Yes, yes, finally a little politics, a little of the outside
reality of poverty and homelessness. Let's not forget that homelessness is
deliberately invented by the societies which then deny responsibility
for its creation and advent. I know the endless homeless ones who
wander the streets and beg. Hunger and humilation on the street, and the
cold, and the indifference and fear (years of it), one encounters in
others. Those who are called priveliged are just one element in the the
war of those who
have homes against those who do not, those who are dispossessed.
About homelessness, yes there is a depth of depravity to it
(Jean Genet describes one form of homelessness in The Thief's Journal for
instance) that all the little world travellers can know nothing about,
nothing at all. How could they? - with their
Virilio speed machines that spin-jerk around the planet from one
nice comfort zone to another. With tourist badges and nice grants, and
cool
places to stay. And nice lectures to give about poetry perhaps, and
perhaps about other people's poverty. How practical a gang they are these
world wide travellers, how different from the refugee and his kids
climbing over the mountains between Europe and the rest of the god
forsaken hell hole of
poverty they seek to escape. Or the teenager out on the streets and his
hunger. And all these dromomaniacs (Virilio) chattering away at one
lecture hall or another. Like the soliders of western capitalism. And it
is not a joy to be
homeless, there is no subtlety about it. Yes, Whose nomadic age is it?
The answer is not much different than it has always been. The migrant, the
refugee, the teenager on the streets, they are the refuse and detritus of
the big machines of power. When the heel of the policeman's boot glares in
one's face, there is no home, and that is that. Why would one theorize
what requires action? Give the homeless a home, a space of their own.
Give the captive ones their bodies back.
Give the tent cities of the world a place to stay. And then the
spaces of Utopia might be really conceivable. No space for one unless the
many can enter, the disaster ridden children of the world may walk on it.
In search of the Millenium, by R.Cohn details this thrust of the crusading
children of homelessness, as does Jean Genet in Un Captif Amoureux, or
Prisoner of Love in English.
Clifford Duffy. * All my words are on Parole.*
> Homi Bhabha writes, "The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the
> displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is
> more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers." So we are
> speaking of two radically different senses of place. Whose "nomadic
> age" is it? Are we speaking of those who have the devices to disperse
> the home and configure it at will anywhere (a privileged placelessness),
> or those who truly have no place?
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