Enter the Tina Zone

Being in the Parisian banlieue brings in a violent contrast to the experiences I've had over the previous weeks. I spent most of my time in collective, self-organised, non-hierarchical structures before arriving here - with and by people who want to create as much freedom as possible for themselves, but (necessarily) have a sense of responsibility for the community they live in.

Here, I look out on the street and see one standardised little house after another filled with a standardised four-people family, one standardised street among millions in the region, where life is spent working from Monday to Friday, taking the bins in and going shopping on Saturday, working on the garden on Sundays. Repeat. Work, consume, forget; work, consume, forget. Theses houses propagate and ingrain the image of the accepted social ideal - buying a house, having a family, getting a job, making money to get a fancy car, or a flat screen TV, eventually both, fly for one-week holidays to exotic places one will never get to know. And then die. The reproduction of the life pattern is taken for granted. The knowledge that all around, there are streets after streets of family living according to the same pattern secures the impression that There Is No Alternative, incorporates the Tina-principle. The banlieue is one vast, self-reproducing Tina-zone. A Tina-zone that encourages fear and mistrust. The family-house is the only bubble where people feel at home. Everything beyond that, perhaps with the exception of the immediate neighbours, is at best suspicious, at worst dangerous, thus destroying part of the social fabric.

In this zone it is hard to think that people could actually choose NOT to spend their life working to get money - but perhaps work for some ideal, or for one's personal development - and have a fulfilling life without all the pre-packed goods that supermarkets have to offer, with little dependence on money. Hard to think that people could want to not live in exclusive family structures but with people who share their ideals and with whom they can organise their lives.

Being here, I was remembered why I left this place, although back when I left I didn't necessarily find small-family structures socially destructive. There is no room for alternatives, no room for self-organisation here. I was thinking it's a shame and "we" (someone...) should actually do something against it, instead of fleeing. What a challenge that would be, considering how all exchanges are based on money, how there is no land to secure some food-independence, how there is absolutely nothing - no alternative book shop or centre of any kind - to create a network, a web with. It would all have to start from scratch, in an area where people wouldn't see the point of self-organisation. They find modern capitalism comfortable, and accept the fact that their comfort is based on social and environmental exploitation - if they ever think about it.

This and texts that I have been reading lately (among others on Trapese) make me more and more interested in popular education - also in theatre of the oppressed - as a way to reach out beyond the movement and initiate critical thinking, politicisation, and, modestly, step by step, cultural change and activism. It's taken me a long time to reach the door-step of activism. There's still a lovely way to go. And plenty of escapes from Tina-zones...

view over a flying chair

Have been on the road for exactly five weeks. It sounds like nothing, yet the beginning of my trip seems so far away from my emotional radar now. So much has happened, yet I am bathed in a numbing feeling of normality and can hardly raise my head above what happens to see the stories within and write them. There have been emotional ups and downs. Especially the first ten days of June were very intense - a mix of constant police repression, extreme bonding with up-to-then unknown rebel clowns, finding comfort and friendship and warmth, pushing my own limits facing authority, experiencing new tools for consensus decision-making and learning about practical direct democracy. Jumbled up I was when I left the glorious clown barrio in little wichmannsdorf facing the baltic see. I'd lived the whole time forgetting the G8 would end, as if we'd all stay on the camp for ever - and even now I feel melancholic thinking about it all - about the place, the actions, about the people I got so close to who are now scattered in Austria and Canada and Germany.

[M], a Canadian friend-clown, and I were the last to leave what had been the camp and was now just clean fields and hills, on Monday 11 June, and we hitched to Berlin. I couldn't handle the change of mood, after nearly two weeks camping out in the fields, free from city-behaviour-codes. A day and a half later, [M] left for Cologne, and I left for the first collective farm I wanted to go to, 80 km north of Berlin.

And that was good. I arrived and didn't get the feeling I immediately had to show what sort of person I was or prove anything. I was left plenty of time to settle down and spent the first two days just writing writing writing all about the actions, the camp, the g8-days, trying to understand the development of some of the emotional dynamics, gathering memories, re-living bits. And then, even though I still had plenty to write, I had reached a point where it was difficult to go back and look for more memories. My mind had flown back to the present, I was getting myself back together again.

Once I had worked through the emotional mess, I concentrated on the group on the farm and took time to figure out what the dynamic was, and how the people were. After a few days of me being there, outsiders arrived and a few days of summer meeting started in a difficult communication process. I slowly developped into a moderator, using some of the non-violent group-communication skills I had learned on the camp. I enjoyed observing this personal development.

I hitched off after ten comfortable days to head for Buschberghof, a farm near Hamburg. The only reason I wanted to go to Buschberghof was because of their interesting distribution structures - free of market and values, and organised on the basis of trust and solidarity. The weekend there was disturbing in many ways. I arrived drenched and soaked to an empty farm in a small one-street village consisting of eeringly quiet but overly large houses surrounded by perfectly controlled vegetation. The only shop in this small village is, absurdly, a huge car retailer.
I waited around for a while but no one came, nothing moved, and the house remained silent when I rang, until a dog, somewhere deep inside, started barking. It started raining again and I found refuge in a barn, where I dozed off leaning against my rucksack.
I had actually told the people at the farm I would arrive on Sunday around lunchtime, and it was Saturday late afternoon. My original plan had been to set up camp somewhere in a field and spend a night alone - but the weather was too bad and I had eaten up all my food, so I waited in the ghostly farm until a mini-van showed up and a family arrived.
-"Hello... I arrived earlier than planned..." I explained, awkwardly, as the family stared at me coldly.
-"oh", said the mother after half a minute of staring, her face remaining strictly neutral.
Another half minute went by, she cast a glance at her husband. I waited there, standing in front of them, in the courtyard, drenched and uneasy, until she eventually uttered with clear disapproval: "Well, I suppose it's alright all the same."

I spent the weekend having the feeling of standing in the way of this family, constantly aware of the presence of unsaid rules and structures I had to guess. For instance, I felt it was definitely not acceptable to sit down at the table before everybody was there and the parents had sat down. I had been told dinner (or rather evening bread snack) would be ready soon, but the dining room remained empty, the long table unoccupied, and I had to figure out how to occupy myself until I felt I could sit down at the table. The room I had been given was in another building, and I didn't feel like going back there. I stood and stared around for a while, patted the dog a little, stared out one window, then another, then concentrated on a child's painting on the wall, looked for another spot to stand and stare... and the parents, who walked around attending chores I couldn't help them with, never once said I should just make myself at home. They silently stared at me. Dinner was accordingly tense. As was breakfast the next morning. I tried to offer my help and set the table - a young farm apprentice who lives with the family came as I was doing so, and worriedly asked if Mister H. had really said to put plates on the table, then started correcting all my mistakes - no plates, just boards, no glasses but mugs, different cuttlery... To add to my unsettling uneasiness, lunch had the added bonus of being preceded by a collective prayer-like thanking of Mother Earth. I stared and remained silent and felt the side looks of the young daughters brushing me.
On the Sunday afternoon, I took part in the yearly meeting of all the members of the community who finance the farm according to their capacity and take the products according to their needs. Most are well-off bourgeois families who do not even think twice about the communist character of the structures they are taking part in. All they are interested in is good healthy food produced according to Rudolf Steiner's methods. The glorification of dodgy esoteric racist rudolf steiner stuck everywhere like slime - even the cup I drank from when I first arrived said "rudolf steiner primary school". It felt like I'd landed in a sect.

I managed to leave with a better impression of the place though - spending the sunday evening with other people from the farm speaking late into the night around a fire, for the first time feeling like a traveler sharing stories, telling of other farms, other places, g8 and clowns. The Monday was spent harvesting, gathering peas and chatting with various other people who were a lot less severe and puritan than the family who was giving me bed and food. I left on Tuesday 26 June, early in the morning with the friend of a farm employee for my journey to Haina, Thuringia.

He left me in a brilliant spot, from where I got taken immediately. Hitchhiking went really well. At one point in mid-journey, I found a guy who was basically going where I was and took me along. He'd spent the weekend at a music festival, I'd spent the weekend on an antroposophic-esoteric farm with a puritan family - we were both a bit phased out.

I arrived near Haina around 7pm and felt glorious. I called up the commune to be picked up at the motorway exit, as they'd said they would be happy to do so. I started feeling nervous when the guy on the phone showed signs of bewilderment when I explained where I was - eventually he understood me - and told me I'd aimed for the wrong Haina and had to travel back. "The wrong haina?" "Yeah... There are two hainas in Thuringia...". Travel back? At 7pm, from this hole? I looked at the map: I had unknowingly driven past the "correct" Haina in the course of the late afternoon. The comic of the situation stopped me from falling into a fit. I got a grumpy worker who'd just finished his shift to take me to a forlorne train station and accepted to spend money to be taken back up north 30 kms. A passenger gave me two apples and conversation. I got to the commune shortly before 10pm and was fed delicious home made cheese and bread in a chaotic setting - just what I'd needed after the awkward weekend in Buschber.

I had originally planned to leave the place today, but didn't. It's the sort of place where you can just stay on and on... and on... Time flows comfortably, I am losing and finding myself again. I enjoy the people here - 13 adults, 9 kids, all very different characters. One is very zen, very quiet with dry humour. Another is incredibly camp and bubbly. One mumblingly tried to tell me about how every critique of the system was immanent and therefore - I think he meant? - senseless. I picked berries, helped out to prepare the summer party, repeatedly tried to draw a good cow for the cheese labels, read, wrote senseless pages of boring diary, chatted and laughed and remained silent, played the piano.
I'm leaving on Saturday to head back to Templin where I was at the beginning. They have their own summer party then.

I'm considering radically changing my travel plans and coming back here in August, when they have two weeks of intensive construction works with only women. I'm not very happy about the "only women" setting (the men in the commune and the children will be scattering around to other befriended communes or places), but it would be a good opportunity to get some practical skills and know the place and its network better. If I do that, I would not go to southern France and Spain as originally planned, but head back for East Germany from Britanny early August - which sounds like a tiring stretch and hectic timing.

In any case, I've decided to head for France a little earlier than planned to make room for changing ideas and plans. I'll head for cologne from Berlin next Wednesday, and from then for Paris on Thursday, in exactly one week. I've been in the countryside for the most part of the last five weeks, bob knows how I'll react to being in the city again.

Outside the window, I see the main house, a lovely orangey-yellow with blue windows, framed by trees, and on top of the roof, a green chair fixed on one leg, with wings attached to its back, trying hard to imitate a weather vane.