The most left wing political territory in the world, the Democratic Administration of North East Syria (DAANES), known colloquially by the Kurdish name Rojava, is under threat of being totally destroyed.
DAANES is a Kurdish-led political experiment which sprung up during the Syrian civil war (2011+), inspired by the teachings of the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, who was in turn inspired by the American scholar-activist Murray Bookchin, who pioneered a system of thought and action known as social ecology: a synthesis of Marxism, anarchism and deep ecological sensibilities, otherwise definable as a deeply ecologically integrated kind of libertarian socialism or social anarchism.
I am upset. In this time of global disorder and what seems to be the irrevocable albeit currently slow Collapse of modern civilization, with far right ideologies and groups gaining ground globally, fed, as in the 1930s, by economic crisis and the horrific and increasing gap between the richest and the poorest, but this time exacerbated by an underlying ecological overshoot (including the climate crisis), and lubricated by an internet that knows no sense, so that the far right may pop up in any society, at any time, the Rojava experiment is to many leftists an excruciatingly rare beacon of hope and revolutionary action. The fact that it could soon end, is deeply deeply tragic. The word tragedy does not even cut it.
I think I did not realise, until yesterday, that just knowing in the back of my mind that Rojava existed, was an ongoing source of strength to me, and an orientation point for how populations can organise in times of Collapse, for the collapse of Syria from 2011 was in a sense a microcosm and reflection of the broader Collapse that is underway globally. I have not been involved in any Kurdish solidarity activism for many years, but I remember with gratitude how my brief involvement with the Kurdish Solidarity Network in the UK led to a longer-lasting and more profound (online) link with the Institute for Social Ecology based in Vermont in the U.S., cofounded by Murray Bookchin, that autodidactical heavyweight mentioned above.
I am not extremely well-versed in the politics of the Middle East, but my understanding of the situation, which I think is workable enough, is that the Kurds in NE Syria are currently being betrayed by the HTS-led Syrian government which contains jihadist (by which I mean extreme Islamist) elements. This current Syrian government (still a new government) had promised some kind of peace deal with DAANES in the north, or at least specifically with the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) which is the military arm of DAANES / Rojava. The SDF were to be integrated with the national Syrian army. This is despite some all-female units in the SDF -the famous ISIS-bashing YPJ units- declaring their wish to remain independent from the Syrian army.
Yet, any agreement has now been breached, and any ceasefire broken. Syrian government forces are currently claiming back land from the Kurds in a lightning offensive, with no intention, it seems, of preserving those radically democratic institutions. There have been military clashes and deaths. Moreover, the escape of ISIS prisoners from previously Kurdish-run prisons is being facilitated or at least not stopped, by the national Syrian forces. Those same ISIS members whom the Kurds in Rojava so courageously defeated in the mid 2010s, at which time America and its allies were happy to help -but no more.
One of the most inspiring things about the Rojava experiment has been the incredibly high level of gender equality aspired to, in line with radical direct democracy, including mix-gendered co-chairs of democratic assemblies, from the street level to the regional level, and special womens assemblies and other womens groups to advance feminism in the DAANES region. This level of gender equality is otherwise unheard of, in the Middle East, and surpasses even many Western countries` practices of gender equality. With images circulating on social media of Syrian government-aligned forces mocking the captured female soldiers of the YPJ, and one particularly horrible video of a man mocking a dead woman by holding up a braid cut from her head, the conflict between the patriarchal, Western state-recognised new government of Syria, and the radically left wing, feminist political project led by an ethnic minority in the region, could not be more stark.
It is warming to see the calls to international activists coming out from Rojava now, and the response of the so-called Kobane caravan, which is a movement of people from all over the world now travelling to Kobane (a key Kurdish city within DAANES) to help militarily defend Rojava. I have my own life plan to advance radical politics, and although I will not be travelling to Kobane to put my life on the line, the least I can do is raise awareness about what is happening there. It would be pointless for me to exclaim DEFEND ROJAVA! on this little blog, although of course we should defend Rojava, first of all in our minds. But this is just a beginning for me. A trying-to-make-sense of what is happening. I hear that the Kurdish citizens of Rojava are mobilising with weapons like never before, surpassing even the mobilisation of the 2010s, and Kurds from the wider Kurdistan region are trying to get to the DAANES territory to help. Alongside the Kobane caravan, I wish them every success in defending Rojava. Please share this with anyone who may be interested, and for updates visit the Rojava Information Center here: https://rojavainformationcenter.org/
Somewhere around 2 in the morning I drag myself out to a rest stop and buy a bottle of water. My baccy must have fallen out again here but I’m really not in a state to realise, or care. Back on the bus, across the aisle from me two young women are sleeping on each other’s shoulders, a blanket over both, and from my angle they look like a modernist painting, a mish mash of lips and cheeks and hair, strangely more beautiful than each on their own. Picasso would have liked it; a sexist bastard bar none, from what I’ve heard. I want that freaking blanket – it’s cold and I’m in shorts.
Wake up to the sight of Catalonia passing by the window, ancient and new, industrial buildings, an evil empire, sand yellow towns appearing and disappearing around them, churches lit by yellow lights in the gathering dawn. It’s the first time I’ve really wished I was travelling slower. It’s starting to rain again.
It’s impossible to capture the scale of these buildings from a distance. Their industrial atmosphere reminded me of something from a fantasy.
At the Barcelona bus stop the water tips down around the coach stand and the travellers stand and smoke and look out at the rain. A little old man asks me for change and I say no, for no reason except I’ve just woken up and I’m taking a picture when he asks.
I go to a local place and buy two coffees one after the other and something to eat and try to book a hostel around the corner. I’m getting bad vibes from the waitresses because I ordered takeaway accidentally and ate inside. Something screws up on the internet and I don’t manage to pay – it’s going to be one of those sorts of mornings. My mum offered to pay for a hotel room but I just don’t fancy the only one nearby, and besides it seems wasteful. I stagger round the nearby hostels and only the one with bad reviews has any rooms left. At least I can check my bag.
As the big guy (literally – you could fit two of me in him) behind the counter tells me I can’t check in until 2 I find myself unaccountably irritated. It’s his attitude, which is kind of shirty, and the screenful of surveillance camera feeds on his right and I just don’t like bodybuilders. I find myself wondering if I could beat him in a fight and decide I would throw my bag at him, which feels like it weighs about a tonne right now. Improbable violent situation planning is a pretty reliable sign I’m tired.
Once I’m done with the bag I decide to walk to the anarchist space I was told about, even though this is like two hours away. This sort of bad decision making is another sign I’m tired. Unfortunately, recognising signs I’m tired is not something I’m good at when I’m over caffeinated and exhausted.
I get about half way there, through the most boring and cloned part of the city centre, give up when my phone dies and catch the metro back. On the way to the hostel, the same man asks me for change as before. I give it to him this time and hope it brings me luck. They let me check in early and I sleep.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the power of language and symbols. Language here is very important – in Bilbao it was whether you spoke Basque that decided if you were part of the tribe, in Barcelona, possibly Catalan, in Madrid, Spanish. I felt excluded, especially in Madrid, by not speaking the language – and everywhere I go it marks me as a tourist. Maybe that’s a good thing. But whenever I go into a shop or get on a bus I hear English pop music and I’m reminded of the power we’ve wielded. I think of Esperanto and wonder what this trip would’ve been like if that experiment had succeeded.
In symbols we see the same divisions; though they are truly international, their meanings are not – and what does it feel like to be Hindu and see the swastika routinely derided? What about the stone cross for Celts? It’s the nature of fascism to imbue these patterns with terrible, divisive meaning and to some extent they exceed in separating us. What does this mean for language? Would we be happier if we had one language, would we be one people? Or would we have lost a million subtleties of thought?
I woke up at 18.30, made dinner and talked to a German tourist at the hostel who knew even less Spanish than me. Ego mildly boosted, I made for the local punk bar strip by metro, jumping the barrier all sneaky-like. When I get out, there’s the sound of explosions and crowds fill the street. It’s a fireworks festival, with masked folks carrying huge sparklers and smoke everywhere. I wander round in the haze for a bit, a little drunk on it, and buy a beer from someone selling them in the street, but like so much tourist stuff it kinda bores me. I slip back out and walk to the nearest punk bar, nevermind. Outside I sit on the phone for a bit catching up with my dad. When I’m finished I’m about to go in when I see the bouncer giving me an interested look. ‘Anarchista?’ I ask. Yup. Individualist, insurrectionist – we agree heavy on dislike for communists – the history of Barcelona doesn’t make anarchists take kindly. He warns me about thieves on the street and says they carry knives, just walk away. Roger. After chatting for a bit I wander inside to check out the scene.
It’s a wide mix of tourists and local punks, but a bit exclusive. Everyone’s in a convo and the vibe isn’t super welcoming. Oh well, I buy a beer, chat with the barman, go bother A, the bouncer some more. I like him a lot – he has that independence and mildly psychotic aspect so many young masculine folks bring to the struggle. The street scene outside is chaotic – you could write a song about it – one with four lines and a repetitive chorus. Tourists and thieves and beggars and punks and the neighbours above are apparently right touchy about the noise. One of A’s jobs is to keep it down. I don’t envy him.
Back inside, I’m joined by an older German guy on holiday. He gets talking on politics (what else?) and tells me how proud he is that he started with nothing, as a chef, and now he earns 179k a year before tax. As we talk it becomes clear why he’s in a punk bar; he misses being part of the crowd, one of the rest of us, misses the simplicity of poverty. You couldn’t wean him from riches though. It’s just not in the thought processes of those able to succeed under capitalism. They can’t help but think they deserve it, that it says something good about them, that they should be proud – that they’re part of an elite. I hold my tongue and try to find points of agreement, similarities, ways to get a little donation for the party. Gotta play the long game innit – if I verbally knock him down and pull out his toenails at this stage he’s just gonna go back to his bank account, wife and house. Would I have sex with someone for 100k? Why are you even asking?! Obviously, every penny to the Anarchist Party…
Jokes aside, my ideology may say power corrupts but I also believe in individual free will and I always try to convince these sympathisers that they’d be happier back among us and that anarchism is a positive, social ideology they need not be afraid of.
He buys me alcohol – probably in an attempt to weaken the strength of my arguments – and I gotta admit by this point I’m getting a little shaky. By the time he leaves – complete with promise, albeit vague, to donate – I’m in a great mood, everyone is my comrade, can I put a song on the jukebox? Where do you go to dance around here?
Place called Sidecar apparently and I’m just about to make a move when a young woman from London asks if I’m English – yeah! – that’s nice, everyone around here is Spanish… well no shit lady, you just flew 350 miles and you expected them to be English? You followed the history of the British Empire lately? Also, most people here are Catalan… I don’t get a chance to say any of this because she’s already wandered off with the supreme disinterest of Londoners everywhere. I feel mildly rejected but it’s ok, my drink addled attention span is already caught up in something new, a young local guy kicking a can down the street. I whistle a sort of ‘geddon bai’ sound and he runs over, offering to do a dance with arms locked.
I was drunk, ok?
We do the dance thing and as we de-interlock I see 20 euros appear in a doorway across from me. Jump for it and grab it and think ‘shit, that be mine’ check my pockets as I start to walk away.
Wallet’s gone. Oh fuck.
I spin around but he’s gone. I chase down the street in the same direction. Two guys in a doorway say ‘he went that way’ pointing to my left. Turn the corner. Empty road. Approximately at this moment, the comment about knives and the memory that my card has contactless appear in my head like whack-a-moles at the arcade.
I slow to zero, call the bank and walk to the nearest atm in hopes I might run into him. Suddenly I’m pretty sober. Card cancelled, I re-explore my pockets. Beautiful life! My broken wallet has dumped all my cash and my passport photocopy into my pocket. Getting back to Nevermind I see the bouncer head inside with my hostel door key. I run after and get it back. The night has turned out ok after all.
I walk home (the metro’s closed), picking up a broken skateboard on the way with some vague notion of fixing it or using it to bash anyone that fucks with me. Nobody does. It takes me about an hour and a half to get back to the hostel and when I arrive in the dorm the sleepers twist and turn, brains half aware of movement, unsafe, but having chosen that – perhaps for reasons of economy, perhaps from a desire to be closer to life, to the world, to other people. In a flash of tipsy intuition, I realise the answer to a question I’ve been asking myself since before I arrived. ‘Why do I feel attracted to vulnerable people?’
Later, I write an approximation of the answer:
With freedom comes insecurity. The closer to life you live, the more chance it ups and fucks you. It’s not a complete trade off – this society normalises the victimisation of the free, ours wouldn’t – but here and now, those of us with the security of a few resources, the constraints of knowing what we’re fighting for (and that we have to) and the maturity to be ready to give, are naturally attracted to those still unanchored, still drifting, hoping, sleeping. Sexual attraction isn’t always appropriate – the lizard doesn’t always understand morality. But to care for these people, to love them – platonically or otherwise – isn’t something we need to be ashamed of. They are the beautiful and free.
Pretty good quality stencil considering it must have been done without opposable thumbs.
Day 13: Barcelona
Wake up and my UK plug converter has disappeared. Priority no. 1 is to get my phone charged. No. 2 is to get the hostel re-booked. I have about 30 euros left, 5% charge and without a phone, no way of getting more – and the hostel costs more than 30 a night. I walk to the train station to look for another plug converter but it’s 12.95. I walk back outside, thinking and trying to organise for the hostel to be re-booked by someone else. I walk back inside. No-one’s looking and the guy has already taken the block off the rack to show me the thing, so I pocket it and walk. Outside, I break it open on the side of a bin. Someone else chucks a paper bag into it without showing the slightest interest. Priority no. 1 sorted and priority no. 2 follows quite shortly once I get back to the hostel.
Panic over.
Last night I had an inkling of catching a plane back to England, to be back in time for a demo in a few days and save the nightmare of trying to manage without a card out here, especially while hitching. Fortunately, now my phone is reliable again, I have privilege to fall back on. Sure does make life easy.
My mother is happy to help, wiring some cash and booking a flight for two days’ time. Yes I feel guilty and more to the point, yes I feel like I’ve taken the easy way out, sold out part of the experience; the painful, annoying bit of trying to survive in a foreign country with no money. But, on the other hand – I fucking work for change, I struggle in hopes that one day everyone will have a life around the same standard as mine. I ain’t about to beat myself up for a little self care.
Also, I have a reasonably intense pain in my chest, which I’m associating with smoking. Feeling like shit is not motivating me to keep getting out there and hitting the street.
Once I’ve sorted food and booking and plane and stuff I go chill in the dorm. Fuck work, I don’t feel like it. I listen to music and zone out for a bit.
When I get up to go make dinner it’s not too long until an event at 1830 at the bank Expropriat in Gràcia, a leftie district a few stops away on the metro. I think it’s a manifestation (demo), but when I re-translate the blurb I realise it’s a talk. A friend from the hostel is going to the beach and I envy her but fuck it, it ain’t what I came here to do (1) and what would I feel like if I left Barcelona without checking out the scene? I eat, roll a cigarette and drag my unwilling ass to the metro.
– later
Glad I did. When I get there it seems dominated by the elderly – something I find worrying from experience in England. But as time goes by more young’uns arrive and it seems a good crew. I use google translate to ask for someone to summarise in English for me and it kinda works. I get about 30%, enough to feel a part of things. It’s good to see a meeting with older, relatively normal people involved, speaking well and determined to do something; they’re discussing Fridays for Future and how in Spain, many of the labour syndicates won’t support people who go on strike for them. It makes me realise how important it is for us to take part and support anyone who’s catching that kind of trouble.
Afterwards I’m hanging around hoping someone speaks English when a young German woman comes over. She’s more than up to chat anarchist politics and we go get beer and wander round in circles for a while. She reminded me a bit of my best friend from when I was younger and I’m not gonna lie, I was starting to get hopeful she wanted to be more than friends.
But I also had gotten used to this feeling around people I knew barely at all by this point and now – writing a few days later, back among the scene at home and with some emotional distance – I can recognise that as someone who’s spent most of my life with reasonably intense family relationships, part of me was searching for a community, or a person to anchor myself to. There was a creeping insecurity around me from being alone that wanted to hook onto someone.
She has a bloke in Germany – and fair play, though I think she’s into me too she’s gonna be monogamous as they agreed to be and I respect that. I half expect to feel that sense of soul death that I used to get when I was a kid. Don’t worry, I will. No journey would be complete without at least one moment of existential dread. But not this time. Instead, just a sense of blossoming friendship. Shit, I’ve grown.
We talk a lot. Revolution, anarchism, the finer points of currency or no currency? Autonomy from the state or acceptance of unethical consumption? And other hot topics among anarchists who agree about pretty much everything else and are looking for something to debate.
It’s fun. When it comes time to go home, we faff around on the metro a bit before saying goodbye, then I realise I have to go up one stop on the same line. I run down the stairs after her just in time to wave goodbye as the train disappears into the tunnel.
On the way down the street to the hostel, I catch the eye of a drunken lady standing in the entrance to a cafe. We strike up conversation. It turns out she’s a quantum physicist at the university. In my heart, she says, I am an anarchist. But you have to work within the system to achieve anything. Uh huh. The owner of the cafe has his own contribution; in France, he says, we have solved the problem. We have the guillotine. Every 150 years we kill the lot of them; they need to be reminded who they work for. The problem is, we missed the last 150 years. I don’t have the energy to argue with either of them, so I chat for a bit around the subject and wander home.
These were beautiful and everywhere in Barcelona.
Day 14: Barcelona
I’m getting pretty skint so my task this morning, once the hostel is re-booked, is to get cash from a Western Union. It takes me a while, partly because I enjoy myself, taking time to get coffee and breakfast. I speak to my dad on the phone and boast that I can write a song every two days when I have the time. He asks me to write a country song for him. Well, ok then I guess…
The cigarettes are still killing me a little. The pain in my chest has faded but I can feel the thinness of my health. Tomorrow’s plane is waiting and I’m half glad, half disappointed.
Before my friend left last night we exchanged numbers and part of me thinks she won’t text. But she does. There’s an open air gig tonight down by the harbour, past where I got robbed and she invites me. It’s a Spanish feminist rap group.
I catch a metro to Sagrada Famillia, near a Western Union, using my last few coins. Near the monument there are thousands of tourists, swarming the streets, a pickpocket’s wet dream. I’m carrying my passport to get the money out and I keep my hands on my pockets as I walk the couple blocks.
Getting the cash is a non-event. A polite and well trained cashier runs through the process she does every day. No inch of humanity escapes her professional facade. I didn’t expect it anyway. Sorted, I go outside for a coffee.
I’m chatting to a Barcelona student on Tinder but there probably isn’t time for us to meet and I can feel him flaking. When he says he’s busy I’m kind of glad – it’s not beyond me to waste time and money getting to a meeting point he didn’t agree to, especially when I’m not sure how to fill the day.
Back at the hostel I slowly get myself into a zone to write. I cheat a bit and listen to a backing track to get the structure ok. It goes:
Day by Day
The streets aren’t the same
That I once knew
The sun outshines the rain
More than it used to
But the tears still fall
When I remember you
And how I took the road
To anywhere new
In all the bars
the drinkers sing
The praises of
living free
But ever since
I lost your ring
There’s a weight in my hand
Where it used to be
I dream you’re sleeping
There in the dark
The one beside you
Doesn’t share your heart
In the beginning
Maybe you dreamed too
But now I’m nothing
But a broken fool
So I’ll catch a plane
To another life
That disappears
As soon as I arrive
I can’t turn around
There is no way
So I just keep breathing
Day by day
Don’t boast if you can’t back it up. It ain’t the best thing I’ve ever done but I don’t mind it. While I’m working, the German guy from a bunk across from me comes in. It turns out he likes country music too, kinda, and we talk about True Detective and how great it was. I lie still for a bit and try and get into siesta mode but it ain’t happening, so I start getting ready to go out instead. The guy asks me what I’m up to – just gonna go make some dinner before I go out, I reply, you? I dunno, I’m kinda bored. You wanna come with?
He does. We slow walk across to the supermarket chatting shit. Turns out he’s an architecture student, here to draw the buildings. When he asks me what I’m here for I give my now standard response – 50/50 vacation and trabajo. What kind of work? Politics. And so the endless conversation begins again.
It’s a variation I haven’t played for a while; that of the person who’s brand new. What does anarchism mean, then? And all that. I give him the works as we get dinner sorted – vegan meat, one minute rice stir fry thing. I have to run out for onions but it’s all good. Over dinner, he tells me about how the German war machine – and by extension, the holocaust – was sustained by extreme drug addiction.
Makes a lot of sense to me if I’m honest.
As he tells me about his upcoming trip to New York and how architecture is quite expensive to study I realise who he is though – the classic privileged guy who’s fascinated by the struggle of those who aren’t, but wouldn’t ever let it affect his life. With the dishes washed up, I roll a cigarette, say goodbye and step out to head for a bookshop the quantum physicist told me about not far from here.
La Ciudad Invisible is a nice well lit little place, with t-shirts and kids’ books sharing space with the heavier shit. A bit expensive though, for my wallet – or my lack of a wallet, to be exact. I start a conversation with the guy behind the till. He tells me they had 6 people arrested for terrorism charges that day, but the movement is otherwise healthy. It seems he’s more interested in the community practices of the Anarchist movement around here, its food sharing programs, its self-managed workplaces. There’s a few of them and the local scene is big enough – well hell, this is Barcelona – to support them alongside a few squats I won’t have time to see and the usual catalogue of small groups and actions. Mine and his approaches are a little at odds, he’s very much the ‘work with anyone you can’ type and even tells me ‘maybe I’m just getting old and becoming a hippie.’ Maybe he is. I come away from it depressed. It’s the last night y’know and this doesn’t seem like my revolution.
What is my revolution? I have a few answers, crowding to the front as usual, but none of them are definitive. I guess part of it is just that I feel I’m moving too fast, I want to slow down but I can’t because the flight’s already booked and I don’t want to go home and this guy with his slow world has reminded me what I’m missing, the tranquility of age. But part of me also screams back an accumulation of swear words, that tranquilo never fought the revolution, that people are suffering here as much as anywhere, that the Communists shot the Anarchists here, in the ruin of the Social Revolution, the last time we had a chance.
Whatever my revolution is, it ain’t mine, it’s ours.
The first bar I go into is expensive, so I sit on a bench and smoke a cigarette and try and sort my head out. I’m just trying to kill time, too, before the gig at 10. Talking to my friend on the phone helps a little. My throat is hurting and I feel tired. I pull myself back up onto my feet and wander towards the tube. Getting out at Jaume I, back near the bar where I was robbed, I decide to wander past. Killing time, of course, not trying to prove anything. It doesn’t seem the same now, it’s quieter, and when I walk inside A, the bouncer isn’t there. I realise he was half the reason I liked the place. I buy a beer and sit there waiting for something to happen, someone to say hi or time to pass, but only the last one happens. It’s just another murky punk bar in a big and tourist filled city, already bored to death with people like me. It’s a long way from the bar in Santander where they sat me down and we played battleships.
Comes time and I head out. The alley is still dodgy, plenty of poor folks around, but with the tourist traffic reduced – it’s a Monday – it’s lost any real danger. It’s just the people now, no meat.
The gig is by the water. It’s huge, open air and there are guys everywhere with bags of beer and ice, selling them for €1.50. The crowd is gathering but quiet, the gig hasn’t started yet and there’s that anticipation. I feel lonely as I wait for my friend to arrive, and have all the usual fears of never finding her. What would I do at this gig, in this community, with no Spanish? Go home, probably. I try and relax. There isn’t much else to do and when the gig starts I try and get into it, but it’s beyond me. I never could fake my way to happiness. I feel excluded again, like I did all those years ago.
Suddenly a text, just as I’m starting to wonder What the Hell? A meet point not far from where I am and there she is, we say hi and hug and I follow her and her amigas through the crowd, like I’m being led through the same door I entered a moment before, only this time it leads somewhere else. My friend H translates some of the choruses but I can see it’s difficult and I say just to listen and enjoy the moment. She does. Watching her enjoy it, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer is enough for me to feel the beat in my legs. It looks like a good show. Time’s getting late quite fast and I have a plane to catch in the morning but I don’t want to leave and when the first band ends I go sit with H and we chat about politics. She’s a pessimist and I’m an optimist but just having met her feeds my positivity and I know I win her over a little. Or maybe pessimists just always like to be disagreed with.
She saves me from an awkward scene with a beer seller who wants me to give him my last cash in exchange for some kind of beer deal I don’t want. He’s super intense in fast Spanish and my shaking head and de nada’s are getting nowhere. In the end she gives him 50¢ to make a move, which he weirdly accepts.
Back to the revolution, we discuss the eviction of Exarcheia. She’s a little too focussed on the formal Anarchist movement and its expressions, I think. I believe that if the activists of Exarcheia are dispersed, with their experiences of liberation still in their hearts, after 6 months of recovery they may well do more for us all individually in the towns and villages and cities of Europe, than they do by keeping those spaces open now. (2)
On the other hand, for the refugees who’d been housed there and are now being moved into immigration camps by the Greek state, the suffering only increases. There is, ultimately, little justification for optimism except the need for hope. We get through another band and it’s coming on for 2 o’clock when I decide it’s time to go.
An old poster for a talk on the EZLN to be held at a squatted school.
A large subsection of my brain would like to hold H, but the other part is still shouting quite loud and in the end I manage to just about keep my cool. We say goodbye and hope we’ll meet again. I touch the tip of her chin with one finger for just a moment before pulling away and waving. As I turn to walk away, my heart beating its shit out and my hands shaking, I stop to roll a cigarette saying ‘this is what we have cigarettes for, this is…’ and turn. She’s waving from the top of the bridge. I wave back and wait for her to disappear. Then I roll the cigarette and wait some more.
I wait for longer than I should, hoping she’ll come back, though I have no right or reason to expect it, hoping I could reach her from here – but for what? I can’t tell you.
I walked away smoking, reminding myself not to hurt myself, staring in a dangerous manner at a reachable cctv camera, telling myself to stay alive. I crossed the road and, to my surprise, realised the metro was open. I walked down the steps, counting this one thin blessing that would get me home in time for sleep.
“Fruity, fruity, fruity” they said. I didn’t even notice them at first, just two English tourists, kinda well dressed. “Fruity, fruity, froo-ty” “are you guys being fucking cunts?” (3) I asked.
“Look at your fucking sandals mate, who wears sandals like that?” “Frooty frooty frooty…”
I tell them to fuck off and give them the finger. Half curious if I can get a free metro ticket, I wander down to the gates, but the security are on tonight. Seems legit. I wander back to the machines, where the two guys are struggling to figure out how to get a ticket.
“Where you from mate? England? We’re from South London we are!” This last said like it gave you a fucking passport or something.
“Devon,” I said as I bought myself a ticket.
“Ahhh fucking Devon, you shouldn’t have said that, is that why you’re wearing those fucking sandals? Is that what they wear in Devon?”
I look them up and down. Turned out pretty nice for city boys, look a little sweaty though in black jeans and shirts and trainers…
“What are you two, in a fucking soul band or something?” His mate’s still struggling with the ticket machine. “You’ll work it out,” I add, “I’m sure they have them in south London too.” I turn and walk for the barriers.
“Frooty, frooty, frooty!” I reach the barriers and start to put the ticket in. The security guards are still there. Am I really gonna take this from these assholes? asks a voice in my head. No, comes the answer and I turn around blood pumping-
“You wanna go then you fucking cunts come on then! Let’s fucking go, you want some!” I get to within range of the mouthy guy and he lamps me from the left real fast, so quick I don’t see it coming and I’m on my ass. I’m getting up, come on then, might as well finish it now, but the security appears between us.
“He started on me!” Says the mouthy one.
“No, no, you leave now,” they say. I get up and go through the barriers. Head feels like it’s been hit by a train, like they used to say. I wander down to the station and sit on the bench.
A few minutes later the security appear. “Are you ok?” They ask.
“Si, si”
“You have your wallet, your phone?”
“Si”
“Why did they want to fight you?”
“They were calling me a fruit and…”
“Muy Engles is no muy bien” with fingers held in the international ‘little bit’ symbol.
“Si. He called me a marricone… and I’m not homophobic but I am not a marricone…” they nod, look a little non-plussed and wander back out to the gates.
Dunno what I was on about. I spent half the day trying to meet a dude on Tinder. Since when am I not a marricone?
I spend the ride home dazedly considering the rights and wrongs of Muerta A La Policia (MALP!) when they’re so fucking handy sometimes. I don’t come to any interesting conclusions.
Back at the hostel, at 2.5 miles an hour I order a bag of mini chocolate croissants and a cup of hot milk. No good vegan me.
I get in the lift. Everything takes a hundred hours. When I get into the dorm, each task, charging the phone, getting the provisions onto the bed and following them, elongates with slowness and pain as I try to be quiet. In the bed, dressed, I eat the lot and drink the milk, cheap sugar passing like morphine into my veins I pass out into a drugged sleep.
Day 14: Barcelona / Aeroplane
Wake up at I don’t know when but it’s early. Feeling…. Nothing much, not even tired. Not had enough sleep to feel tired. Head hurts. Everyone else is getting ready to go and I let them leave first, one by one, each short acquaintance I’ve made since being in the dorm. I whisper goodbye to those I know, then go and shower. Glad I got my bag packed yesterday.
Made some breakfast and ate outside, with a coffee. Checked the time and I’m not too far behind. Roll a cigarette and make a move, say goodbye to the guy on the hostel desk.
Gonna miss the street and the sun and the skyline. I walk to the bus station and stub out my cigarette, then descend into the metro. I buy a ticket to the airport – it’s a special price, a special line that goes that way – like an escape route in a video game that skips all the other rooms. I sit on the train and wait, head hurting. I sit and sit and sit.
The airport is huge and modern, spaceport like with just a couple of cheeky stickers – non political – on its endless grey hallways. They are building more outside the window. I pause on the bridge from the metro to the terminal and wait for the energy to come back. My head hurts.
In the terminal I find parts A and B but not C, which is where I’m supposed to be. I still have some time and there’s no one at the counters. I buy a coffee at ridiculous expense and sit for a minute refuelling. On the Party group chat we are arguing with a socialist about our autonomy at an upcoming demonstration, the rights and wrongs of using the word ‘fascist’ liberally. Later it will turn out we should have been thinking more out of the box on this, but as usual it seems we’re just being told what to do by someone from another group and most of our back hairs are up. It’s a long way from the sense of solidarity between revolutionaries I’ve found here, but then maybe my ignorance hid the bad parts. Maybe if I’d known Spanish I would’ve heard the arguments.
Still no sign of my counter opening. Eventually I ask. ‘Terminal C’s in the next building over’ I’m told. I have a little panic and run, but it’s ok. Everything smooths along and the only bad thing that happens is I get past the smoking areas before I have a last fag.
On the group chat the argument trundles on…
Port, bus, steps, aeroplane. I get on the wrong end and have to walk all the way down the aisle. You can tell I’m not used to this. I’m anxious. Beside me is a dude in a suit who looks pretty gross, doing business on his phone. I try and zone out a little but that coffee must be hitting me because I find myself watching his screen. Imagine my surprise when I see an email from a constituent accusing him of complicity in the actions of government because of his role as a Conservative MP. Holy fuck.
He’s also on a Conservative MPs WhatsApp chat. I try and film it on my phone but I have to hold it at a ridiculous angle and the glare is too bright. Oh dear, I was hoping for a nice chilled out flight; what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? What am I gonna…
He changes seats to the one across the aisle. ‘What’s wrong with this one?’ I say super normal like hoping he hasn’t clocked my weird ass behaviour. ‘Oh nothing, it’s just more room isn’t it.’ Cool, just what I want to hear. Next bad news – I know this guy’s an MP in government but I know literally nothing else about him. Also – plane just lifted off – can’t use the fucking internet. Is this an opportunity to give up? No! This does not happen every day!
If I’m starting to get an idea that I want to verbally confront him, paranoia is also running on overdrive. I’ve just come from Spain where they do people for terrorism for practically nothing. Plus people are fucking freaky about aeroplanes. The sense that I have no choice about this, that I’m acting under pressure of circumstances, adds to my fear. Plus he keeps throwing glances my way. Either he thinks I’m sexy or he’s trying to look through the far side window.
I think it’s the latter.
What do I do? The things I know how to do. I write a condemnation of the government and him by extension. I delete all the apps and data on my phone that could give them information about my comrades. I memorise my speech (well, sorta) and make a plan to livestream a video of the action. None of the security stuff I do would stand up under intense scrutiny – my laptop is still logged in to all my shit for instance and it’s in the hold – but it’s the best I can do. I’m helped by the fact none of us talk too dodge online anyway.
It doesn’t help that we’re still an hour away from landing once I have made all these plans. An hour spent stewing in my own anxiety. I’m having some trouble breathing properly. Thinking of Peter Tatchell (4) and Elin Ersson (5) helps with the determination but doesn’t help with the feeling of not having a choice. Compared to them folks what I’m doing is nothing.
As we start to come into land though, I still hold my breath and close my eyes and tell myself I don’t have to do this if I don’t want to, I can walk away and come back tomorrow and keep fighting and yes I’ll know there was something I couldn’t do but that won’t stop me acting. I open my eyes with a decision to change the start of my speech to make it more clearly a peaceful protest, but otherwise to go ahead.
You can see the vid on YouTube or on the Anarchist Party page or here on Centre of the Web. I’m really quiet (a friend called it ‘sweet’) because I can’t actually fill my lungs to speak louder. It’s very short and a lot of the vid is his tie. Funny enough, it still works. When I found out afterward it was Boris Johnson’s Parliamentary Private Secretary I could’ve just about exploded with satisfaction; it’s pretty unknown at the moment so satisfaction is about the only thing I’m gonna get from it.
The Bristol terminal goes in a smooth process. I don’t get bothered, to my surprise, and I’m on the bus south to Exeter when the tiredness and the hunger hits me. The rain is falling against the windscreen and my phone has died. When I get to Exeter, my lift is late and I have to blag a phone call to check on it. It’s all fine. I eat dinner at home and have a drink with my friend, then let it go black.
Conclusion: This Is One Flawed Motherfucker
Over the next couple of days I crashed through a family argument, sleeping at a former partner’s partner’s place, and an aggy antifascist demonstration, purely by keeping my head up and my brain moving a little bit faster than my mouth. Caffeine and cigarettes were the engine behind it all and when it was over I collapsed for a while. I’m quitting the fags now.
This hasn’t been an attempt at fiction. It hasn’t been about showing you how good a person an anarchist can be – I expect that’s obvious. It’s just me doing the only thing I know how to do; putting myself out there as I am, ready to change, ready to fail but trying to tell the truth about it. Sometimes I spin it a little, but never by much.
If Anarchism is against oppression and exploitation, against the positioning of one above another, honesty is a part of that project. If you just saw the actions I did and not the words in my head, maybe you’d think there was something special here. I hope now you’ve seen the insecurity, the isolation and the dirt you’ll get a little of why I’m just a part of something, never the whole. Maybe there is something special too, but it’s individuality, not perfection. We all have it.
Glad to be here.
Goodnight.
Floor stencils fade slowly but capture our attention when we’re stuck looking down; by contrast my presence was transient and my shadow is already long gone.
Footnotes:
(1)Actually, it was, but I’d forgotten that by this point
(2)Quite possibly my position is the result of ignorance. I’m told gangs operated in Exarchia and that, combined with constant struggle and internal conflict, might make it far less of a liberating experience than those of us watching from afar might hope.
(3)Trying not say it – I know it’s pretty gender oppressive. Still kinda automatic in some situations though.
“In the Heat of the Fire – Solidarity, Retaliation, G20”
A demand for ‘amnesty’ for Basque political prisoners. A common statement on the walls of poor areas.
Day 7: Madrid
I woke at 5 a.m. to everyone else in the dorm leaving, noisily. I say ‘a little quieter, por favor’ and go back to sleep, but it leaves me with a weird feeling. What do they know that I don’t?
At the bus station I’m a little early so get a potato omelette and use the toilets. Of all the toilets I’ve been to since arriving, only one had a working lock and I can imagine it being difficult here for trans people or others who might be worried about getting walked in on. I’m anxious about the bus, but have no problems and soon we are rolling slowly through the plains and canyons of north central Spain, the greenery of the Basque land already diminished to a flat and never ending yellow. Half way there we stop at a gas station for a rest break. In the toilets someone has written ACAB with a circle A in felt tip. It feels like I’m on the right track. An hour before we reach Madrid we rise again into low mountains and the leaves on the trees turn green.
Arriving at the bus station I have a moment of worry when the police look at me funny, wondering what they would make of my revolutionary writings. But nothing happens and I’m soon on the street. Madrid feels more anonymous and work-focused than Bilbao and once on the underground I am instantly reminded of London. Gone are the punks, replaced by well dressed, body conscious individuals who do not smile. Arriving at Tetuán, where I have arranged to meet S, K’s friend, I find posters for a gym covering Anarchist ones. I remove them and politely re stick them underneath. A moment later a swarm of joggers runs past, intensely focused on themselves. I wait.
S told me 11 minutes – seems pretty exact, but he isn’t on time. When he arrives he is a pleasant young basque man in the classic anarchist mould, tall and thin and free spirited. He’s intense though, and interested in the politics – good to talk to. He shows me to the squat, which is well kitted out with a bunch of rooms and a cooker. They have five or six squats in this area, he tells me, which is interesting – it doesn’t feel like a sub-cultural neighbourhood, just poor. There are two others staying, young anarchists recently come from the Hamburg forest. They’ll have to remain somewhat faceless here for security reasons. S takes me to the market where I buy some stuff for dinner and a couple of beers. He has to run to an assembly – the word they use for meetings here – so I walk back to the squat alone. On the way, I find a nub of hash in a bag – serendipity or what! Get back and have a drink and a smoke and feel good. Serious conversation about the inevitability of climate rebellion – and what it means – in English enlivens the evening. I crash happy.
I love bubble letters.
Day 8: Madrid
Wake up and head out early for coffee and a cigarette at a cafe, where I write a song. There’s an idea floating for me and the Hamburg crew to do a little concert in two days’ time. Could be fun and one of them likes screaming in songs so I write a scream into the chorus. There’s a first time for everything, but I’ll let him do it – my vocal chords probably couldn’t handle that and my current smoking habit. The squat has a fucked up lock, so we can only open it from outside, but it doesn’t really slow anything down too much. We have neighbours just round the corner who are happy to pop round and open it up. On the way back from the cafe I run into the crew on its way out to a potential eviction. I turn around and go with them. We jump the metro and catch a few different trains. People are talking about the new Tarantino movie. They liked it. We discuss whether he is right or left wing – I argue he’s on the right but I get the idea I’m in a minority. Oh well, we arrive at the squat to find 50+ anarchists and poor squatters standing in the road waiting for security to arrive. They never do. The authorities call an organiser and when they hear how many of us there are they decide to come another day, ‘with riot police and firefighters’ – they say.
Heading back to the squat there’s some discussion of the different Anarchist groups in Europe. I get the impression we are similar all over, and facing similar issues – the eviction of our squats and social centres by newly confident right-wing governments and the unapproachability of serious direct action from a context which is relatively insecure. Alongside this, there is a little of the usual culture of revolutionary tourism and ‘living the life’ at the expense of efficiency, outreach and action. Then again, maybe I’m just hot and moany – I’d thought to have a day off today and sabotaged it again. Back at the squat, everyone else heads for siesta while I feel driven to write something. I get about a paragraph in – hadda get some music going, smoke, glass of water, faff – and the others get up to go liberate dinner. I’m down for a break and follow, even though I shouldn’t. First thing we do is head to a comrade’s to sort out some fancier clothes. One of us, who is gender non-binary, is getting changed in front of us – yes, I’m cis, used to be heterosexual and I’m a prudish Brit and no, I don’t know where to look, but I figure not staring is always the cool thing – and gets a call from the police. Turns out it’s just they’ve found a friend’s wallet but it makes them sweat for a minute.
The comrade who we’re borrowing the clothes from lends me a book in English, ‘total liberation’ – it looks interesting. We head out and I split off and go buy coffee and a croissant and read, feeling like a tourist and a bad person. Glad I did it though – the book is essentially the article I was trying to write, but ten times better. Head back for dinner and get invited to an assembly at 9. I also agree to give a talk on the IRA – should be fun. They have a lot of support here – I may be in the rare position of being more critical of them than everyone else in the room. We bike to the assembly, an experience scarily like playing a video game – I have to remind myself I have no spare lives, I’m just not as aware of the traffic or the street rules as I would be at home – and when we get there an old man is standing by where we lock the bikes. I presume he is a comrade – he seems friendly with the person who brought me. It turns out he is a security guard, as is his son.
The assembly is 50/50 men and women and seems very cool, but all in Spanish with no translation and after the first hour and a half of considering fundamentals of anarchist politics and the way people interact in meetings (with no actual context) I start to struggle. Cigarettes, changing my position, playing with my phone – this thing’s been going on for 3 hours now and I just wish I could understand some basic meaning. Ah well. There’s a tonne of ants near where I’m sat but none of them seem to be biting me. Anti-speciesist solidarity?
Jesus, did I get antsy at that thing. Too much experience of meetings made me overly self aware and I tried to look interested throughout cause I didn’t want to sabotage the vibe. You try looking interested when there are 1000 ants by your non-socked feet, you’re sitting on asphalt and you can’t understand more than 1 word in 20 that everyone’s saying. It’s not fun.
Still strangely glad I went though. It was interesting to watch, interesting to note the intensity of emotion combined with mutual respect of the participants – the product, I guess of all being committed to the action in question – and the absolute disregard for having a chairperson or any of the more hierarchical aspects of British leftist organisation. Behind the city thunder sparks in the clouds, the yellow light glows over the main road at the bottom of the hill from where we’re sat and I smoke cigarettes and watch the cars go past, so insecure and so unaware. Afterwards a few people give me a summary of the meeting; it was very intense, they say, because the decision as to whether to continue the squat affects everyone, but the people squatting are very tired. Spanish law means that new people entering a squat that is marked for eviction do so illegally (approximately – the detail is hard to translate) so the weight is on the current squatters to keep the place open. Me and A hop back on our bikes and head for the Embos and she gives me a running commentary on anarchist politics here as we slide through red lights, watching each way and laughing when we’re stopped by the flow of traffic. Back at the squat there is a minor plan developing, details of which I’ll leave hazy, but suffice to say a few of us go on a walk later and it makes us feel much better. There’s a woman here with us, J, who I’m attracted to, but it’s reasonably exploitative – I just wanna fuck. I get the impression she doesn’t and more to the point, my lack of Spanish leaves me unable to make decent jokes.
Let’s face it, if you can’t find out if you share a sense of humour, you aren’t getting anywhere, but my damn stupid subconscious isn’t listening and when she decides to sleep in the same room (in uncertain English, ‘Maybe I’ll sleep with you… in your room though’) keeps me in a state of suppressed tension all night. Damn, someone told me my grandmother is reading this.
Screamo:
I see your faces
I see your smiles
But I don’t understand
What keeps you going all the while
The world is burning
My love is dying and I I I I I
[screams]
I see you working
I see you dressing
but tell me how you feel
the world is burning
my love is dying and I, I, I, I
[screams]
and if I could feel the wind of your soul
if I could feel your heartbeat alone
I could believe there was something in you
something we could both call home
I didn’t even realise this was here until I turned to leave the square.
Day 9: Madrid
Sun comes up, it’s Wednesday morning… I lie in bed and sort the necessary on my phone. After that I don’t do too much except work on my talk. When evening comes it’s at 75% and I’ve stopped freaking out it won’t be done. I walk round to M’s place, another squat round the corner from the Embos and we all chip in to making a dinner for the community. It’s a nice example of vegan slop, with the ever present lentils and rice and everyone’s just as late as they would be at home. I just love the anarchist community…
If I seem a little neggy, don’t worry, I bounced back a couple hours later when, everyone else having flaked out, I convinced S to go on a little walk with me, dragging him away from putting a film list together for the talk. As always with these things it’s a lot of fun and the only thing I have to complain about is that my spelling in Espanol is fucking shite – no-one’s fault but my own. When we get back he says ‘and now I go back to my work, fuck you’ and gives me the finger and I feel that warming intensity of shared spirit I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy more than once since being here. Earlier today my comrade told me the decision I made a few months back to dedicate my life to the struggle was one that many of us were making, and I was not alone, or even unusual in the choice I made.
Sleep is a blanket of warmth like the arms of someone I love.
Day 10: Madrid
Talk day! I work like a motherfucker to get it done, with slides and everything, like being in college again, then catch a siesta till 6. We get one person turn up a little early, then a couple more an hour later and we begin. For once in my life I haven’t over written and even with everything said twice – once in English and once in translation – we don’t over run. I’m glad to have given it and maybe I make people think a little. People come and go and we watch Bloody Sunday, which almost makes me cry, despite the thousands of others who’ve died before and since. I couldn’t quite tell you why. My depression only lifts after a load of chocolate, some orange juice and coffee. J and the internationalists are about and we go for a walk in the city, dumpster dive – pretty much everything we find isn’t vegan – and I know I told you my lips would be sealed but I’m reasonably certain this isn’t prosecutable, we egg the fuck out of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) office round the corner.
We end up back at the Embos watching It Follows, which is pretty good if a bit slow and my subconscious still refuses to shut the fuck up. When it’s over I walk J round the corner to get ready for her flight at 7 to Marseilles for the Anarchist Bookfair there, jealous as ever of:
Her cheap and apparently guilt free air travel
Her opportunity to see Marseilles and the anarcho scene
Her girlfriend
Before I go she says we’ll stay in touch by Whatsapp but by this point the main brain is sitting on top of the lizard brain and showing it who’s boss and my heart doesn’t even lift a little. Back at the lab I knock out a song for the way I feel, still positive from the chocolate and action:
Don’t Look Back
If being a decent guy
ain’t what gets you high
well that’s alright
if seeing you ain’t mine
makes you wanna start a fight
well I don’t mind
But don’t blame it on me
The pain you feel
it ain’t my fault
For being me
Never said I needed you
but you needed me
So don’t chain me down
Cause i’ll break the chain
I don’t need your key
And if the dreams I have
You can’t believe
Well I’ll take that chance
Time is moving on
If you wait behind
I won’t change your mind
But don’t hold me back
The pain I feel
it drives me on
To paint the whole world black
I want you here
but that don’t mean
I’m gonna run on your track
So don’t be surprised
If we say goodbye
When I don’t look back
Cause I’m goddamn fucking free
and that’s a fact
Ah yeah
I’m goddamn fucking free
and that’s a fact
if you take the time
to liberate your mind
then you will find
me at your side
fighting hard
not fighting blind
for a world where we
could find a place
both yours and mine
So don’t hold me back
The pain I feel
it drives me on
To paint the whole world black
I want you here
but that don’t mean
I’m gonna run on your track
So don’t be surprised
If we say goodbye
When I don’t look back
If you’re wondering by now why I’m telling you all this, it’s because the paper always deserves the truth, even if it ain’t pretty.
By 6.15 I’m dead to the world.
If you look closely, you can see where an Anarchist symbol has been removed; this church was a very popular landmark and tourist attraction.
Day 11: Madrid
I awaken from two hours’ sleep and a dream where I am in a rich man’s house? Maybe? With some extinction rebellion older hippy dude and a couple others (I think the internationalists from the squat)… there are a couple of prize racehorses in a room, skinny and small, like children. They look ok until we realise they have blood between their legs. The music is on and there is weed smoke in the air. The phone rings and it is the police calling the owner of the house looking for his family… he has committed suicide on the other side of the country. I look across and the XR guy is using a wire brush to clean the blood from a chair. I shout at him to stop – he doesn’t hear over the sound of the music – I shout and shout until I am right beside him and grab him by the hair. In the real world, there is a sound of banging from the door and I run down the stairs with an erection bouncing everywhere (1) – I thought it was someone trying to get in but it is our friend who lives here who is going to university. He can’t get the door open from the inside, a problem that has been happening on and off since I arrived. We bang away at it and another comrade shows from upstairs – by this point, fortunately, the erection has deflated – and I go to get the key to pass to someone outside to open the door. I’m standing by the window when somehow he manages it – never, ever use this lock any more, he says and we nod and he goes and I crumble back up the stairs to bed to write this weird shit down before it slips from my head…
I wrote that at 8:30am – it would be sad if it wasn’t so goddamn funny.
– Later
Decent day doing basics; laundry, food, bag packing. I go out with Manu, new geezer in the flat, for beers and a joint and we chat about the struggle. We share a lot – we’re both relatively un-queer, non straight edge men, we both feel that we can achieve the most when we’re near our homes and we like similar music – if in different languages. I feel like I’ve made a proper friend in someone I didn’t really expect to. When I get back one of the internationalists cooks dinner and we talk about all sorts of stuff from ‘which variety of anarchist are you then?’ to ‘how do Australians pronounce things?’ Him and his partner are fun to be with and as the rain comes down with all the intensity that long dry days can bring I feel warm and close to these people and find myself looking out the window at the downpour and saying ‘the world doesn’t want me to leave Madrid.’ When the rain stops I go out and meet M at her home and the sense of family is complete; as we dumpster dive together and she tells me about her ongoing ‘terrorism’ case for allegedly bricking a window (2) I feel that same sense of comradeship that has haunted me since I first arrived in Santander – haunted, because it’s so hard to act on, when all the machinery of nations is aligned to prevent our solidarity. When I leave after hugging everyone and exchanging contact details it’s almost like leaving home again and I feel an echo of the mystery and adventure and tension that filled me as I got onto the boat in Plymouth.
I’m early for the bus, bit of a rare thing – maybe I’m getting better at this? – and buy a load of very unvegan food in hopes it’ll kick back against a developing sore throat (don’t judge me, it worked). I have a half a beer and find my usual first-drink depression settling in. Waiting outside the station I become a sort of cigarette distribution point for local Romanian folks and I’m mildly glad to have the excuse to leave off catching the bus. On the way a priest in dog collar points out where I’ve dropped my baccy. Supporting me in slow suicide doesn’t seem very Christian but I say gracias. Almost miss the bus anyway cause it’s at the wrong stand and then settle in to my seat – lucky bastard, I just happen to have another empty one next to me – and try to find a comfortable position to go to sleep. I talk to my dad on the phone but we’re both in a funny state of mind and ring off before we can get pissy with each other. Leaving Madrid behind I’m caught by the realisation of its size; I regret not having truly explored. Oh well, I drift off into an uncomfortable doze as the darkened landscape flows by.
Footnotes:
(1) This was a constant presence in the mornings throughout the trip and had nothing to do with the dream, which was probably a result of the horror movie and a meme I saw the night before about David Cameron starting to hunt on horseback again.
(2) There were also a variety of other charges made against this person, none of which I believe to any degree, some involving bombs etc. The general comment among comrades in Spain was that false charges were a way of attempting to terrorise the movement by the Spanish state.
Last night was too sober, I had trouble getting to sleep and everything irritated me. I was sitting in the common room of the hostel late at night drinking a glass of water and looking at the posters – British colonial, Chinese communist and Hindu – when the lady who ran it came in.
“The common room is closed.”
I felt snappish and down but said only “perdone” as I washed my glass and went back to bed.
In the morning I am desperate to leave the hostel. I finish a diary entry before I realise I have missed the bus I had planned to get. I rush pack and shower and leave for the station. There, I wait at the terminal but when the bus arrives they turn me away – I need a ticket. No matter, I buy one for the next bus with space – the 1220. I sit on the steps outside and eat my first cigarette of the day. Bilbao is worrying me. I haven’t booked anywhere to stay when I get there, nor found any connections to meet. Never mind, I head to the library and do some research on my laptop and engage with everyone back home. Roger Hallam says we have one year to change society. They always exaggerate, but not by much – 18 months is the figure I’ve heard.
I feel incredibly far away, denialist and self-indulgent.
I head back to the station and grab a coffee on the way. On the bus to Bilbao I speed write one article and plan another. I for one will go down fighting.
We rise up into the basque land, fiercely beautiful and steep, the home of irregular warfare. Turning a corner, Bilbao appears as an almost equal city, every building a similar size and style except for a monolithic oval of glass and steel at its centre, phallic and strangely imperial. The bus arrives and I step out realising I’m in a big city again. I’m a little freaked out by its bustle and anonymity, so after a detour to a cafe toilet – no lock on the door – I book a hostel. It’s cheap and there is only one room left and I know I’m being stupid but I do it and when I’ve paid I check where it is – an hour across town, on top of a mountain. I’m exaggerating but hill just doesn’t cover it. Never mind, I hoist my bag onto my shoulder and get my walk on, rationing myself to only two pictures of graffiti on the way. There are many older ladies begging in doorways, in what I think are Kurdish shawls, but i don’t stop to talk. I tell myself I’ll find out what this means later. Bilbao is already more metropolitan and multi-ethnic than Santander. I even saw a vegan option in a restaraunt!
This mural tells the story of the woman who lived there and her resistance against the authorities who wanted to demolish the building.
Half way there I see a punk looking at me friendly and ask “por favor, donde espacio anarchistas?”
“Like a squat?”
“Yeah”
“It’s just round the corner, up the steps”
Fuck sake. I mark it for later and continue.
Beautiful old poster from the Japanese G8 mobilisation.
– later –
Wandered into town, bought coffee, talked ear off possible new organiser from home, supermarket bought basics, back to the hostel…
Came out to a beautiful sunset. Walked down into town – realised I wasn’t wearing a jumper. Back to the hostel…
Descended the mountain to the river, then right up a thin street, I hear the roar of a crowd from the next street over. Calle Somera is crowded with small groups drinking beers and smoking, fed by the bars that open on both sides of the street. Radical stickers are everywhere. I can’t find the squat so I buy a beer and wander round, but like so many scenes like it it’s hard to join. I stop and buy weed from a geezer (twice the price it should be, I later learn – fuck it, I’d bleed the tourist too) and chat to the Swedish guy sitting next to him, but we share approximately nada. I keep wandering until I see a young woman on her own in an antifascist hoodie, waiting around. I stop to chat and find she has passable English, just bad enough to be fun working out words she doesn’t know – good diversion. I explain I am an anarchist – “but I am a communist!” She exclaims. I try to draw her into discussing politics but she says it’s hard enough in Spanish.
“You can also fight with wrinkles in your pussy” – Google translation. Corrections welcome.
Her friends, a bunch of punks, show and we roll a joint (porro). They are all quite beautiful and young and fill me with nostalgia and sadness. We have the conversations I’ve had so many times before; stoned surrealism – her friend‘s cat can teleport, possibly see ghosts, maybe is a ghost – drugs as a right of passage – she’s 17, says one year she couldn’t stop doing amphet – romantic violence in punk music – ‘Volo volo, Carrero volo!’ (1) And I’m filled with the same sense of wanting to reach out and protect, with a maturity born of reading of death, these fragile open egos. Somewhere, mixed in, is the usual inappropriate sexual frisson of power which I will keep locked in my shoes.
I ask her to translate the chorus of the song I’m writing into Spanish, which she does, and tells me it is very beautiful. I want to yell ‘many things are beautiful, this is nothing, you are so young and will die!’ But just say ‘muchas gracias’ a few times. She shows me a video of her and her friends playing a cover of a punk song. The drummer is twice as fast as everyone else. She heads for home and the remainder head to a pontoon on the river, where I jump around like an overclocked robot worrying her friend wrecked on absinthe will fall. He doesn’t. More weed, more tobacco – my lungs feel full of tobacco – and rap music. Most of the kids here are communists it seems, maybe legacy of ETA, but one who is an anarchist has a tattoo that says RAP with a circle A. I can’t find anything to talk about so I head for the hostel, stopping half way up to buy crisps and beer which I consume on a bench by, apparently, the most regularly patrolled road in town. I try to catch up on my diary and work on my song as I watch the police drive by and the drunks wander past.
‘Migrants welcome, racists out’
– later still –
I get back to the hostel and two men from Barcelona are smoking outside. One recognises the Anarchy symbol on my jacket and says hi – he’s an anarchist too, but we don’t share enough language to learn in depth. He’s studying to make violins; used to play but then he got meningitis and his hands can no longer tension the strings. His friend rolls a joint and shows me his poetry, then Billy Joel’s piano man. They’re good people to stay up too late with. Before I go inside I meet a German man who’s in town for the football – says it will be like street war between the teams. We talk politics and the left club St Pauli. He says there are a lot of fascist football supporters in Germany, big wide old men who get aggy with the young. I get inside and spend an age trying to sort out my bed before giving up and sleeping in the duvet cover. It’s good.
First graffiti of Bilbao!
The song:
Cariño (After Carmelita, by Warren Zevon)
I hear American voices talk nothing
And laughing with gossip exchanged
And as I slip between
Awake and asleep
I’m home with you in my dreams
Chorus: (Spanish parts sung in harmony)
Slowly, my sweet boy
I think I’m sinking down
Tranquilo cariño
Creo que me estoy ahogando
As I wonder what you’re taking
On the streets of my hometown
Me pregunto Si te estaras drogando
En alguna Calle de mi ciudad
Well I took the bus to Bilbao
And I met the image of you
And as she laughed when
I told her your name
A part of me howled at the moon
(Chorus)
My darling I feel you fading
Beneath the stress of my life and the strain
Of finding yourself
Of making your way
And always escaping the pain
Sunset from just outside the hostel.
(1) ‘Volo volo, Carrero volo!’: Luis Carrero Blanco, was prime minister for a time. When ETA, the paramilitary group fighting for Basque independence, blew him up in his car, the debris landed on balconies on the fifth story. So a Basque punk group wrote a song saying ‘Carrero Blanco, fly! Fly!’ They made his dreams come true!
Day 5 -Bilbao
Wake up hungover and decide to have an easy one. Laundry, shower etc. Go looking for a library but the maps fail me – it’s a civic centre and closed anyway. Walk to a laundromat in the midday sun – mistake. Get there and it’s more expensive than getting it done at the hostel. Glad I brought water or it’d be day 2 again but minus the good bits. Walk back past the Guggenheim and pop inside but it’s all too much for me. I stop at a cafe, eat a vegan hamburger and read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Just at the point where the moon, in revolution, is attacked by soldiers of Earth and women, children and men die defending it and I feel heavy at heart, which surprises me given I’ve read it 3 times before. But it reminds me that the innocent always go first. On the way back I try the squat. No luck. I see a sticker that says ‘Tourist Go Home!’ I make it back to the hostel – just.
– later –
When I get back to the hostel the Barcelona bais are planning a foray into the city. I make some dinner – only marginally distracted by a South African guy who asks what kind of political organiser I am (I give him the spiel) – then head out. In town, there has been a demonstration (manifestacion) and we catch the aftermath – milling crowds of middle aged basque folks wearing stickers that display their allegiance to the amnesty campaign. Recently, I am told, two young men were imprisoned for a year for ‘terrorism offences’ for telling the police to fuck off in the pub. The willingness of the police to use terrorism legislation is part of the legacy of ETA, which has a lot of support among the young here. We sit on a step near a bar and watch the traffic flow by – there are a lot of punks here, more even than in Barcelona I’m told – but I suspect it’s largely fashion. Mixed in with the punks and the protestors are tourists here for the football. It’s a weird mix, and where it’s busy it feels halfway to a riot – but the police know not to harass anyone and besides I don’t know if it is as militant as it seems – drinking in the street here is traditional, much more so than in England.
I’m waiting for the toilet in a bar and a man queuing behind me asks if I’m a punk. Si, I say, habla ingles? A little. We get by with our bits of shared language while we wait – you’re young to be a punk, no? He asks. Mi padre y my madre punks, I explain. Sex pistols? He asks. God save the queen! No! I laugh and agree. The door opens and I enter into a tiny cubicle covered in punk, anarchist and communist stickers. My friend, the Anarchist from Barcelona, tells me that his right leg is very weak, from meningitis. He’s watched the paralympics and wants to get his lower leg removed and replaced with a false one. He was going to do it, but he passed his test at making violins, so he’s put it off. There is something beautiful about his weakened, wasted skin. He’s only 26 but looks ten years older. I’m glad he and his friend have taken me in, and I feel part of a crew again. We get Chinese takeaway and go back to the hostel, chat and smoke till midnight, then crash out.
Etxerat (‘homeward’) is an association of family members of Basque political prisoners.
Day 6 -Bilbao
It looks like another quiet one, at first at least. I start by getting lost in the network of streets down the hill from the hostel, which is enlivened by seeing a massive feminist symbol on a wall (no idea how they did it.) After that I visit the squat, but no one answers my knock. I lose some time after on the phone, trying to diagnose computer issues from 300 miles away – a sign of my ego maybe that I even think it possible. But it’s good to keep in touch with my friends and smothers any discomfort I might feel at being alone. Eventually I wind up back at the squat, feeling like an overplayed record, banging on the door.
This time there is a fan running inside, but otherwise it’s the same.
After a brief and unproductive period of irritability (mucho calor – it’s hot) I do the obvious and research anarchism in Bilbao on the phone. Turns out there’s a social centre across the river, but it’s closed. I walk there anyway on the off chance I can meet someone. When I get there I find only an imposing door and more graffiti. I decide to head to a vegan restaraunt my friend recommended but only get 5 minutes down the road when I come across a semi circle of bars with beautiful antifascist murals around them. Deciding it’s worth one more shot, I pop inside and ask my now standard ‘donde esta espacio anarchista?’ Which gets me ‘Anarchista, que?’ Eventually I show her the sign on my hoodie. She understands then and takes me outside to introduce me to two men sitting at a table. They tell me that until Tuesday, there was a space called Anna Campbell here. But the police didn’t like it, now the locks have been changed and it is closed. After some discussion though they tell me of Karmela, a former school that has been occupied. Better still, it’s on my way back to the hostel.
I get lost again, though this time it’s the gps that’s out, not me.
When I arrive, it’s to a nicely painted wall and a locked gate. I email the address on it, find and message their page and wait. For what, I’m not sure. Someone to come home I guess.
I’m just not ready to go back to the hostel yet. Its utilitarian modernity is like an open prison.
Eventually, two people come home.
Both are Moroccan and one, H, speaks good English. They seem completely undisturbed by finding a random Englishman outside the gate, let me in and show me around.
It’s beautiful. No other word for it. A former school, its many rooms are well looked after and prepared for different purposes: meeting rooms, including one for LGBTQIA folk only, a climbing room, a playroom for children, a gym, a cinema, a library, a kitchen, a bar… everywhere the walls have been painted with antifascist and anti state murals. Once I’ve been given the tour, I buy a beer from the bar and we sit and chat about politics. Karmela, it turns out, is an illegal squat, managed by a neighbourhood assembly. I also learn they have another word for Anarchists here, bahar (or something like it – too many words…) H is very on side, as is his friend, who tells me that in Morocco everything is taken by the king – who then lives abroad. We talk about our hatred of government – they make a problem, then charge you to fix it – and the racism of police. H’s friend shows me the marks on his wrists where he was handcuffed. I leave, with an invitation to return at 7 – one which will not go to plan.
This guy said I was the first anarchist he’d met in Bilbao. I suspect he hadn’t tried very hard.
– later –
Got back and had dinner, then felt low on energy and didn’t get back to Karmela till 7.45. No one’s there except the boxers at the gym, who don’t take particularly kindly to me ringing the bell and refuse to let me in. H has gone home, so I sit around for a bit thinking, as it gets dark. I decide to walk to the squat for the legendary ‘one more try’, plus the chance of starting conversation in the punky bars nearby. When I get there, there is someone just about to ring the bell. When the door is answered I explain, but once again I’m not welcome – they’re in a meeting and after that they’re going home. I ask if there’s anyone I could talk to about Anarchism here. ‘Go talk to the man in the white shirt’ the lady tells me, pointing to someone sat outside a bar.
So I stagger down the steps, by this point somewhat tired of badgering people and, at a kind of polite moment, interrupt the conversation to repeat my badly translated introduction. I finish – everyone’s looking at me like I just landed – and one says ‘we speak English’. Oh, I say, I’ll stop speaking to you in bad Spanish then. Do we look like European Anarchists? The same man asks. No, I reply, the lady up there told me to talk to you. That breaks the ice a little, they invite me to sit down and I go buy a beer.
It turns out they all used to live in Bristol and finally I get the full treatment on the political situation in Bilbao.
There are many anarchists here, I’m told, but they work as part of other social movements; the anti state wing of independence, squatting and anti-gentrification. The CNT, the major Anarchist organisation in Spain, is largely irrelevant here – it’s too Spanish and insufficiently supportive of prison abolition and the Basque language. For the Anarchist Party back home, this raises important points – to organise a group over here it would be necessary to send someone with a strong knowledge of the independence movement, especially someone fluent in Basque. The insularity of Bilbao and the Basque land generally, with its culture of opposition to outsiders – seen as a source of oppression – explains somewhat the difficulty that I’ve had making connections and my general feeling of insecurity when not wearing a visible Anarchist symbol, itself meaning rebellion and opposition to the (Spanish) state, more than anything specific.
But if K, the person I speak to who’s lived here the longest, is unimpressed by the possibilities for any political organisation here outside of the independence movement, it’s also clear that Independence is an ever receding mirage. Just look, they tell me, at the repression that Catalonian independence has produced. Within the independence movement there are divisions between those who want a Basque state and those who don’t, which in itself suggests potential for an Anarchist movement, if one likely to be allied with and infiltrated by radical socialists and communists.
I’m glad to have met them. If culture and age differences prevent us developing fast friendship, nonetheless we know we are comrades, and K sets me up with a contact in Madrid, who offers to let me sleep at his house. The next morning I go to Karmela one last time to meet H for coffee. He doesn’t show, and I leave after half an hour to catch the bus. It seems a fitting end to my time in Bilbao, which has been characterised by a sense of potential somehow always beyond the tips of my fingers. I’m looking forward to the opportunities a new city might bring.
The day I travel to Spain I’m not sure I will make it. My work as an organiser is busy and exciting and my family life is in crisis. I rush around worrying and am surprised when the knots disentangle themselves. In the last hour I visit comrades in Plymouth before realising I’ve not left enough time to catch the ferry. I run to the port, thumb a taxi en route and make it with 15 minutes to spare. I board and wait until I can watch Plymouth harbour disappear from view. On the top deck I stop to try and bum a cigarette and my passport falls from my pocket – I stamp on it before the wind can blow it overboard. Too close a call. I button it inside my jacket from now on.
Sticker in Plymouth
On the ferry I meet a young farmer on his way to drive around Spain and we discuss politics. We agree on the major points but he cannot apply his analysis to his own actions; he’s scared for the future of climate change, like everyone, but is driving a 20 to the gallon Hilux on his travels and farming beef. The next morning he appears at my table in the cafe and proceeds to follow me around the ferry like a lost dog for the next couple of hours. A lonely loner, like I once was, but one who stinks of exploitation. I ditch him, buy baccy and proceed to smoke my way through the rest of the trip.
If I’m hoping to escape politics, I quickly realise I don’t have much of a chance – on the way off the ship I overhear three conversations about Brexit, Corbyn and the future of England. Bollocks.
On leaving the ferry…
Day 2 – Santander
Arriving in Santander I head into a bar where I’m drawn into conversation with a man from Colombia. We discuss politics:
“is all shit” – with a finger pointed upwards.
“Soy anarchista!”
“Ah anarchista, si – sex pistols!”
Turns out his politics doesn’t go much further than liking punk music and being unemployed but he buys me a beer and walks me to the hostel.
An hour or so later I wander back out into the evening to look for a vegan place to eat. I find two, after some walking, which are both closed, contrary to the internet. No worries, I buy falafel at a kebab shop and collect some pictures of anarchist graffiti, which is everywhere. Wandering to a punky bar, I ask “donde esta espacio anarchista?” and am directed a few streets away. No sign there so I ask more locals, who take me back to a different bar around the corner. Introducing me as an anarchist I have a moment of apprehension as no one seems to know what to do with me. After a moment they take me inside and it turns out I’m in an anti-fascist bar. A woman with blue dyed tips says “anarchista?” “Si” “Ahhh anarchista! This is a safe space.” She introduces me to her boyfriend who high fives me and introduces me to others and we discuss Spanish and English politics…. politicians are just as useless and corrupt here as anywhere else apparently. I settle into chatting with three medical students and after a few drinks, a game of battleships I win by cheating and a game of connect four that I lose they drive me back to the hostel drunk. I hop out of the car. “Anarchist forever!” They shout. “Si! Anarchist forever!” I reply and instantly walk smack into a lamppost. Symbolic? Let’s hope not.
Bar stickers
Day 3: Santander
I start the day by leaving my phone in the hostel, the first of several stupidities. After coffee and croissant I make my way to La Libre, an anarchist social centre and library five minutes from the hostel. With the help of several customers and google translate I have a long conversation with the mujer behind the till. She seems damn sensible and gives me an overview of Anarchism in Santander – about ten active folks keep the space open and organise events. It seems very similar to the situation in Devon, but they’re very impressed at the progress we’ve made. One person had visited when she was in England and thought Devon was dead to the revolution. We end on good terms and she hugs me fiercely – I have yet to get used to the Spanish comfort with physical closeness between men and women. From there, I walk to an occupied social centre on the edge of town, which appears empty if well kept. Here I make my second stupid mistake, taking a small sip of water from a discarded cup on a table. I’m still feeling sick at time of writing, about two hours later. I remain surprised at my ability to completely disregard years of advice as to caution drinking water in hot countries. Oh well, let’s hope it kills me and I can forget.
– later –
Well, that was dehydration. About an hour and a half after I staggered to a nearby taberna and drank a bottle of water the nausea passed, along with the heat of the day, and I wondered back to the Centro Social Okupado (CSO). There I’m surprised to find the occupier, a lady called M, home with three dogs. I introduce myself and find she speaks very good English. She’s just cooking when I arrive and, after I blag – the sickness has suddenly left me very hungry – makes me several large thin pancakes that I eat with olive oil, feeling guiltily that I’m stealing her food. But she convinces me that she has already eaten and we proceed to discuss politics.
Santander orange…
It turns out the Centre was set up mostly by French folks who were staying in Santander, which, she explains, has a long history of being right wing. The graffiti I’ve seen, I now realise, is probably years old – she explains the council don’t bother to remove it. I ramble for about half an hour about our scene back home and realise as I do so that we’re very different in that there are few wanderers among us, no squats, and very few of us living the classic ‘anarchist lifestyle’. It occurs to me this might be why we get so much done.
She shows me around the social centre, where for a moment I think I’ve finally found the mythical Anarchist Conservatives, the Black and Blues – but it turns out the blue was meant to be purple and the paint didn’t mix well. The place is beautifully made and I donate a few cents to the library before getting ready to leave. Before I go, M tells me she spent 66 euros getting to a meeting organised over Signal the week before which no one else attended – buses can be expensive here.
‘All good things are free and wild’
Just as I’m leaving another occupier turns up, David, I introduce myself also as David.
“Tu?” He says,
“Si,” i reply, then remember a word the medical students had taught me; “Tocayo!” He laughs.
Tocayo is someone who shares your name.
Before I leave this part of Santander I climb to the top of the hill and look out over the fields and thinning houses to where the cliffs meet the ocean. A donkey haws in the distance and I see horses tied in a backyard. It’s beautiful, but my legs are tired and I turn back towards the city.
I catch a bus into town and end up eating out again, too tired to figure out what I want to cook. The place I find is a Chinese restaurant, apparently marooned from the mid ‘90s with that same dim fluorescent lighting that’s in Hong Kong thrillers and the largest computer monitor I’ve ever seen sat on the desk by the till. Once everyone but me has left, the family that runs it come out and have dinner at one of the tables. I eat as much as I want for once, and tip.
Empty lots like this were far more accessible and overgrown in the cities I travelled through than in the UK.
Centre of the Web 