Malinda Words: Reclaiming the everyday with solidarities of tender fury

I am eternally grateful to my friend Mahendra Silva for urging me to watch the movie The Life of David Gale. It happened when he quoted from a lecture delivered by the principal character, played by Kevin Spacey, in the course of clarifying something.

'So the lesson of Lacan is, living by your wants will never make you happy. What it means to be fully human is to strive to live by ideas and ideals and not to measure your life by what you've attained in terms of your desires but those small moments of integrity, compassion, rationality, even self-sacrifice. Because in the end, the only way that we can measure the significance of our own lives is by valuing the lives of others.'

More than fifteen years later I was privileged to listen to a lecture delivered by another friend, Kanishka Goonewardena. He introduced me to the work of the French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s work on the idea of ‘everyday,’ as a space colonised by capitalism characterised by neglect and exclusion as well as a site of struggle.

There are everyday-struggles. Individuals in various spaces, collectives concerned about issues, even countries trip over the everyday even as they design and execute plans to inscribe meaning to it. Everyday. Everywhere. Everyday and everywhere there are ‘small moments of integrity, compassion, rationality and even self-sacrifice.’ Everyday and everywhere people consciously or otherwise ‘measure the significance of [their] own lives by valuing the lives of others.’ The mainstream media doesn’t report any of it. Oh, they do know, but selectivity and absenting is part of the game of producing what Lefebvre called ‘intermediate residue’ not only in the deliberate exclusion from ‘everyday’ but in ghosting those who inhabit ‘everyday’ in ways that make the exclusionists, if you will, squirm.

Everywhere and everyday, for example, people are protesting the absolutely genocidal attacks on Palestinians who by the way have been sequestered in their own lands for decades. The mainstream media is largely absent and the grandmasters of social media platforms, let us not forget, are doing their best to toe the lie-line, but each time someone raises an objection, something of the everyday is recovered.

Why should the Puyallup Tribe living in the North Western coast of the USA bother about what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank, about the demonstrations vehemently condemning the Israel Government, the complicity of the USA, UK and other countries in the crime of genocide and the large swathes of silence in Media Land? For them it was simple: ‘Land-back includes Palestine.’

What did they do about it? They marched. They protested. Their objections expanded to a water resistance with indigenous water warriors taking to the Puget Sound in traditional canoes in order to block the cargo ship MV Cape Orlando, believed to be loaded with weapons headed for Israel. That’s solidarity of a high order. That’s recovering a piece of the everyday. That’s love, as Calina Lawrence, a Suquamish water warrior stated: ‘To the people of Gaza, we love you from Coast Salish Territory and beyond!’

Then we have the Organization of Port Stevedores of Barcelona in Catalan refusing to load or unload military materials onto any ship bound for Israel or any other war zone where they could be used against civilians.

‘We have decided... not to allow shipping activity in our port that contains military equipment, with the sole purpose of protecting any civilian population in any territory,' the union stated, insisting that ‘no cause justifies sacrificing civilians.’

Right now, as I write, a Melbourne shipyard has ground to a halt after trade unionists, long with Palestinians and Jews, ‘called for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the genocide in Gaza and justice for Palestine.’

All these people are recovering the narrative. They are refusing to be residue or residual. They are enlarging their Everyday Footprint.

They are doing all this because there are 10,569 Palestinians who will never ever be able to wrest one cubic milimetre of the everyday they have all been denied, as individuals and as a collective, among them are 4,324 children and 2,823 women. Tomorrow has been erased from the everyday of their lives. They are dead. Killed. I don’t know what the numbers will be by the time I finish this piece and I don’t know what the numbers will be by the time you read this. I do know that the perpetrators are under scrutiny unlike never before.

Let’s return to Lacan. We are seeing innumerable moments of integrity from all across the planet. We are seeing compassion and rationality. Other lives are being valued. People are redefining what it means to be fully human. They are making shoes for themselves and fellow travelers so that their stories can walk to all corners of our planet. And so our footprint on the everyday grows, one story at a time, one protest song at a time, one conscious act of objection at a time, held together with solidarities of tender fury.

*I borrowed 'tender fury' from Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation by Subcomandante.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 264th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

09 November 2023

Reclaiming the everyday with solidarities of tender fury

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