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By Starhawk
Spirals: How to Conjure Justice
"Wake Up Muggles! Conjure Justice!" (The Revel Alliance sticker for the A16 action against the World Bank/IMF.)
This is how it works: someone has a vision. Donald goes to the Bear Mounds and is told, "Make spirals. Make them of impermanent materials, on the steps of institutions, governments, banks."
We are in Washington DC, on the second day of actions against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. We join a march that takes over the downtown streets. We are drumming, chanting, singing. Giant puppets march with us and above our heads float beautiful banners emblazoned with ears of corn and slogans of justice. I am with Culebra, Evergreen, and Leah who is eighty-three years old. A cold, drenching rain falls and our voices echo off the walls of stores and corporations.
I am warily keeping my eye on the police who line each intersection as we pass. I don't want Leah to get trapped and arrested. But she does not want to leave. With every step, she seems to shine with a brighter inner glow. The march swells and grows. A fierce joy rises from our chanting, and I see it reflected in Leah's eyes.
And then we are trapped, in a massive intersection where many streets come together. The police that guard the streets have on their riot gear. They have covered their badges. "Go with Evergreen," we say to Leah. "Tell them you're eighty-three years old, they'll probably let you out."
"But I don't want to leave," Leah says.
I don't blame her. I don't want to leave, either. I want to stay in the midst of these thousands of brave and crazy people willing to face tear gas or arrest in order to stand up for justice. So we wait. We bring reporters over to talk to Leah. We borrow a cell phone and call the rest of our cluster. We wait some more. The rain pours down.
At last Leah begins to get cold. Reluctantly, she decides to go, and Evergreen goes with her. We have heard that there is a way out further down the street. Culebra and I move deeper into the crowd. "Sit down! Sit down!" someone is calling, and we do, although the street is wet. We sing, as the rain pours down. "Hold on, hold on, hold the vision, that's being born." We hear voices chanting in Spanish behind us, and shift to "Si, se puede!" Someone brings a small sound system over and Culebra stands up and teaches the Spanish chant to the crowd. "It means, ‘Yes, it's possible. It can be done!’" she tells them. "Cesar Chavez used it in the farmworkers' struggle, and many, many people have used it." The small affinity group of Latinos behind us join in with vigor. The Spanish language media come over and interview all of us.
The police put on their gas masks. We put on ours. Dan, from our cluster, has joined us. The rain falls in cold sheets. We sit down, waiting for some form of violence to begin. I find chalk in my pocket, and draw a spiral on the street. I write "Justice." Next to me is a young man in black, masked and hooded. I hand him the chalk. He studies it for a long moment, then draws a Circle A and writes, "Resist!" I find another piece of chalk and begin passing it around. The rest of our cluster joins us, with boxes of chalk. It circulates through the crowd. We draw spirals, and the rain dissolves our marks almost as soon as we make them. We do not know this at the time, but up at the front of the line, the police chief is negotiating with what the media later describe as "a woman dressed as a tree." Mary Bull, wearing a foam redwood, works out a deal. The police uncover their badges. They take off their gas masks. They call for anyone who wants to get arrested to move forward. Someone hands the Chief of police a bouquet of roses.
The tension eases. Jugglers appear, and fire eaters dancing with flames, and radical cheerleaders, and drum circles. We stand up, hovering together as the cold rain falls. Under our feet is a labyrinth someone has drawn, which the rain does not wash away.
This is how it works: the Police Chief, who two days before illegally arrested six hundred people, goes on T.V. holding his roses and talks about democracy. Meanwhile those who volunteered to get arrested in order to make a statement about justice are kept in handcuffs for many, many hours. They are hit in the face for smiling, or for asking to see a lawyer. They are kept in wet clothes shivering with hypothermia. They are not given food, or water, for so long that some end up drinking from the jail toilets. They are brutalized, intimidated, lied to. In one holding cell deep in the underworld, Cullet leaves a spiral torn from scraps of a dollar bill.
This is how it works: there are twelve of us and the rattlesnake makes thirteen. We are in the redwoods, next to the river we have been fighting to defend, among the trees that will be cut if the Timber Harvest Plan goes through. The snake is in a bucket: she appeared on the driveway as one of our friends was leaving to come to the ritual. We have with us a pile of letters that have been written, a petition that all the neighbors have signed. We know that the man who will take possession of this land, if the Timber Harvest Plan goes through, has lied, cheated, has destroyed ancient trees and has desecrated graves with bulldozers. The California Department of Forestry has no mechanism for integrating this information. There is nothing in its process that truly allows the voice of our concerns for the river, the land the community to be heard, as there is nothing in the deliberations of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization or the political processes that support them that truly opens an ear to concerns of justice. Within these institutions are good people who truly desire to protect the forests, to help the poor. Yet whatever efforts they make, and regardless of what is stated in press conferences or political campaigns, injustice is embedded in the very structure of these bodies, in the procedures that must be followed, in the questions that can and cannot be asked, in how the debate is framed. If we want justice, we have to conjure it up from another framework. We have to step outside the institutions, walk out into the streets, the forests, drawing impermanent spirals in the face of fear.
So we gather in the woods to claim this forest as sacred space, to charge our letters, our petition, our phone calls, with magic, that extra something that may shift the structures just a bit, create an opening for something new. We sing, we chant, we make offerings, we claim this land as sacred space. We dare to call upon the ancestors although we recognize ourselves as the inheritors of stolen lands. Out of these contradictions, out of our willingness to listen, to guard the soil and the trees and the rivers, to cherish each other and the love that arises from our history of everyday work and quarrels and our common song, we intend to conjure back the salmon, the ancient groves, the community of those indigenous to this place. We draw spirals in the dirt. We leave feathers, yarn, a shell: our altar. We release the snake from her bucket. She is beautiful, the scales on her back glistening in diamond shape, her tale crowned with many rattles. She leans her chin on the shell filled with waters of the world and listens as we sing to her. When we go, she will coil her body into a spiral and remain, a fitting guardian for this land.
This is how it works: someone has a vision that arises from a fierce and passionate love. To make it real, we must love every moment of what we do. Impermanent spirals embed themselves in asphalt, concrete, in dust. Slowly, slowly, they eat into the foundations of the structures of power. Deep transformations take time. Regeneration arises from decay. Si se puede! It can be done.
Copyright (c) 2000 by Starhawk. All rights reserved. This copyright protects Starhawk's right to future publication of her work. Nonprofit, activist, and educational groups may circulate this essay (forward it, reprint it, translate it, post it, or reproduce it) for nonprofit uses. Please do not change any part of it without permission. Readers are invited to visit the web site: www.starhawk.org.