Tag: society

Antifascist Clubbing

Yvet Youssef2 Comments

Going out in Berlin with borderline bronchitis while surprise bleeding a week off schedule, my dear friend and I stand in line to enter a club at 2 in the morning. I am generally not one for ignoring my body’s needs, but right about now I am pissed off at my perpetually failing immune system this winter, and my desire to go dancing in Berlin overrules this coughing, aching body. Just this once, just this twice, just this week, OK? I have never waited in line for a club before out of principle, but here we are. It is freezing outside, with that humidity that cuts through your bones. Berlin is gritty. We talk to two guys in front of us while figuring out what we are actually standing in line for. Who is playing and what are they playing? We SoundCloud through the list of DJs on a smartphone and decide it seems danceable enough for our taste and good enough to warrant our waiting in the freezing cold, for now. We will see how long this lasts.

We manage to reach the front of the line where a thin guy in a black hat starts speaking to us in German. I stare at him somewhat amused at how such a slightly built character can have such an intimidating presence. When it becomes clear he wants me to respond to something I say: “Sorry, my German is not good enough for this”. He goes: “Alright, in English then: We are a leftist club…” “Oh!” I interrupt “thát is why that guy is on the wall” pointing to a graffiti stencil of Karl Marx next to us. “Yes” he responds firmly, looking me directly in the eye: “du you like him?”
“I do, actually!” I say with an enthusiasm that is clearly out of place and does not fit the vibe of the location. More aloof, Yvet, this is fucking serious, alright? The guy continues to explain the politics of the club we are about to enter: “no homophobia, no sexism, no racism. Are you OK with these terms?”
“Absolutely.”

Something in me actually quite appreciates these politics as door-policy. All performance aside, these should be the conditions for entering all public spaces. Just stating these terms with clarity at the entrance grants a feeling of safety, like an insurance, and that, I notice, feels remarkably welcoming to me.

We are allowed to walk to the next station two people at a time. Even though the two guys we were talking to technically stood in line before us they let us enter first as my friend joyfully exclaims: “ladies first!” Which she immediately half-jokingly, half-seriously withdraws: “or, maybe not, I don’t know if they allow that here…?” We arrive at the next station, right hand on an imagined Communist Manifesto, where our bags are searched and our phones get stickers over the cameras and we are told we can’t take photos inside the club. Onward to station three, the cash register. This is where the Marxist Idealism ends and good old capitalism requests €15 a person to be able to enter the club. I am not smart-assed enough in this moment to ask whether there is a sliding fee for low-income guests or if we are going to keep our leftist radicalism just slightly hovering over class issues for the sake of making a profit?

Anyway, when we are finally inside the typically old and dark and grungy smoked out rooms of the Berlin club scene, we dance. I am wearing my usual all-black attire, which in the Netherlands sometimes feels a little grave in comparison, but here looks so similar to the German Antifa uniform, I fit right in. Germany is interesting like that, there are still Punkers, and Altos and general rawness. You hear that Nethies: Too many smooth hipsters, not enough grungy Antifascist grit. The techno beats sound through the old industrial building doused in black paint and thick smoke. I dance the wild radical dance of a totally sober, sick, and bleeding body refusing to miss out on some live Berliner EDM. Like a leftist badass.

I am contemplating the performance of radicalism, the limits of leftist politics, the lack of leftist voices in Netherlands, the synchronous bullshit AND importance of it all. And I am imagining Karl Marx in line of a self-proclaimed leftist nightclub in 21st century Berlin, standing in the dark smoky hallways observing groups of drug-addicted youngsters huddling together in genderless toilet stalls with overflowing toilet bowls and never any damned toilet paper. Escaping from something, somehow. Or reaching for something, somehow. Would he laugh a giant belly laugh or sternly shake his head at the silliness of this scene? When in fact, we know quite well, it’s dead-serious, everything is so very serious at the root of it all. It’s just not serious like staged performative aloofness. It’s serious like the deeply human struggle for meaning while we are here in these bodies, making sense of our existence, or eagerly running from it. We are alive, all together now comrades, and it is horrible, and silly, and so much fun, simultaneously.

Also Netherlands, a footnote of gratitude: Let’s be long-term real here – thank you for the smoking ban in your clubs and public spaces ❤ ❤ ❤ I, for one, deeply appreciate it. I will take the sweat and fart stink over the total annihilation of my lungs and tar lodging into every pore on my body any day. I have washed my hair three times since Berlin, and I have yet to arrive at something that doesn’t smell like death. I love going out dancing too much to be slowly killed by it.

Guesthouses

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For 14 months I have slept in spare bedrooms and on couches, in hostels, in tents and on the occasional bus or balcony – relying on the hospitality of others, unable, still, to recreate what I lost, and establish a new home for myself. I know it seems strange to some people, but I also suppose most people don’t know what it feels like, so it doesn’t really matter what they think. I write this last sentence with relative ease now, but this understanding hasn’t come easy. We have to unlearn so much of our cultural and psychological programming to truly care less about other people’s judgements of us… I am still diligently working through it.

Since having been involuntarily uprooted and catapulted from one continent to another, I’ve struggled with a need for my own space, and I have wrestled with my dependency on others. It’s been a challenging time on many levels. But I have also felt a strong resistance at the thought of living in a new permanent residence by myself while pretending to be a well-adjusted independent single woman in her early thirties. As if I could lose home and hearth one minute and, without blinking an eye, feign having my shit together while painting the walls emerald green and millennial pink in some other house for me to occupy. As if it doesn’t hurt like hell. As if it hasn’t fucked me up. As if I am not still grieving a loss that extends from the material into the emotional and spiritual aspects of my being.

For years I had poured myself into the creation of a home-space and it got suddenly ripped away from me. My identity as a spouse, a stepmom, a homemaker, a caretaker of cats and plants, a maker of family meals, a collector of eclectic furniture; it all vanished one moment to the next. My hands left empty, entirely unsure of who exactly to BE now. To truly learn the lessons from this predicament, there was one message overruling all other sentiments in my mind and it sounded like this: STOP.

Stop. Stand still. Wait. Sit in this astounding agony. Be broken down for as long as it takes. Resist all external pressures towards “normalcy” – be wholly, repulsively, irritatingly, frustratingly “abnormal”. Not because you want to be recalcitrant, but because it is the healthiest thing you can do at the moment. However long it takes?

Yes. However long it takes.

The second message of equal weight has been ringing through the hallways of my heart repeatedly during this time: TRUST. Whatever this is, trust that it will bring you closer to yourself. Trust you are supported even in times of relentless turmoil. Trust the light will return. Trust your love and your vision and your intuition. Trust this path. You don’t have to know exactly where it leads.

And so I have been defying norms and convention, a full-grown adult, homeless, single and childless, without even a damned coffeemaker or vacuum cleaner or piece of furniture to call my own anymore. If life has a reset button, someone took a small pin to mine and relentlessly pressed it until the whole system was rebooted. Back at the factory settings. It’s confusing and torturous at times, yet when I look in the mirror I can look myself in the eye and say: “I Love you. I am so unbelievably proud of you, you sensitive, courageous spirit. You are doing so well with all of this”.

There’s a learning curve to losing everything. There’s a learning curve to accepting support. There’s a learning curve to living in proverbial guesthouses for a while. We are all guests, I guess. It’s just easy to forget when we crown ourselves rulers of our insulated Queen and Kingdoms of Domesticity. But do we truly own anything? The planet we get to live on? The bodies we move around in? These roofs, these couches, these cups of tea, these blankets? Take nothing for granted.

We are all reliant upon each other. We have just been taught that we can and ought to be in complete control of our own little private corners of reality, and that if we lose that control, we have somehow failed at life. We judge ourselves and feel the judgement of others. “I didn’t plan for this.” “This wasn’t supposed to happen.” Turns out we don’t really have that much control, not as much as we think we do by a long shot. Control is a rigidity that feels like strength at first, until it reveals itself as a barrier to a life blossoming.

I am, for the time being, experiencing life as a transient guest in other people’s houses, relying on the goodwill of those around me, family, friends, hospitable strangers and hostel hosts. I am floating through a vast stretch of liminal space, which I presume I have to learn to soar through freely now. To live with something I can only describe as a fluidity of presence. To receive gifts, over and over. Receiving is a difficult task for many of us self-reliant, control-freakish, independent creatures of habit. But it’s a powerful exercise. To say “thank you” again and again and again, until all uncomfortable fear-based-pride is pulverized, THANK YOU.

I know deep in my heart, there will be a time I will occupy a home-space to call my own again, with a coffeemaker, millennial pink walls, and a bunch of amazing rugs. I know that I will open that space for others who are then where I am now. To pay it forward. To give what I have learned to receive. To support others on similar journeys. I find solace in that knowing. And I trust it will happen in exactly the right place and in exactly the right time.

Evolving Consciousness

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I am not perfect. I get stuck and hooked and I trip over myself plenty. I don’t know everything. I do not have all the answers. There have been times I’ve felt shame around this. How can I be whole without being perfect? There are still moments where I think I should not speak my truth before it is perfected. Who am I to use my voice? To write about the Sacred? To point out the wounds of our world?

Then something in me goes: Wait a minute, that sounds like a tune that you picked up from our cultural command of unworthiness: “Don’t you dare think yourself worthy because it will mess with a system predicated on your perpetual sense of insecurity!”

But, dear one, worthiness already lives inside of us. It is a birthright, no matter how much our societies have tried to oppress or obscure it. Our work is to re-claim our worth, to stop hiding from it, to stop rejecting it, to stop repressing it. What are we so afraid of?

We are evolutionary creatures. Everything we do is a path, not towards a perfect destination, but towards growth. Beyond what we can now imagine as some type of destination lies still more path and still more possibilities for expansion of consciousness. My only job here is to commit to that path with reverence, gratitude and conscious presence as an evolutionary being who is always learning. That is how I serve the whole. That is the place from where I can legitimately speak. Not because I claim to have all the answers, but because we are all in this together, like links in a chain, connected. We grow towards healing together and we evolve together. When I stretch out my hand to reach for you and pull you up, you may accept it, just like I rely on the pointed finger of someone else to guide the way onward. We build ladders and throw out ropes and make signposts along the way because we need each other, and, quite frankly, this whole experience is a lot more fun with loving company.

“She Feels the Music”

Yvet Youssef5 Comments

Some weeks ago I found myself at one of the most mesmerizing concerts. The sound was perfect, the music was pure excellence, and the venue was beautiful. World class musicians producing sparkling melodies and stirring rhythms. Imagine yourself in this space for a moment. Can you see it? Soul uplifting gloriousness. While I am taking in this incredible soundscape, a group of tall Dutch white men gather several feet away from me. I notice they gather so close to me because I was dancing, and they kinda took my dancing space… I get slightly irked when people invade my dancing space whenever there is actually plenty of room everywhere else. It’s like being in a long row of completely empty toilet stalls, and the next person entering the bathroom picking that one stall right next to you. And now your pee won’t come out until they leave, so you are just staring at the shoes of your new neighbor thinking: “Of all the stalls, in all the world, you had to pick the one right next to mine?” And I know they can tell I am being exceptionally quiet, so there is this awkward silent standoff happening until one of us flushes first. Yeah, OK, so I have public-toilet-issues, I know some of you out there know what I am talking about…

Anyway, I digress. We were at a concert. The men were closing in. But that was not all. In a completely silent concert hall, where everyone is moved by the gorgeous sound, these men begin an absurdly loud conversation amongst themselves. Let me tell you this: Nothing gets me out of musical ecstasy quite as fast as a group of insensitive men talking way too loud about absolutely nothing to each other through a performance. Let’s call this the sonic equivalent of man-spreading. It is incredibly annoying and energetically invasive. Since I feel like I can no longer afford being very shy about making my needs known to people, I begin frantically waving at these guys to please be quiet. But, as was already clear from their irreverent talking, they were not aware enough of their surroundings to notice me. I try to immerse back into the music while attempting to ignore their chatter. The band announces their last song, and as they begin playing the men start talking yet again. I decide to tap one of them on the shoulder and gesture my request for their silence during this last song. One of them nods at me. They stop talking for a while.

As I go back into the soundscape, I feel thankful for getting to witness this music. I close my eyes and my body naturally sways to the beautiful melodies when suddenly a voice interrupts from behind me. One of the men. This guy had apparently been observing me dance and felt the pressing need to unsubtly inform his pals: “She feels the music” – followed by one of those utterly stupid Beeves and Butthead type of chuckles: huhuhh huhuh. I don’t visibly respond to this, but again jolted out of my communion with the sound, I think to myself: “What the hell else is a person supposed to do with music?”

At a different location I am attending a concert by an incredible band that plays some of the best psychedelic rock of this generation. I notice the crowd exists primarily of men and that the venue is a little bit too crowded for my taste. My friend and I find a spot in the back that has slightly more wiggle room. As should be clear by now, I am pretty particular about space during concerts, and if I don’t have at least a little wiggle room, I will likely leave. The reason for this is that I feel the need to move my body when I hear good music, and if I am prevented from doing so in an overcrowded space I get pretty intense claustrophobia. Additionally, I find that if I can’t move freely with the music, I am less capable of receiving it completely. I want to hear it with my ears but, since I have the physical ability, also with my spine and my arms and my legs. As the concert ensues, I look out over the crowd and notice that 95 percent of the people is standing completely still. Two young guys are standing still in front of me. One taps the other on his shoulder and says: “You could also play this” – in a tone that reveals a certain criticism of the sound. As if the fact that this music is playable by other musicians is somehow reducing their ability of enjoying it. 

I try it out for a while, to stand completely still, no movement, just observing. The music comes in through my ears and stops at the brain. I experience the music maybe at a 25 percent, if not less. As soon as I move my body with the melodies I start feeling the music more intensely again and start enjoying what before was merely alright.

Then it hits me. In our intellect driven world the experience of live music for many people is also reduced to an intellectual affair. The very art form that is meant to move every cell in your body and vibrate your entire Being to a different level of consciousness has become, left in the hands of the cultural descendants of the European enlightenment, something to merely observe with the mind. So if you are not feeeeeling the music, then you must be thinking about it: …Is it good, is it not good, can I play this or can’t I play this, which guitar brand is that, how does it compare to the record, are the band members interacting with each other, I think I think I think I will give this performance a 6.6 on a scale of one to ten… 

I look around the static crowd and suddenly feel sad. Because this precisely illustrates the biggest problem of our time. Our inability to feel. Feeling, our society instructs, is something not to be taken seriously, something to be made fun of, ridiculed even. Especially (though not exclusively by any means) by men, who have been systematically trained to repress their feelings and to rely entirely on intellectual capacities for “survival” in a hyper-rational world. A woman intensely experiencing music and swaying her body to the sound is so peculiar that someone feels the need to comment on it followed by an awkward chuckle. Because the feminine, the creative, the physical, the embodied, the sensual has been repressed for so incredibly long it makes people feel uncomfortable.

We are collectively so afraid of the body. So afraid of sensuality. So afraid of expressing ourselves in abundant bliss. We have created repressive barriers where unbridled ecstatic flow should be. (And BTW, this also includes the fear of peeing in public toilets for the strange anxiety of someone else hearing you during the most basic and essential task in human-body maintenance…) We have this idea that we live in relative freedom, but we don’t take into account the ridged complexes of our collective culture of emotional, spiritual, and sensual oppression. And we are primarily just talking about dancing here, but think about what this means for the ways in which people make love to each other…. Holy shit…. That’s really awful. Hyper-rational sex, anyone? I think I’ll pass, thank you very much. I don’t want that. I don’t want that confinement. I want to move. I want to sway. I want freedom.

I have lived for decades with detailed instructions from the headquarters of our culture on how to hate my body. I have been told time and again to “act normal” – which is actually the commandment of invisibility. Don’t show yourself too much, don’t express yourself too much, don’t enjoy yourself too much. I have spent decades struggling to unlearn those messages, and to learn how to love my body regardless. It’s an ongoing process. We are here on Earth in physical form for a short amount of time. Nobody really knows what happens afterwards. Can we afford to let our time here be controlled by fear of our own capacities? Or do we wake up from our disconnected slumber to wholeheartedly, profoundly, and unapologetically FEEL the music?

How I Became A Vegetarian But More Importantly How We Change Our Hearts And Save The Planet

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For 8 years I was in a relationship with a hardcore vegetarian. During most of this time I did not identify as a vegetarian myself, but I cooked mostly vegetarian food in our house, and I respected and understood my partner’s vegetarianism completely. When he decided to also quit eating eggs, I admit I did some huffing and puffing because that seriously challenged my baking and cooking habits, as well as our sweet ritual of sharing meals in restaurants. But then when it came down to it, I couldn’t bear ever baking cookies that he couldn’t also enjoy, so I always ended up using egg-replacer anyway. See, I understood vegetarianism intellectually. It made a lot of sense to me. But I continued eating a hamburger every now and then when I was out.

Until one Summer when I was biting in a hamburger at a local diner, and all of a sudden it tasted disgusting to me. I was chewing on this meat and something about it just felt wrong. This glob of animal parts was (or plural, were…) raised under horrible circumstances and was (were) killed to become this mediocre dish on my plate. I suddenly felt shame and a disturbing sense of decadence. I was chewing on suffering. I was chewing on pain. And I was allowing that degradation into my body. How is that nourishing? It was in this moment that a shift occurred from understanding vegetarianism intellectually, to feeling it emotionally and spiritually. That’s when I stopped eating meat. I have had a couple of meat dishes since in other people’s homes as a gesture of gratitude for their hospitality, but when I get to choose, I always choose meatless options. When asked, I now identify as vegetarian.

It’s an interesting feeling, because once that shift has occurred – once that light switch flips over – you can’t really go back. You can go from unawareness to awareness, but you can’t go from awareness into unawareness again. That doesn’t work. You could go into denial. And there are a lot of ways in which I am in denial when it comes to the choices I make as a consumer in a capitalist society. Our societies are actually based on systems of complete denial, so it’s particularly easy to go along with that current. In fact, we are constantly stimulated to participate in this system of denial with every step we take in this world. Our supermarkets are neatly presented aisles of denial. Our traveling methods are meticulously streamlined networks of denial. Our wardrobes are eclectic messes of denial. Our electronics are such amazingly convenient apparatuses of denial. We are in the thick of it.

Now, I am not writing this because I am preaching vegetarianism to you. If you caught my drift, the idea is that such preaching is fruitless. My point is that knowing something intellectually will never be enough to generate change. This goes for everything in life. We have reached the absolute end-station of the intellect-train. To prevent this train from driving us all straight off the cliff of existence, we need to hop onto the train of emotional awareness. That means we have to personally and collectively look deep into the abyss of planetary suffering, and begin FEELING our actions on an emotional and energetic level. This is scary work. We have made a real mess of things, and it’s extremely painful to bear witness to that reality. But I believe that we can talk about climate change, and sustainability, and ethics, and racism, and sexism, and everything that’s wrong with our world until the end of time (literally…), yet nothing will ever change until we really FEEL it. That means we have to begin uncovering all the barriers in our lives that prevent us from feeling pain, discomfort, grief, sadness, and sorrow. And from that place, we must connect the dots between our personal and our collective suffering.

Changing behavior on the basis of intellect alone is never going to be enough. Emotionally disconnected action, even towards a righteous goal, will not prevail. We need an uprising of emotional intelligence, of open hearts and spirits feeling passionately into the reality that our intellect presents to us. Don’t get me wrong, the intellect is a neat tool. But like any tool, it has no ethical compass. A hammer can be used to build a home and to smash someone’s skull in. Our intellect can be used to build networks of connection and to methodically orchestrate genocide. If anything is going to change our world for the better, it’s going to be that emotional heart of yours, it’s going to be your capacity to really feel pain, to cry, to love. Cultivating, harnessing, and revering emotional intelligence is going to be the next crucial leap in our evolution. And since we are dangling on the precipice of planetary destruction, I’d say it’s about time.