Weaving Solidarity

In Becoming an Ally: Breaking the Cycle of Oppression in People, Anne Bishop describes her dream vision of the world as “a world where no one doubts that to hurt anyone or anything is to hurt yourself and those you love most, a world where everyone works to understand how everything we do will affect future generations.” This quote is so powerful for me, and really resonates with our class and my shaped perception of solidarity: we help others to help ourselves, for we are inextricably connected and bound across economic, political, and social lines; the people who you hurt, are, in fact, the people that you love.

Through the processes of our class, I have witnessed and participated in solidarity as a mutual intention and effort to build consciousness and understanding between groups and individuals; love, too, incidentally formed. Celia, Marla, Jen, Juanita and members of the class have become people that I deeply care for, that I wish, earnestly, with all of my heart, only the best. This love, this sense of family created in such a short time, even without much direct communication, is, I believe, the dream: the “deep, driving force” of our work and our class . . . I feel it deep in my bones.

            It’s like a shared ache, an ache for all students to take a class based on a community learning model, to explore their origins and their position in the hierarchies of privilege and oppression, to experience the beautiful relationships that so often accompany these journeys and processes, and, most of all, to effect profound and lasting change in the way we live, interact, consume, create, and resist. Like Bishop, I want to be an “activist”, to persistently incite action on the part of myself and others. Entwined in this perpetuation of awareness and initiative is the generational effect of our actions. Bishop envisions a world where everyone works to understand how everything we do will affect future generations. We do not only pass on the physical conditions of our world, but the practices, attitudes, and values that shaped them, each one etched into the earth like the hollows of the mines, the changed bark of the trees, and the unprecedented colours of the sky.

            Through the work of our class, we strive to pass on an awareness of the value and beauty of creative resistance, visually and cathartically, but also politically, economically, and socially. In the hand of creative resistance is the importance of responsible consumerism; behind every “product,” every piece of art, is a maker, a human maker, a woman or man that toils in the “product’s” creation. As Marla depicts in her beautiful poem, the art is the struggle and we are the artwork. Each of us embodies a thread in the weaving process of solidarity, resistance, and change. This weaving, however, is ongoing: a living masterpiece whose beauty lies, as many have emphasized, in the discomfort, awkwardness, and silliness of the process, in the clash of colours, patterns, thoughts and ideas, in the interlacing of different fingers from different hands, all different sizes, colours, and shapes. I am so grateful to every member of the class for their tremendous commitment, engagement, and contributions, to Celia, Marla, and Jen for believing in us and so graciously sharing with us their time, work, and hearts, as did, of course(!), Juanita, who made it all possible. Let us rave about the community learning model, Juanita, and GEOG 495 so that everyone may be as lucky as us . . . hasta pronto en Chiapas, nos vemos!