This Is The Grassroots Work I'm Gonna Do With You

Today we flip from from winter to summer. While we in the Northern Hemisphere shiver haplessly in the dark, the days are long and hot in São Paulo, Brazil where this just came in from Frederico, our latest member of the 31 Dreamers' dream team:

I'm in a southeastern Brazilian country house in the rainforest. Maybe I’m a teenager on vacation from school. With me are three other teens. Our routine is to wait for the bus from the city, which stops on the dirt road uphill, and take it back and forth from our country house to the city. In the house is a priest—a left wing priest from the days when Liberation Theology used to be more common in South America. It's always nighttime. I'm thirsty.

It's our last day at the house and we walk to the dirt road to take the bus back home. We wait for hours and I'm still thirsty. The bus is late. The priest reminds us that we should bring our bags to the bus stop. I know that the bus is nearby, I see it coming down the road, but the road is so curvy that its headlights fall outside the curves instead of lighting the road ahead. I'm relaxed though, because I know I'm one step ahead of my friends—my stuff is already packed.

I go to my room to get my backpack and my camcorder case (I’ve never owned a camcorder in real life). I go to the kitchen to drink a cup of water from the terra-cotta container and I see a lot of posters hanging on the green wall. All of them have anti-racist messages. There’s one with an Afro-Brazilian woman wearing a dress and a hat, and another paired with it depicting a female chimp with the same hair and dress. These images were extracted from government propaganda, and they were put side by side on the posters to denounce the racism of the military dictatorship. Then I notice I'm in the 1970s and that the house is a clandestine school where the priests teach the local population. I realize that both the priest and I are Afro-Brazilians.

The priest is also in the kitchen, hanging some posters, when a third Afro-Brazilian guy steps in the room looking for the priest. He's has an afro and a beige 70s-style suit. He tells the priest that he’s doing very well with his grassroots work there and wants to invite him to do the same thing on the coast. The guy invites the priest to the living room to meet some friends: a guy of Japanese ancestry with long hair, a mustache and grey 70s-style suit, and a fat white guy wearing Ray Ban glasses, his hairy chest poking out of his half-open shirt. It's clearly a set up—these guys are cops and they’ve come to arrest the priest. Suddenly the priest draws his gun and shoots the Japanese-Brazilian in the heart. The fat guy shoots the priest in the leg and the priest shoots back, killing the fat guy. All this happens as if in a kung fu movie, with those zoom-ins and close-takes in slow motion. Finally, the priest grabs the afro guy before he can get to his gun. The priest chokes the afro guy and points his gun at the other guy's head, and says: "This is the grassroots work I'm gonna do with you."

I wake up sweating because it was a really hot night. I go to the kitchen and finally drink my glass of water.

Frederico, you've been watching a lot of movies, haven't you? 

Your dream is also rife with a few subtle and noteworthy cultural items that I'd like to draw attention to:

1. São Paulo (a.k.a. Sampa) is the largest city in South America, third-largest in the world, surrounded by Brazil's biggest industrial park, beyond which is a vast expanse of fertile farmland.

2. Japanese Brazilians are a huge ethnic group, constituting the largest sector of the Japanese Diaspora. There are more people of Japanese descent living in São Paulo than in any other city outside of Japan.

3. Afro-Brazilians account for more than half of all people of African descent living outside of Africa and make up over half of Brazil's population.

4. Brazil's Military Dictatorship was supported by the U.S. to oust a democratically elected leftist president. The junta ruled the nation from 1964 to 1985.

5. Liberation Theology is an activist movement created by Brazilian Catholic Marxists in the 1950s and 60s who officially recognized capitalism as a sin.

Now that we've cleared up these fun facts for our non-Brazilian dreamers, we can move on.

Frederico, I'm guessing that you lead a compartmentalized life. Your dream has you commuting between the tranquil country and your home in the bustling city, making this trip every day (or night actually—it's always night in your dream) without ever really seeing the path in between. This can reflect the dichotomy between any number of situations: home, work, school, friends, family, loved ones, hobbies, responsibilities—pick any two. You are comfortable in both places and, unlike your peers, you're prepared to transition from one to the other. But they remain separate parts of your life. Are you worried about that? Not really. You just grab your bag and go. However you are thirsty—there is something that you want that you're not getting, and you go looking for it before you leave this place (or situation) for the last time, possibly to never return.

When trying to find this desired thing and you are faced with a "corrected" version of the past. In the dream it's a commentary on racist aspects of your country's junta, outside the dream it is likely that it's you, noticing something about yourself, some way that you used to be that has fallen out of favor. You face this thing, simultaneously wanting to highlight it and to wipe it out—so much so that you assert an identity (Afro-Brazilian, in the dream) that erases any possibility of complicity with flawed past notions (represented by racism in the dream). You are beside yourself—the lefty priest is there and he is you as a liberator, a corrector of flawed ideas and corrupt actions. And the show is about to begin.

In they come: the cops in your head—rivaling the fuzzy racial rainbow coalition from Barney Miller—each a different aspect of your personality that your internal warrior-priest must defeat. The first one seems cool—he looks like you and your priest and seems to share your ideas, your values. But really he is all talk. The next cop could be alright with his long hair, but that third one—no way! He oozes sketchiness like the chest hair oozing out between the buttons of his polyester shirt. Your priest calls the shots and you just watch. This isn't quite the cold glass of water that you'd hoped for. Then that soliloquy (pictured at the top of this post) . . . is the kind of action you really wanted to take?

Frederico, there might me millions of approaches to tackling whatever "the grassroots work" is that you're dealing with here. I'll put two in the crosshairs of your metaphorical viewfinder:

The first is the Super Fly Approach, as epitomized by the 1972 film of the same name (left). The protagonist in this film (whose name, coincidentally, was "Priest"), eschewed the grassroot SNCC/Black Panther types for the simpler politics of the gun. The problem with this tactic when dealing with "cops in your head" is that they aren't like your average city cops, they're more like ghosts. Bullets—even metaphorical ones—go right through them and they will always come back to haunt you.

The second approach is one actually called "Cop In The Head," as described in the book Rainbow of Desire by Brazilian theater artist/ex-politician (and survivor of torture at the hands of the military dictatorship) Augusto Boal (yeah, I tend to plug Boal a lot). The Cop In The Head technique, put simply, invites you to take these cops out of your head and put them on stage in front of you. Recognize them, name them, and deal with them. 

Frederico, whether you read this aforementioned book or not, you can meditate on its idea. In the meantime, I advise you to invest in a camcorder—you obviously have a cinematographic mind. And always have a glass of water ready at your bedside. It may come in handy.

Plea For A Rickshaw

Many of you have sent in dreams about bicycles and it seems important that I feature at least one today. I myself have had recurring anxiety dreams about driving automobiles since I was a little kid. Today's dream is a hybrid of both—bike and car—and comes from Connor in Montreal, Quebec. The fourth of our 31 Dreamers writes:

I had a morning dream that was a little more intense than the usual half-asleep dream. I was leaving an anonymous workplace with some friends, the street was vaguely familiar; an ideal building and urban space—it might have been from [the Canadian TV series] Degrassi. Anyway, one of the friends was my buddy Rob, there was a faceless co-worker, and a tag-along who remained nameless but was of South Asian descent. After walking aimlessly we started talking about where I worked and what I did and how we were hiring youth workers. The tag-along expressed an interest in the job and it seemed like I was probably going to hire her—she was studying youth intervention. So finally we get to my car and decide to pile in. Once inside I ask Rob for the handlebars of his bike to replace my steering wheel, with no hesitation he hands them over (the entire bike and two people magically fit in my back seat for some reason). We start driving but I'm having a really hard time steering the car and this gets progressively harder as the dream goes on. 

We are rolling around some nameless suburban landscape, looking for something, when all these friends from my past come rolling by on bicycles. We decide we'll catch up and join them. But because of the problems steering the car with the handlebars, we are losing them fast—in fact the roads are getting narrower and we are moving really slowly and the car has morphed into a gas-guzzling Buick from the 70s. Finally we see them and need to make a U-turn into a driveway. When we do, the car sinks into the gaps in the driveway. It’s a very unusual driveway and when we get out, we can't understand it—it's kind of a metal bridge that has lots of sections missing. If you looked at it from above it would look like this:

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Anyway we're stuck in this gap and finally the old guy who lives there (and has his car parked ahead of ours) comes out and tells me that there should be no problem: "Just back right out."

The dream ends with me scratching my head.

Connor, I gather that the influence of the Degrassi television universe is a bit more pervasive in Canadian culture than in that of your yankee neighbors. Of its four TV serials, only Degrassi Junior High was afforded U.S. syndication and it was confined to the cult audience of Public Television. Thus Degrassi's tentacles of teenage drama are more likely to wrap themselves up in the Canuck subconscious spaces between Generations X and Y, and you, good sir, are no exception to this trend. But I digress (or is that "Degrass?"). Let's look at your dream:

Your dream puts you somewhere on the path between youth and adulthood. You begin as a person posited squarely in the adult world: you supervise young people; you have the power to hire others at your job; you own a car and you sit at its helm, deciding where it will take you and your friends. At the same time you want to retain your youthful identity and so replace your grown-up's steering wheel with the controls of a younger person's vehicle—bicycle handlebars. 

Suddenly you find it difficult to master this combination of puerile spirit with adult responsibility. You are not in total control of your direction. You seek things without being sure what they are. This is when your youth passes you by (all your friends on bikes) and you suddenly feel yourself outmaneuvered—trapped in the Buick of behemoth maturity and trying to navigate life's paths, which have narrowed with age, affording you less mobility. You try to bang a U-ie back to your salad days, but find yourself snagged by the driveway of your predecessors who have settled in suburbia. You step out of your vehicle and see that you are in fact stuck on the bridge between your two worlds—young and old—unable to move. The old man "who has his car parked ahead of [y]ours" (a person who took your path years ago and ended up squarely on the adult side of things) takes one look at your situation and says, "Back up sonny. You're not ready for this yet." This is the advice that you left with at the end.

However, there is further advice encoded in the middle of this dream. Who is this nameless tag-along with the South Asian ancestry whom you're probably going to hire? Your dream shows your interest in who she is and what she says peaking at about 6½ on a scale of 1 to 10. She is the spirit of youth—not of your own fleeting youth, but of younger people from whom you and I have much to learn. She reminds us to not get so wrapped up in juvenile nostalgia that we overlook people who are actually younger than us. (And yes, I suddenly jumped into this part of your dream with you because I want to adopt its messages as well. You can call me "faceless co-worker" from now on.)

The other thing that's fascinating to me is that when you plunked those handlebars onto your dashboard, you inadvertently converted your car into an auto rickshaw (also called a tuk tuk, pictured above). Rickshaws are essentially 3-wheeled covered motorcycles and are used as taxis all over Asia. Compared to the 4-wheeled automobile, the rickshaw is easier to maneuver, uses less gas and takes up less space on the road. We in the West have much to learn from the auto rickshaw—imagine if half the taxicabs in New York were replaced by rickshaws! Traffic and pollution wouldn't be nearly as bad. In your dream, your jury-rigging of the handlebars into your car seems like a plea for something different. Something that can navigate the narrow lanes between youth and maturity. Something that is stable and yet can handle a 360º turn in tight spaces. Something that is both fun and practical and takes you where you want to go. Connor, what you need is a rickshaw. Both on the streets of Montreal and on your road to happiness in life.

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Today's book is Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India by Gita Mehta. Sadly it makes no mention of the auto rickshaw, which, given the subject matter, is surprising.

Take Me Black Where I Belong

The second of the 31 Dreamers is Kim who currently lives in Okinawa, Japan. Kim's dream:

So I was trying to get home to my dad's house, AKA what used to be my parents' house before my mom died and what is now owned by someone else because my dad lost the house. Foreclosure cit-ay! But the long country road my parents' house was on was instead Naha's own Kokusai (AKA "international") Street, which is cheesy and horrible like Haight St. [San Francisco] or South St. in Philly. And so the Tennessee road was lined with karaoke and snack bars and shit, but the people on the street were American frat boys who kept making fun of me and I couldn't figure out why. I blacked out on the walk home and starting running barefoot, kept trying to get there but the road never ended. I found a bathroom and went in and was in a stall and a Japanese girl in a kimono was in there, speaking to me in Japanese, and kept picking up pieces of shit off the floor (that were mine) and her face was also covered in my own shit. When I was leaving the bathroom I saw that I was wearing a leopard print skirt and my face was made up in the Japanese "ganguro" style. Insane! I never made it home.

Kim, some years back I read an article by Joe Wood in Harvard's African diasporic journal Transition entitled "The Yellow Negro," about the subset of ganguro (Japanese for "blackface") who specifically parrot African-American styles of appearance and culture. Transition's byline for the article: 

Like their white American counterparts, Japanese kids dig hip-hop, graffiti, and break dancing. In the clubs of Tokyo’s Roppongi district, however, what separates the real from the poser is blackface: darkened skin and curls. Joe Wood wonders whether the Japanese minstrels are trying to be Janet Jackson . . . or Al Jolson.

Then there are the ganguro who darken their skin but lighten their hair (see picture) giving the appearance not of Japanese girls who are trying to look black, but either as Japanese girls who are trying to look like white girls who are trying to look black (e.g. the "orange" tan job prevalent on American college campuses), or as Japanese girls who are trying to look like black girls who are trying to look white (e.g. straight and/or blond "not natural" hair that all the hair salons and dollar stores in my neighborhood specialize in). With the painful complexities and history of race and racism in the U.S., this has been an all but taboo subject outside of academia, a trend that's likely to change as we see more and more people with a visibly "trans-racial" identity (cf: transgender issues were far more invisible a decade ago than they are today). In Japan—a country without a history of Europeans enslaving Africans, and whose social and popular culture is both hyper-accelerated and über-homogenous—is it little wonder that ganguro is what it is? Well, yes, it is a wonder. Now that that's explained, let's move on to your dream:

Clearly Kim, there are places that you want to go back to that are no longer there: a house that doesn't belong to your family anymore; a parent who has left the world of the living; a country road that's been swallowed by commercial sprawl. You want to reconnect with the history that you desire—your feet are bare, making contact with the earth under which bygone things are buried. You are running but you cannot achieve your goal because what's gone is gone forever. 

At the same time you are conflicted in your own role and identity in these matters. Remember when that Tennessee country road seemed so blasé and the idea of Haight Street or South Streets seemed so cool? A lot of alienated young people had the same idea, and so the Haight Streets and Kokusai Streets of the world were created by and for all the people who just didn't fit in to where they came from. These places were probably pretty great before the subcultures that birthed them reached critical mass and were co-opted to become the marketing schemes that they are today. And in the eyes of many, these places are still great—look at how many people flock to South Street in Philadelphia on a Saturday night! But they are not your people, and this is a past that you disavow.

And now your dream has you in Japan, and one of the locals is picking up your own fecal matter and showing it to you—reflecting it back at you like a mirror. And then you see yourself as someone who has bought into the vicious cycle of identity consumerism: a European-American, trying to be a Japanese person, trying to look like an African-American, who might be trying to become . . . European-American.

The dream's imagery is a bit fatalistic, but the message is positive. You obviously recognize the pitfalls of this cycle and so eschew participation in it. You are surrounded by people who bombard you with a fratboyesque cluelessness, yet you stay strong. You know where your roots are and celebrate their strength. It is true that the shortest path homeward is to never leave the house in the first place. But you are wise to travel—to see the world and experience different ways of doing things, and for this reason you perceive the changes in the places that you've left and are more critical of them. You are also more critical of your own changes and the person who you once were—you want to reclaim the desireble parts while shedding the detritus. You want to find that perfect place, free from bogusness and cacophony of karoke bars and fast food. And so you keep running, non-stop, to find your beloved Tennessee country road.