighborhood, echoing and supporting a collective vision
of community, while also articulating common goals and aspirations.
It was out of this belief that New City Community Press (NCCP)
was launched.
In the more than ten years of its existence, NCCP has published
over twenty books, supported local writing groups, sponsored public
readings, and helped to organize international writing festivals. In
total, NCCP has highlighted the personal stories, testimonies, and
political insights of hundreds of neighborhood residents, activists,
and organizers. It has done so out of the growing belief that the
distribution of these stories could affect local debate, shift the terms
of power, and open up greater opportunities for democratic dialogue.
Over the past several years, as local, national, and global events have
pushed the meaning of democracy towards sometimes surprising
ends, I would argue that traditional and new forms of community
publishing can play an even more engaged, activist role. For
publications that reach deep into a community’s identity, that identity
is only as powerful as the organizing that enacts and follows through
on the vision expressed. Ultimately, democratic dialogue is the only
as effective as the activist practices it produces.
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For that reason, I have come to believe that long-standing
community publication projects, like NCCP, need to directly join
their resources to the rhetorical and material work of local and
global activists, embedding democratic dialogue within a call for
progressive structural change. With this in mind, I want to use the
following pages to briefly show NCCP’s developing relationship to
the question of community organizing, share a forthcoming essay
from a forthcoming community publication on the Arab Spring,
and conclude with a discussion of what it might entail to work for
democracy in the current political moment.
Writing Beyond the Curriculum
NCCP was initiated in Philadelphia. It was started during a time when
I worked at Temple University and, with Eli Goldblatt, was actively
developing a “Writing Beyond the Curriculum” (WBC) model of a
university writing program. NCCP was designed to be the outreach
element of our emerging community writing/partnership groups.
As such, the initial publications were distributed across the city and
featured writing by urban youth, undocumented workers, disability
activists, and marginalized neighborhood residents. In the case of
some publications, such as Espejos y Ventanas: Oral Histories of Mexican
Farmworkers and Their Families, these “local” voices gained national
and international attention, reaching an audience far beyond our
initial expectations.
Still, each of these publications was developed and articulated
within a “Writing Beyond the Curriculum” model. To that end,
their principle goals were to support a series of writing courses
linked to community organizations, to improve the literacy skills of
those involved, and, ultimately, to demonstrate the insights of local
residents. During the period of WBC’s growth, then, there were a
series of such partnerships that came together, did a piece of literacy
work, and then dissipated. As noted, NCCP books stood as testimony
to the results of this effort. In my more cynical moments, I would
call these partnerships “bubble communities” for the way life was
breathed into them, only to watch them pop as they hit the harsh
reality of structural oppression. That is, I found it difficult to argue
much progressive structural change had occurred as the result of
our work.
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Institutionally, however, it was a very successful model, supporting a
myriad of programming, gaining approximately 1.5 million dollars
in funding, and creating an on-going endowment to continue such
programming well into the future. Eventually, however, university
support for the work of WBC and NCCP went away. Although I
often felt no real change had occurred in the lives of the involved
communities, the college could only see these efforts as “political
agitation” and/or “social work.” Threatened with being essentially
starved of funds and shut down, I moved NCCP outside of Temple
University and, eventually, to Syracuse University; Eli Goldblatt
moved towards a partnership with Treehouse Books. Our sustaining
collaboration continued, but was now practiced in two different
locations. (For my version of this history, see Gravyland: Writing
Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love. To see Eli’s version
of this history, see Because We Live Here.)
In Syracuse, which has its own rich history of industrial growth and
decline linked to progressive movements for economic/social justice,
NCCP found a supportive university and community network within
which to expand its work. Over the next several years, multiple
writing group/book projects were launched which featured the
voices of urban schoolchildren, union workers, and community
activists. (See “Emergent Strategies,” with Nick Pollard, for a partial
accounting of this work.) In fact, the press had gained such a strong
local reputation, that NCCP was invited to act as a community liaison
by a local foundation for residents whose neighborhood was in the
midst of a redevelopment project. Located just off of the restaurant
district of downtown, the neighborhood had been home to many
small and large industries during its heyday, a period which also saw
the neighborhood act as an economic incubator for the aspirations
of recent immigrant populations. As with many such industrial
neighborhoods, economic downturns had devastated opportunity, if
not the community’s spirit. The goal of the redevelopment project
was to revitalize both business and community prospects.
Here is where the story moves towards the role of writing beyond
the printed page of community publications. It is one type of project
to support a neighborhood’s ability to “tell their story.” This had
marked my work in Philadelphia. It is, as I discovered, another thing
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entirely to link the “story telling” to efforts to fundamentally change
power relations through actual community organizing. Yet, for this
project, as part of the process of collecting neighborhood insights,
a door-to-door interview campaign was initiated. The collected
insights about the residents concerning their hopes/concerns for
the neighborhood were shared at a resulting open neighborhood
forum. Not surprisingly, there was deep ambivalence about the
redevelopment efforts. Or rather, there was broad support for efforts
to improve the community, but ambivalence about the ability of the
residents to be active participants in that process. As a result of the
neighborhood forum, there were calls to form a new neighborhood
coalition, an organization which would attempt to be an active force
in the community. Our work soon turned to such efforts.
All of these actions occurred before a single word was printed on a
page, turned into a book, and distributed across the neighborhood.
Yet the immediate fact of the printed word being joined to
community organizing efforts, efforts mistakenly seen as against the
redevelopment project, created a harsh backlash. As a result, there
was an immediate loss of funding from national grant organizations
for our neighborhood projects, strained partnerships with the “mover
and shakers” involved, and the creation of lingering distrust about
whether the community was being “manipulated” by “outsiders.”
Here it must also be noted that the development project had initiated
its own power-sharing plan, which while disputed in some sections
of the neighborhood, was also respected and supported in others.
The point here is that who were “outsiders” and/or “manipulators”
was greatly dependent on a person’s position in the neighborhood.
In spirit, however, I believed everyone imagined they were working
toward the same goal of community-led progress.
Despite this deeply conflicted context, the work continued. The new
residents organization sponsored a community picnic, supported
completely by their own efforts, which made real their claim to be
community-based. At this picnic writing prompts about the community
were circulated. Later, writing groups focused on the neighborhood
were initiated. Eventually, NCCP helped to create an aligned local
neighborhood press, under control of the residents, linked to the
emergent community organization, as a means to reframe the image
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of residents and their goals as a community. Entitled “HOME,” their
first publication featured personal testimonies such as the one by
Susan Hamilton:
My initial encounter with the neighborhood was accidental–I got lost
on streets that veer off on a diagonal and that took me to an unexpected
destination. In the same way, I didn’t really plan to live here. I owned
a home on the Southwest side, and though I was dissatisfied with its
lack of porches, its small yard, and the size of the mortgage payment,
I was not actively looking to move. Then an acquaintance who knows
I like old houses urged me to tour one that was coming up for sale on
Holland Street. The previous owner had died in her 90s, leaving this
house something like a museum. Most of its Victorian splendor was
intact, right down to the intricately wrought metal pulls on the pantry
drawers, and I was immediately hooked. The area didn’t frighten
me; it reminded me of Deep Rondo, the inner-city, racially mixed
neighborhood in St. Paul where I lived as a young child. I had been
working as a community organizer on the Near Westside, so I already
knew some of my new neighbors. But I wasn’t blind to the problems,
such as the drug house across the street and decades of neglect by local
government. The lot next door, where a house had been set afire to cover
up a burglary, had been vacant for more than a decade and used as an
informal dump. When I bought my house, I began cleaning out the lot’s
trash and trying to mow the thicket of weeds, some taller than my head,
with a push mower. When drug dealers would congregate at the curb, I
walked around them, picking up the food wrappers and subtly giving the
message that I too had a role to play and a claim to that space.
A little over two years later, early in the morning of Labor Day 1998,
a freak storm blasted Syracuse. I was awakened by the shriek of a
box fan being blown out of the window by 115 mph winds. I closed
windows and laid back down on the bed, which moved as the whole
house swayed. Lightening flashed green outside, like strobe lights, and
thunder punctuated the sound of falling trees. When I got dressed and
went downstairs, I could not see out the windows because they were all
streaked with rain. I opened the back door and could see only leaves
where my car was parked. My dog Che, terrorized by the storm, cowered
at my feet. Before I could decide whether to take refuge in the basement,
the worst of the storm passed. The electricity went out–and would
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not be restored for a week. Peering out the front door, I could vaguely
see the shapes of big trees on the ground, power lines snared in their
branches. Then I heard voices from the darkness. A group of young
men from the surrounding houses appeared, holding cans of beer and
flashlights. They asked if I was OK, and I told them I was afraid that
my car had been crushed. Disregarding the danger of fallen electrical
wires, a couple of them scrambled over branches to reach the backyard
and returned to report that the car was unscathed under a mound of
small twigs. Then the guys moved on to the next house, calling out to the
tenants to see if they needed help.
As I came back inside to comfort my dog, I realized that for the first
time I really felt at home in this neighborhood, where people do look out
for each other and pull together during crises. During the next week of
post-storm recovery, people shared food from their freezers, told where
ice could be purchased, helped one another cut up trees that littered yards,
and cheered together when the Hydro Ontario trucks sent from Canada
finally restored power to our streets.
Though still neglected by local government, we could take care of each
other.
When published, HOME demonstrated a much different argument
about residents than typically seen. Typically, residents were
portrayed as poor, uninformed, and ungrateful by mainstream
publications/organizations. HOME demonstrated that long-term
and short-term neighbors wanted a developed neighborhood, but one
that respected its traditions of diversity, hard work, and community
support. The book implicitly argued that these values had not been
sufficiently recognized by those in authority both historically and in
the present moment–that they had not been brought into the actual
power sharing of any project in terms that the resident organization
recognized (italics here expressing the fundamental nature of true
representation). It was also an attempt to reframe the students
involved in the project that were being portrayed as manipulative
and insensitive to the “actual” needs of the residents. Through the
press, the collaboration of students/faculty was shown to be directed
by the residents. A different power dynamic than the criticism’s had
implied had also been created.
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NCCP had clearly published such books before. Yet only when these
stories were supported by an activist organization were the concerns
expressed raised to the level that local leaders, real estate developers,
non-profit organizers, grant foundations took notice and responded—
initially in very harsh terms, but eventually in collaboration. The fact
of the neighborhood organization had reframed the book as a vehicle
to claim the power to control their neighborhood, a claim which
eventually enabled partnerships with many community, business, and
religious organizations focused on structurally addressing primary
concerns in the neighborhood, such as crime. (This element of the
story should be told by Ben Kuebrich who worked with residents
to record their concerns about police conduct as part of a police/
neighborhood delegation, publishing a book which became a site
of citywide debate, entitled I Witness.) Publishing plus organizing
had helped to create the possibility of grassroots community-led
structural change to occur.
While I intend on writing a longer book length account of this
experience, for the purposes of this article, I want to highlight the
ways in which the simple documentation of a neighborhood story
was seen as an insufficient response by a neighborhood faced with
an immediate challenge (or so perceived) to their “way of life.” The
“bubble” community of the first iteration of NCCP was not up to the
task of moving “writing beyond the curriculum” toward actual social
change. The residents, faced with fundamental challenges to their
way of life, recognized that stories unconnected to efforts to organize
were insufficient if the actual goal was to shift power relationships.
And here I would hazard to guess that most of the documentaries
that emerge out of community-based partnership work either
directly or indirectly to offer a challenge to the status quo, a call for
a different dynamic between residents and the dominant hegemony
in which they exist. The experience of this particular community
project highlighted the need to rethink our role as community
documentarians and to consider in what ways it also implies a related
sense of community activists. To what extent, that is, are we morally
obligated having taken up the former to also inhabit the latter subject
position as well? And when that moment arrives, how does a claim to
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support “writing beyond the curriculum” mutate into the need to push
beyond the status quo toward progressive and structural change?
Writing a Revolution
Since 2012, NCCP has been working with activist/teachers from the
Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to create a book focused on
the meaning of democracy and democratic activism. The publication,
initiated by the individuals in the book, was created during a summer
period when they were all in Washington, D.C. The publication
will feature individual testimonies from Libya, Egypt, Tunisia,
Bahrain, Palestine, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, as well as
other countries in the region. Many of the participants were or
are educators, community and/or school-based. All are under the
age of 30. The individuals in the book wrote their own piece, were
interviewed, or produced their chapter by some combination of these
two methods.
In their stories, bombs explode in the next room; army soldiers hold
guns to their heads; husbands are pulled out of cars, arrested, and
taken away. It goes without saying that each of these individuals share
experiences that are both striking in the terror they experienced and
admirable for their courageous response. Here is an excerpt from
one of the participants, Ibrahim Shebani. He named his piece “Libya:
Four Days of the Revolution”:
[O]n the 15th of February, I received a phone call from one of
my friends, Ahmed, telling me that Benghazi has awakened.
There was a massive protest in front of the security directory.
. . . by the mothers, daughters and wives of massacred Busleem
prisoners. Everybody was chanting ‘’Wake up, wake up Benghazi.
The day you have long waited for had just come.’’ [We] couldn’t
predict what was going to happen, but I was certain of only one
thing, that I must leave for Benghazi.
I arrived to Benghazi on the 16th of February. . . . My friends
Ahmed and “Suliman” came to pick me up from the airport and
we went straight to downtown where many young Libyans had
started already protesting and clashing with police forces loyal
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to Gadafi. . . .[W]e could hear people chanting, whistling, and
clashing with police forces. . . . [We] were very scared to join. I
could clearly see the security trying to abort the protest. [I also
saw] the angry protestors screaming ‘’Down Down Gadhafi,”
“The Police’s duty is to serve and protect the civilians,” and
“People want the downfall of the regime.” This all took me by
surprise and a boost of adrenaline rushed through my veins. I
wanted to join the front line of the protestors and scream, say
many things I had dreamed of saying. . . I turned on my mobile
phone video camera, covered my head with my hoody, and wore
the sunglasses I had in my pocket. I went to join the protestors
and I couldn’t stop screaming, “The people want the downfall
of the regime.” [Soon the] security forces started chasing the
protestors, capturing as many as possible. . . . We had to run to
our car.
[On February 17th,] I woke up early like a little kid on his way
to his first day of school; this is the day all of Benghazi was
going out. Although I knew that the protest won’t start until at
3 pm, I just got ready and waited for my friends to pick me up.
Suliam arrived at around 1:30. We drove towards downtown. As
we were passing on the bridge of Juliana that crosses the lake
of Benghazi where there is a massive garden often visited by
families, I saw something I didn’t understand quite well at that
time. The garden was full of workers wearing yellow helmets,
probably over a 1,000, clearly immigrants, mostly Africans and
some Asian. I looked at Suliman and told him, “See this is pretty
smart. They brought workers to clean up the mess of the protest
to show the world that nothing in happening in Benghazi.” I had
no clue what the regime had in mind for the protestors. . . .
There weren’t many people out in front of the court, but
protestors already had started chanting ‘’Constitution, freedom
and equality.” We went and joined them, waiting for the rest to
arrive. . . . Thousands of people were marching from downtown
Benghazi. Now we were clearly over 5,000 Libyans, all in one
voice, “Tell Moamer and his sons, Benghazi is full of real men’’
and provoking some Libyans who kept watching from distance
out of fear telling them ‘’Join us, join us, and no harm would
143
reach you.’’ We were getting more and more people. I couldn’t
stop calling family and friends telling them about what I am
witnessing!
We waited for the [rest of the] marching groups to join us, but
no one arrived! We received a phone call from our friend Osama,
according to him over 10,000 men were marching. . . . These men
went over the bridge crossing the lake of Benghazi and had no
clue what was waiting for them. . . . As they were coming down
the bridge, mercenaries dressed in cleaners outfits and yellow
helmets, supported by the army, started shooting at the unarmed
protestors. They hit them with heavy artillery and aircrafts,
Kalashnikovs, tear bombs, bats, machetes. Chaos broke through.
Protestors were being pushed back. Those in the front lines were
murdered. Many of them jumped in the lake and many of them
were captured. People in front of the court were receiving phone
calls. Anger was showing on the protestors’ faces. Everybody
was shouting ‘’People want the downfall of Gadhafi.’’ I saw rage
and anger that nothing could stop.
On the 18th, I woke up early. . . I was heading downtown and all I
could see are these big clouds of smoke coming up from most of
the regime’s buildings. The people of Benghazi were attacking
unarmed. All they had was gas, matches, rage and will. Security
forces were being push backed from downtown towards either
the ‘’Alfadel Buomar brigade compound’’ or to the ‘’security
directory building.” I parked my car quite far and decided to walk
to court. I was getting closer and the only thing I could see was a
massive independence flag waving from the courthouse! This flag
was even forbidden to talk about during the past 42 years and
the majority of Libyans were born and raised under the Gadhafi
regime didn’t even know it existed.
In front of the court there were thousands and thousands of
protestors. Many of my friends that I haven’t seen for a while were
there too; the feeling was indescribable. . . . I saw “Mohamed.” I
called him ‘’Hey what are you up to?” He said he had to go home
to bring this satellite to the court. He was trying to connect on
Aljazeera Live to show the world what was really happening in
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front of the court of Benghazi. So far no proper videos were
broadcasted, only some amateur camera phone videos. He was
trying to find other people to come with him to carry the satellite.
It took us almost 45 minutes. . . [As we returned to the city], the
streets were empty, the only thing you could see was the smoke
of the burning buildings. We arrived safe to the court. That was
my mission of the day. People were happy to see the satellite.
Finally the world will be seeing what is really happing.
I felt so proud to be part of this small mission.
In addition to such experiences, individuals also tell stories of
running for political office; teaching classes focused on gender equity;
and leading workshops on democratic organizing. Activism, the book
argues, comes in all forms, but takes place across the region as a united
effort. It was not so a “spring” that occurred, these authors argue, as
much as the emergence of a series of long-term grassroots efforts
designed to foster a democratic spirit and set of concerted actions by
a new generation. If the work in the city of Syracuse reframed the
goals of NCCP, forcing it to recognize the need to link publication
to local activism, the “Arab Spring” book poses the question of how
community publishing can align itself with larger global efforts at
grassroots activism.
In drawing such a connection, I recognize it would be far too simple
to equate activists in Syracuse with those across the Middle East.
Nor should the danger faced by those involved in the projects be
equated. Reluctant real estate developers should not be compared
to brutal dictators. And while I may have lost some funding for
publishing HOME, the MENA lost friends, families, and, too often,
their homes as well. Also some members of the MENA publication
collective were even unable to participate fearing retribution would
be taken out on their families. Yet, it would also be too simple not to
establish connections but, instead, to assume that the two projects,
two audiences, could not talk back and forth across religious, ethnic,
language, and geographical barriers. Nor should it be assumed that
no lessons could be drawn from the other’s project—that mutual
insight is not possible. So instead of drawing simple connections
145
across continents, I want to suggest possible tactical and strategic
possibilities suggested by both projects.
NCCP began in a print-based community-publishing world—a
world still marked by the strategies of Vivian Usherwood’s Poems.
The publication of HOME bears the traces of that history. HOME
was a printed book linked to a grassroots community effort that
deployed classic organizing strategies—door-to-door interviews,
public meetings, focus on key community issues, etc. The MENA
publication occurs in a world of social media. To read Ibrahim
Shebani’s engagement as an activist is to hear of cell phones, video
cameras, satellite TV, international television stations blending with
traditional strategies of street protest and mass organizing. To a great
extent, the strategies of the MENA book demonstrate the ways in
which “community publishing” now needs to occur across platforms
and media, making the experiences and insights of its participants
immediately available, part of the flow of rhetorical argument
and material practices informing the actions of those involved.
The “book” represents one moment in what would ultimately be a
networked set of “publishing” actions designed to empower the work
of those engaged in social/political struggles for justice.
While I do not want to claim these MENA activists’ linking of
rhetorical social media work and grassroots strategies are “new”
(rather I see them as having a track record of success), I do want
to claim they represent a step forward for framing the traditional
community-publishing project. For instance, in the case of the
MENA project, we are actively building an accompanying website
for the publication which will feature “links” to related organizations,
efforts, and activists engaged in the work of democratizing their
communities and countries. There is also discussion about creating
an accessible database onto which protest/organizing footage
could be collected/distributed—creating an on-going archive of
sorts. And we are considering how to support/foster the myriad of
technologies which allow conversation to occur in contexts where the
act of conversation itself is dangerous and a cause for persecution.
Here “traditional” boundaries of publishing as a means to reach an
“audience” come up against more immediate needs of organizing in
hostile environments.
146
All of this work exists with the knowledge that internet access can
not be considered a common resource for many communities. Here
the ability of “print” to physically move across communities enables
a different form of circulation to occur. That is, the distribution
network associated with printed books allows the ideas to circulate
across communities where technology may not be as accessible;
where cell phones, video cameras, and computers are not (or are
no longer) the principle means by which ideas are shared. This was
certainly the case in the Syracuse neighbourhood in which HOME
was circulated; I would hazard to guess similar communities exist
across the MENA countries as well. For this reason, the MENA book
will be printed in both English and Arabic, circulated in the U.S.A.
and MENA countries. Taken collectively, then, what HOME and
the MENA book bring forth is the need to work across emergent
and traditional technologies, always linked to a grassroots effort at
changing actual structures of power through democratic activism.
In doing this work, activist and academic communities are thinking
through how to use the histories and resources of a community
press to serve as a “organizing site” through which to capture the
aspirations of their neighbours and to formulate actions in their
efforts to bring democracy to their daily lives.
Clearly much more could be said about the possibilities of such
cross-platform community publishing/activist efforts. And I do not
want to pretend or to claim any unique knowledge or insight (nor
any particular models for success) on how this will new form of
hybrid community publishing, with its new responsibilities, will be
accomplished. For me, this is a radically new experience, one in which
I am learning whether a decade’s worth of publishing work might
have produced resources to support the work of activists both local
and global. I am suggesting, however, that as teachers, professors,
and, more generally, citizens, we need to place ourselves in positions
where our institutional resources can be used for purposes beyond
our “writing careers.” For ultimately, if we are true to our rhetoric,
many of the progressive arguments surrounding community literacy,
service-learning, neighbourhood partnerships should lead us into
such activist partnerships. That is, I believe we need to become active
agents in the fostering of democratic dialogue and change if we are
to impact the current political moment.
147
Democratic Dialogues/Democratic Actions
I want to end by invoking the work of Amartya Sen who argues
for a definition of democracy that is premised on the need to foster
public dialogue designed to correct fundamental injustices. Sen’s
work is particularly appropriate since he invokes different “MENA”
kings, philosophers, and leaders throughout history as a means to
demonstrate that attempts to open discussion, foster tolerance, and
provide fundamental rights occurred in that region prior to Western
Europe, while still acknowledging the West as an important site for
theorizing democracy. This cross cultural/cross-historical framework
is a useful to consider when articulating the meaning of democracy,
as both a local and global practice.
Sen’s work is focused on the power of democratic states to address
fundamental human injustices—the existence of torture, the growth
of the sex slave trade, the perpetuation of gender discrimination.
He believes that democratic government’s are uniquely situated to
address such issues. To argue this, he uses a study of famine in Bengal,
India, during British occupation. In that study, Sen demonstrates
that it was not the lack of food which led to the famine but the
failure of the wages of marginalized workers to rise in response to
the increased cost of food—partially attributed to the increase of
British troops and consequent demand on food supplies. Providing
support for worker wages would have eliminated the famine as well
as addressed fundamental issues of poverty. It is Sen’s contention
that such famines have never occurred in a democracy, where public
opinion, protest, and activism quickly draw attention to such issues.
Such practices were not possible given British ruling practices
in India. For a democracy to function adequately, then, requires a
constant flow of information and discussion, a dialogic cross hatching
that is endlessly informed by multiple sources. This is the necessary
foundation to insure that recognized democratic or human rights are
not just recognized, but actualized.
I want to suggest, then, that Sen’s focus on democratic debate and
fundamental injustices might provide a more invigorated framework
upon which to base our political work in Composition/Rhetoric. In
writing this, I am aware that, within Sen’s theory, it is somewhat
difficult to adequately assess what counts as a fundamental injustice
148
and, accordingly, the opposite category of a fundamental right. He
initiates his project more as the ending of the negative than the
articulation of the positive. Consequently, he frequently lists issues
such as the lack of adequate health care, gender discrimination, and
famine as essential injustices, putting forth how each demands a
certain type of action based upon a person/community’s location.
When flipped to the positive, these are not necessarily different in
kind from a generalized list of individual rights that most liberal
humanists might endorse. For Sen, however, the focus on injustice
is meant to also carry the burden of a duty toward others. For Sen,
individual rights are placed within a larger paradigm of collective
duty and collective duty requires action.
In developing an appropriate plan of action, Sen asks individuals to
analyze how, from their unique position, they can collectively address
(and collaboratively) redress a fundamental injustice—an injustice
that clearly evidences a betrayal of basic humanity. He argues such
actions should be premised upon creating an engaged democratic
form of public debate, one that links rhetoric to action, argument to
policy change, and stated political right to the capability to use it. In
this way, we have not so much moved far from the concepts deployed
by many scholars active in community partnership/publication work
as much as shifted the paradigm in which they occur—they must
be premised on a fundamental injustice. And here I would argue, a
different type of partnership work is necessary.
For if community engagement has meant supporting after-school
literacy projects, and neighborhood writing groups, Sen draws us
into an analysis of the deeper cause—fundamental issues of the
economic injustice and school funding formulas that cause literacy
stratification. If community publishing has been a vehicle to foster
debate between students and residents about urban crime, Sen
mandates that we do more then just publish a story, we must move
beyond the word to the actions that can address the injustice of
police behaviour. Ultimately, Sen’s focus on injustice moves us off
our comfortable classroom and disciplinary based actions, pushing
us into the streets where democratic words meet collective action.
For now, the assessment is not whether words are written, but if
injustices are resolved.
149
It is for this reason I have come to believe that community publishing
can and should mean more than a circulation of stories. Our work can
and should produce more than words on a page. It must be linked with
local and global attempts to foster democratic dialogue and democratic
rights. It must endlessly consider how the resources inherent in such
work can be expanded across platforms, communities, and borders to
foster the type of collaborative practices that address fundamental
injustices—efforts that do not just ameliorate the problem, but alter
the structure in which it exists. I am not so arrogant as to presume
that any of the projects discussed here offer such solutions. I am sure,
however, that the above experiences have led me to a new place from
which to consider my future work.
I am also sure that to achieve this larger goal, as a field, we must
analyze our own position, actively seek alliances and partnerships
which turn private resources toward the public good, and move
beyond an identity simply framed as writer, teacher, and publisher
to the more complex and conflicted world of democratic activists. In
doing so, we can might begin to reinvigorate the progressive elements
of community publishing and partnership. We might, that is, begin
to put in place the practices required for writing and publishing in a
post-Arab Spring world.
Steve Parks is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at
Syracuse University. He serves as Chair of Graduate Studies/
Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Program as well as co-chair of
the Advocacy and Public Rhetoric minor. He has published two books,
Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love
(2010) and Class Politics: The Movement for a Students’ Right To Their
Own Language (NCTE 2000/Parlor Press 2012). He is also founder
of New City Community Press (newcitycommunitypress.com). He
has published in numerous journals, including College English and
Journal of the Conference of College Composition and Communication,
on issues related to literacy, community partnerships, progressive
politics, and language rights.
150
Works Cited
Goldblatt, Eli. Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the
College Curriculum. New York: Hampton Press, 2007. Print.
Kuebrich, Benjamin. I Witness: Perspectives on Policing in the Westside.
Syracuse: Gifford Street Community Press. 2011. Print.
Lyons, Mark and August Tarrier. Espejos y Ventanas: Oral Histories
of Farmworkers and Their Families. New City Community Press.
2010. Print.
Parks, Steve. Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of
Brotherly Love. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2010. Print.
Parks, Steve and Eli Goldlbatt. “Writing Beyond the Curriculum:
Fostering New Collaborations in Literacy.” College English 62.5
(2000): 584-606. Print.
Parks, Steve and Nick Pollard. “Emergent Strategies for an Established
Field: The Role of Worker-Writer Collectives in Composition
and Rhetoric.” College Composition and Communication 61.3 (2010):
476-509. Print.
Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor, 2000.
Print.
---. The Idea of Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard UP,
2011. Print.
151
Reflections on Community
Future Casting:
Digital Storytelling to Inspire Urban
Solutions
Catherine Girves,
Ohio State University Area
Enrichment Association
Lorrie McAllister,
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
Dickie Selfe,
Ohio State
& Amy Youngs,
Ohio State
The authors have provided, here, a brief
introduction to their digital article, which can
be found online at <http://go.osu.edu/cfcreflections>.
I
n 2011, the leadership team of
Catherine Girves, Lorrie McAllister,
Dickie Selfe, and Amy Youngs began a
grant-supported community-media project,
Community Future-Casting (CFC), meant
to create change in the neighborhoods
around The Ohio State University in
Columbus, Ohio. This introduction aims to
give the reader an overview of the project,
its theoretical framework, and reflections
of project participants. The leadership team
invites readers to visit the media-rich web
page <http://go.osu.edu/cfc-reflections>,
linked from the Reflections web site < http://
reflectionsjournal.net/> where they have
assembled text, audio, and video clips that
tell the story of the project in more detail
and give voice to this community work. 152
Reflections on Community Future Casting
Hudson Street Corridor Brainstorming Meeting
The CFC Project: Overview
Community Future-Casting is an interdisciplinary, interinstitutional, community-led media project that relies primarily on a
specific community organization—The University Area Enrichment
Association. Units and departments at The Ohio State University
are also contributing by supplying technology support, helping with
project management, and encouraging video production approaches
like brainstorming, storytelling, and storyboarding. The most
important results of the project will come out of the communityled, future-casting media projects produced for and by local citizens.
In the near future (Fall, 2012), each community team will present
their projects to community members, city planners, grant agencies,
corporate representatives and government officials in an effort to
improve the quality of life in the University District. Adding another
level of complexity, as we describe in more detail later, the CFC
leadership team members are also conducting a literacy research
project that allows the community team members individually to
153
speak about their CFC experiences: some of those voices are exciting
and some very challenging. Readers/Listeners of the online article
will hear those voices at <http://go.osu.edu/cfc-reflections>. They
will also find more information about the project’s research approach
in Appendix A of the online article. Largely because of our on- and
off-campus collaborations, including the research component, the
CFC leadership team received a two-year, approximately $30,000
Research and Creative Activities (RCA) grant from the Division of
Arts and Humanities at OSU. The project is now in its second year. Starting in earnest during the Summer of 2011, the CFC leadership
team’s goal was to address digital divide concerns by encouraging
University District community members (youth and adults) to
identify problems and opportunities in a community space important
to them: parks and open spaces, corridors, bridges, ravines, schools
and schooling spaces, businesses, houses, housing projects, and the
like. In our initial plans, outlined in the grant, these teams would
work in and receive support from the Community Computer Lab
(CCL) run by the University Area Enrichment Association (UAEA).
Catherine Girves directs both the UAEA and the CCL and was
instrumental in initiating both. Each CFC team will be supported
by OSU faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students as they create
digital media products that represent the past, present, and one
potential future (future-casting) of their self-selected community space.
Our initial pilot video, the Hudson Corridor project, is about three
minutes in length, took a year to produce, and is meant for audiences
such as local community members and groups such as the Columbus
City Council, where any citizen can request to speak for three minutes
without prior arrangements; the Columbus Foundation, a centralized
community grants organization; OSU’s off-campus planning group;
or, in this case, the Ohio Department of Transportation. The
Hudson Corridor group wanted to draw attention to a busy and
seemingly neglected segment of Hudson Avenue in Columbus that
borders several pocket neighborhoods. The group aimed to improve
this area through advocacy for greener, cleaner, and safer treatment
of this avenue. The final video was the result of many hours of
neighborhood meetings, storytelling, planning, and composing. The
first future-casting video about the Hudson Corridor in the Glen
154
Echo neighborhood, has been completed and is viewable on the
Vimeo.com website http://go.osu.edu/HudsonSt.
Past Projects and Theory
Community Future-Casting is one of several community media
projects that Dickie Selfe has worked on over the past four years.
Each was an attempt to set up spaces, events, and the technical/
human support systems in order to encourage community members
to participate in some type of digital storytelling. He and his
colleague, Aaron Knochel, now a faculty member in Art Education
at SUNY New Paltz, made a case for community-centered media
work in another publication based on a project started back in 2009.
In that online article called “Spaces of the Hilltop: A case study of
community academic interaction” the authors followed the lead
of other scholars of digital rhetoric who had built community
programs of their own: Jeff Grabill (2007), Adam Banks (2011),
and the collaborative team of H. Louis Ulman, Scott DeWitt,
and Cindy Selfe (forthcoming). In addition, they incorporated the
concerns of important scholars in composition like Beverly Moss
(2010) and Ellen Cushman (1998), both of whom address practical,
ethical approaches to interacting with community groups. In their
article about community academic interaction, Dickie Selfe and
Aaron Knochel also explored the formulations of social theorists like
Michel de Certeau (1988), Arturo Escobar (2008), and Bruno Latour
(2005), applying those theorists’ approaches to the digital community
literacy work they conducted in the Hilltop area of West Columbus,
Ohio. Interested readers can read the more “theoretical interludes”
(as they were called in that article) in the Spaces of the Hilltop article
http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/16.3/praxis/selfe_knochel/index.
html. Those concepts, motivations, and challenging goals are well
reflected in the CFC project. For Selfe in particular, the changing
digital literacies reported by CFC video team members keep the
project fresh and exciting. But for the leadership team, this project is
centered on the thoughts and feelings of people in the communities,
with a particular focus on how they work to effect change, and
what they want for their communities. The collective goal of this
project, as it was with the scholars and theorists listed above, is to
keep the futures that community members imagine in front of us
155
and subsequently find ways to involve academics and OSU students
productively in support of these emerging community futures.
The CFC Leadership Team
Neither the RCA grant mentioned above nor the beginning stages
of the project would have been completed without the involvement
of all members of the leadership team. Building off of Catherine
Girves’ strong commitments and connections to the University Area
community, were two other community members who also happened
to be working at Ohio State University across the street: Amy
Youngs and Lorrie McAllister. Amy Youngs is currently a faculty
member of the Art and Technology division in the Department of
Art at OSU. Youngs has expertise in creating experimental moving
image art and in mentoring students who are creating artworks that
involve technology. She has had extensive national and international
experience creating and exhibiting interactive new media art objects,
videos and installations. Her current research interests include
community art projects that create experimental interfaces between
urban nature and human inhabitants (see her artwork at: http://
hypernatural.com/). In addition, Youngs also motivated the rest of
us to look beyond the typical digital storytelling genre—most often
composed of an important personal story reflecting on the past—
as we designed this project. As powerful as those stories can be,
her leadership convinced us to look forward as well, to encourage
community members to imagine a better future in each of their
place-based videos.
Lorrie McAllister is a former Digital Media Curator for the
Knowlton School of Architecture who has worked with digital media
and educational web applications for over ten years. Among other
skill sets, she brought her experience in digital media management
and preservation, intellectual property, video editing, and community
work to this project. McAllister also connected Selfe and Girves,
which seeded this project team. McAllister spent the first year of this
project helping to organize leadership team activities and co-lead the
Glen Echo Neighbors Civic Association video project. She has since
accepted a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) as a Digital Collections Strategist and Architecture Librarian,
although she continues to be involved and committed to the completion
156
of this project. It was McAllister who noted in her audio interview
that while the leadership team set out to learn about changing digital
literacies, instead, they learned more about community literacy (how
to navigate and be a part of a community).
Dickie Selfe does not live in the University Area near OSU but
brings to this project about fifteen years of media-based outreach
and engagement work in K-12 and community settings. He is the
Director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at Ohio
State University and, in that center, coordinates the Communication
Technology Consultants. Some of those undergraduate technology
consultants end up working with CFC video teams. He is also the
primary grant writer for the project.
Project Schematic (for the RCA grant)
The complexity of our project became apparent as the leadership
team talked it up among community members and colleagues. As a
result, we asked Lorrie McAllister to design a project schematic to
157
illustrate our workflow visually. We think it helped and hope readers
will as well.
Please join us online
With this brief overview of the program, the theories and people, as
well as a link to the Hudson Corridor pilot project, the leadership team
hopes to encourage readers to visit the media-rich website <http://
go.osu.edu/cfc-reflections> where we try to answer questions like
the following:
1. How will Community Future-Casting activities change, in
any way, participants’ technological literacy practices?
2. Will community members find community future-casting an
effective way to initiate change in their community? What
are the complexities of that change, if any? What are the
relative successes and failures that they see in their futurecasting efforts?
3. Will the CFC process change team members’ willingness to
become local community activists? If so, how?
4. Will the CFC process actually help build community? If so,
what sort and how does this type of community building
work?
5. In what ways is the CFC process valuable to team members?
Catherine Girves is the Executive Director of the University
Area Enrichment Association, a neighborhood based community
operated organization that works to improve quality of life in the
neighborhoods surrounding Ohio State University. Catherine has
worked as a community organizer and activist for over 30 years,
working and volunteering in the area since 1982.
158
Richard (Dickie) Selfe is currently the Director of the Center for the
Study and Teaching of Writing (CSTW) at The Ohio State University.
His scholarly interests cluster around the issues of communication
pedagogies, community media, and the social/institutional influences
of digital systems.
Lorrie McAllister has a MLIS and was the Digital Media Curator,
Knowlton School of Architecture (KSA) where she was responsible
for management and support for educational digital media collections
and web applications supporting the KSA’s educational mission. She
is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a
Digital Collections Strategist and Architecture Librarian.
Amy Youngs creates biological art, interactive sculptures and
digital media works that explore the complex relationship between
technology and our changing concept of nature and self (see http://
hypernatural.com). Youngs’ work is shown internationally. She
received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at the Ohio State
University. 159
Review:
Dir. Alex Luster (Director). Tony Reyes
(Writer). Stick ‘Em Up. (Shoot, Edit, Sleep
and Stone Kanyon Productions, 2011)
http://stickemupmovie.com
Jennifer Wingard,
University of Houston
T
o call Stick ‘Em Up a quintessential
Houston documentary is both
a compliment and a critique. It
represents praise because the film does
what it sets out to do very well: document
and celebrate the thriving wheatpaste street
art movement in Houston, TX. On the
other hand, it is a criticism because unlike
its more popular predecessor Exit Through
the Gift Shop (Paranoid Pictures 2010), Stick
‘Em Up makes no attempt to connect the
Houston street art scene to anything outside
itself – commerce, politics, or the larger
global street art movement. Instead, the film
focuses so exclusively on the local that it
obfuscates much of the revolutionary history
and potential of street art, boiling it down
to a series of choices made by individuals,
apparently driven only by their craft.
And it is that individualizing of the process,
product, and event of pasting that makes
the film so indicative of the Houstonian
mindset. Houston is a major oil city. It has
160
Wingard | Review: Stick ‘Em Up
not suffered in the wake of our current recession to nearly the extent
of the rest of the nation. On the surface, it seems as if there is no
logic to Houston’s largess, but I would argue that individualism and
its hegemony is the underlying logic. It has both the most evangelical
churches and the most strip clubs per square mile of any major U.S.
city. It has a large diversity of immigrants, ethnicities, and languages.
It has the first openly lesbian mayor, as well as the most powerful
right-wing State School-board actively legislating today. There are
eclectic neighborhoods, wealthy cultural elites, and areas of poverty
that do not discriminate. Part of living in the city of Houston and
the outlying areas is living and negotiating these contradictions daily.
In certain respects, the artists profiled in Stick ‘Em Up become
representative of those logics. For example, Eyesore, one of the film’s
most prolific artists, talks about his commitment to wheatpasting
and stickers as a form of “pure self expression,” one that does
not require the recognition of others. However, his work is shown
circulating throughout the upper class of Houston as fine art. And
one collector who is interviewed discusses how Eyesore produced
several limited-edition pieces to sell to high-end galleries and
collectors. This contradiction between “art for art’s sake” (albeit in a
decidedly populist form) and the production of art for sale is one that
has been engaged by many artists, operating within various historical
formations. However, Eyesore does not comment on or engage with
these contradictions. Instead, throughout the film, he maintains that
his art is “pure.”
Another artist profiled in the film is Give Up. According to one
collector, Give Up is the one artist who is “angry and has a message.”
But throughout the film, that message is not clarified. Instead, we
see him pasting up either text only, or sexually explicit images with
his tag – ‘Give Up.’ While working, he discusses how he continues
to paste in public even though he knows his images will often get
torn down because, as an artist, that is his job. We also see him in
his home preparing his images, mixing wheatpaste, and preparing
several pieces to mail to buyers. He is the only artist who discusses
his lack of money because of his chosen line of work, but he chalks
it up to his carelessness with cash. He says, “Once I get money, I just
spend it. I don’t really care to have it around.”
161
The film juxtaposes Give Up’s practice with the filming of the art
collector who lives in a well-appointed urban loft in Houston. Yet,
the film does not comment, and neither do the wheatpaste artists,
on the drastic difference between their living conditions and those
of their collectors. Instead, the film chooses to follow the artists
while they work and create. Each artist profiled discusses the artistic
process as an individual drive that they cannot avoid, not as an
attempt to change or disrupt prevailing notions of art, the cityscape,
or dominant history.
The final section of the film shifts from the perspective of the artists
to that of one individual woman who has been deeply affected by the
work of Give Up. Yet her engagement with his art only occurs after
his art has been “poached” by another artist (who is not featured in the
film). The secondary artist finds Give Up’s work and writes “Never”
in flowery writing over his prints. The woman, a cancer survivor,
describes how seeing “Never Give Up” on an abandoned building after
a particularly devastating doctor’s appointment changed her view
on her treatment and her life. From then on, she was a convert and
believer in street art. Not to belittle this Houstonian’s experience, but
the grounded example offered by Stick ‘Em Up is one of individual
rather than collective engagement. Just like the art collector, who
claims he’s not an expert, this woman is not an expert either – but she
is a real woman who is engaged with the work of the street artists
from an individual perspective. Again, individualism reigns.
The film’s adherence to individual artistic inspiration is particularly
confounding in Stick ‘Em Up because it engages with wheatpasting
and sticker art without ever delving into the aggressively public nature
of its subject. As an art form, street art and graffiti are often posed
as public forms of resistance to not only local city planning, but also
to the history of art as an elitist and highbrow endeavor. In the case
of street art in Houston, it could be said that the very impermanence
of wheatpasting and sticker art engage with Houston’s lack of
commitment to historic preservation and its continual renewal
through gentrification. Old buildings are razed so that new, modern
ones can be put up in their place. Instead of holding onto history
through restoration, Houston pushes forward to the future through
demolition. It could be said that the art form of wheatpasting does
162
Wingard | Review: Stick ‘Em Up
much the same. But this line of reasoning – quite different than the
philosophy of street art that Banksy and company propose in Exit
Through the Gift Shop – remains implicit in Stick ‘Em Up.
I taught this film in an introductory writing course with a focus on
Houston. And although it is flawed in the many ways I describe, it was
a valuable film in a course where students were writing about the very
city featured in the film. When placed against essays and other films
which engage Houston’s neoliberal and anti-historic commitments,
the students were able to easily analyze the film in much the same
way I have in this review. The students not only saw the film as a
product of Houston, but they were left with many questions about
the history of street art, the political nature of the work, and the
economic disparities presented in the film. These questions led to
productive discussions about how and why filmmakers choose their
subjects, and what filmmakers might not even recognize as bias
because of their own located experiences (the filmmaker is a Houston
native).
So I return to my opening remark that Stick ‘Em Up is a Houstonian
film in every sense. It celebrates the individual, it occludes issues of
inequality, and it fetishizes the new. Each artist and supporter within
the film sees Houston’s street art, not as a product of a larger global
artistic movement, but instead as a means of individual inspiration
and identification. The art on the street can inspire cancer patients,
fund local graffiti galleries and summer camps, and be washed away
just as soon as it is put in place only for the cycle to begin anew. As
Give Up says, “Once [the art is taken down] you can just put up
something new.” In this regard, street art is the ideal medium for the
zoning-free, neoliberal city.
Jennifer Wingard is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition,
and Pedagogy at the University of Houston. Her manuscript Branding
Bodies: Rhetoric and the Neoliberal Nation State will be released in early
2013. Her current research and teaching focuses on Houston, TX,
as a critical site of inquiry within global economic and neoliberal
rhetoric.
163
Review:
Banksy (Director). Exit Through the Gift
Shop. (Paranoid Pictures 2010)
Lauren Goldstein,
New Mexico State University
A
lone elephant, awash in red paint
and stenciled with gold fleur-de-lis,
lumbers through the loading deck
of a warehouse on Skid Row in L.A. She
matches the wallpaper background of a
freestanding living room, designed to be the
centerpiece of an art exhibition by newlyminted street artist Mr. Brainwash (MBW).
The impressive, gentle animal is meant
to symbolize the proverbial “elephant in
the room,” but the joke seems to be on hip
Hollywood attendees and Los Angeles press,
who don’t realize they are the elephant.
Through the extensive use of irony, Exit
Through the Gift Shop (2010) provokes
questions of authenticity and voice in the
street art movement—an underground,
secretive counterculture that has gone
mainstream. The documentary is meant
to identify questions and ignite dialogue
about free expression, the ownership of
public space and definitions of public art.
In combination with texts such as Daphne
Spain’s Gendered Spaces, the documentary
164
Goldstein | Review: Exit Through the Gift Shop
provides a wealth of discussion and assignment topics from which to
create conditions for engaged pedagogy in a first-year or upper-level
composition classroom.
The documentary introduces us to Los Angeles vintage clothing
shop owner Thierry Guetta, who becomes both subject of Exit and
the director of his own documentary. Guetta obsessively records
his family’s daily life and follows street artists in a way that makes
the viewer (and the other speakers in the documentary) question his
sanity and integrity. He explains the root of the obsession lies in
his family’s decision to never mention his mother’s terminal illness
until her death. In turn, he tries to capture all waking moments
because they will never happen the same way again. It is a strange
balance of curated and uncontrolled – private and public displays of
messages that director Banksy critiques in Exit. This kairotic notion
helps Banksy identify the impermanent temporal context of street
art that continues to permeate the dialogue of artists in the film (and
a productive opportunity for composition students to consider the
temporal nature of their own writing).
Early in the documentary, we are introduced to Guetta’s street art
inspiration – his French cousin, artist Space Invader, who pastes
small tile replicas of 8-bit video game aliens above the alleyways and
thoroughfares of Paris. Space Invader introduces Guetta to a second
artist, Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic red and blue Obama
“HOPE” poster of the 2008 presidential election – another example
of kairos at the intersection of art and politics. Here, narrator Rhys
Ifans situates street art as a “movement” through a range of styles and
materials, and piques viewer interest by outlining the danger, rush,
and stealth needed to express oneself in a public space. Eventually,
Exit brings Banksy and Guetta together for collaboration, and Banksy
urges Guetta to edit his thousands of hours of valuable footage of
street artists (a hodge-podge stored in plastic bins and shoeboxes)
into a documentary – a vehicle for his message.
Ultimately, Banksy is horrified at Guetta’s resulting 90 minutemashup trainwreck, Life Remote Control. Banksy explains through
voice-changer and pixilated black hoodie, “Thierry had all this
amazing footage…and it would never happen again.” So Banksy
165
turns the camera on Guetta, and transforms him from hapless
director into rhetorically crafted street art persona “Mr. Brainwash.”
So begins Guetta’s egotistical journey as he drains his bank accounts,
refinances his business, and hires a staff of 100 collaborators to go
into full-swing production on his ironically titled installation “Life
is Beautiful.” Mr. Brainwash is a rhetorically orchestrated persona,
sprung from Banksy’s mind like the fully-formed Athena from Zeus.
However, there are so many layers of irony and critique, considering
Banksy’s notoriety as an anarchic artist, even Banksy’s own broker
admits, “I don’t know who the joke is on. I don’t know if there is a
joke.”
Yet Banksy remains Thierry Guetta’s Holy Grail. Banksy’s allure
is evident through his popular anti-war, anti-consumerism messages
that scaffold his signature art. For example, Exit highlights his piece,
“Balloon Girl,” which he composed on the wall of the West Bank. In
silhouette, a pony-tailed girl is lifted skyward by balloons, presumably
over the barrier. Besides Guetta’s obvious interest in Banksy’s art,
however, the relationship between Banksy and Guetta remains
complicated from the viewer’s perspective. There is some speculation
that Banksy, perhaps along with other street artists, orchestrated the
embedded documentary as one direct social critique of mass media,
consumerism, and the adverse effects of institutionalized art. This
criticism recognizes Guetta’s buffoonish tendencies as a product of
Banksy’s puppeteering. To introduce this layer of consideration in the
classroom, it would be productive to utilize Peter Elbow’s “doubting
and believing” game for students to consider why Banksy might
make such rhetorical choices. Officially, however, Banksy denies such
claims and insists on his film’s authenticity.
Banksy’s criticism of mainstream ideologies (orchestrated or not) is
evident as Guetta/MBW continues to skyrocket to success despite his
inability to actually create art. His team uses Photoshop to digitally
manipulate images and employs props builders to execute ideas,
while MBW busies himself with hype and promotion. Regardless
of the lack of artistic integrity, his “work” is a successful imitation
of the styles he’d captured from Fairey and others, and the exhibit,
complete with elephant, drew an appropriately hyped crowd. Banksy’s
social critique, “building” an artist with no real artistic talent, raises
166
a number of important questions regarding authenticity and voice
that prove interesting fodder for the composition classroom. He
ultimately concludes, “I used to encourage everyone to make art, I
used to think everyone should do it. But I don’t do that so much
anymore.”
The assignments I’ve constructed in conjunction with Exit Through
the Gift Shop ask students to think expressly about how their own
bodies and others’ move through spaces – to reflect on the complex
interactions of public spaces, the written and unwritten rules of
social engagement, and teaches them to identify gaps in the rhetoric
and dialogue of public space. In first and second year composition
classrooms, I’ve used the opening chapter of feminist scholar Daphne
Spain’s Gendered Spaces to provide a productive lens for examining
this documentary. Though Spain’s academic writing style might not
be immediately accessible, my composition students were invested
enough in examining Exit as well as their own “Create Your Own
Space” projects that they made the extra effort to wrestle with Spain’s
heady theories. This pedagogical strategy creates the potential
atmosphere for honest engagement that is so desired in ethos of
writers and speakers; it encourages students to challenge notions
of mainstream ideologies and critically examine intersections of
politics and art.
One criticism of Exit, and an opportune time to invoke notions of
power and gender via the Gendered Spaces chapter, is that it lacks
female voices. Banksy’s purpose as director was to point out holes
in the dialog and rhetoric of street art, and so too can students
identify gaps in the conversation. Exit introduces artists such as
Dotmasters, Swoon, Sweet Toof, Borf (who explains, “Borf is the
name of my best friend who killed himself when we were 16, so I do
this to kind of commemorate his life”), and Buffmonster. Of these
monikers – evidence of artists’ underground status – Swoon is the
only female artist. These omitted female voices are easily accessible
in another documentary short Creative Violation: The Rebel Art of the
Street Stencil, which is a mere 20 minutes and doesn’t provide the
same depth as Exit, but works well in a time-crunched 50-minute
class, as well as Cedar Lewisohn’s visually-stunning book, Street Art:
The Graffiti Revolution which highlights street artists such as Jenny
167
Holzer, Judith Sulpine, Martha Cooper, Miss Van, Lady Pink and
others.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is not only an adventure in irony and
politically and socially motivated art; it is a fascinating sojourn
into the complexities of message, meaning, and public space. The
documentary opens the composition classroom space as a forum for
students to connect with their own and one another’s shared spaces
– neighborhoods, suburbs, bus stations and streets – to promote
genuine, engaged dialogue and promote the critical and contextual
understanding of multifaceted literacies and cultures.
Lauren Goldstein is a doctoral candidate at New Mexico State
University. Her research interests include the rhetoric of gender
and performance (last year she created Butler for Babies – A Judith
Butler Children’s Book as a semester project), as well as the impact
of aesthetic choices on student engagement and retention rates in
online composition classrooms. Assignments and materials from
this public space unit, part of a conference project-in-progress, are
available at laurengoldstein.weebly.com.
168
Works Cited
Creative Violation: The Rebel Art of the Street Stencil. Dir. Andrew
Stevenson. Breakfast Films, 2008. Film.
Lewisohn, Cedar. Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution. New York:
Abrams, 2008. Print.
Spain, Daphne. Gendered Spaces. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1992. Print.
169
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Em Up - Reflections

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