Nosy ass questions
A farm newsletter in three parts
This month Alex is raffling two recycled-copper bouquets they welded to benefit two families in Gaza. Please donate (any amount) to the gofundme campaigns linked below and email a screenshot of your donation(s)—no need to include the amount, just that you donated—to us at: buenocompartir (at) gmail (dot) com
Donating to one campaign counts as (1) one raffle ticket, donating to both will double your (2) two entries for a total of (4) four raffle tickets. It benefits your chances of winning and of supporting the families to donate to both!
If you have previously donated at any point, please join the raffle!
** Raffle ends May 31st at 11:59pm **
NEW ZINE!
We made our October 2023 newsletter Liberation like Guava into a zine.
Why guava? They can grow in the least fertile soils, thriving in muddy flood zones where only the most toxic weeds survive, producing fruit from nothing.
Here in Puerto Rico, guava is the most popular flavor of many of our traditional pastries, sweets, and drinks. Yet few farms grow them anymore, the industry having dried up drained by a collection of colonial taxes and laws that make it harder for Puerto Rico to grow food.
In addition to purchasing individual zines, if you’d like to support our work head over to our farm store: under small zines, select the “fund the next round of zines” option. We’ll still send you our whole catalog of zines, but this option also supports us in creating more.
Buenocompartir.bigcartel.com
Yejin’s Nosy Ass Questions*
For our part, we’d like to start by acknowledging that moral clarity is not a destination. Rather a life-long learning journey that we’ve been on separately and together for some time.
The last seven months have been a violent reminder that the daily actions that support (initiate, perpetuate) genocide, imperialism, and fascist state violence are banal and unremarkable, even shiny and comfortable. As farmers we have been acutely aware of the silence of the people in agriculture, especially the young liberal who is willing to ignore famine, feeling protected by the moral superiority they’ve found in sustainable farming.
(More on that in our newsletter from April)
It’s a trope, truly, and has been around for over a century. The back-to-the-land, nature-loving, vegetarian, soil rejuvenating, herbalist, and nudist teachings of the early 1900s Lebensreform “Life Reform” movement were used by Hitler’s regime to substantialize the beliefs of racial superiority and thusly excuse ethnic cleansing as an appropriate goal to bettering the world. Fresh air, bare feet, and vegetables would turn good Germans to superhumans. This duality - earth loving life reform and vile support of eugenics - is present now in anti-vax retorts of a population-culling pandemic being no worse than a minor cold and the masses of dead and newly disabled were just not strong enough. The duality exists in the belief that vegan restaurants and organic farms justify gentrification and displacement. While Palestinians lose land, community, sovereignty, Israel populates kibbutzim based on aspirational ideas of sustainability, patriotism, and equality.
The film Zone Of Interest illustrates the banality involved in war crimes. It focuses on the commandant of Auschwitz’s palatial family home and gardens, which share a cement and barbed wire fence with the death camp, in the buffer zone where Nazi officers live as settler farmers. The Zone of Interest was an experiment, an attempt to normalize the brutality, using the idyllic naturalist teachings of Lebensreform, to encourage settler expansion into new territory. Before the grand tour of the abundant garden, the commandant is on the phone dictating work memos:
“Subject: Lilac bushes by the commandants guard barracks. From now on, SS members who pick lilacs in a thoughtless and blatant manner so that the bushes bleed will be punished. I expect the SS members, if they wish to take some, to do it in a way that does not damage the bushes. In the interest of our whole community, I hope you understand that the lilac bushes are intended to decorate our entire camp both now and in the future.”
We later learn that the bushes are fertilized with ashes from the camp’s crematorium.
Food security experts warn1 that famine is quickly approaching in Haiti, the UN estimates over a million people are at risk.2 The present situation in Haiti is yet another catastrophe long in the making; the starvation only gets attention when it makes bloody headlines. Amidst the death and displacement in Haiti, Dominicans, living comfortably in a current economic boom, just re-elected the deportation-touting, border wall obsessed president, by a landslide.3 Last year, the richest president4 in Latin America deported more than a quarter of a million Haitians across the border into starvation conditions and now he promises that his Trump-style border wall along the Massacre River, made with the concrete of his family business, secured with the sensors and drones familiar to Palestinians, will be second only to that of the US-Mexico border wall. The food crisis has been escalating for years, and so when DR closed the border in response to Haitian farmers taking too much water from the river, it created the situation that now when the border is temporarily opened, Haitians fall off bridges in the rush to cross the border in order to get food. Yet the so-called Haitian “gangs” will be blamed for the Haitian famine.
Genocide is planned long before it is executed, and it begins long before it is denounced.5 Genocide is made possible in the cartography, the mixing of cement, the job fair for engineers that will innovate the next generation of border-protecting tech. It’s in the closed-door meeting, negotiating weapons deals before lunch, or the gently raised hand that signals yet another US veto at the UN security council. It is the kibbutzim idyllic dream of being a patriotic settler farmer, occupying their own zone of interest.
Ultimately, movement work with a moral superiority is no different. When ideologies blind us to those around us, when the insistence of how things “should be” justifies making invisible how things are, we are on a slippery slope.
It is the easy lure of guilt-free superiority that allows the moral opacity. And so the response, if it is to be implemented daily for liberation, must too be simple and straightforward. It’s a reminder that can fortify and protect our clarity, one so fundamentally true that it cuts through the lies which say some people deserve better than others, that anyone can live in paradise without needing to look around, that genocides are self-defense and famines aren’t manmade.6
There is enough if we share.
*special thanks to Yejin (their website) for all that they’ve generously shared. This section was conceptually born from their series of nosy ass questions posed on instagram (@yejin_lee). Thank you Yejin!
https://apnews.com/article/famine-gaza-haiti-starvation-malnutrition-hunger-16215137be084e51849c41a83335119d
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna143594
https://www.ft.com/content/27259385-901c-4552-b078-93864e259061
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/dominican-republics-president-elect-abinader-takes-tough-stand-graft-haiti-2024-05-20/
https://time.com/4690591/famine-south-sudan/
https://www.wfp.org/stories/3-things-you-may-not-know-about-famine-and-how-prevent-it