goings-on around the town: religion overload, or god's good for business

So, after my perilous run-in with the jews for jesus, I’ve had a number of other adventures, and I feel like I haven’t necessarily had the time or mental vivacity to reflect upon these things lately. But it’s time to sit and grind out the reflexivity, as a preliminary step to a more rigorous journaling outlay of some sort. as a result of recent overloadings of religious pabulums of various sorts, i have to say that i can't stand the use of the word 'soul' right now. i just can't. apologies to every song/book/poem/greeting card/condom wrapper/1970s album featuring said pestiferous word. there's something about 'soul' that's just so overdetermined as to render it semantically vacuous. which can be used to advantage,but you've got to be really smart about it. can't just drop that word anywhere. it's like 'freedom.'

ooh! i want to interject. the parrots are flying in large green-and-yellow flocks right now. they tend to do this at sunset. their voices actually resonate in the timbres of squabbling children, or so it seems to me.

but anyway, back to worldly things. much work-related activity going on in the old cortex and world, which is good. two for two. I’ve been really getting into this kind of thing, and it’s nice because it feels both like “work” and “leisure,” which must mean that I like what I’m doing. Sunday was the first day of the week of activities related to canal history, “Conozca su Canal,” and it kicked off with this unbelievably bombastic mass in a dilapidated Methodist church that was celebrating its 100^th anniversary down in calidonia. The journalists from montreal were there, and we all sang every hymn as best we could (“washed in the blood of jesus” - “Christ died that we could live” – “doxology” - things of that nature) to the music blasting from hidden speakers and accompanied by this rail-thin and very Dimmesdale-esque (or actually looking more like a black Ichabod Crane) church pianist with the curliest eyelashes that I’d seen in awhile, plus this mane of hair that looked like controlled chaos, futilely tempered with grease. it sort of rose up in this cool-looking wedge of foamy spray. And the pastor was amazing: this very lithe and sexy (blasphemous! But true) man with an incredibly sweet smiling face and (again) extremely long and luxurious lashes. Worthy of all those adverbs. I found myself ogling him as he swung his bendable torso up onto the podium, then traveled across the altar in smooth motions to the left and right of the stage, to perch impishly in these sort of raised platforms with medieval-looking articulated woodwork (someone help me out here – someone Christian - ah, pulpits? Sacral chambers? Is that actually something located in the nose?). anyhow, so there were three hours or so of clapping, raucously singing, and boogieing down with the sashaying choirgals (in all actuality, all 70-year-old ladies or so, and a couple indestructible wiry dudes). then the sermon shifted to ‘testimonies,’ and the smiling pastor swept down the aisles with a cordless mike to see if anyone was willing to hold forth. This lady talked about her magical healing from car-accident wounds, and the giant party of people in from belize arose and pontificated about how god had given them the experience of being here, in this place, at this time, and then this guy got up and started basically freaking out about jesus. He turned out to be a Nigerian evangelical preacher, and he told this long and involved story about how he had come to the US to get a green card, and the first judge who oversaw his case was a mean and evil jew, clearly sent by god as an obstacle akin to those that faced jesus on his way up the mount (or what have you), but after this spiritual trial the clouds parted - the second judge was a lady who asked him about his Christian faith, and he told her, and she took pity on him and gave him the green card. so god was responsible for his blessed visit to panama with his beautiful African wife (she really was gorgeous, in a bright yellow gown and gold shoes), and ohh jesus ohh jesus ohh jesus thank thank thank you jesus.

Anyhow, this mixture of jumpy evangelism, circus music (scratchy piped-in organ-grinder sounds) and sort of staid Methodism (trefoils everywhere) was really wearing thin after three hours, and I could tell that the montreal guy was having some sort of atheist’s smug, grinning moment in his head. But I still clapped and sang and tried to keep my eyes unclouded. Then, afterward, we filed into the education center, in an adjacent building attached by a sort of castlelike bridge, and proceeded to see this awesome church talent show of biblical performance art (very ron athey circa “solar anus” – just kidding) and baile típico and c. wherever you look, someone’s always doing a baile típico in pollera, montuno, and the rest. It’s interesting to me that many west indians/afropanamanians of west indian descent have wholeheartedly taken on the wearing of these traditional Panamanian costumes. new research is emerging that suggests that the traje típico originated among afro-colonial blacks in panama, and then Panamanian “whites” (or at least elite rabiblancos) reclaimed it as some sort of banner of white-indigeneity, and then West Indians (and Zonians, while they were here) appropriated it once more, so now it’s ‘black’ again, but after being cycled through a course of blanquimiento. Hmm. the racial acrobatics of culture in Panama once again prove a bit too heady for my o'ertrammeled mind at present. anyway, i feel like this is one of those things that continually revolves, with no point at which one can settle upon a clear and definite answer, though different aspects seem "right" at different points. for example, though no one can agree on the degree of institutionalism of panamanian racism, many have experienced it and can pinpoint those moments at which relations of power have seemed to come into focus. like anything, there are glints here and there.

which brings me to another point about opinions, truth, morality/ethics, and the like. being here in panama is interesting because everyone is always trying to convince me that their opinions are the 'correct' ones, that they have a handle on exactly how the country is managing to unravel itself. but then, after hearing three similarly-shaded reports, i'll be blindsided by one very strong case to the contrary and have to rethink and refilter everything i've been told. this is especially true now that it's election season. typically, all of this back-and-forth causes me to settle into an ultimately neutral position, one of sympathetic and informed head-nodding. it's nice to be relieved of the duty of engaging in these polemico-moralizing battles right now about the downward trajectory of X, let me say. at the same time, i'm enjoying being privy to the debates, and i appreciate the rhetorical flourishes of others. taking a stance is a funny thing, often hastily done with malinformed posturing.

Anyhow, back to the World. another interesting thing to me is the way that many of these ‘historical’ west Indian activities in panama – the museo afroantillano, for example, or the Wesley Methodist church – are located in areas that could well be considered barrio (or casi barrio, i should qualify), like Calidonia. Yet a lot of the west Indians seem to reside in the far-away ‘suburbs’ of panama city – middle-class conurbations like juan diaz and chanis – and they commute in for these activities like tourists to the city, since many of them also grew up in the canal zone, which was geographically adjacent to but ideologically (and socioeconomically) quite distant from these areas. It sort of reminds me of how the jews in Milwaukee used to commute in from the suburbs to temple on the weekends, although we always walked because we lived around the corner when i was growing up (and that's another story in itself, replete with my father's and my games wherein we'd think of nicknames for the place, including "Ye Olde Pittes O' Helle and Eternal Damnation" and later, when i'd read a bit of the Rg Veda, in translation, of course, in my humanities class, the "House of Clay" (as opposed to the Vedic heaven, the "House of the Fathers" - shortened simply to the "Clayhaus") – and finally the congregation got fed up with this 15-or-so minute drive and decided to sell the old, grey, noble campus (the 'old man') and build a new one that looked like a smooth little red box, like a sketch in chalky pastel, with perfect brickwork that seemed all of a piece, like it had been airlifted into place beside a similarly red-brick little church. Blech. Hate that new place, down to its plaster six-point star. we still do high holy days in the belly of the 'old man,' but it's now owned by U-dub, which converted it to a theatre (interestingly enough), so i always feel like i'm seeing a b-list band in concert when the shofar's blown.

In fact, I'm having a bit of religious overload at the moment, as stated above. Lately I’ve been inundated with various forms of anti-semitism like some object permeated by radar or sonar or something: I can’t see or feel it going through me, but I sense that it’s having some kind of subtly radioactive or debilitating effect, like slowly sapping my strength. My lack of a natural lead apron (am currently trying to cast off my barriga) is really wearing me down. Whew! But sometimes the fact that I’m frank about being a secular-cultural-US-but-non-jewish-lobby-jew is a helpful thing. It gets people to talk to me, because I have a hint of the exotic and the commiserable (a word, that?) without being too exotic, and I’m emphatically not a rabid jew. I’m not really even a jew, as evidenced by my foucauldian laughter during the meeting with the jews-for-jesus. But you know, I’m completely okay with this west Indian man’s insistence that Judaism came from Africa, and jews were originally black, hence the peyot. As crazy as it is, I think that my tolerance of these things is endearing me to him.

Another silly thought: today I was reading some victor turner, and it dawned on me that the structure of social drama is very like that pertaining to a breakup. Maybe victor thought that one up while having problems with his novia/o. I mean, come on – separation, liminality, resolution (or ‘new culture’)? It’s too cliché not to apply in some fashion to that mystical metastasizing mass of ‘love.’ Mass of love! Choking off my left ventricle! Added to these histrionics, I must say that I’m learning some dirty words in Chilean Spanish. So pleasurable to roll those things off your tongue when you only half-know their meanings.

Anyhow, back to Events and reportage. We're on to Monday, people! Wake up! So Monday I was all business, waking at dawn to do the leg-slapping and poto-shaking exercises of eternal youth. Then I went to the ciudad de saber (the epically or wizard of oz-ian named ‘city of knowledge’), which used to be the US military base Fort Clayton, to take part in this capacitación about human rights and racism for highschoolers from all over panama. This thing was sponsored by the naciones unidas (UN), and it took place in this really well-appointed room, with computers over which the kids slobbered like craven young addicts in need of a digital-social-platform-networking fix. I was a little underwhelmed by the ponencia, which was much more about the UN’s origins and current peacekeeping efforts than about the specific conditions facing West Indians throughout Panamanian history and into the present. Of course, there was a section on the current state of racism/discrimination in panama, and that proved quite interesting, with several of the kids self-identifying as ‘black’ (in a black-pride way) and talking about their experiences with racism in Panama, which is often said (falsely, falsely! obviamente) not to exist.

I should add that to the outside observer from the Global North/US who visits Panama for a short time, the country initially has a sort of racial-utopia glow about it, akin to the Brazilian mythos, because it seems as though Panamanian ‘race’ is very difficult to quantify/classify, very slippery, evading categorization. And it’s true that there are more people of color in government, but this is fairly unavoidable given that the country is 90% people of color (my estimate, but probably not far off). Anyhow, but appearances are almost always misleading (oh! cartesian - or is it humean? - scepticism paying off again). despite what people call themselves, others call them whites or blacks. the afrocoloniales are a fraught case-in-point: they often disidentify as black, and politicians have variously played them off against the west indians, but in the final call they suffer from subtly racist acts like resource (mis)allocation, which are masked by euphemisms. people considered 'black' still get falsely arrested/racially profiled and kicked out of restaurants and clubs all the time. Housing still tends to be somewhat segregated, and hiring definitely is. The colonenses in particular were vocal about being turned away from social establishments or accused of being criminals/primitives, which I learned may have been due to the fact that a radical black rights organization, la coordinadora de la etnia negra de colón, had been going around and preaching racial consciousness in schools. Interesting considering that the atlantic coast has a high percentage of afrocoloniales, who haven’t historically considered themselves black (see above). the historical divide between afrocoloniales and afroantillanos has been ‘patched up,’ say some, while others maintain that it continues to be a problem. This all gets very hairy, too hairy to deal with at the present exhausted moment.

Anyhow, so SAMAAP, the group sponsoring the lecture, has quite a stake in the promulgation of a sort of race-first platform, albeit one with distinct class and cultural shadings. Several prominent SAMAAP members stood up and gave these very animated/forceful/concerned lectures about how there are now laws in place to address these grievances, and the kids need to take advantage of these channels and seek litigation and fight and suchlike, because otherwise the laws will be moot and dead. In fact, the two high-profile individuals were a bit exasperated, having personally worked hard to bring these this legislation into existence. They kept yelling out the phone number of this racial equity/black rights lawyer in panama. it was quite interesting. Also, I got to meet some excellent women who are in charge of this massive and very (very! extremely - extremadamente) cool oral history project masterminded by the same individual who happens to be editing my article as we speak (eek). I might help them with their project, and this could be a really exciting and cool opportunity for me and, hopefully, them. When this horse wants to work, it works. Yay! Good outcomes in that respect.

Also, I wanted to say a word about the city of knowledge. For those of you know don’t know, the canal was handed over (or "returned," as panamanians like to say) to panama roughly 8 years ago. every building that used to be owned and operated by the US was either turned into some panamanian thing or left to rot, essentially. which they do, looking like rusticated dinosaurs with totally a-tropical architecture, crouching among the creeping weeds, vomiting vines from their half-cracked windows. a large percentage of buildings were kept in use according to their original purposes (actually, there's an anal-retentive clause in the handover treaty that stipulates that those buildings that were hospitals, schools, churches, and other wholesome-activity community places must retain their former uses under the US regime. staging governance, anyone?) or lived in or modified slightly and converted into panamanian institutions. the architecture is really curious, though, and it's constantly giving you baleful, silent reminders that being in the canal zone is sort of oppressively/aggressively NOT like being in panama. for one thing, the buildings are of uniform composition, as you might expect on a military base of sorts, but with strange civilian touches, like a stern-faced man trying hard to smile. they're sort of generic-unusual, or stark-charming, in a way that comes off as creepy and cultish. i have to post some pictures some time, really. they're like triangular-rectangles composed of a narrow range of colors and materials - a weird thick butter-yellow paint and red tile roofs - and either comprising one, two, or three stories. they squat equidistant from each other in an area of well-clipped lawns and shrubbery and speed bumps and no garbage. the speed limit, i hear, used to be 15. it's about as immaculate as the jungle can get.

so, there are several areas of the former Zone on the pacific side (panama city) that engage a lot of panamanian traffic and daily use: fort clayton (which is now the aforementioned city of knowledge), balboa/ancon (the HQ of the ACP, the autoridad del canal de panamá), albrook airport (still used as an airport by the ACP, with this cartoonish mall that middle-class panamanians seem to love), and of course the miraflores locks. new people have moved into the old segregated townships too (like paraiso), although many of the 'silver' towns were abandoned an eaten up by the jungle, leaving basically no trace. people remember, though. when i went on the unbelievable west indian canal launch (getting ahead of myself! ack!), everyone on the boat was going crazy trying to locate their old neighborhood and pointing to invisible clubhouses and commissaries and baseball fields and the like. it was really cool and interesting and exhilarating and also emotionally overwhelming. more on that later in this blog. despite my desire to deviate from chronicling causalities, i'm aware that Events have their chronologies, with internal logics and 'flows,' shall we say (not to be all appadurai about it, but), and as an avid (though cynical) historiadora, i'm trying to honor those silly temporal counts to the best of my ability.

ennntonces...where was i. this is getting longwinded, and my apologies to the sick, old, and dying among you, o vast and expansive reading public, who are waiting so patiently for me to get on with it. so we're inside the green zone of panama, which is bedecked with all the emperor's NGOs, like unicef and the interamerican bank and something called the louis berger group (in a fancy half-revamped barracks) and protect-the-toucans-fund and naciones unidas and etc. and we're particularly perched in an upper barracks (everyone was well familiar with the former uses of these sites, because the buildings had barely been reincarnated as panamanian and still smelt of their former lives) listening to a presentation about racism and human rights in panama. and the two SAMAAP members gave these really impassioned and eloquent disquisitions on the issues of race and discrimination and mestizaje and all the issues mentioned above. i learned more about the divisions among the 'etnia negra' movement (essentially, the move to introduce affirmative action into panamanian government, as brazil and colombia have).

another thing i wanted to mention is that some of the old zone buildings have been repurposed seemingly by blind-deaf idiot clowns. for example: the current contemporary art museum is housed in an old masonic lodge, with those mystical eye-compass symbols carved everywhere. my roommate, who works there, says that on the second floor was a giant pentacle, which really freaked her out since she's into 'la magia y la brujería.'

so after this meeting, i left to do some work at the SAMAAP archive, and while there i became a passive onlooker in an all-out brawl between this really fat and charlatan-ish government worker (i think for INAC) and his supervisor. the gist of the fight was essentially that she wanted him to do some work, and he claimed some sort of disability in the knees. it was a big deal. and then he sat back down, smiling but with a reddish face, and proceeded to doze off again. hm.

entonces, yo fui a cenar con un amigo, pero tuve que levantarme muy temprano para las actividades del martes: the boat launch, the "romería." the word actually means 'pilgrimage,' and this is what it was. i woke and rose at 6 am to prepare for the day, which lasted until about 1 or 2pm, at which i slouched home completely drained in many senses. it was something very hard to explain - ironic, since this is what i want to write my dissertation about, at least in part. mmmmmm, where to start?

okay, in moments like these, brute chronology takes over. for those hardy few who have stuck with me until now, i congratulate you. you deserve some kind of neo-roosevelt medal. i'd really like to know who you are, so that i can come to your houses and personally kiss each one of you on the hand. you have humored the longest of long winds. think of yourselves as jesuses, with one last hill to climb before landing in beersheba and being touched on the head by a malevolent dragon...okay, i really don't know how the jesus part of the story goes. after moses, i'm basically out.

Anyway, so Tuesday. i got into the car with these impeccably-dressed and rambunctious women, the sprightliest being the 89-year-old miss christie, who wore mint-green linen and sported the funkiest nails ever. pinky outdid herself. we drove out to the pedro miguel locks, and i made friends with a thin, quiet, and very gracious older lady named martha, who, i learned, had 7 kids, all of whom were doing famous and incredible things in the world. her eldest headed a huge civil engineering firm in barcelona and spoke five languages; another daughter was in the US academy; etc., etc. it's really amazing how common these stories are among the west indian community in panama. martha herself had come to panama as a child, born in the zone to parents from barbados and antigua, and worked in panama for a while (making 56 cents an hour) until she transferred to the canal zone, where her pay immediately shot up to 3 dollars an hour, with benefits, and then to 6. like most of the west indians who worked for the canal, she gets a good pension and can afford to travel to spain almost every year. moreover, her children come to panama all the time. among the party was a woman from brooklyn whose father had been a prominent educator, teaching in 'colored schools' all over the zone. learned so much! so many stories about experiences in citizenship limbo, being forced to assimilate (or eager to - and disappointed that their parents hadn't taught them spanish) - all sorts of things. at about 10 we launched the boat, and everyone was there save a few. also present was a film crew, documenting the exploits for a canal once program and a separate fancy spanish-grant documentary (from the aforementioned 'betesda films,' all clad in wraparound or aviator shades and preppy-sport clothes, irking me with their yuppie presence) and one of the montreal journalists, this strangely bitter guy who was one of those people who have an argumentative tone but don't seem aware of this. when i asked him if he was going to link his coverage of the labor strike to that of the west indian memorial events, he said, "no...are you trying to fuck me up or something?" he really seemed suspicious that i was trying to sabotage his project in some way. strange!

anyhow, so we set off in two boats, the gaviota and the calamar, and i took ridiculous numbers of pictures of the centennial bridge and the construction being done on the third set of locks, the crane 'titan' and the perforator 'thor' and other such industrial fetishes. it was AWESOME. i must, must, must emphasize this. and the day was sunny, cloudless, with little trace of the heavy smog that sits over panama city. birds were around, and (apparently) alligators. we launched into the culebra cut, at which point the boats turned around and came to a halt for the rose-petal throwing ceremony, in which we all participated, saying the names of our great-grandparents (i said "herman zien") and then, interestingly, "ashé." half of the people didn't know what ashé meant, and there was some debate over why it was being said. a choir of old gals sang hymns, two pastors held forth, and the president of SAMAAP read from mathew parker's Panama Fever, specifically from the introduction, wherein parker talks about this very ritual. it was very intense. some people cried. meanwhile, huge cargo-laden boats cycled through the canal, painted bright blue and orange. so cool. and also incredibly hot, i should say. it was like 100 degrees on that boat deck. people were sort of fainting, and the boat was bobbing like crazy. there were several 90-year-olds in attendance. after a long stretch of this, we headed back into the boat.

actually, it turned out that we were going to gamboa, and on the way we had this fabulous tour guide, an old west indian man with gold teeth and jazzy shades, who knew basically everything that one could know about the canal. he was really cool. at one point, one of the awesome outspoken ladies demanded to hear stories of samuel whyte, who spearheaded the 1920 strike. the guide said that he didn't really know, being from the pacific side of the zone (panama city). this spawned a massive, fist-shaking outcry from half of the boat, which shouted themes of atlantic-side solidarity (like "colonenses!") and caused the pacific side to rally its yelling forces. at the end, the outspoken lady clutched her head and said to me dramatically, "i better hold down my wig so they don't pull it off!"

there were other fights: about which language must be spoken on the boat (the older WI's demanded english-only, but the panamanians protested), about how the current canal profits were being (mis)spent by corrupt panamanian government officials, and, finally, about panamanian party politics, and specifically the runoff between balbina and juan carlos navarro. several of the WIs invoked the 1941 constitution of the arnulfista party (which is still in existence), saying that they'd never vote along a party line that had tried to force them out of the country. anyhow, it was quite the circus.

at the end of the romería, as at the end of this drawn-out reportage, i was bone-tired. i think everyone was. there was some food and drink, and i sat with this really interesting lady who had been a community organizer among west indians in brooklyn for many years. we talked about citizenship claims and some of the litigation that west indians had taken on to acquire US citizenship, which they felt was rightfully theirs, seeing as how they'd been born in the canal zone, spoke only english, and had grown up reciting the US national anthem every day at school until the mid-1950s at earliest. then i felt rather spent, and i rode back into town with the raucous ladies who'd given me a lift to the zone. the 89-year-old demanded that we stop for a milkshake on the way back, and she kept calling for this necessary milkshake in an incredibly endearing manner. thus i was melted and spent. the end of a full morning.