Mercedes Eng
I’m excited to talk with you for this issue about community care and resisting carceral modes of “care” and “safety.” You’ve been involved in migrant justice, anti-capitalist, feminist, and abolitionist movements for a couple of decades now. How do you see the role of art in justice movements, like, what is it that art can contribute to movements that’s maybe different than meetings with the city, or a march, or a press conference?
Harsha Walia
Art can definitely contribute to our imagination, which, especially in late-stage capitalism, is deliberately stifled. Imagining a different world feels impossible. But art can expand our imagination and also remind us that beauty is not just in a utopic future. I’m thinking of murals that remind us about how we can and have lived. Also, art that’s collective and collectivized is incredibly powerful, because so many art practices are caught up in and influenced by neoliberalism, competition, capitalism, and clout chasing. Art projects that are collectivized are embedded within movement, cultural, and life practices that are communal. Such practices help us figure out how to be and produce together. Collective forms of production, whether it’s a collective garden or a collective art piece, are relational practices that help us do and be together.
ME
Mm. I love what you’re saying about the power of imagination. I struggle with depression both clinical and not and often focus on what’s wrong instead of imagining otherwise, then I think about Ruth Wilson Gilmore who says, “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” It’s not only about decarceration and defunding the cops, it’s imagining what we want and making it happen.
HW
Yeah, and there’s that pithy quote: “In order to build it, you have to imagine it.”
ME
Yeah, very much so. When I started volunteering, I had a pretty narrow and ableist view of what activism was, that frontline work is the “real” work. So as a poet I’m appreciative of the way that art can serve resistance movements.
HW
Even the suggestion that art is maybe different than a press conference or a rally – I would actually offer that all of those do include art. Placards and banners are creative expression. A lot of organizing involves a lot of art that maybe isn’t considered like high-brow, gallery art, but it is art: puppets, street theatre, graffiti, street art, murals, stencilling, chalking, beading, screen printing, banner making – all of these are art and I don’t necessarily see them as disconnected from other parts of organizing.
ME
Has art been part of your organizing from the jump or did that come later?
HW
I have always been around organizing that included art. Maybe that becomes a question of what is considered art, but I have never been part of organizing communities that don’t include poetry, song, artistic design, drawing, painting. Even things that seem as mundane as titling an event involve a lot of artistry, to think of phrasing, word play, imagination, and evocation. Or all the posters that people make in the movement to announce events or initiatives – that’s incredible artistic production!
ME
When I met you during 2010 anti-Olympics organizing, art was part of actions that folks like yourself and No One Is Illegal (NOII) were organizing. Then, in August 2010, when the Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka arrived on the coast and the women and children were incarcerated at Burnaby Youth Detention Centre, there was a support rally with people banging on pots and drums and Tamil dance music blasting on a loudspeaker so that they could hear us and know we were there for them. I remember seeing a little hand waving. I guess I’m thinking about what art can do in a carceral context like that – when advocates and supporters couldn’t get in right away, the music let them know we were there.
HW
Totally.
ME
I think about something like that, and a recent event featuring multilingual poetry and performance in honour of Yom al-Ard (Palestinian Land Day) that Weaving Our Worlds organized – it was such a beautiful gathering: people eating together, listening together, singing together, raising fists together, raising money together while the artists and musicians and cultural workers illuminated connections across movements like Land Back and Free Palestine.
HW
Art is so expansive and makes space for different relationships to language, visual art, spoken word, poetics, and so on. Thinking about the detained Tamil refugees – as you may recall, there was such intense backlash and racism at that time. Every time we were doing rallies, we were getting yelled at and spat at. So we spent time trying to think of different ways to counter the racism, while refusing to disappear from public view. One thing we did was spend days making paper flowers – hundreds of these paper roses. We handed them out during marches as a way to de-escalate and disarm the amount of hatred we were experiencing. And tucked into those paper flowers were flyers. People would just throw the flyers at our faces, but when we approached people with a handmade paper flower, we hoped to elicit a different response. And it wasn’t just the hours and hours of making these flowers, but the creative process of trying to figure out how we were going to engage with people. Another part of it was a massive poster campaign around the city, and different artists produced art that we turned into posters to try to engage through art and history in trying to counter the anti-migrant xenophobia.
There’s just so many examples like that. In the Downtown Eastside in the same year, Mercy, you may recall, there was this influx of condo development. We were all trying to think about how to organize in response, and a big feature of that was public paint-ins as a way to take up space, both physical and visual space, and engage the community in different ways – sometimes at the same time as a direct action or occupation was taking place. The paint-ins were also a way of marking a permanent presence against gentrification in the Downtown Eastside. So for me, it’s just always been so integrated – both art as a form, but also as a tactic.
