Inspiration

Poem for an Activist Who Doubts Herself
by Dani Montgomery

We're standing on the curb smoking
and you raise your face to the sky
wanting to know why couldn't i have been around back
in the seventies?
you read books about struggle and feel small
you walk along fillmore in the february wind
while cops circle the block again and again
wondering how come
in a time when so many grow up
and go out
without even the hope
of enough
why when we need a movement
more than ever

there's less and less talk of revolution?

and like you said
we need more than a job center
a drop in clinic
more than a free meal
more than a few lives saved.
we need more than this block
more than this city
more than five hundred
or five thousand marching.

but we're two
and upstairs in the office there's three more
cutting flyers and making phone calls
and at the senior center down the street
we could find six or seven
been sitting alone in their rooms
without enough cash for taxi fare
and on the bus
i know we could get eight, nine, ten
out of work
riding up and down town all day
filling out forms in the hope of a bed tonight and
there's number eleven
counting out rolls of pennies in safeway
yesterday in juvie i met twelve through twenty
armed with pencils
and they have mothers and lovers and brothers and friends
who have a niece and a godson and a downstairs neighbor
and we'll get to enough
We'll be the light on our granddaughter's faces
when they pierce the sky with victory.

A little report from the safe space of Queeruption

For nearly half a year I had been thinking about the safe space for Q9. Nearly half a year of imagining a place inside a place that didn[t itself exist yet. Queeruption was a dream of countless nights and days, sometimes of excitement and imagination and, just as often, terror that it would all go wrong and how the hell could we be organising all of this, just us, by ourselves? But we did, and one of the most special parts for me personally was the safe space and the t-team which used it.

Somehow it worked. The confidence I found from really good training allowed me to enter and listen to stressful, emotional situations and keep control and, hopefully, change something. And we had a lot to listen to. Q9 took place during the Israeli was with Lebanon with all the resultant trauma that a war like that could bring. Q9 gave many the chance to join demonstrations in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem/Al Quds and the Territories with all the violence that we've come to expect from the Israeli State in these situations. And in the end, Q9 itself was, occasionally, an extremely stressful situation full of the internal politics and tensions that we could predict from organising something so complex and intense. There are, I've come to realise, many kinds of trauma.

But unexpectedly, and in the end, quite queerly, the safe space that we so carefully designated and delineated with sheets and signs and drawing pins and sellotape somehow escaped while we weren't looking. Suddenly the quiet space of resting or talking through problems found itself in random corners of the enormous club that was the home of Q9. Every day when the T-team came together to debrief our experiences of the day we found that we'd been doing our thing in any random place and only sometimes in the safespace that we so carefully marked out.

People still came to the safe space for a chat, for a massage, acupuncture treatment or just to rest from the madness but I also found myself counselling - if that's what I do - in random corners of the building between one workshop and another, still setting my boundaries and being very clear what was happening, but not needing to be in a specific space to do it.

Autonomously and quite unbeknownst to us, people started discussing their traumas, their stresses, their dreams in other spaces - sharing circles, behing the bar and over coffee. Suddenly emotions were on the agenda in plenary meetings and in affinity meetings before demos. I'm told that this is something new for Queeruption. It was certainly something new for me and was, perhaps, the greatest gift the T-team could have given to our queeruption.

The T-Team library

The T-Team now proudly has a library of (kindly donated) trauma related books to borrow and read. Here's what we have so far:

The PTSD workbook: Simple, effective techniques for overcoming traumatic stress symptoms by Mary Beth Williams and Soili Poijula

Growing beyond survival: A self-help toolkit for managing traumatic stress by Elizabeth Vermilyea

EMDR: 'eye movement therapy for overcoming anxiety, stress and trauma by Shapiro and Forest

The Body Bears the Burden: trauma, dissociation and disease by Robert Scaer

Breaking the Patterns of Depression by Michael Yapko

And...
All time classic 'Trauma and Recovery' by Judith Herman in Hebrew

If you'd like to borrow something please drop us an email - t-team@riseup.net

T is for Trauma. And Tea

something I wrote for a friend who asked me to contribute to a d.i.y. health zine she was preparing...

T is for Trauma. And Tea.

Possibly one of the most inspirational projects I’ve ever worked on, the T-Team began as just an idea thrown about in an organising meeting for Queeruption Tel Aviv. There was a suggestion that, considering the event would involve direct actions in the Palestinian Occupied Territories we should organise a safe-space where people could come, chill out, drink tea, and talk to someone after the actions. I got in touch with Lucy who I’d worked together with on the Trauma safe-space at the G8 protests in Scotland and we started to discuss the idea of expanding the Queeruption safe-space into something bigger, longer term and desperately needed – an activist-trauma group for Israel-Palestine. The T-team was born.

A few months later the team had grown to 12 members and we organised ourselves a training programme from friends and contacts in post-trauma, rape-crisis, reiki, street medicine, thai massage, listening skills etc so that we could offer a range of emotional first-aid therapies to activists burnt out, traumatised or otherwise affected by their work in Israel/Palestine. We made contact with other groups, other future trainers, and other activist groups like Anarchists against the Wall and ISM who we hope to work with in the future. We’re still organising the safe-space during Queeruption next month and hope it will provide a good first experience of using our training as a group.

That’s the logistic stuff. But for me the process itself of forming the group and receiving training has been intensely emotional. Much of the training has involved deep emotional work shared with the group. We’ve also put a big focus on group cohesion and bonding events so that at the end of a day of supporting people outside the group, we’re still capable of supporting each other, as activists, and as friends. In the end I think that might be the most important thing to grow out of this beautiful project.

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