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...