human zoos and basil on my fingers

this past weekend has been a motley assortment of the usual-unusual things: hanging out with my roommates-the-hipsters and their artist friends, exploring an abandoned building, riding in a police car at 3 am...okay, so these are not exactly "usual" things. and this is not exactly the place to explain them. but let me say that the new la casona (concert venue par excellence) is way better than the old la casona, whatever i might've said about that old one, with its diminutive charming garden and monastery mural and such. i mean, the old one was navigable and inviting, but the new one is cavernous and half-boarded up and mysterious, full of urbanized grottoes (read: holes in the wall made by bulldozers) and dust and collapsed/collapsing eaves and such. quite the place. it looks like the setting for some sort of video game. already some artists have come in and painted up the joint with the sort of décor that my friend E suggested was "churlish" (not his word, but the same sentiment), and some others have begun to fill the grottoes with dungeon-looking implements and couches for necking and the like. anyhow, it's an excellent space. you can still see the teller's area (it used to be a bank), and i learned that 2/3 of the space will not be used as such - although there were a lot of artists there on friday trying to negotiate some gallery deal. one of them said that he was "flirting with la casona," and when i told this to the owner, she adamantly stated: "no negocios!" This was, apparently, not the time for business.

so it was really really fun. i can understand that this social scene is intimate to the point of incestuous tendencies, but hey. i'm just passing through, trying to put out feelers to plant roots next year while i continue my fieldwork. and it's great that the cultural scene is so varied - among the people in attendance on the new casona's inaugural night was the daughter of SAMAAP president enrique sanchez, among others who i could name but for now am not going to. maybe later. entonces, pues...there are also a lot of chileans here, many of whom came as political prisoners when Omar Torrijos opened the door to those fleeing Pinochet's dictadura. they have a sort of strong flock, and though some of them espouse racist/racialist attitudes about panamanians (preferring to date other chileans, say), others seem to mingle quite a lot with certain components of the population here. so that's an interesting thing.

then today i went to the xxxi feria nacional de artesanías, the huge annual crafts fair. i admit that i'm not much into crafts, because of the many complicated and problematic issues that bubble up once the surface is scratched (cults of authenticity, the "local"/consumer-oriented regionalism, indigeneity, cultural traditionalism, the naivete of the colonizer, "going native," the colonizer as the most ardent preserver of the art of the colonized, definitions of art vs. ritual or everyday objects, the consumption/production factor, mystified means of production, the history of "folklore" as subsumed in conquest, violence, slavery, and rape; oh god, i could go on), but i decided to go and put aside my academicism for once. and it turned out to be sort of colorful and fun: young children in polleras and montunos and the very strange flipped-up sombrera típica...lots of accordion and hand-worked lace and spanish carryovers and imported stuff from china posing as folk art. it was a pastiche, in other words, and the scores of people thronging the place seemed rather entertained, and so was i. and i did buy some small things to "bring back," as they say, and overall i was feeling pretty okay with it until i stumbled upon the human zoo. aaaaagh! there were these half-naked indigenous women slowly making emberá baskets, or pretending to, and looking decorative inside of this sort of faux-jungle atmosphere. tourists took photos. it was the couple in the cage! aaagh. i also took photos for purposes of documenting the ridiculousness and the kitsch of it, but i felt sort of bad about it, seeing as how these were real people's souls i was stealing. the women seemed pretty cool with the whole setup. it was just one of those ethical dilemmas where no amount of moralizing will extricate us. on the way there, i chatted with a friendly taxi driver as we passed a giant megalopolis mall - and i thought about how the developers of such monstrous paean to consumerism probably rationalized it away by noting that "the people liked/wanted it." some marxists might come in and say, "but this is the alienation of labor! surplus value, etc!" but if this kind of institution was taken away, hundreds of shopgirls would lament its demise, having nowhere to spend their meager earnings on the weekends. and should we chalk this up to false consciousness?

okay, this was not supposed to be my academic blog, but this particular post is a little cerebral. sorry, guys! i should also report that i did two very rich and full interviews last week - one with an afro-panamanian author/historian who worked in the canal zone and undertook this exhaustive chronicle of west indians in panama, going through decades of chronology and biographies and the like. very fine-grained and interesting, the work of what E might call, after gramsci, an "organic intellectual." i'm still not too comfortable with that term, but hey. this guy, who will remain anonymous for now, is apparently part of a crypto-jew messianic cult, and he wants me to take part in the shabbat festivities next week. uh, okay.

the second interview was with a theatre director who i know somewhat well, and it was one of those "tip of the iceberg" things that require more in-depth study. sometimes an interview delivers such a huge amount of information that it demands several subsequent rounds of review and sifting through the words to the thoughts and arguments. if i were to spatialize this, i'd say that an interview is a very horizontal thing: everything gets laid out with different weights assigned by the speaker, which the listener may or may not take into account (posing its own ethical problems and issues of "mining" the tale). so you have this landscape of facts, opinions, references, interpretations, etc., and it's up to you then to put it in some kind of workable order for your purposes of retelling. so from the horizontal, you have to take it like some sort of glutinous agent and spin it out into these vertical bands of x, y, and z. it's like making spaghetti or something. all this flour that needs to be differentiated into strands, which are then eventually cooked and intertwined in various ways, speared on the reader's fork.

anyhow, so those were good. i'm still in the process of going through the material, trying to hone in on the information that i'm seeking - but really enjoying the act of just transcribing all of the narrative and seeing where it leads in novelistic style. interviews: what a process! such wunderbar things can be turned up in the tilling of that soil. you just never know who's going to explode into storytelling like some kind of amazing cabinet of curiosities opening inside their chests, spilling out all its collected refuse. it's like a sort of blossoming, or a geyser - people just burst into these active processes of memory-recall, with all the exigencies and embroideries...really a fascinating enterprise.

okay, last thing: this is somewhat unrelated, but i found this new york times article fascinating and extremely sad. there are so many things going on here: the failure of health care in the US, the failure of health care in other countries, our tension between the need to be delicate and respect other countries' institutions and our brute, scientistic knowledge of the superiority of US health care; immigration laws and the inhumane ways that people are labeled "illegal" and "alien," often both at once; the fact that the central figure here was nearly killed in a car accident involving a drunken, maleficent US citizen; and in addition to this, the fact that the patient was lonely and missed his family back home, so that when returned to Guatemala he seemed happier but would likely not live as long. i appreciate that rather than wrapping up with a nice little tied-knot solution or some sort of catchy final word, as many periodical articles are wont to do (and the nytimes is very guilty of this annoying marketing tack), the article sort of lays it all out in this solemn and respectful way without mucking it up by proposing a solution, identifying the way forward, or any of this. it's more of an unearthing or explication of a helix of problems and issues that are resulting in the deportation of people treated like animals. it's one of those morasses so deep and longstanding* that there seems to be little way out short of complete overhauls of several institutions regarding health and the borderlands.

at issue here also is US collective dismissal of the sick, elderly, and less-useful human fodder that often wanders to the wayside and, to differing degrees, accepts or fights the labels affixed to it. this is also an example of how publicity does not balance the scales, you know? or bring the "margins" into the "center." a million people can read this article and feel outraged and saddened, but how will this change the legal practices surrounding immigration and health care? which must change first, our ruthless eugenics-happy american zeitgeist or the legal structures that dictate where people fall within these rubrics of "valuable" and not?

and related to this, the number of people with HIV has been drastically underreported/underassessed. obviously! hello, people. this indicates that we still have not truly addressed the problem of "bodies that matter." the current administration is much more at ease with the idea that africans suffer from HIV because of lack of information and resources than it is with the fact that US queers and people of color - and queers of color! remember those? - exist and need support and resources as well. i second henry waxman in opining that AIDS discourse remains saturated with moralizing and ideology, in part because of its connections with sex and, in some cases, alternative sexualities and living arrangements, differing/"deviant" bodies and family structures. ehh, okay. inchoate rant!

so okay, to return to "real-time:" after all this, i went home and ate some eggplant with tomato and basil procured from the giant wholesale market - fresh basil that, when torn, left a complicated perfume on my fingertips. and this is where things stand at the moment.

*one thing that i missed from this article was a sense of the historicity of hospitals' errant deportation of ill undocumenteds. i have a feeling that we've been throwing the near-dead bodies of migrant workers over the border for as long as the US has existed. some of this might have enriched the discussion of how systematic an issue this is, though i was convinced by the article that it's happening all the time. ugh, ghastly.