Hanging Up

I'm having a heartbroken afternoon, and I'm pretty sure it's because I'm not going back to Burning Man, at least not for a very long time. It keeps coming back to one thing: the phones.

Somehow, that change over all the others has cut me deep. Hearing people bitch about poor reception. Daily updates about what's going on in the outside world. People sitting around camp staring at shit on the internet. It all feels like vandalism to something that means so much to me. 

It used to be so magical--that long journey out, following mountain roads and rivers to the place where an alien landscape took hold and the data connection died. This was the process of going to another world, one that was temporary and beautiful and that you could only visit briefly. (Really, they are all that way.)

Maybe it's that I'm a forest creature stuck living in a day-to-day where people are zombies staring at screens all the time, breaking conversations to answer noises on a machine, not idle for more than nanoseconds before the boredom tick of scrolling on the phone takes over. The pointless treadmill of meaningless novelty, hitting the button for connectedness and missing it the whole time. That burns me; my own abstinence is imperfect, and has no impact on the tide coming in on me, anyway.

I love those places that remain sacred, untainted by those bastard toys, their nagging for attention and indulgences of narcissism. Maybe it's time to let go of the idea that Black Rock City can be one of those places. But, man, it hurts. 

I'm going to put my energy into creating new worlds. I'll find other remote places teeming with feral energy. I have other things to do in life, so it seems a bit silly to feel so sad about outgrowing this one. But, it's been precious to me for a long time. All of my adult life so far. I've fought this corner. The wild experiment changed me. 

It might turn out that I miss hitchhiking on art cars and making possibility in the starkest dry dust too much to stay away. But, for the foreseeable future, I think it's time to accept that I can't stand in the face of this change and hope for a pivot. Maybe I can find a new way to be involved with this crazy place, where I can pitch myself into projects with other folks that want to shine up the immediacy and involvement in our ephemeral, imaginary city.

For now, though, I can tell you this: Convenience is death to purpose.

Human, Animal

I've been too quietly watching the news, speculation and details come out about Sandra Bland's death. There are so many instances of racism cutting life short, hitting the news daily, that I don't know how anyone could pretend the US doesn't have an issue with such things. It's a victory that the Confederate battle flag is being consigned to its rightful place as a historical relic steeped in violence, oppression and treason. But that's merely a symbolic victory--there's behavior to change. 

Meanwhile, the ugliness of a lion's death is galvanizing my soft-hearted friends who stand up against the torment of animals. Discussion of extinction, cruelty and the outrageous arrogance of humans permeates my social media. And that's a good thing. It's also an extremely simple thing to condemn--much easier than digging deep into the injustices human society inflicts on its own. 

But, let's remember: humans have the gift, amongst all animals, to be better than our savagery. We can increase our understanding, learn from our mistakes and ignorant transgressions. We are uniquely able to embrace our better natures and mitigate our own destructiveness. We can take each of those lessons and enhance our compassion, almost infinitely. 

Let's remember that almost every calamity we witness in our brief, delicate lives is directly related to human suffering and its awful, echoing effects. Our shimmering gem of a planet is ravaged out of hunger, fear, desperation and disregard. Everything we can do to replace trauma with kindness and consideration makes a little more space for healthy life, of all kinds. 

It is a beautiful thing to be able to empathize with other creatures. It can be harder to keep the lights on in our hearts for other people, whose problems may be uncomfortably tangled into the messiness of our own lives, or who may resemble those that have hurt us. 

The lurking shadows of human cruelty are overcome by helping each other to burn ever more brightly, and freeing ourselves from the ashen remains of our confinement from one another.

Bomb Blasts and Beginnings

Ten years ago today, I was flying into London with my bags packed for a new life and voicemail messages from James about how terrorists were blowing up the city. With heightened security, all of us boarded the plane anyway. 

I landed in a city deserted. All of the cabs had long since been taken by commuting workers stranded by the eerily quiet transport system, shut down by the morning's bombs. The last option for transport was a limo, complete with chauffeur, so I was greeted by two men in suits and a placard with my name on it. 

There was no traffic from Heathrow to Holborn. I've never seen anything like it since. 

James himself had breezed past not one but two of the blast sites on his way to the office. Then, as the city realized what had happened, the phone networks became overwhelmed and normal life disappeared into a mix of chaos and the remarkable calm that only London can possess as it's having the shit kicked out of it. The place has had practice, after all. 

Within two days, people were taking the tube to work again. Within three months, we moved onto Edgware Road. 

This morning, I woke up to a lovely email reminding me that, despite the somber anniversary and the rough landing into English life, today also marks a decade of having gained a family and having started an adventure that changed my life forever. 

London, you're a tough old city. I'm loving you a lot today.

Of Zills and Pink Slippers

I've been thinking a lot lately about connection. And other "-tions": Motivation. Inspiration. 

I've also been pondering the slings and arrows of growth and change. Of running after, and letting go.

…

I think it might have started when I got the letter from my student loan company, laying out in brutal terms how much I would be paying per month and over the lifetime of my loans. Before that, I'd thought I understood how lending worked and that I'd done my due diligence by carefully reading all the fine print. But the demon of compounding interest had me by the hair, and it was too late. 

I was a newly graduated university student and professional bellydancer. And I was going to have to pay as much monthly on my loans as I did for rent in London--one of the most expensive cities in the world. I'd been applying for jobs, and no one was responding; this was 2008, and the financial crisis was really hitting the city, resulting in massive layoffs in the banking sector, flooding the job market with ambitious folks with experience. 

And there I was, foreign, all my references in another country, armed with my anthropology degree and an overwhelming sense that my can-do spirit was not enough.

That's when I knew I had to dance. The lucky break I'd gotten as a bellydance teacher while studying was my only viable employment. My hopes of keeping dance for myself and developing a career in my area of study were met with only endless unpaid internships I couldn't afford to take.

… 

Over the next few years, I kept dancing. I loved my students and my classes. I was proud of the festivals I was privileged to help grow by teaching and performing, all over Europe. I felt like I was part of a new tradition of bellydance that was vibrant and exciting, and that I was doing something meaningful to help it thrive abroad.

I was also wearing down. Unbeknownst to me, I had a serious digestive ailment that was making me sicker and sicker. I kept going, though--taking all the workshops I could, drilling daily for hours, teaching several classes a week, travelling frequently. There were a few scary times when I felt dangerously depleted, almost in shock, but I pushed through.

It started to add up. I began to feel diminished. My husband and I talked about what would come next, and we casually discussed the possibility of moving to San Francisco. 

Then, suddenly, it happened. The offer came. And, if we said no, we might not have another chance in the foreseeable future. We debated, we cried, we held hands, and we jumped.

… 

In retrospect, I don't think I ever recovered from losing my students. I loved teaching. As the years have gone by, I've remained intensely proud of the dancers they've become. Some of my most precious friendships came out of curious forays into classes I taught, and I am so incredibly grateful for the presence of those women in my life. 

In my naiveté, I had assumed that I would simply start over in San Francisco. I thought my accomplishments would come with me, and that I would jump right into the place I had previously called home. I underestimated the emotional impact of shutting down a healthy business I had grown from scratch, and the challenge of learning to feed myself again as a dancer with dietary restrictions. I needed to build my strength and get settled, and those things require time and attention. But I hadn't realised that yet.

I offered to be a substitute teacher for a friend's class. Her negative response stung. I started to realise that all those years working on my own did not add up to being part of the local tradition. I felt disconnected and disappointed with myself. It seemed that the things I had achieved overseas had evaporated. My motivation began to wither.

I tried to reconnect with the things I loved about bellydance. There were some moments of inspiration, and times of profound sadness. Grief. My body started to interfere with my ability to keep up. Family drama overwhelmed my emotional resilience. Loneliness set in. 

…

The first human profession I remember wanting to pursue was being a ballerina. From the ages of about five to nine, I took classes. I remember the way the cement floor of my teacher's basement studio felt under my little pink shoes, the dusty sound of a rond de jambe at what must have been a tiny barre. I remember a yellow costume that reminded me of the teardrop Johnson & Johnson logo on my baby sister's shampoo, and the first time I got lost in a choreography onstage. (A fate I was destined to repeat even as an adult dancer, and--in retrospect--the first evidence of my right/left confusion from learning dances in a mirror.)

When we moved to the countryside, away from my teacher, my dancing days became shows improvised to my parents' record collection, performed to imaginary audiences. I climbed trees, read books, and imagined I would become a veterinarian. It was a long time before I had a dance class again.

…

Twenty years after I stopped, I went back to ballet. A search for classes revealed a school with an adult program a few blocks from my home in San Francisco. I started packing pink shoes with me in my purse. 

I started, then life got in the way. I started again, and then I bought a house, and that took all of my time. I started again, and, by this third start, I had discovered that my creaky back was increasingly intolerant of the undulations I'd worked so hard to install as a bellydancer. The harder I pushed, the more physical and emotional pain I felt. Ballet started to put me back together. 

There's something to be said for revisiting your first love. I will never be a ballerina, but several times a week, I make an investment in keeping my identity as a dancer. While I hope that I might one day learn enough to integrate the dance forms that have shaped my body and spirit in some sort of personal expression, I think it might be enough for me to just go. Maybe I'll be able to contribute something beautiful to the world this way, even if it is only carrying myself with more strength and ease. I'm getting older, and I want to see what can happen while I have time. I have things to express in this mortal form, and I want to expand my reach and means to do so.

I am so grateful for all of my teachers. Over twelve years ago, Rachel Brice got me dancing again when I was just a little raver gyrating under laser beams. Now, I feel so lucky to restart an old journey of a thousand tendus with Zory Karah, Joshua Trader and Rubén Martín Cintas. You all help me to be a little more alive in a very special way, and I am glad for it.

"I am not a racist."

White people, listen up: If even the Klan claims not be be racist, think of how hollow your protestations might sound in the face of overwhelming statistical evidence that the United States has a race problem. 

Over the summer, someone said to me: "White men are the bad guys for everything now. You can't even talk about race if you're white without being called a racist." I found this hilarious, and was stunned to find, upon sharing this ludicrous statement, that it is actually a fairly common opinion.

Allow me to clarify: This is bullshit. I talk about race all the time, and have never been accused of being a racist. To add a wrinkle to this, my husband and I openly converse about racism and racial prejudice, and acknowledge that there is always a risk and a likelihood that we unknowingly bumble into racist behaviour in the course of our lives. We don't get accused of being racists, even as we admit that there are unthinking things we do that probably contribute to these social ills. We are likelier to accept that we might be racist, on some level, than the KKK. Such is the warped state of this national conversation.

If no one is a racist, then where is this racial bias coming from? We can see it in national statistics, anecdotes and evidence, and yet, somehow, everyone is blameless.

All of us have prejudices; it's one of life's great challenges to remain real with yourself, and discover what your own flaws are so you can take action to root them out and be a better person. This an everyday endeavour, the practice of refinement and open-mindedness and education. This is looking at patterns in the world around you and being really real that not everyone gets treated like you do. It is not claiming to be colour-blind as you negotiate a blame-shift because the situation is uncomfortable.

If you are protesting that you are not a racist, or that you can't even talk about race without being accused of racism, knock it off. Seriously, you are probably saying racist things, and dressing it up in some conversation about class, culture, behaviour, economics, affirmative action or any number of excuses that allow you a little distance to judge others without directly filling in the blank that you're talking about race. You are being judgmental, loud and ignorant, and that is the problem.

If you want to talk about educational achievement gaps, you need to talk about the impact poverty has on educational outcomes. You need to talk about urban food deserts and the PTSD-like symptoms that kids in rough urban neighbourhoods often exhibit that prevent them from being able to concentrate in school, leading to disparities in academic performance relative to their better-off peers. You need to talk about how relentless testing, failing scores and de-funding of schools drastically affects kids whose parents cannot simply move them to the suburbs or put them in private school.

If you want to talk about economics, you need to talk about the biases amongst employers that mean a black grad with no criminal record has similar odds in the job market to a white ex-con. And then you need to talk about how the people making those hiring decisions are disproportionately white, and how the crucial component of an inside connection for a job posting cuts along racial lines.

If you want to talk about prison populations and absentee fathers, you need to talk about disproportionate arrest rates between races, especially for minor crimes, and the fact that your white teenage son or daughter is lucky they aren't black, because if they were they'd be getting thrown out of school for minor offences, sent to prison over small amounts of marijuana or shot because they looked threatening. 

And your kids are not special. They are doing this stuff, too. I know from experience. Their skin colour alone is improving their odds of finishing high school, going to university and getting a job, even staying alive, because authority figures are not watching their every move like they are criminals waiting to happen. Instead, the police are likelier to be lenient with them, perhaps because they relate to them more as their own sons and daughters.

All of these problems are fixable. We just have to properly identify them at their source, and with kindness. There is systematic discrimination, and it is wrong, and it also breaks down into smaller, still-nasty pieces that can be attacked bit-by-bit. But you have to see that the problem is there, acknowledge your part in it and start to fix it, both within yourself and in the world around you. A huge part of that, the most important part, is listening to the people who are being hurt by this. Understanding what someone's going through, rather than telling them. So many people are experiencing the sharp end of racism, and I'd bet that each of them has some solution to the problems they encounter.

From my informal polls, it appears that no one wants to be a racist. We are not yet colour-blind, however much we might want to be in that post-racial world. We live shoulder-to-shoulder in this injustice and violence, and defensive posturing does no one any service. Soften your heart, listen, and embrace the possibility that you have been wrong, or misinformed, or you didn't know. We can all be better.

From One White Bellydancer to Another

This post is in response to an opinion piece which made waves in the bellydance world this week: Randa Jarrar's "Why I Can't Stand White Bellydancers," for Salon.com.

Imagine your uncle broke into someone's house on the other side of town, and stole a very beautiful necklace, among other things. Years later, someone gives it to you. You treasure it. One day, while you're walking down the street, the daughter of the woman who was robbed sees her mother's jewellery around your neck. She comes up to you to tell you that the necklace is a priceless family heirloom that was stolen. It had been in her family for generations, passed down from mother to daughter over decades. Would you try to suggest to her that you should keep it, or that she is crazy to try to tell you that she has a greater claim to it? Would you try to compare your love for it to hers?

As white women, we all have that uncle, or appear to. We look like the wives and daughters of the soldiers and foreign heads of state that played a part in carving up the Middle East and helped perpetuate conflict there. The impacts of that violence are not past but present, and the ruptures manifest in the looting of museums, the endangerment of women and minorities, and the erosion of cultural autonomy. We, as dancers, might not have done this, but we have to imagine how it looks to take on a certain costume and dance style and proclaim ourselves protectors of an art form that originated outside our borders.

Even if you are not from a country that directly colonised anywhere, we should remember a few facts. Baghdad has been sacked. Cairo remains tense. Throughout the Middle East, people are dealing with the aftermath and ongoing damage to cultures that have been ripped open partly by white people. Did they do that to each other, too? Yes. Does that exempt us from consideration of our appropriation of their arts? No. 

I think we need to be extraordinarily cautious about dismissing Randa Jarrar as cranky, racist, or bigoted, which has been the tendency of some. She is having the experience of something that is culturally near and dear to her being rewritten, by people who look nothing like her and mostly do not have the history of their culture being exploited that she does. The dance she loves does not belong exclusively to her, but it is woven into the fabric of her childhood and family life in a way that is very different from the experience of most Western dancers.

There is a difference between people adopting the dress and customs of a dominant culture that is actively exported (as in the cases of European dress or American music) and people from a dominant global culture feeling entitled to adopt or adapt the folk arts of another region. In one instance, the originators of the cultural form happily expect to be leading the way, and are validated by the uptake of their trademarks. In the other, people often feel that they are fighting to retain their identities and ways of life in the face of massive pressure to assimilate to "modern" expectations, largely from the global West/North.

The circumstances surrounding who has the luxury of dabbling in what art--including day-to-day discrimination based on skin color, historical facts of empire, wealth and power imbalances, gender politics (and how those are affected by race, nationality and context)--must be taken into account. It stings to get hit between the eyes with racism. White folks are generally not used to that. After we're done feeling our feelings about it, we have an obligation to acknowledge that our attempts to artfully borrow may have collateral damage. And, we have to decide if that changes our approach, or if we're okay with some people feeling the way Jarrar does. She is not alone in her feelings, either. 

It is a mighty privilege to be able to buy another region's priceless cultural heritage and try it on for fun and experimentation. That's what appropriation is. If other cultures feel respected when we do that, we help grow folk arts into global arts, like ballet. If we leave people feeling violated, then it undermines our cause, in my opinion. 

No one can be blamed for finding dance beautiful and becoming enamoured by it, regardless of context. One can, however, be held to account for failing to deepen one's education of context and history, especially in reference to a region where there has been ongoing conflict and war with Western nations, through our lifetimes. Art never happens in a vacuum--it is surrounded by facts and vagaries of history, and the tensions within those. 

If you are not comfortable with the weight of responsibility for other people's interpretation about your interaction with their cultures, I would suggest, as Jarrar does, that you find another hobby. There are some uniquely American dance forms that risk dying out right now--any one of them would appreciate your attention and participation. If they are not as appealing, I invite you to ask yourself why that is. Less amazing jewellery to wear? Not as worldly? Fewer opportunities for personal authorship in dance? 

Because, honestly, many of the things that make this dance shine to newcomers and audiences hinge on motivating common ideas we all have about the exotic, which derive from moments when Western culture became enamoured with the real and imagined worlds "over there." And, while we might once have felt far apart, those worlds are rapidly growing together, ever more mixed up in and exposed to each other. The heady appeal of that opportunity to craft one's own artistry, literally from the pieces of another place's cultural treasures, comes with the great responsibility to not just feel like you are respecting that with your intentions, but to deliver on that respect. 

We can't expect anyone to read our minds and hearts, and interpret our enthusiasm as appreciation. Execution is crucial; it is what defines art. If we intend to honour peoples' traditions, then we have to check to make sure that they do, in fact, feel honoured. The practices we reference in bellydance don't belong to long-gone people of the past--they are borrowed also from their descendants, who have the right to be respected when they speak up for their cultural integrity. If they don't feel loved, we might want to re-evaluate whether what we're doing just feels good to us, to the exclusion of their feelings on the matter.

In the case of Middle Eastern dance, we can choose to engage--artfully and considerately, and hopefully by invitation--with the injuries of conflicts we have directly or indirectly been party to. Or, we can keep blindly dancing in that wound, without regard to the feelings of those closest to the thing we claim to love. I know what I'd rather do.

None of us will get it right all the time. The failures sting, and they should. We should learn from that, and refine our approach. From there, we can begin to integrate the great diversity of opinion that matters outside of our own, and gain a sense of the perspective. We find our audiences, and we lead them somewhere. We can do better than presenting a cartoon of "elsewhere."

Violet Silver Moon

The moon was beautiful tonight. I caught sight of her as I was walking along on errands around 6pm, when the sky was indigo chasing twilight, and I kept seeing bright flashes between treetops. And then, there she was: suspended, elegant, in that rich blue infinity, shining silvery white in a sliver of a crescent with a crisp violet disk of the shadowed portion of her face. 

Only moments before, I'd unpacked my bag from hiking in Berkeley, and left my camera and sunglasses behind to lighten the load. I figured that I'd have nothing to take pictures of that would be demanding enough for me to risk getting caught unawares with a big fancy camera around my neck in the dark. So I left it behind. And then, there was the moon, daring me to try to steal the moment for a little longer by committing it to pixels. My phone never stood a chance.