Land of the Forgotten

 My sophomore year of college, the slides that were the standard for portfolio submission transitioned into digital files. It was also the last year that my very animation focused school offered traditional animation as a foundational requirement for first and second year students, because that style was quickly receding into the past. 

Graduation was a portal into an unfamiliar world that I was not adequately prepared for, and entrance into the labor force brought me face to face with the tectonic shifts taking place on an economic scale. We have transitioned from an economy that exported goods, made in American factories - into an economy mostly exporting intellectual and data driven properties. Prior to that, shipping required a labor force that loaded/unloaded the boats at the piers along the west side of Manhattan. By the time I was put in charge of utilizing the Longshoremen's Union to build fashion shows in those same piers, now empty - it was composed of elderly men in crocs, used to moving things with pallet jacks rather then the strength of their bodies. There are no new members - the Longshoremen's Union is literally dying, aging into past tense. It makes me think about people growing up in the rust belt, and what entire towns and family histories must feel like as factory work moved on, have also become past tense. Entire identities evaporating in the face of technological advancement. Lifestyles, hard fought cultures and trauma responses, history - no longer fathomable by a lot of the general public. It doesn't matter what politicians promise about bringing that kind of work back - it is literally gone, and the skills and living memories of the people who - in an earlier time - fulfilled those vital functions and defined themselves by it are like ghosts in this new landscape.

From this vantage point, I can almost see how someone might not believe something as intense as the Holocaust actually happened - like a figment of someone's imagination, as impossible to fathom as maybe a European country, or anywhere outside of the rural and disconnected places people like this must all be from - while we still cope on a global scale with the aftermath of that kind of trauma. People are calling out the capacity for the Israel state (formed as an apology for the Nazis mass slaughter of Jewish people, carved out of Palestinian homes) to be exterminating Palestinians now - ironic - but so often, hurt people hurt other people, and abuse patterns get passed down through families until it becomes indistinguishable across cultures and identities.

While talking to an old friend, he gave me small pieces of his early life during the collapse of the USSR recently that I am still chewing on - 'You know what happens?' he asked me gruffly at one point - 'there isn't enough food'. 

While I was working as a figure model in Richmond Virginia, a professor I often modeled for was an older Russian man. While students drew me, he would fill the intense focused silence with lugubrious stories about living behind the iron curtain, how people got simple things like butter from the black market, or bribing the dairy truck to let you scrape the butter solids that formed during the rocking of transportation that gathered and clung to the metal apparatus inside. One day he described going to an American grocery store for the first time, overwhelmed by the rows of available products, free to choose as much as you wanted from a multitude of brands.

I had a 9th grade student last year, from a family that fled Russia when the war on Ukraine broke out - all he would say about it was 'There is no future there'.

It is a fallacy to think this is not where we are headed.

A large amount of Jewish refugees from the collapse of the USSR ended up being received by Israel - there is some relationship here that I haven't parsed out yet, either in political handshaking or trauma - but the bulking out of a region that was literally stolen land seems like an obvious motivator, just like the creation of the Birth Right trip in 1999 with its Headquarters in the US and 80% of participants coming from America. Prior to that, Israel went to Madison Avenue advertising companies in the 50's, trying to inspire the world to view the new state as a fully formed and ancient one. Round and round we go again - the heroism of the US in destroying the Nazis in the 1940s is like dust - but now the antisemitic, mostly conservative body of America is clamoring in a bloodthirst for support of Israel's active genocide on a deeply battered population surviving in the desert, the middle east a symbol they learned to hate way back during the time of Oil Barons - a thirst that is stoked by the fires of the industrial revolution and explosion of Capitalism/early 1900s Colonial expansion into the East as oil replaced the coal being mined in the Appalachian mountains of the US - so deeply embedded now, hatred of the Middle East has no connection to reality, just political symbols being fed to populations looking for someone to blame for anything. Gang mentality sanctioned on a global scale. Self vs other. Resource hoarding - here are all the reasons why I am justified in taking what you have. Politicians trying to unite us against some fabricated monster, to justify war and its often boosting effect on the economy while effectively distracting us from its Colonial intentions. And we lap it up.

What does community mean at this point in our collective development? What actually connects us to each other, other then survival and trauma bonds? The simplistic stories we are teaching our young ones with, about who our community is composed of and why - simply aren't true, nor are they useful anymore. It is often our loved ones that do the most damage to us in our lives, and it is impossible to expect people to be available in ways that they simply cannot. If we learn our only tether to this life and this world requires we submit to the crushing weight of history manifesting in the way our caregivers and politicians handle us - or that identity is a solid structure, unchanging, the pieces handed to us rather then springing from our attempts to process our experience of the world - fluid and responsive- then genocide will not stop. Identity will continue to be flattened to a symbol we would kill for, and the Crusades - fighting over the origin of western religion, from a story (the Bible) literally about Middle Eastern people - will recapitulate until there is nothing left. For the Warrior - how do they know themselves in peace, if their identity is bound up in one singular, symbolic representation? 

 

From the Book of Life - Manolo comes from a long line of famous bull fighters - but to his father's horror, he wants to be a musician. When he descends into the underworld to retrieve the soul of his dead love, he is tasked with fighting every bull ever fought and killed in his entire family history, combined into one massive beast.

Thinking of all of the people who have been effectively erased on this Dia de los Muertos - and the space between remembering and forgetting. Those that get to live in the Land of the Remembered, and those that are fated to the Land of the Forgotten.