2004-11-18 - 1:00 a.m.
In case anyone has been wondering what I have been doing and why I haven’t returned your letter, email or phone call, it’s because in addition to school I have been interning with POV-American Documentary, a non-profit that shows independent social issue documentaries on PBS and partners with community organizations to screen the films and hold discussions, workshops and action oriented events around them. It’s an amazing organizations with really dedicated, talented fierce people working there and it’s given me a point of hope in times when I feel increasingly more frustrated.
The weekend after the election was the POV youth views institute where about twenty young people who are organizers, activists and cultural workers came from different communities around the country and city to do workshops on story telling, media literacy, even organizing, promotion and writing a press release, the “isms”, acknowledging elders, building trust with a camera and so much more. It was a hectic and exhausting weekend, and without falling back on some cheesy rhetoric about how “children are the future” it instead gave me something to focus on concretely how we can work together to try to stop some of the damage that the neo-cons and those that fall in line with them (even if they don’t know it) are doing.
In my other life I’ve been in an amazing graduate class called “Anthropology as a History of the Present” with an amazing professor named Ann Stoler who you should read if you haven’t already, talking about memory, rumor, nostalgia, affect, all kinds of complicated things that go into the workings of a culture and a person.
Thinking about nostalgia, tonight I watched a POV film called “Our House in Havana” about a rich Cuban woman who left after the revolution and goes back to Cuba 39 years later to see her house and the places she loved. It is an amazing film for presenting a variety of view points and really showing Silvia, the main character, as an empathetic person, as she comes into a realization that the blockade (the embargo) must be lifted. Watching the movie, filled with the sights and sounds of Havana that looked so much like it did when I was there (some of the buildings and scenes in the movie were places that I saw everyday) it brought on my own sense of nostalgia, even as it explored Silvia’s for the Cuba that was (for her). It was interesting too because Silvia realized the privilege she had to leave the Cuba, how huge that was which was one of the things that I thought about so much when I was there and after.
I think one of the things that makes the thought of Cuba so emotional for me is that I know how difficult it would be to go back and questioning why I want to because I know it will not be the same and if it’s just something I can do to flaunt my American privilege really. Perhaps because it is such a huge reminder of the US’s colonialism and Cuba’s ultimate defiance of it, perhaps it is because of ties of history, or the fact it is such a complicated place that is only 90 miles from the US but might as well be another world. I am not sure of the ends of these thoughts, they are loose bursts of memory and emotion hovering in my mind.
